§ 5. To say, however, that the answers came in the main from an educated class, is not, of course, a guarantee of the accuracy of the census; and before giving the actual results it may be well to forestall some possible objections.

It may be said, to begin with, that people may have had the experience inquired about, but may have forgotten the fact. This is the objection which was considered above in respect of dreams of death, and which there seemed to have decided force. In respect of waking hallucinations of the senses, its force is very much less. No doubt hallucinations may exhibit all degrees of vagueness; and it is very possible that extremely slight and momentary specimens may make little impression, and may rapidly be forgotten; but for the purposes of the census it would not in the least matter that persons whose experience had been of this slight and momentary kind should answer no instead of yes. It would have been unwise to complicate the question asked by an attempt to define the extent of vividness that the hallucination must have reached, to be reckoned as an item in our census; but clearly the only subjective hallucinations of which it really concerns us to ascertain the frequency are those which are in themselves as distinct and impressive as the hallucinations that we represent as telepathic; and any that fall below this point of distinctness and impressiveness have no bearing on the argument.

And, per contra, it will be seen that by not limiting the wording of the question to distinct and impressive hallucinations, the collector exposes himself to receiving the answer "yes" from persons whose hallucination actually was very vague and momentary, but who do, as it happens, remember its occurrence. In point of fact, this has occurred a good many times; and the swelling of the list of yeses by this means probably outweighs any losses of what should have been genuine yeses through failure of memory. For consider what such failure of memory would imply. A fact of sight, hearing, or touch, as clear and unequivocal as most of the sensory impressions which we adduce as evidence for telepathy, must be very clear and unequivocal indeed. And the absence of the normal external cause of such an impression, when recognised, can hardly fail to give rise to genuine surprise - the surprise that follows a novel and unaccountable experience: this has been the result of almost all the "telepathic" phantasms, quite independently of the news which afterwards seemed to connect them with reality.

Now, can it be a common thing for an experience as unusual and surprising as this to be, within a dozen years or any shorter period, so utterly obliterated from a person's mind that his memory remains a blank, even when he is pointedly asked to try and recall whether he has had such an experience or not?

A second objection is this. It has been suggested that untrue answers may be given by persons wishing to amuse themselves at our expense. Now I cannot deny that persons may exist who would be glad to thwart us, and amuse themselves, even at the cost of untruth. But when the question is put, "Do you remember having ever distinctly seen the face or form of a person known to you, when that person was not really there?" it is not at once obvious whether the amusing untruth would be "Yes" or "No." In neither case would the joke seem to be that of a very exhilarating quality; but, on the whole, I should say that "Yes" would be the favourite, as at any rate representing the rarer and less commonplace experience. "Yes" is, moreover, the answer which (as I have explained) it has been very generally thought that we ourselves preferred; so that to give it might produce a piquant sense of fooling us to the top of our bent. But the reader has seen that, so far as the census might be thus affected, it would be affected in a direction adverse to the telepathic argument; for the commoner the purely casual hallucinations are reckoned to be, the stronger is the argument that the visions which correspond with real events do so by chance.

And if the number of these coincident visions makes the chance-argument untenable, even when the basis of estimation is affected in the way supposed, a fortiori would this be the case if the yeses were reduced to their true number.

Yet another objection is that persons who have had hallucinations may sometimes be disinclined to admit the fact, and may say "No" instead of "Yes" in self-defence. This source of error must be frankly admitted; but I feel tolerably confident that it has not affected the results to a really detrimental extent. Any reluctance to give the true answer is, as a rule, observable at the moment; and in most cases it disappears when the purpose of the census is explained, and careful suppression of names is guaranteed. And against this tendency to swell the noes may be set several reasons why, quite apart from untruth, a census like this is sure to produce an unfair number of yeses. Quite apart from any wish to deceive, the very general impression that yeses were what was specially wanted could not but affect some of the answers given, at any rate to the extent of causing indistinct impressions to be represented as vivid sensory experiences; 1 and it has also led some of those who have aided in the collection to put the questions to persons of whom it was known beforehand that their answer would be yes.

Moreover, when questionforms to be filled up are distributed on a large scale, it is impossible to bring it home to the minds of many of the persons whose answer would be "No" that there is any use in recording that answer. They probably have a vague idea that they have heard "negative evidence" disparaged, and fail to see that every percentage in the world involves it - that we cannot know that one man in 100 is six feet high without evidence that 99 men in 100 are not six feet high. This difficulty has been encountered again and again; and on the whole I have no doubt that the proportion of yeses is decidedly larger than it ought to be. Fortunately, incorrectness on this side need not trouble us - its only effect being that the telepathic argument, if it prevail, will prevail though based on distinctly unfavourable assumptions.

1 For instance, a lady who answers that she has had an auditory hallucination, and is written to with the view of finding out in what it had consisted, then states that "it was not an auditory experience, but merely a feeling that something had happened." Here the answer could be rectified; but even the many hundreds of letters that have been written on the subject have not served to eliminate all doubtful cases.