§ 3. Perhaps the neglect of statistics has in part been due to an apparent hopelessness of attaining a sufficient quantity of reliable facts on which to found an argument - to an idea that any census on which a conclusion could be founded would have to be carried out on a scale so vast as to be practically impossible. "Do you intend," I have been sometimes asked, "to ask every man and woman in England whether he or she has experienced any subjective hallucination during, say, the last twenty years, and also to get a complete record of all the alleged coincidences within the same period, and then to compare the two lists? " Happily nothing at all approaching this is required. We shall find that approximately accurate figures are necessary only on one point - the frequency of the subjective hallucinations; and this can be ascertained by making inquiries of any fraction of the population which is large and varied enough to serve as a fair sample of the whole. Even this smaller task, however, is a very tedious one, consisting, as it does for the most part, in carefully registering negative information.

The believer in telepathy may feel that he is doing much more to advance his belief by narrating a striking positive instance at a dinner party than by ascertaining, for instance, from twenty of his acquaintance the dull fact that they have never experienced a distinct visual hallucination. Just in the same way a scientific lecturer may win more regard at the moment by a sensational experiment with pretty colours and loud explosions than by laborious quantitative work in his laboratory. But it must be persistently impressed on the friends of "psychical research " that the laborious quantitative work has to be done; and it is some satisfaction to think that the facts themselves may stand as material for others to deal with, even if the conclusions here drawn from them are incorrect.

Nor has the dulness of the work been by any means the only difficulty: its purpose has been widely misconceived, and its scope has thereby been much curtailed. The proposal for a numerical estimate was introduced in a circular letter, every word of which might have been penned by a zealous sceptic, anxious above all things to prove that, in cases where the phantasm of a distant person has appeared simultaneously with the person's death, the coincidence has been an accidental one. Not a syllable was used implying that the authors of the letter had themselves any opinion as to whether phantasms to which no real event corresponds are or are not common things; it was simply pointed out that it is necessary to have some idea how common they are, before deciding whether phantasms to which real events do correspond are or are not to be fairly accounted for by chance. And since sensory hallucinations, whatever their frequency, are at any rate phenomena as completely admitted as measles or colour-blindness, it did not occur to us that the following question could possibly be misunderstood: -

Since January 1, 1874, have you - when in good health, free from anxiety, and completely awake - had a vivid impression of seeing or being touched by a human being, or of hearing a voice or sound which suggested a human presence, when no one was there? Yes or no? 1

Clearly, the more yeses are received to this question - i.e., the commoner the purely subjective hallucinations prove to be - the stronger is the argument for chance as an adequate explanation of the instances of coincidence; the more noes - the rarer the purely subjective hallucinations prove to be - the stronger the argument that the death or other crisis which coincides with the apparition is in some way the cause of the apparition. We should have expected, if any injustice was to be done us, that it would have taken the form of attributing to us an inordinate desire for noes. To our amazement we found that we were supposed to be aiming exclusively at yeses - and not only at yeses, but at yeses expanded into orthodox "ghost-stories" - to be anxious, in fact, that every one in and out of Bedlam who had ever imagined something that was not there, or mistaken one object for another, should tell us his experience, with a view that we might immediately interpret it as due to the intervention of a bogey. A more singular instance of the power of expectancy - of the power of gathering from words any meaning that a critic comes predisposed to find there - can hardly be conceived.

A statistical question on a perfectly well-recognised point in the natural history of the senses was treated, in scientific and unscientific quarters alike, as a manifesto of faith in "supernatural" agencies; and we found ourselves solemnly rebuked for ignoring the morbid and subjective character of many hallucinations - that is to say, for ignoring the fact which we had set forth as the very basis of our appeal, and from which its whole and sole point was derived.

1 This comprehensive question has been actually asked in several parte. As first put, for example, it contained no limitation as to date - as I was anxious to obtain accounts of as many hallucinations of the sane as possible; and the fact that any experience recorded had or had not fallen within the specified period of twelve years was ascertained by subsequent correspondence. The details of the experience were also a matter of subsequent inquiry.