They both said they had seen no one. ' Why, you don't mean to say I have not been in the house?' I said. ' Oh, yes; you were in the midst of saying something about the alterations, when you suddenly stopped, and walked back to the house; we could not tell why,' they both said. I was in perfect health at the time of the occurrence, and continued to be so after it".

The next account is from Dr. Charles M. Smith, of Franklin, St. Mary's Parish, Louisiana. He narrates that a lady of his acquaintance, Mrs. P., lost her life at Last Island, in the terrible hurricane of August, 1856. " Nearly two months afterwards, on my way to visit a patient in the country, I met Mr. Weeks, a brother of Mrs. P., and in the buggy with him a lady so wonderfully like Mrs. P. that, but for my knowledge of her death, I would have declared it to be herself. The carriage and horses used by Mr. Weeks were easily distinguished by certain well-marked peculiarities from any other in the parish, and I saw these as distinctly as the occupants themselves." Dr. Smith bowed, and called Mr. Weeks by name, but no notice was taken, and the buggy passed on. Returning home an hour later, he made particular inquiry, and found that no persons in the least resembling those he had seen had arrived in the village; and he afterwards learnt that Mr. Weeks had been at his home 30 miles away at the time. "The conclusion seemed inevitable," he adds, "that the whole affair was an optical delusion" another person at a distance, our point of view is, in fact, altered in relation to the whole subject of transient hallucinations of the sane.

Ever since the abandonment of the idea, once widely held, that delusions of the senses were the direct and (in a manner) objective productions of the devil,1 the universal assumption has been that they are all purely subjective phenomena - even the belief in "ghosts" having been really no exception to the rule, since the believers have not regarded these as hallucinations at all, but as independent entities. Now when telepathy of the externalised type is admitted, the first effect, of course, is to destroy the generality of the old assumption by driving it quite decisively off a certain part of the field: it is involved in the new doctrine that a certain number of sensory hallucinations - the majority, namely, of those which have markedly corresponded to real and unforeseen events - can no longer possibly be regarded as purely subjective.2 But the effect does not stop short here. The new vera causa, which has decisively occupied one corner of the field, throws, so to speak, a shadow of doubt over the rest; for while we perceive its reality, we have as yet neither probed its conditions nor measured its range.

I have already pointed out (p. 77) that the action of telepathy cannot be dogmatically limited to those most conclusive cases on which our evidential proof of it must depend; and if its reality in the world renders the old doctrine of the subjectivity of hallucinations definitely untenable in some cases, we need not be surprised if in others it renders it doubtful, and doubtful, moreover, in various degrees. Thus, between the hallucinations which are clearly subjective and those which are clearly telepathic, there will be a neutral region, where neither explanation can be adopted with certainty. Now, on all accounts it is important that this neutral region should be recognised and defined. It is important theoretically, because in time we may learn more of the conditions of the phenomena, and may be able to assign them with confidence to this class or that; but even more is it important evidentially, because, till the grounds of doubt are understood, there is always a risk that purely subjective cases will be misinterpreted, and will be reckoned into the cumulative proof of telepathy, or in some other way laid to the account of supernormal influences.

It seems advisable, therefore, to take a glance along the whole line of transient hallucinations of the sane, up to the point at which the action of telepathy may appear to be clearly assured. I will make my survey as rapid as possible, being loth to detain the reader among these subjective and dubious cases, while the main body of the telepathic evidence is perforce kept waiting.

§ 4. In the first group, the cause of the phenomena is, by exception, quite clear. The hallucination is an after-image - the direct reproduction of some object or sound with which the senses of the percipient have been particularly occupied; and though we may not always be able to say why the reproduction takes place at such and such a moment, the purely subjective character of the experience is obvious. It is sometimes due to mere fatigue of the retina; it occurs, for instance, after long gazing at objects through a microscope. Some examples due to a more central cause have been given in the preceding chapters; e.g., M. Maury's hypnagogic vision of the beefsteak (p. 252), Mr. Wilson's visions of the tombstones, and Mr. Turner's phantom-chandelier (p. 314) - the latter case being remarkable for the length of time which had elapsed since the real object had been seen. Another type is where the original impression has been of a distressing kind. Thus, Dr. Andral reports1 that, having received a shock from the condition of a child's body in the dissecting-room, he was startled next morning, on waking, by a vivid repetition of the spectacle.

I have a similar first-hand case from a friend, who in girlhood suffered for several nights from a hallucination caused by the unaccustomed sight of death; and another where a lady had a vivid waking vision of a servant who had startled her some hours before. The transcript is not always quite literal. Thus, a gentleman tells me that the figure of a deceased friend, whom he had just been seeing in his coffin, appeared to him, but in his living aspect and carrying a portfolio; and another informant - the Rev. J. M. Blackler, of 121, St. George's Road, S.W. - who one morning had a vision of the upper parts of three cooks in white caps, and was able to trace the impression unmistakably to a recently seen placard, but noticed nevertheless that the resemblance was only of a general kind. As good auditory examples, I may mention the hallucination of hearing the bells of the Town Hall at Manchester play "Auld Lang Syne," experienced more than once by a lady when sleeping in a room where she had on former occasions heard the actual performance; and a case where a young lady, who had suffered considerably from the manners of young schoolboy brothers, was afterwards startled, when alone, by such remarks as "Shut up," and "Get out of the way".

1 [The omitted note on Witchcraft is here referred to. - Ed.] ² At this point, the truth of the doctrine is of course not assumed to have been proved; the proof is a long cumulative process, which will be carried on to the end of the book. But it would have been intolerably inconvenient, both to writer and reader, to defer all attempts at logical treatment and analysis until the whole of the cases had been presented en masse. I may take leave therefore, by anticipation, to describe as telepathic the incidents which every reader who, in the end, agrees that telepathy is a true fact in Nature, will agree in regarding as almost certainly true examples of it.