707. Let us now press the actual evidential question somewhat closer. Let us consider, for it is by no means evident at first sight, what conditions a visual or auditory phantasm is bound to fulfil before it can be regarded as indicating prima facie the influence of a discarnate mind. The discussion may be best introduced by quoting the words in which Edmund Gurney opened it in 1888.1 The main evidential lines as there laid down retain their validity, although the years which have since passed have greatly augmented the testimony, and in so doing have illustrated yet other tests of true post-mortem communication, - to which we shall presently come.

Those who have followed the records and discussions printed in the Proceedings and the Journal of this Society will not need to be informed how little the evidence which has not infrequently led even educated persons to believe in the actual reappearance of dead friends really justifies any such belief. The reason can be given in a single sentence. In most of the cases where persons have professed to have seen or to have held communication with deceased friends and relatives, there is nothing to distinguish the phenomenon which their senses have encountered from purely subjective hallucination. Simple as this statement seems, the truth which it embodies remained for centuries un-guessed. It is only in comparatively modern days that the facts of sensory hallucination have been at all understood, and that the extreme definiteness which the delusive object may take has been recognised; and even now the truth of the matter has not had time to penetrate to the popular mind. The reply of average common sense to any account of an apparition is usually either that the witness is lying or grossly exaggerating, or that he was mad or drunk or emotionally excited at the time; or at the very most that his experience was an illusion - a misinterpretation of some sight or sound which was of an entirely objective kind.

A very little careful study of the subject will, however, show that all these hypotheses mustoften be rejected; that the witness may be in good health, and in no exceptional state of nervousness or excitement, and that what he sees or hears may still be of purely subjective origin - the projection of his own brain. And among the objects thus fictitiously presented, it is only natural to expect that a certain percentage will take the form of a human figure or voice which the percipient recognises as that of a deceased person; for the memory of such figures and voices is part of his mental store, and the latent images are ready to supply the material of waking hallucination, just as they are ready to supply the material of dream.

It is further evident that in alleged cases of apparitions of the dead, the point which we have held to distinguish certain apparitions of living persons from purely subjective hallucinations is necessarily lacking. That point is coincidence between the apparition and some critical or exceptional condition of the person who seems to appear; but with regard to the dead, we have no l Proceedings S.P.R., vol. v. pp. 403-408. independent knowledge of their condition, and therefore never have the opportunity of observing any such coincidences.

There remain three, and I think only three, conditions which might establish a presumption that an apparition or other immediate manifestation1 of a dead person is something more than a mere subjective hallucination of the percipient's senses. Either (1) more persons than one might be independently affected by the phenomenon; or (2) the phantasm might convey information, afterwards discovered to be true, of something which the percipient had never known; or (3) the appearance might be that of a person whom the percipient himself had never seen, and of whose aspect he was ignorant, and yet his description of it might be sufficiently definite for identification. But though one or more of these conditions would have to be fully satisfied before we could be convinced that any particular apparition of the dead had some cause external to the percipient's own mind, there is one more general characteristic of the class which is sufficiently suggestive of such a cause to be worth considering. I mean the disproportionate number of cases which occur shortly after the death of the person represented.

Such a time-relation, if frequendy enough encountered, might enable us to argue for the objective origin of the phenomenon in a manner analogous to that which leads us to conclude that many phantasms of the living have an objective (a telepathic) origin. For, according to the doctrines of probabilities, a hallucination representing a known person would not by chance present a definite time-relation to a special cognate event - viz., the death of that person - in more than a certain percentage of the whole number of similar hallucinations that occur; and if that percentage is decidedly exceeded, there is reason to surmise that some other cause than chance - in other words, some objective origin for the phantasm - is present.

Supposing the peculiarity which I have mentioned to be established, the significance of the time-relation would of course be quite a different question. The popular mind naturally leaps to explanations of an exciting fact, before the fact itself is at all established. Thus it is said that the deceased person comes to say farewell, or to cheer the hearts of mourners while their grief is fresh; or that his "spirit" is "earth-bound," and can only gradually free itself. Or, again, there is the elaborate theory of "shells" propounded by M. D'Assier, who holds that, though consciousness and individuality have died, some basis of physical manifestation is still left, which fades away by slow degrees. I do not propose now to discuss any of these hypotheses. Our business at present is wholly with the facts of post-mortem appearances. The question for science is simply whether those facts point to any external cause at all; and it is as bearing on this great primary question that the inquiry as to the relative frequency of the phenomena near the time of death assumes importance.

It was in the formation of a large collection of first-hand testimony on the subject of sensory hallucination, that I was first struck by the large proportion of cases where the phantasm represented a friend or relative recently dead. Out of two hundred and thirty-one hallucinations representing recognised human beings, twenty-eight, or nearly an eighth part, occurred within a few weeks of the death of the person represented. There are two reasons, however, why little weight can be allowed to this fact. In the first place a phantasm representing a person whose death is recent is specially likely to excite interest, and so to be noted and remembered; and this might easily swell the percentage of this class of cases in such a collection as mine. And in the second place, the fact of the death was in every instance known to the percipient. It is, therefore, natural to conclude that the emotional state of the percipient was the sufficient cause of the hallucination; and that is the explanation which the large majority of psychological and medical experts would at once adopt. I should myself feel more completely satisfied with it if we had any record of the phantasmal appearance of a person whom the friend who saw the appearance believed to be dead, but who was really safe and sound.

