586 The Outline of Science 



and carry him softly out in shoeless feet, quietly and sur- 

 reptitiously, lest we should know that he had died, and the 

 next night I thought take him away to the cemetery. 

 Afterwards, when I told these happenings to the sisters, 

 they informed me that this had happened just as I had 

 fancied. But the name of the poor fellow I never knew. 



This kind of experience, with varieties of form, has often 

 been narrated by persons who have been at the point of death 

 and have recovered, or who have awakened out of a deep trance. 

 Such persons have said that they felt physically attached to the 

 body, as by a kind of cord, and were under the impression that 

 if the cord snapped return would be impossible. 1 



Return is indeed often undesired, for the free condition 

 seems much more attractive than the cramped, fettered, and 

 commonplace condition familiar to us in our customary associa- 

 tion with an animal-descended body, full of appetites and liable 

 to pain and physical troubles: though, doubtless, the association 

 is for some good and evolutionary purpose. 



Travelling clairvoyance is the projection, as it were, of the 

 intelligence out of the body into some distant place, so that it 

 brings back information as to what is there at the time occurring; 

 it is a phenomenon which certainly suggests the separation and 

 independent existence of mind and body, and which also in some 

 exceptional forms suggests an ectoplasmic or other vehicle for 

 the intelligence, while separated from its usual complete 

 organism. 



For when the distant vision of the surroundings of an absent 

 person is being attained, by what feels like a visit to a distant 

 place, there are certain rare, so-called reciprocal, cases in which 

 the distant person is aware of the presence of his visitor, who is 

 said to manifest a sort of phantasmal appearance, as if the percep- 

 tion were not wholly subjective, and not limited to one side alone. 2 



>Cf. J. A. Hill's Man is a Spirit, ch. iv. 



' A good instance, much too long to quote, is cited in Myers's Human Personality, 

 vol. i, p. 682, from vol. vii, p. 41, of the Proceedings S.P.R. 



