640. Dissociation of personality, combined with activity in the tnetetherial environment; such, in the phraseology used in this book, will be the formula which will most easily cover those actually observed facts of veridical apparition on which we must now enter at considerable length. And after this preliminary explanation I shall ask leave to use for clearness in my argument such words as are simplest and shortest, however vague or disputable their connotation may be. I must needs, for instance, use the word "spirit," when I speak of that unknown fraction of a man's personality - not the supraliminal fraction - which we discern as operating before or after death in the metetherial environment. For this conception I can find no other term, but by the word spirit I wish to imply nothing more definite than this. Of the spirit's relation to space, or (which is a part of the same problem) to its own spatial manifestation in definite form, something has already been said, and there will be more to say hereafter.

And similarly those terms, invader or invaded, from whose strangeness and barbarity our immediate discussion began, will depend for their meaning upon conceptions which the evidence itself must gradually supply.

641. That evidence, as it now lies before us, is perplexingly various both in content and quality. For some of the canons needed in its analysis I have already referred the reader to long extracts from Edmund Gurney's writings. Certain points must still be mentioned here before the narrative begins.

It must be remembered, in the first place, that all these veridical or coincidental cases stand out together as a single group from a background of hallucinations which involve no coincidence, which have no claim to veridicality. If purely subjective hallucinations of the senses affected insane or disordered brains alone, - as was pretty generally the assumption, even in scientific circles, when our inquiry began, - our task would have been much easier than it is. There can be no question as to the sound and healthy condition of many of our informants, and it would much simplify matters if we were entitled to argue - say, in one of our cases where a schoolboy sees his brother's phantom while he is playing in a cricket match, - "This schoolboy was in perfect health; this apparition was the only one which he ever saw, therefore it necessarily had some cause outside himself".

Most people, in point of fact, do thus argue, when an apparition, unique in their lives, presents itself to them while they are feeling thoroughly well and at ease in mind. It so happens that it was left for Edmund Gurney to show unexpected difficulties in this presumption. His census of hallucinations (1884) showed a frequency, previously unsuspected, of scattered hallucinations among sane and healthy persons, the experience being often unique in a lifetime, and in no apparent connection with any other circumstance whatever (see 612).

Since casual hallucinations of the sane, I say, are thus frequent, we can hardly venture to assume that they are all veridical. And the existence of all these perhaps merely subjective hallucinations greatly complicates our investigation of veridical hallucinations. It prevents the mere existence of the hallucinations, however strangely interposed in ordinary life, from having any evidential value, and throws us upon external forms of evidence; - coincidences, especially, between the hallucinations and some event taking place at a distance. For we have as yet no clear criterion in the percipient's feelings which can show us which hallucination is or is not caused by something otherwise unknown which is occurring outside him. Hypnotic hallucinations, for instance, which correspond to no external fact beyond the hypnotiser's suggestive utterance heard in the usual way, form perhaps the most distinct and persistent group of all hallucinations of the sane. We have then, I repeat, at present no general subjective test which can discriminate falsidical from veridical hallucinations. It does not indeed follow that we need despair of finding such a test.

Some individual sensitives, liable to both kinds of hallucinations, believe that they have actually learnt to distinguish for themselves between the two classes, or even to distinguish in the veridical class between apparitions due to the agency of incarnate or of discarnate spirits; and it is of course to be hoped that as such sensitivity comes to be more often recognised, and more seriously valued, the sensitive's own discriminative power may become an increasingly important factor of evidence.

642. Meantime we have to rely on the evidence afforded by external coincidence; - on the mere fact, to put such a coincidence in its simplest form, that I see a phantom of my friend Smith at the moment when Smith is unexpectedly dying at a distance. A coincidence of this general type, if it occurs, need not be difficult to substantiate, and we have in fact substantiated it with more or less completeness in several hundred cases.

The primâ facie conclusion will obviously be that there is a causal connection between the death and the apparition. To overcome this presumption it would be necessary either to impugn the accuracy of the informant's testimony, or to show that chance alone might have brought about the observed coincidences.

On both of these questions there have been full and repeated discussions elsewhere. I need not re-argue them at length here, but will give in the Appendices to this section some of the more important points. Thus the general canons of evidence for coincidental hallucinations were given by Edmund Gurney at the outset of this inquiry so clearly that no restatement is needed. It then became manifest that our evidence was weak in one particular where our canons dwelt on the importance of strength. Only a small proportion of the coincidental phantasms were recorded in writing before the coincidental event was known. Some discussion of this point is given in 642 B; to which I have added a list of cases - much more numerous now than when the question was first raised - where some contemporary record has actually been preserved. The next Appendix deals with a cognate point - the danger of illusions of memory, creating or magnifying the interesting coincidences. But on these and other points the reader should also consult the "Report on the Census of Hallucinations," Proceedings S.P.R., vol. x. (already analysed in 612 A), where every source of error as yet discovered has been pretty fully considered.

To that volume also I must refer him for a thorough discussion of the arguments for and against chance-coincidence (summarised in 612 A). The conclusion to which the Committee unanimously came is expressed in the closing words: "Between deaths and apparitions of the dying person a connection exists which is not due to chance, alone".

We have a right, I think, to say that only by another census of hallucinations, equally careful, more extensive, and yielding absolutely different results, could this conclusion be overthrown.