Still, false alarms of death are not so common as to make it certain, or perhaps even likely, that we should have encountered such a case. And meanwhile I think that grief, and the sense of awe commonly connected with death, ought to be held as the sufficient cause of abnormal sensory experiences connected with persons whose recent death is being mourned, until the objective reality of phantasms of the dead in certain cases is established by some independent line of proof.

1 I am not here considering mediate manifestations, as where evidence of "spirit identity" is alleged to have been given through, e.g., the writing of a medium under "control".

If, then, we are to draw any probable conclusion as to the objective nature of post-mortem appearances and communications (or of some of them) from the fact of their special frequency soon after death, we must confine ourselves to cases where the fact of death has been unknown to the percipient at the time of his experience. Now, in these days of letters and telegrams, people for the most part hear of the deaths of friends and relatives within a very few days, sometimes within a very few hours, after the death occurs; so that appearances of the sort required would, as a rule, have to follow very closely indeed on the death. Have we evidence of any considerable number of such cases?

Readers of Phantasms of the Living will know that we have. In a number of cases which were treated in that book as examples of telepathic transference from a dying person, the person was actually dead at the time that the percipient's experience occurred; and the inclusion of such cases under the title of Phantasms of the Living naturally occasioned a certain amount of adverse criticism. Their inclusion, it will be remembered, required an assumption which cannot by any means be regarded as certain. We had to suppose that the telepathic transfer took place just before, or exactly at, the moment of death; but that the impression remained latent in the percipient's mind, and only after an interval emerged into his consciousness, whether as waking vision or as dream or in some other form. Now, as a provisional hypothesis, I think that this assumption was justified. For, in the first place, the moment of death is, in time, the central point of a cluster of abnormal experiences occurring to percipients at a distance, of which some precede, while others follow, the death; it is natural, therefore, to surmise that the same explanation will cover the whole group, and that the motive force in each of its divisions lies in a state of the "agent" prior to bodily death.

In the second place, some of the facts of experimental thought-transference countenance the view that "transferred impressions" may be latent for a time before the recipient becomes aware of them; and recent discoveries with respect to the whole subject of automatism and "secondary intelligence" make it seem far less improbable than it would otherwise have seemed that telepathy may take effect first on the "unconscious" part of the mind.1 And in the third place, the period of supposed latency has in a good many instances been a period when the person affected was in activity, and when his mind and senses were being solicited by other things; and in such cases it is specially easy to suppose that the telepathic impression did not get the right conditions for rising into consciousness until a season of silence and recueillement arrived.1 But though the theory of latency has thus a good deal to be said for it, my colleagues and I are most anxious not to be supposed to be putting forward as a dogma what must be regarded at present merely as a working hypothesis. Psychical research is of all subjects the one where it is most important to avoid this error, and to keep the mind open for new interpretations of the facts.

And in the present instance there are certain definite objections which may fairly be made to the hypothesis that a telepathic impression derived from a dying person may emerge after hours of latency. The experimental cases to which I have referred as analogous are few and uncertain, and, moreover, in them the period of latency has been measured by seconds or minutes, not by hours. And though, as I have said, some of the instances of apparent delay among the death-cases might be accounted for by the fact that the percipient's mind or senses needed to be withdrawn from other occupations before the manifestation could take place, there are other instances where this is not so, and where no ground at all appears for connecting the delay with the percipient's condition. On the whole, then, the alternative hypothesis - that the condition of the phenomenon on the "agent's" side (be it psychical or be it physical) is one which only comes into existence at a distinct interval after death, and that the percipient really is impressed at the moment, and not before the moment, when he is conscious of the impression - is one which must be steadily kept in view.

1 In some experimental cases, it will be remembered, the impression takes effect through the motor, not the sensory, system of the recipient, as by automatic writing, so that he is never directly aware of it at all.

So far I have been speaking of cases where the interval between the death and the manifestation was so short as to make the theory of latency possible. The rule adopted in Phantasms of the Living was that this interval must not exceed twelve hours. But we have records of a few cases where this interval has been greatly exceeded, and yet where the fact of the death was still unknown to the percipient at the time of his experience. The theory of latency cannot reasonably be applied to cases where weeks or months divide the vision (or whatever it may be) from the moment of death, which is the latest at which an ordinary2 telepathically transferred idea could have obtained access to the percipient. And the existence of such cases - so far as it tends to establish the reality of objectively-caused apparitions of the dead - diminishes the objection to conceiving that the appearances, etc, which have very shortly followed death have had a different causation from those which have coincided with or very shortly preceded it.

For we shall not be inventing a wholly new class for the former cases, but only provisionally shifting them from one class to another - to a much smaller and much less well-evidenced class, it is true, but one nevertheless for which we have evidence enough to justify us in expecting more.

1 See. for instance, case 500, Phantasms of the Living, vol. ii. p. 462.

2 I mean by "ordinary" the classes which are recognised and treated of in Phantasms of the Living. But if the departed survive, the possibility of thought-transference between them and those who remain is of course a perfectly tenable hypothesis. "As our telepathic theory is a psychical one, and makes no physical assumptions, it would be perfectly applicable (though the name perhaps would be in-appropriate) to the conditions of disembodied existence." - Phantasms, vol. i. p. 512.