644 I must begin with cases where the action of the excursive fragment of the personality is of the weakest kind - the least capable of affecting other observers, or of being recalled into the agent's own waking memory.

1 Visual cases, when occurring indoors at any rate, are generally stronger evidentially than auditory cases, because less likely to be originated by mere mistake or illusion.

Such cases, naturally enough, will be hard to bring up to evidential level. It must depend on mere chance whether these weak and aimless psychical excursions are observed at all; or are observed in such a way as to lead us to attribute them to anything more than the subjective fancy of the observers.

How can a casual vision - say, of a lady sitting in her drawing-room, - of a man returning home at six o'clock - be distinguished from memory-images on the one hand and from what I may term "expectation-images " on the other? The picture of the lady may be a slightly modified and externalised reminiscence; the picture of the man walking up to the door may be a mere projection of what the observer was hoping to see.

I have assumed that these phantoms coincided with no marked event. The lady may have been thinking of going to her drawing -room; the man may have been in the act of walking home; - but these are trivial circumstances which might be repeated any day.

Yet, however trivial, almost any set of human circumstances are sufficiently complex to leave room for coincidence. If the sitter in the drawing-room is wearing a distinctive article of dress, never seen by the percipient until it is seen in the hallucination; - if the phantasmal homeward traveller is carrying a parcel of unusual shape, which the real man does afterwards unexpectedly bring home with him; - there may be reason to think that there is a causal connection between the apparent agent's condition at the moment, and the apparition.

I will quote one of these "arrival-cases," so to term them, where the peculiarity of dress was such as to make the coincidence between vision and reality well worth attention. The case is interesting also as one of our earliest examples of a psychical incident carefully recorded at the time; so that after the lapse of nearly forty years it was possible to correct the percipient's surviving recollection by his contemporary written statement.

It is taken from Phantasms of the Living, vol. ii. p. 94, having been contributed by Colonel Bigge, of 2 Morpeth Terrace, S.W., who took the account out of a sealed envelope, in Gurney's presence, for the first time since it was written on the day of the occurrence.

An account of a circumstance which occurred to me when quartered at Templemore, Co. Tipperary, on 20th February 1847.

This afternoon, about 3 o'clock p.m., I was walking from my quarters towards the mess-room to put some letters into the letter-box, when I distinctly saw Lieut.-Colonel Reed, 70th Regiment, walking from the corner of the range of buildings occupied by the officers towards the mess-room door; and I saw him go into the passage. He was dressed in a brown shooting-jacket, with grey summer regulation tweed trousers, and had a fishing-rod and a landing-net in his hand. Although at the time I saw him he was about 15 or 20 yards from me, and although anxious to speak to him at the moment, I did not do so, but followed him into the passage and turned into the ante-room on the left-hand side, where I expected to find him. On opening the door, to my great surprise, he was not there; the only person in the room was Quartermaster Nolan, 70th Regiment, and I immediately asked him if he had seen the colonel, and he replied he had not; upon which I said, "I suppose he has gone upstairs," and I immediately left the room.

Thinking he might have gone upstairs to one of the officers' rooms, I listened at the bottom of the stairs and then went up to the first landing-place; but not hearing anything I went downstairs again and tried to open the bedroom door, which is opposite to the anteroom, thinking he might have gone there; but I found the door locked, as it usually is in the middle of the day. I was very much surprised at not finding the colonel, and I walked into the barrack-yard and joined Lieutenant Caulfield, 66th Regiment, who was walking there; and I told the story to him, and particularly described the dress in which I had seen the colonel. We walked up and down the barrack-yard talking about it for about ten minutes, when, to my great surprise, never having kept my eye from the door leading to the mess-room (there is only one outlet from it), I saw the colonel walk into the barracks through the gate - which is in the opposite direction - accompanied by Ensign Willing-ton, 70th Regiment, in precisely the same dress in which I had seen him, and with a fishing-rod and a landing-net in his hand.

Lieutenant Caulfield and I immediately walked to them, and we were joined by Lieut-Colonel Goldie, 66th Regiment, and Captain Hartford, and I asked Colonel Reed if he had not gone into the mess-room about ten minutes before. He replied that he certainly had not, for that he had been out fishing for more than two hours at some ponds about a mile from the barracks, and that he had not been near the mess-room at all since the morning.

At the time I saw Colonel Reed going into the mess-room, I was not aware that he had gone out fishing - a very unusual thing to do at this time of the year; neither had I seen him before in the dress I have described during that day. I had seen him in uniform in the morning at parade, but not afterwards at all until 3 o'clock - having been engaged in my room writing letters, and upon other business. My eyesight being very good, and the colonel's figure and general appearance somewhat remarkable, it is morally impossible that I could have mistaken any other person in the world for him. That I did see him I shall continue to believe until the last day of my existence.

William Matthew Bigge,

Major, 70th Regiment.

[On July 17th, 1885, after Colonel Bigge had described the occurrence, but before the account was taken from the envelope and read, he dictated the following remarks to Gurney]: -

When Colonel R. got off the car about a couple of hours afterwards, Colonel Goldie and other officers said to me, "Why, that's the very dress you described." They had not known where he was or how he was engaged. The month, February, was a most unlikely one to be fishing in. Colonel Reed was much alarmed when told what I had seen.

The quartermaster, sitting at the window, would have been bound to see a real figure; he denied having seen anything.

I have never had the slightest hallucination of the senses on any other occasion.

[It will be seen that these recent remarks exhibit two slips of memory. It is quite unimportant whether Colonel Reed was seen walking in at the gate or getting off a car. But in making the interval between the vision and the return two hours instead of ten minutes, the later account unduly diminishes the force of the case. If there is any justification at all for the provisional hypothesis that the sense of impending arrival is a condition favourable for the emission of a telepathic influence, it is of importance that, at the time when the phantasmal form was seen, Colonel Reed was not busy with his fishing, but was rapidly approaching his destination; for thus the incident, at any rate, gets the benefit of analogy with other cases].

In these arrival cases, there is, I say, a certain likelihood that the man's mind may be fixed on his return home, so that his phantasm is seen in what might seem both to himself and to others the most probable place.