§ 8. But I have not yet done. There are considerations of a quite different kind which still further strengthen the argument for telepathy as against chance. Though the hallucinations which may be regarded as telepathic or veridical include many cases which may differ from purely subjective hallucinations of the sane only in the fact of being veridical, yet the group, as a whole, presents some peculiarities. [Discussion of the proportion of visual to auditory cases is here omitted. See p. 371. - Ed].

One peculiarity worth noting, is that the proportion of cases where more senses than one have been concerned is considerably larger in the telepathic than in the purely subjective class of hallucinations - which seems to imply what may be called a higher average intensity in the former class. Out of 590 subjective cases, I find that 49, that is, a trifle over 8 per cent. of the whole number, are alleged to have concerned more senses than one; of which 24 were visual and auditory, 8 visual and tactile, 13 auditory and tactile, and 4 concerned all three senses. Taking the telepathic evidence, I find that, out of 423 cases where a sensory hallucination seems to have been distinctly externalised, 80, or 19 per cent. of the whole number, are alleged to have concerned more senses than one; of which 53 were visual and auditory, 12 visual and tactile, 7 auditory and tactile, and 8 concerned all three senses. I may add that the proportion of 19 per cent. remains exactly the same if only the first-hand cases included in the body of the work be taken into account, and cannot therefore be attributed to exaggeration of the facts in those narratives in the Supplement which are given at second-hand.1 [Two paragraphs omitted here. - Ed].

The last point to which I must call attention, as conflicting with the theory of chance-coincidence, is a characteristic not of the telepathic phantasms themselves, but of the distant events with which they and other telepathic impressions coincide; but it none the less serves to distinguish these coincidences as due to a definite and peculiar cause. It is the very large proportion of cases in which the distant event is death. It is in this profoundest shock which human life encounters that these phenomena seem to be oftenest engendered; and, where not in death itself, at least in one of those special moments, whether of strong mental excitement or of bodily collapse, which of all living experiences come nearest to the great crisis of dissolution. Thus among the 668 cases of spontaneous telepathy in this book, 401 (or among 423 examples of the sensory externalised class, 304) are death-cases, in the sense that the percipient's experience either coincided with or very shortly followed the agent's death; while in 25 more cases the agent's condition, at the time of the percipient's experience, was one of serious illness which in a few hours or a few days terminated in death.

Nor, in this connection, can I avoid once more referring to the large number of cases in which the event that befell the agent has been death (or a very near approach to it) by drowning or suffocation. Out of the 401 death-cases just mentioned, there are 35, or nearly 9 per cent., where the death was by drowning - clearly a very much higher proportion than deaths of this particular form bear to all deaths, for even of accidental deaths among the male population, only 5 per cent. are due to drowning - and in 6 other cases the agent's escape from such a death was a narrow one. And if we do not insist on the form of death, but only on its suddenness, the above proportion still remains a very striking fact; since deaths by accident, even among males, are only a little over 4 per cent. of the total of deaths.

We do not know why the conditions of death generally, or of sudden death, or of any particular form of death,1 or of excitement or collapse, should be effective; but we at all events know that the conditions are themselves unusual. Similarly in most cases of experimental thought-transference, the agent's mind is unusually occupied by its concentrated fixation on a single object; and whether it be in the curiosities of an afternoon or in the crises of a lifetime that telepathy finds its occasion, the peculiarity of the agent's state has at any rate that degree of explanatory power which succeeds in connecting the rare effect with the rare cause. In neither case can we trace out the actual process whereby the percipient is influenced; but we have the same sort of ground for refusing to attribute to chance the oft-repeated apparitions at the time of death, as the oft-repeated successes in guessing cards and reproducing diagrams.

1 If only the subjective cases received from the canvassed group of 5705 persons be considered, those which concerned more than one sense amount to less than 4 per cent.; while of the 29 special coincidental cases auditory and visual used in estimating the improbability of chance coincidence, 5, that is 17 per cent., concerned more than one sense.

The only way of meeting this argument would be to show that similar coincidences have been frequently met with in connection with definite events which produced no unusual physical or mental state in the person to whom they occurred. For instance, if B at a distance has a vision of A on the day that A scratches his finger or orders a new pair of boots, it would seem wholly irrational to connect the two facts. Accordingly, if many, or even several, such coincidences were on record, I should have to admit that the operations of chance altogether overpass my estimate, and that the data on which the previous argument rested must, therefore, be somehow defective. Or, to take a case where some emotional disturbance is, as a rule, involved, if it proved to be not extremely uncommon to have a vision of an absent friend on the morning of his marriage, I should feel that my argument was so far weakened; for it would be difficult to suppose that the emotions connected with that one morning stood distinctly apart from those of other seasons dedicated to happiness and the affections. But in point of fact we do not find that coincidences of these types prevail.

The coincidental phantasms seem limited to seasons of exceptional crisis or excitement on the agent's part; and this limitation, in once more marking out these phantasms as a distinct group of natural phenomena, strongly confirms the substantial accuracy of the statistical results.

I am not forgetting, in these final remarks, what I have expressly stated before (p. 77), that the action of telepathy must not be dogmatically confined to those examples of striking coincidence which are suitable to be quoted in demonstration of it; and even in respect of such extreme affections as hallucinations of the senses, I should hesitate to assert that they cannot be due to an absent agent whose condition is not markedly abnormal. I regard it, however, as so unlikely that this is often their source - I regard the probability as so enormous that a phantasm seen or heard by A only, and representing B who is at the time living a piece of ordinary life, is of purely subjective origin - that the above argument remains in my view a fair one; and it is at any rate fairly addressed to those (whom of course I have had chiefly in view throughout the present chapter) who have not hitherto admitted or considered the case for telepathy even as based on the markedly coincidental examples.

1 At the same time, with respect to drowning, one cannot but recall the peculiar vividness and concentration of psychical life which (from the accounts of many persons who have been ultimately rescued) seem to characterise the earlier stages of that form of death.

[Note. - Gurney appended to his concluding chapter an appeal for help in extending his statistics of sensory hallucinations by canvassing another known number of persons taken at random. He did not live to carry out the work, but it was subsequently done by the Society for Psychical Research, and the results published in vol. x. of the Proceedings. Much interesting information may there be found about sensory hallucinations in general, and about the proportion of veridical ones in particular. The number of persons canvassed - 17,000 - was thought to be sufficiently large to make it unnecessary to go outside the census itself for coincidences with death, or consequently to make any assumption as to the size of the circle from which they were drawn. The result fully confirmed the conclusion come to in this chapter that the number of death coincidences cannot be attributed to chance. - Ed].