§ 7. The cases of the preceding section, and of § 2, though not evidentially among the strongest in our collection, are sufficient, I think, to establish a strong presumption for the genuineness of this collective type of telepathic hallucination. But the establishment of facts, in "psychical" as in other departments of Nature, may far outstrip our power of satisfactorily accounting for them; and such account as I can render of these phenomena is here put forward rather as a suggestion or adumbration than as a final view.

To begin with, it would, I think, be irrational not to recognise a special significance in the fact that in all the cases of § 6, and most of those of § 5, the several percipients were together: to that extent, at all events, conditions of place seem to enter vitally into the phenomena. But there is nothing in this that need drive us for a moment off idealistic or "psychical" ground. I have spoken often, throughout the book, of a rapport between the parties concerned in a psychical transference - meaning by the word simply some pre-existing psychical approximation which conditions the transference. The rapport has usually been that of kinship or affection. But I regard these collective cases as strongly indicative of a rapport of a different sort - consisting not in old-established sympathy, but in similarity of immediate mental occupation. I suspect that such a rapport might be induced by a common environment - by partnership in that particular piece of the "life of relation" within which the hallucination happens to fall.

That is to say, I should regard the fact that B's hallucination spreads to C, when B and C are in the same place, as possibly largely due to the fact that a very important part of the contents of B's and C's minds is - and has been for some hours, minutes, or moments preceding -identical. The local condition would be, not any physical presence or centre of influence in the circle of space outside them, but the community of scene, and of other objective impressions, in the two parallel currents of ideas which are their real two existences.1 It must be remembered that we have no a priori means of knowing what the mental conditions that favour telepathy are likely to be. And I venture to think that if, by some process of psychical chemistry, the elements and affinities of different minds at particular moments could be analysed and estimated, mere community of scene and of immediate sensory impression might count for more - might prove, that is, to involve a larger amount of real correspondence or identity - than the external and accidental character of such passing experience might have led us to expect.

1 A similar explanation may be suggested for the fact that thought-transference experiments rarely succeed when agent and percipient are so far withdrawn from one another as to have quite different environments. This fact would otherwise seem explicable only by some hypothesis of "brain-waves" diminishing in strength with the increase of the distance between the parties - a hypothesis which has the disadvantage of being quite inapplicable to many of the facts of spontaneous telepathy (p. 93). [More success with experiments at a distance has been obtained since this was written and it is such success that the S.P.R. now aims at. - Ed].

But this idea, if tenable, seems capable of being extended. If community of environment opens a channel of supersensuous communication between B and C, we come to conceive a greater fluidity (so to speak) in the directions of telepathic transference than the more usual cases of a distant agent and a single percipient could reveal. And this brings me to what I suspect to be a more correct account of the collective telepathic cases that have been passed in review.