and effect between the hallucination and the coincident crisis.  That connection would be provisionally explained by some not understood action of the mind or brain of the person in the crisis, on that of the person who has the hallucination.  This is no new idea; only the name, Telepathy, is modern.  Of course, if all this were accepted, it would be the next step to ask whether hallucinations representing the dead show any signs of being caused by some action on the side of the departed.  That is a topic on which the little that we have to say must be said later.

In the meantime the reader who has persevered so far is apt to go no further.  The prejudice against ‘wraiths’ and ‘ghosts’ is very strong; but, then, our innocent phantasms are neither (as we understand their nature) ghosts nor wraiths.  Kant broke the edges of his metaphysical tools against, not these phantasms, but the logically inconceivable entities which were at once material and non-material, at once ‘spiritual’ and ‘space-filling.’  There is no such difficulty about hallucinations, which, whatever else may be said about them, are familiar facts of experience.  The only real objections are the statements that hallucinations are always morbid (which is no longer the universal belief of physiologists and psychologists), and that the alleged coincidences of a phantasm of a person with the unknown death of that person at a distance are ’pure flukes.’  That is the question to which we recur later.

In the meantime, the defenders of the theory, that there is some not understood connection of cause and effect between the death or other crisis at one end and the perception representing the person affected by the crisis at the other end, point out that such hallucinations, or other effects on the percipient, exist in a regular rising scale of potency and perceptibility.  Suppose that ‘A’s’ death in Yorkshire is to affect the consciousness of ‘B’ in Surrey before he knows anything about the fact (suppose it for the sake of argument), then the effect may take place (1) on ‘B’s’ emotions, producing a vague malaise and gloom; (2) on his motor nerves, urging him to some act; (3) or may translate itself into his senses, as a touch felt, a voice heard, a figure seen; or (4) may render itself as a phrase or an idea.

Of these, (1) the emotional effect is, of course, the vaguest.  We may all have had a sudden fit of gloom which we could not explain.  People rarely act on such impressions, and, when they do, are often wrong.  Thus a friend of my own was suddenly so overwhelmed, at golf, with inexplicable misery (though winning his match) that he apologised to his opponent and walked home from the ninth hole.  Nothing was wrong at home.  Probably some real ground of apprehension had obscurely occurred to his mind and expressed itself in his emotion.