576 The Outline of Science 



As when a boy killed by a crash from the air is both seen 

 and heard, almost immediately afterwards, by another officer sit- 

 ting in the camp, and hailed and spoken to; surprise being ex- 

 pressed that his long journey was so soon over. The figure, 

 which exhibited identifying details of costume, responds and goes 

 out. In the evening the officer learns that this same youth, whom 

 he knew intimately, had been killed by an accident on the way 

 to his destination, at just about the time of his appearance. A 

 much fuller account of this occurrence is in the Journal of the 

 S.P.R. for June, 1919. But really instances of this kind are 

 innumerable, and are often narrated in biographies. 



The voice of Rochester heard by Jane Eyre at an impossible 

 distance could not be attributed to a hyper-acute sense of hear- 

 ing; if it occurred in reality it would have to be attributed to a 

 telepathic or sympathetic connection between, shall we say, kin- 

 dred souls; for it is represented as a reciprocal and not a one- 

 sided experience. Mrs. Gaskell heard Charlotte Bronte say 

 that it was based on an incident which had really happened. 1 



Few families are without some such story in their archives; 

 and all difficulties about the physical appearance of any real 

 phantom, the dripping clothes for instance, the accompanying 

 horse, or any wild scene generally which cannot be thought of 

 as an objective present reality, even if the phantom itself could 

 so be regarded all difficulties of this kind vanish or are reduced 

 to insignificance when once it is realised that the whole impression 

 is a mental one, and that the surprised percipient has auto- 

 matically constructed not only the phantom itself, but a number 

 of accessory features too, as mental imagery appropriate to and 

 aroused by the purely mental shock or stimulus which, through 

 his unsuspected receptive power, he has been privileged to receive. 



Such cases are far too numerous for chance coincidences to 

 explain a fact which a most carefully conducted and hyper- 

 critical census of inquiry has established. The sensible thing for 



1 Life, p. 446. 



