Yet Herr Parish avers that, in all calculations, it is assumed that hallucinations are equally readily recalled whether impressive or not!  Once more, the Report says (p. 246), ‘It is not the case’ that coincidental (and impressive) hallucinations are as easily subject to oblivion as non-coincidental, and non-impressive ones.  The editors therefore multiply the non-coincidental cases by four, arguing that no coincidental cases (hits) are forgotten, while three out of four non-coincidentals (misses) are forgotten, or may be supposed likely to be forgotten.  Immediately after declaring that the English authors suppose all hallucinations to be equally well remembered (which is the precise reverse of what they do say), Herr Parish admits that the authors multiply the misses by four, ‘influenced by other considerations’ (p. 289).  By what other considerations?  They give their reason (that very reason which they decline to entertain, says Herr Parish), namely, that misses are four times as likely to be forgotten as hits.  ’To go into the reason for adopting this plan would lead us too far,’ he writes.  Why, it is the very reason which, he says, does not find favour with the English authors!

How curiously remote from being ‘coincidental’ with plain facts, or ‘veridical’ at all, is this scientific criticism!  Herr Parish says that a ‘view’ (which does not exist) is ‘of course assumed in all calculations;’ and, on the very same page, he says that it is not assumed!  ’The witnesses of the report—­influenced, it is true, by other considerations’ (which is not the case), ’have sought to turn the point of this objection by multiplying the whole number of (non-coincidental) cases by four.’  Then the ‘view’ is not ‘assumed in all calculations,’ as Herr Parish has just asserted.

What led Herr Parish, an honourable and clearheaded critic, into this maze of incorrect and contradictory assertions?  It is interesting to try to trace the causes of such non-veridical illusions, to find the points de repere of these literary hallucinations.  One may suggest that when Herr Parish ‘recast the chapters’ of his German edition, as he says in his preface to the English version, he accidentally left in a passage based on an earlier paper by Mr. Gurney,[7] not observing that it was no longer accurate or appropriate.

After this odd passage, Herr Parish argues that a ‘veridical’ hallucination is regarded by the English authors as ‘coincidental,’ even when external circumstances have made that very hallucination a probable occurrence by producing ’tension of the corresponding nerve element groups.’  That is to say, a person is in a condition—­a nervous condition—­ likely, a priori, to beget an hallucination.  An hallucination is begotten, quite naturally; and so, if it happens to coincide with an event, the coincidence should not count—­it is purely fortuitous.[8]