Here is an example.  A lady, facing an old sideboard, saw a friend, with no coat on, and in a waistcoat with a back of shiny material.  Within an hour she was taken to where her friend lay dying, without a coat, and in a waistcoat with a shiny back.[9] Here is the scientific explanation of Herr Parish:  ’The shimmer of a reflecting surface [the sideboard?] formed the occasion for the hallucinatory emergence of a subconsciously perceived shiny black waistcoat [quotation incorrect, of course], and an individual subconsciously associated with that impression.[10] I ask any lady whether she, consciously or subconsciously, associates the men she knows with the backs of their waistcoats.  Herr Parish’s would be a brilliantly satisfactory explanation if it were only true to the printed words that lay under his eyes when he wrote.  There was no ’shiny black waistcoat’ in the case, but a waistcoat with a shiny back.  Gentlemen, and especially old gentlemen who go about in bath-chairs (like the man in this story), don’t habitually take off their coats and show the backs of their waistcoats to ladies of nineteen in England.  And, if Herr Parish had cared to read his case, he would have found it expressly stated that the lady ‘had never seen the man without his coat’ (and so could not associate him with an impression of a shiny back to his waistcoat) till after the hallucination, when she saw him coatless on his death-bed.  In this instance Herr Parish had an hallucinatory memory, all wrong, of the page under his eyes.  The case is got rid of, then, by aid of the ’fanciful addenda,’ to which Herr Parish justly objects.  He first gives the facts incorrectly, and then explains an occurrence which, as reported by him, did not occur, and was not asserted to occur.

I confess that, if Herr Parish’s version were as correct as it is essentially inaccurate, his explanation would leave me doubtful.  For the circumstances were that the old gentleman of the story lunched daily with the young lady’s mother.  Suppose that she was familiar (which she was not) with the shiny back of his waistcoat, still, she saw him daily, and daily, too, was in the way of seeing the (hypothetically) shiny surface of the sideboard.  That being the case, she had, every day, the materials, subjective and objective, of the hallucination.  Yet it only occurred once, and then it precisely coincided with the death agony of the old gentleman, and with his coatless condition.  Why only that once? C’est la le miracle! ‘How much for this little veskit?’ as the man asked David Copperfield.

Herr Parish next invents a cause for an hallucination, which, I myself think, ought not to have been reckoned, because the percipient had been sitting up with the sick man.  This he would class as a ‘suspicious’ case.  But, even granting him his own way of handling the statistics, he would still have far too large a proportion of coincidences for the laws of chance to allow, if we are to go by these statistics at all.