§4. I fear to weary the reader by yet further explanations and distinctions before examples are given. But difficulty of exposition and risk of misapprehension alike culminate in this final chapter; and the patience which has been able to accompany me thus far must be so considerable that I venture to make one more demand on it.

I have propounded the question, what evidence do we find that purely subjective hallucinations of the senses may be infectious? and I have implied that I am able to produce some evidence of the sort. And, in fact, I am about to cite examples which I think that the majority of my readers - or of such of them at any rate as accept the substantial accuracy of the facts - will regard as going some way to establish the point. But there are those, I am aware, in whose minds some of my instances will produce a doubt whether the experiences were really subjective times occurred to one person alone, and at other times to several together. But the hypothesis, as thus extended, becomes doubtful and difficult, and is, moreover, only one out of several hypotheses, all about equally doubtful and difficult, that may be suggested. (See Mrs. H. Sidgwick's paper "On the Evidence, collected by the Society, for Phantasms of the Dead," in the Proceedings of the S.P.R., vol. iii., especially pp. 146-8).

Clearly no such explanation is needed for the general run of traditional appearances - the white ladies, headless horses, and phantom dogs, which are the most widely spread forms; or the phantasms which are more or less indigenous to a particular district, like the "corpse-candles" of some Welsh counties, and the figures in shrouds of the Western Scottish islands. To account for these, wo need not go beyond the latent idea in the percipient's own mind. But it seems occasionally to happen that the percipient of a traditional phantasm is a person not previously acquainted with the tradition. Thus Mr. Lowell tells me that he once saw the appearance of the "Witch-farm," on the Massachusetts coast, though unaware of the local legend concerning it, at the very place to which he found afterwards that the legend assigned it; and in Dyer's English Folk-lore, p. 208, a case is reported where a phantasm, coinciding with and possibly originating in a death, took a form that exactly accorded with the ideas of death-apparitions current in the place, though the percipient was a transient sojourner whom no rumour of those ideas had reached.

Another type (recorded by Aubrey, Martin, Dalyell, Napier, Gregor, and other writers on "second-sight," and possibly genuine), which seems to strain the hypothesis of infection somewhat less, is that where physical contact with the percipient of an abnormal sight or sound has enabled a second person to share it. Our own collection contains a couple of modern instances - one first-hand from Mrs. Taunton, of Brook Vale, Witton, near Birmingham, the other from two daughters and a son-in-law of the late Mr. and Mrs. George Whittaker, of the Bowdlands, Clitheroe, the first-hand witnesses. Such a phenomenon might at least be compared with the favouring effect of contact in certain *' thought-reading " results, which (by rare exception among results where contact is a condition) seem not to be explicable as "muscle-reading," whether they may not have had some unknown origin external to any of the perceiving minds; and I admit, though the doubt weakens my argument, that it is one which I in some measure share.

To explain this, I must recur to a point that was very briefly touched on in Chapter XI (Transient Hallucinations Of The Sane: Ambiguous Cases) (p. 331, note). It may be remembered that the question there arose whether post-mortem appearances of persons some time deceased were necessarily subjective hallucinations, or whether they might not be amenable to a telepathic explanation; and I observed that, while telepathy - being a psychical and not a physical conception - was quite able to embrace these phenomena as possibly due to the action of human minds continuing after bodily death, yet the evidence for them (of a sort that would preclude their being regarded as purely subjective experiences) was scanty and inconclusive; and I dismissed the topic as not germane to an inquiry concerning telepathic transferences between the minds of living persons. But the topic which was rightly thus dismissed when we were considering affections of a single percipient, forces itself on us again when we encounter cases of joint percipience. For suppose that the object which B and C both simultaneously behold is the form of the deceased A. Then, if (1) the idea of B's and C's affection by the still continuing mind of A be rejected - as it would be by disbelievers in survival after physical death - yet B's and C's simultaneous affection remains a fact which demands recognition in this book; because, if A does not affect them, then one of them must affect the other, i.e., the case is one of transference between the minds of living persons.

And if (2) the idea of A's continuing power to affect B or C be admitted as tenable, but the joint affection of B and C by A be regarded as improbable (owing to the difficulties already pointed out of conceiving the projection, under a telepathic impulse, of exactly simultaneous and corresponding hallucinations), yet again a fact remains which demands recognition in this book; because, if A affects B and not C, then C's vision of A must be obtained from B, and the case is again one of transference between the minds of living persons.

The reader will now, perhaps, divine why I hesitate to apply the words" purely subjective" to some, at any rate, of the cases in the group that awaits us. Though no absent living person was concerned in them as agent, I think it would be rash and unscientific to prejudge the question (deliberately left open in Chapter XI (Transient Hallucinations Of The Sane: Ambiguous Cases)) whether they had an origin in psychical conditions which have survived the change of death. I have shown that alike on either of the above hypotheses - alike, whether the dead (1) have not, or (2) have, minds which can influence the living - cases of collective percipience suggestive of the dead fall within the legitimate scope of the present inquiry; but I am anxious to avoid any appearance of dogmatic decision between (1) and (2). I am about equally dissatisfied with the arguments adduced for the former, and with the evidence adduced for the latter. But in my view the cases, whatever else they involve, at any rate involve an element of quite mundane thought-transference between the minds of the living persons concerned; and I must beg the reader to bear in mind that it is simply as probable or possible cases of thought-transference, and not as manifestations from the dead, that those of them which may seem to have reference to the dead are here adduced.

If the senses of B and C are similarly and simultaneously affected without the presence of any material cause, then alike whether there is or is not a real immaterial cause outside their two selves, I believe that the joint phenomenon still depends (partly, if there is such a cause, wholly, if there is not) on psychical communication between their two minds. As to the point that is left in abeyance - the existence or non-existence of the said cause - all varieties of opinion will be allowed for by defining the group, not positively, as cases of "purely subjective" origin, but negatively, as cases which do not apparently originate in the condition of any absent living person.