If now we grant a genuine pluralism of editions to the quality q, by assigning to each a context which shall distinguish it from its mates, we may proceed to explain which edition of it the feeling knows, by extending our principle of resemblance to the context too, and saying the feeling knows the particular q whose context it most exactly duplicates.  But here again the theoretic doubt recurs:  duplication and coincidence, are they knowledge?  The gun shows which q it points to and hits, by breaking it.  Until the feeling can show us which q it points to and knows, by some equally flagrant token, why are we not free to deny that it either points to or knows any one of the real q’s at all, and to affirm that the word ‘resemblance’ exhaustively describes its relation to the reality?

Well, as a matter of fact, every actual feeling does show us, quite as flagrantly as the gun, which q it points to; and practically in concrete cases the matter is decided by an element we have hitherto left out.  Let us pass from abstractions to possible instances, and ask our obliging deus ex machina to frame for us a richer world.  Let him send me, for example, a dream of the death of a certain man, and let him simultaneously cause the man to die.  How would our practical instinct spontaneously decide whether this were a case of cognition of the reality, or only a sort of marvellous coincidence of a resembling reality with my dream?  Just such puzzling cases as this are what the ‘society for psychical research’ is busily collecting and trying to interpret in the most reasonable way.

If my dream were the only one of the kind I ever had in my life, if the context of the death in the dream differed in many particulars from the real death’s context, and if my dream led me to no action about the death, unquestionably we should all call it a strange coincidence, and naught besides.  But if the death in the dream had a long context, agreeing point for point with every feature that attended the real death; if I were constantly having such dreams, all equally perfect, and if on awaking I had a habit of acting immediately as if they were true and so getting ‘the start’ of my more tardily instructed neighbors,—­we should in all probability have to admit that I had some mysterious kind of clairvoyant power, that my dreams in an inscrutable way meant just those realities they figured, and that the word ‘coincidence’ failed to touch the root of the matter.  And whatever doubts any one preserved would completely vanish, if it should appear that from the midst of my dream I had the power of interfering with the course of the reality, and making the events in it turn this way or that, according as I dreamed they should.  Then at least it would be certain that my waking critics and my dreaming self were dealing with the same.