The inquiry showed that the number was much too small to admit of any coincidence being accepted.

Parish, however, has criticized all the available material, and thinks that all the results admit of a different explanation. The first thing to be considered is retroactive hallucination. As soon as the news of a death is communicated £0 a person, he thinks he has had a vision of the event. But the second objection, the adaptability of the memory, is much more important. Supposing a person has a hallucinatory perception of an event at the time of its occurrence, his memory will later on retain the hallucination as though it were the recollection of something really experienced. A third objection is raised by Parish - he thinks that there is no question of waking hallucinations, but that we have, rather, in many cases to deal with the phenomena of a dream-state in which the memory is much less clear. Finally, he opines that the waking hallucinations are sometimes called up by circumstances which have nothing whatever to do with the death of a person who is far away. There might have been factors which led to the hallucination in some way or other. It is often very difficult to discover how the hallucination came about.

But it is extremely dangerous to assume straightway that such an event as a death at a distance is a cause, instead of proving that no other contributory causes have been at work.

I have just explained that Parish has criticized the spontaneous occurrence of the perception of things distant, as far as the large amount of material at his disposal permitted. Against this criticism, we can hardly oppose the reports that occasionally reach us of cases which tell in favour of such action at a distance, and in which not only dying persons are concerned but other important events, such as serious injuries, as well. The only cases demanding earnest consideration are those in which the person concerned has written down the nature of the phenomenon. In such cases there would be no question of delusion or adaptation of memory. Still, the last of the sources of error mentioned by Parish would have to be considered. Isolated cases of this kind, in which all that happened was put down in writing at the time, have been reported to me. Thus, a Mr. X. who lived in America wrote to me as follows: - "One day when I was half asleep, I seemed to see my father, who appeared rather 'elevated,' come round the corner of a house I did not know, and walk across the courtyard; I saw him slip on a large flat stone at the foot of the stack-pipe leading from the gutter attached to the roof, and he lay there with the blood streaming from him over the stone." As X. recognized the second face, he at once wrote down all he had seen in his notebook, so as to be able to verify the day and hour later on.

When he saw his relatives in Europe a year later and visited his parents' new home, he went into the courtyard, and "there I saw the stone exactly as I had seen it in my dream. I at once called my mother, pointed out the stone, and told her what had happened. As it had been intended to keep the accident a secret from me, she asked who had told me about it. I told her what I knew, and showed her the entry in my notebook. The hour given in my note was perfectly correct - i.e., after making due allowance for W. longitude. On the day in question, my father had completed a large business transaction for a capitalist, and the latter had passed the bottle freely, making my father drink more wine than he wanted to." The man who told me this thought his father had never been drunk on any other occasion. He did not think the coincidence accidental. In spite of this detailed communication - I have received others of a similar nature - I must add that in this case, particularly, the fourth of the sources of error mentioned by Parish is not excluded.

At all events, any one who does not wish to be lost in a maze of miracles, must carefully consider these sources of error when dealing with such statements as are occasionally made.

As we see, the cases of thought-transference that have been observed fall into two groups - the spontaneous, which I have just noticed, and the experimental, which I mentioned first of all. Those produced experimentally do not call for any serious criticism. All that Du Prel, Mensi, Welsch, and many others have published on this hardly requires even moderate criticism. Among those who vouch for the reality of telepathy I mention Charles Richet, Ochorowicz, Pierre Janet, Gibert, F. Myers, A. Myers, Gurney, Lombroso, Birchall, Guthrie, Eeden, Glardon, Schrenck-Notzing. I had an opportunity of being present at Mrs. Sidgwick's very neat experiments at Brighton. Two persons were in the hypnotic condition, and one had to indicate a number thought of by the other. The proportion of correct answers was extremely large. As, however, the two persons experimented on, though separated by a folding screen, were somewhat near together, the experiments were not conclusive. Mrs. Sidgwick admitted the justice of this criticism. Also the experiments made by the other persons I have mentioned do not stand serious criticism. My own experiments, especially those I made some years ago in conjunction with Max Dessoir, only gave negative results when the necessary precautions were taken.

Still, I agree with Loewen-feld that we cannot deny the possibility of there being such a thing as telepathy, or at least the possibility of their being ways of influencing others about which we know nothing in the present day. But up to the present no proof of this has been forthcoming.

I intend, in conclusion, to give all the sources of error to which occultism is liable, in a connected form, but here I will just mention a principal source of error in connection with thought-reading, which is not invariably properly considered, to wit, involuntary unconscious or subconscious signals. I discussed thought-reading on page 63, where I mentioned that steadfast concentration of the thoughts on an object or a place causes muscular contractions that guide the subject to the place where the object is. In any case, it is a fact that steadfast concentration of thought sets up involuntary, and for the most part unconscious movements, that are often so slight that they can only be detected by means of very fine instruments, as, for example, Preyer, Richet, and Sommer have stated. These very slight movements are often tactually perceptible without being visible. It also frequently happens that certain persons can see them while others cannot. A certain amount of practice, perhaps also a special, capacity, enables some persons to perceive signs that are so slight that others overlook them.