PSYCHICAL RESEARCH OF THE CENTURY. «79 



various kinds and degrees the mind or brain of another person at a 

 distance. This was a mere development of the idea of vohintary and 

 experimental thought transference by no recognized channel of sense. 

 These conclusions, if accepted, account for the universal belief in death 

 wraiths. But of course an obvious difficulty arises. Many sane and 

 temperate people have had experience of the halhuunation Uiat a dis- 

 tant person is present, when that person turns out to ha\e been in 

 perfect health and in no crisis at all. Therefore, we nmst ask. Do the 

 hallucinations which coincide with a death or other crisis coincide >)y 

 mere accident and so afford no evidence for the action of mind on dis- 

 tant mind^ Without an enormous census, this question can not be 

 decided. The society, however, collected more than 17,000 answers to 

 a list of questions, and the conuuittee satisfied -themselves that, on this 

 body of testimony, the hallucinatory appearances (-oincided with the 

 death of the person who seemed to appear -i-tO times more often than 

 ought to be the case by the law of probabilities. They pronomiced 

 that "between deaths and apparitions of the dying a connection exists 

 which is not due to chance alone.'' This position has been attacked by 

 Dr. Parish in his "'Hallucinations and Illusions." 



The society, as a society, expresses no opinion, Init the committee of 

 the society, for their part, decided that "wraiths'' are coincidental, or 

 veridical, hallucinations produced by some unknown mental or cerebral 

 process, called, provisionally, "telepathy" — sensation from a distance. 

 Whether the process is "physical," and caused by the molecular action 

 of on(^ l)rain upon another distant and recipient brain (as in "wireless 

 telegraphy"), or whether the process is "psj'chical.'' and involves the 

 action of a niA'^sterious psychical faculty, there is no means of deciding. 

 But if we admit that there are phantasms of the dead, not being mere 

 casual hallucinations, then we nuist conceive the pi'ocess to be psychical: 

 the hrain of the dead being dust, the "soul" must be the agent. Of 

 phantasms of the dead or "ghosts," the society has collected numer- 

 ous examples at first hand. On tlie hypothesis already explained, these 

 appearances would l)e caused l)y the action of the disincarnatc vipon 

 the living mind But hoAV can it ))e proved that the phantasm is no 

 mere empty hallucination or illusion, begotten subjectively by grief, 

 by association of ideas, or by a casual arrangement of light and shaded 

 We have in the case of the dead no coincidental crisis of their own to 

 appeal to, as in the case of phantasms of the living. The only possi- 

 ble test is the communication by the phantasm of knowledge otheiwise 

 unattainable by the percipient. 



The modern ghost seldom speaks, and the knowledge is indirectly 

 communicated. One or two examples are needed. Thus., residing in 

 a house in Switzerland, a lady saw a phantasm exactly like the por- 

 traits of Voltaire. She then learned, for the first time, that she occu- 

 pied what had been Voltaire's room. But had she not known about 



