That study I am about to try to sketch.  My object is to examine some ‘superstitious practices’ and beliefs of savages by aid of the comparative method.  I shall compare, as I have already said, the ethnological evidence for savage usages and beliefs analogous to thought-transference, coincidental hallucinations, alternating personality, and so forth, with the best attested modern examples, experimental or spontaneous.  This raises the question of our evidence, which is all-important.  We proceed to defend it.  The savage accounts are on the level of much anthropological evidence; they may, that is, be dismissed by adversaries as ‘travellers’ tales.’  But the best testimony for the truth of the reports as to actual belief in the facts is the undesigned coincidence of evidence from all ages and quarters.[5] When the stories brought by travellers, ancient and modern, learned and unlearned, pious or sceptical, agree in the main, we have all the certainty that anthropology can offer.  Again, when we find practically the same strange neglected sparks, not only rumoured of in European popular superstition, but attested in many hundreds of depositions made at first hand by respectable modern witnesses, educated and responsible, we cannot honestly or safely dismiss the coincidence of report as indicating a mere ‘survival’ of savage superstitious belief, and nothing more.

We can no longer do so, it is agreed, in the case of hypnotic phenomena.  I hope to make it seem possible that we should not do so in the matter of the hallucinations provoked by gazing in a smooth deep, usually styled ‘crystal-gazing.’  Ethnologically, this practice is at least as old as classical times, and is of practically world-wide distribution.  I shall prove its existence in Australia, New Zealand, North America, South America, Asia, Africa, Polynesia, and among the Incas, not to speak of the middle and recent European ages.  The universal idea is that such visions may be ‘clairvoyant.’  To take a Polynesian case, ’resembling the Hawaiian wai harru.’  When anyone has been robbed, the priest, after praying, has a hole dug in the floor of the house, and filled with water.  Then he gazes into the water, ’over which the god is supposed to place the spirit of the thief....  The image of the thief was, according to their account, reflected in the water, and being perceived by the priest, he named the individual, or the parties.’[6] Here the statement about the ‘spirit’ is a mere savage philosophical explanation.  But the fact that hallucinatory pictures can really be seen by a fair percentage of educated Europeans, in water, glass balls, and so forth, is now confirmed by frequent experiment, and accepted by opponents, ‘non-mystical writers,’ like Dr. Parish of Munich.[7] I shall bring evidence to suggest that the visions may correctly reflect, as it were, persons and places absolutely unknown to the gazer, and that they may even reveal details unknown to every one present.  Such results among savages, or among the superstitious, would be, and are, explained by the theory of ‘spirits.’  Modern science has still to find an explanation consistent with recognised laws of nature, but ‘spirits’ we shall not invoke.