Sufficient illustrations have now been given of the two types of case, where special features of dress and aspect may lead us pretty confidently to refer the detailed form which the hallucination takes to the percipient and to the agent respectively. But the majority of visual telepathic phantasms, as we shall find later, present no such special features; the aspect of the figure is free from striking peculiarities, and the dress little noticed, and such as either of the two persons concerned might readily picture as natural and familiar. In all such cases, and alike whether the agent is or is not so habited at the moment, it seems to me reasonable to refer the details of the appearance to the percipient's mind. As compared with our total ignorance concerning the prior process of transference, our view of the immediate process in the percipient which issues in sensory hallucination may be said to be knowledge; in it we at any rate have the analogy of subjective hallucinations to go by. Inasmuch, then, as a member of a civilised community has been impelled to project a phantasm - for there it stands, projected - it is in accordance with analogy, and we may almost say inevitable, that he should project it in some dress; and it is surely simpler, as I have suggested above, to suppose that he does this wholly from his own resources, which are adequate for the purpose, than to suppose that a detailed image is supplied to him, clean-cut and complete, from indefinite unconscious or subconscious strata of the agent's mind.

The point becomes clearest when there is a clear choice of familiar dresses. For instance, a son sees the phantasm of his mother "dressed in a peculiar silver-grey dress, which she had originally got for a fancy-ball " (p. 423). That he should so project her image, under a sudden telepathic influence received from her (p. 351-2), no more needs explanation than that any other item of past experience should present itself unsought in memory or dream; but that she should so transmit her image would decidedly need explanation; for even if she was conscious at the time - which she most likely was not - unless her mind was consciously engaged with this particular dress, what disturbance can we assume of the quite impartial state of latency in which her ideas of her various dresses would be? There being no sudden call on her - as there is on her son - to represent her image, there would be no impulse to the selection (whether conscious or casual) of one particular form of representation. And the same argument will apply wherever the phantasmal costume, or any part of it, is such as would not form an almost necessary element in the agent's consciousness at the time.

In most cases where costume is noticed at all, it includes particulars the choice of which presents no difficulty if we leave the percipient to make it, among the various familiar aspects of the friend whose image he is ex hypothesi impelled to construct; but any precedence of which over others on the agent's side would imply a detailed activity of construction, occurring not only without consciousness, but apparently without cause; since there is no ground for connecting the construction (least of all the unconscious construction) of highly elaborated visual images with the conditions of spontaneous telepathic agency.1

1 It occasionally happens at seances - whether owing to the attitude of expectancy or to some other condition - that a sitter falls into an odd unconscious, or semiconscious state; which would have nothing alarming in it to any one familiar with the phenomena of hypnotism. As to the subjective sense of "going out of oneself," see above, p. 363, note.

1 Any hypothesis that the condition of agency in itself (i.e., apart from that reaction of the percipient on the impression to which I have attributed its projection in sensory form) tends to clicit and transmit out of the recesses of the agent's mind some definite image of his own aspect, would seem open to this objection - that there are a large number of telepathic phantasms - notably the auditory class - in which nothing connected with the agent's aspect appears. Apart from literal representations of some conscious thought or sensation of the agent (p. 349, note), it has seemed an adequate hypothesis that the particular form of sensory development is determined on the percipient's side; and it would be very difficult to combine with this the hypothesis that sometimes the form is compelled to be visual by the preponderating force in the agent's mind of a latent image of his own aspect. For if the image is latent, and has no particular relevance to the circumstances of the moment, such an image has had just the same amount of presence in the agent's mind, and just as much (or little) chance of telepathically asserting itself, in the non-visual cases.