§ 7. The examination of these precise points may lead us on to more general ground. If we admit a power in the percipient to evolve a waking dream from the nucleus of a "transferred impression," we at once get rid of what has been a very real obstacle to the recognition of the telepathic evidence. Phantasms having often been conceived as in some way objective and independent presences, it has seemed to the sceptic that all idea of reality about them was sufficiently refuted, if they possessed features which were a clear reflection of the percipient's beliefs and ideas. Students of folklore and of comparative thaumatology have observed that such phenomena, in various times and countries, have borne a perceptible relation to prevalent habits and opinions; and if specimens which have coincided with, and so seemed to announce and typify, unusual events, have borne a similar relation, it has been easy to argue for their purely subjective character from this subordinate point, and to ignore the essen-tial point - the fact of the coincidence. This wrong issue is precluded as soon as the analogy of dream is boldly insisted on, and the phenomena arc described as hallucinations, not presences, and as veridical, not objective.

Any presumption against them, as sentimental, or superstitious, or fantastic, then loses its basis. The naked fact of coincidence can no more be sentimental or superstitious than stoical or sceptical; but subjective colourings may attach to waking hallucinations as easily as to dreams; and it cannot seem surprising that the same mental habits and traditions which give a particular character to so many of the hallucinations which are illusory through and through - hallucinations and nothing more - should give a similar character to some of the hallucinations which are not illusory through and through, but are projected under the stimulus of a true impression from the mind of some absent person. The same cast of ideas through the dominance of which a devote may receive a false impression that she has met the Virgin in a wood, may very naturally lead her, or one like her, on the receipt of a true impression that some beloved relative is dying, to body forth the figure as robed in white and with a radiant face; and much more bizarre apparitions than this might, on the same principle, be accepted as having a causal connection with a real conveyed to the mortuary and whose thoughts were naturally directed to him.

Now on this view of the "agency" the experience none the less involves an independent contribution on the part of the percipient. For he saw the child's figure, though as if dead, in his little blue sailor suit; which was familiar to him, but which we can hardly conceive to have been present, in association with the ideas of death and burial, in his mother-in-law's mind.

Event.1 The opportunity for observing such phenomena in telepathic cases is, no doubt, limited by the fact that cases of any evidential weight are almost confined to quite modern days, and for the present to the more advanced nations; but it is possible that as interest in the subject increases, a wider area will be covered. Meanwhile we have quite enough cases to illustrate the point.

As examples of phantasmal appearances presenting features which would in reality be impossible, the following three accounts may serve. [The first two, 203 and 204, are omitted.] The next case is from the Memoirs of Georgiana, Lady Chatterton (1878), by E. H. Dering, the second husband of Lady Chatterton, pp. 185-6. The author says: -