§ 10. The above may serve as examples of the several groups classified with reference to the nature of the percipient's impression. But it will be seen that the agent has also been exhibited in a great variety of conditions - in normal waking health, in apparently dreamless sleep (pp. 83-8), in dream, in physical pain, in a swoon, in the excitement of danger, in dangerous illness, and in articulo mortis, the death being in one case accidental and instantaneous, in another the result of a sudden seizure, and in others the conclusion of a prolonged illness. And amid this variety the reader will, no doubt, have been struck by the large proportion of death cases - a proportion which duly represents their general preponderance among alleged cases of spontaneous telepathy. They constitute about half of our whole collection. Now this fact raises a question with respect to the interpretation of the phenomena which may be conveniently noticed at once since it bears an equal relation to nearly all the chapters that follow, while such answer as I can give to it depends to some extent on what has preceded.

We are, of course, accustomed to regard death as a completely unique and incomparably important event; and it might thus seem, on a superficial glance, that if spontaneous telepathy is possible, and the conditions and occasions of its occurrence are in question, no more likely occasion than death could be suggested. But on closer consideration, we are reminded that the actual psychical condition that immediately precedes death often does not seem to be specially or at all remarkable, still less unique; and that it is this actual psychical condition - while it lasts, and not after it has ceased - that really concerns us here. Our subject is phantasms of the living: we seek the conditions of the telepathic impulse on the hither side of the dividing line, in the closing passage of life; not in that huge negative fact - the apparent cessation or absence of life - on which the common idea of death and its momentous importance is based. And the closing passage of life, in some of the cases above quoted and in many others that are to follow, was, to all appearance, one of more or less complete lethargy; a state which (on its psychical side at any rate) seems in no way distinguishable from one through which the agent has passed on numerous previous occasions - that of deep sleep.

Nor are the cases which issue in death the only ones to which this remark applies; in the more remarkable cases of Chapter III (The Transition From Experimental To Spontaneous Telepathy)., the agent was actually in deep sleep; Mrs. Bettany's mother was in a swoon (p. 138); and other similar instances will meet us. Here, then, there appears to be a real difficulty. For how can we attribute an extraordinary exercise of psychical energy to a state which on its psychical side is quite ordinary, and in which psychical and physical energies alike seem reduced to their lowest limits?

1 Mrs. Sewill (who was 14 or 15 at the time) is certain that she is correct on this point; and in conversation with her uncle, I found that his memory agrees with here.

It may, no doubt, be replied that we have no right to assume that the psychical condition is ordinary; that the nervous condition in the lethargy of approaching death, and even in a fainting-fit, may differ greatly from that of normal sleep, and that this difference may be somehow represented on the psychical side, even though the ostensible psychical condition is approximately nil. But a completer answer may possibly be found in some further development of the idea of the "unconscious intelligence" which was mentioned above (pp. 56, 57). We there noted stray manifestations of psychical action that seemed unconnected with the more or less coherent stream of experience which we recognise as a self; and a probable relation of these was pointed out to those curious cases of "double consciousness," in which two more or less coherent streams of experience replace one another by turns, and the same person seems to have two selves. Many other cognate facts might be mentioned, which enable us to generalise to some extent the conceptions suggested by the more prominent instances.

But since for present purposes the topic only concerns us at the point where it comes into contact with telepathy, I must ask the reader to seek those further facts elsewhere; and to accept here the statement that the more these little-known paths of psychology are explored, the more difficult will it appear to round off the idea of personality, or to measure human existence by the limits of the phenomenal self.1 Now the very nature of this difficulty cannot but suggest a deeper solution than the mere connection of various streams of psychic life in a single organism. It suggests the hypothesis that a single individuality may have its psychical being, so to speak, on different planes; that the stray fragments of "unconscious intelligence," and the alternating selves of "double consciousness," belong really to a more fundamental unity, which finds in what we call life very imperfect conditions of manifestation; and that the self which ordinary men habitually regard as their proper individuality may after all be only a partial emergence. And this hypothesis would readily embrace and explain the special telepathic fact in question; while itself drawing from that fact a fresh support.

By its aid we can at once picture to ourselves how it should be that the near approach of death is a condition exceptionally favourable to telepathic action, even though vital faculties seem all but withdrawn, and the familiar self has lapsed to the very threshold of consciousness. For to the hidden and completer self the imminence of the great change may be apparent in its full and unique impressiveness; nay, death itself may be recognised, for aught we can tell, not as a cessation but as a liberation of energy. But this line of thought, though worth pointing out as that along which the full account of certain phenomena of telepathy may in time be sought, is not one that I can here pursue.

1 In addition to Dr. Azam's well-known case of Felida, I may refer specially to Professor Verriest's "Observation de trois existences cerdbralcs distinctes chez le meme sujet," in the Bulletin de Academie Royale de Medicine de Belgique, 3rd series, vol. xvi.; the case of Louis V------, with his six different personalities, reported by various French observers (Camuset, Annales Medico-psychologiques, 1882, p. 75; Jules Voisin, Archives de Neurologie, September, 1885; Bourru and Burot, Revue Philosophique, October, 1885, Archives de Neurologic, November, 18S5); and the hypnotic experiments described by Mr. Myers, in his paper on "Human Person-lity," Proceedings of the S.P.R., Part x. • A theory of the transcendental self, in its relation to various abnormal states, has been worked out at length in Du Prel's Philosophicder Mystik (Leipzig, 1885). [Many additions could of course now be made to this list of references. - ED].