among crabs, regarded as food.”

This kind of evidence is not the best, because the thoughts of members of one family run more or less in similar grooves; though the experimenters recognised this and chose unlikely things purposely. Other investigators have sometimes used cards, drawing one at random from a shuffled pack, looking at it, and the percipient then trying to say what it is. The chance of success is of course one in fifty-two, and the amount of success which we might expect by chance in any series can be mathematically determined. In one series of successful experiments conducted by Sir Oliver Lodge the odds against an explanation by chance alone were about ten millions to one. In ordinary matters this would be regarded as proof.

Other experiments of the same general character have been carried out by Sir William Barrett, Professor Sidgwick, and others, and details may be found in the S.P.R. Proceedings. In most cases the idea comes into the mind as an impression, but if the percipient is a good visualiser it is sometimes seen almost externalised as a hallucination. This leads us to the next step.

If it is possible to convey to another mind—sometimes so vividly that the thing is almost seen as if out there in space—an image of scenes thought about, may it not be possible to convey an image of oneself? This idea occurred to a gentleman referred to by Myers as Mr S. H. B. in his book Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. Mr S. H. B., whom I know by correspondence and whose brother I have known personally for many years, decided that he would try to make himself visible to two young ladies whom he knew, and he concentrated his mind on the effort just before going to bed. He willed to show himself in their room at one o’clock in the morning. The distance from his house to theirs was three miles. Next time he saw them, a few days later, they told him they had had a great fright: the elder sister had seen Mr B.’s apparition, had screamed and awakened her little sister, who also saw him. The time was one o’clock in the morning. They told him this before he said anything about his experiment, and they had no reason to expect that he would try anything of the kind. Both Mr B. and his brother are keen and successful business men; Mr S. H. B. is now retired, his brother is still the head of a large firm. I mention this because some critics seem to have a notion that psychical researchers are a crowd of long-haired poets or semi-lunatic cranks.

PHANTASMS OF THE DEAD

Now if a living man can by force of will project a telepathic phantasm of himself, it is reasonable to suppose that a dead man can do the same, if the so-called dead man still exists; for telepathy does not seem to be a physical process of ether-waves, does not conform to the law of inverse squares or propagate itself in all directions as physical forces do. It seems to occur in the mental world, between mind and mind rather than between brain and brain. Consequently, telepathy from the dead is likely to be easier than from the living, for they over there are not clogged with the fleshly body. Certainly, however they may be explained, there are many cases of the apparition of a deceased person. The difficulty about accepting the evidentiality of some of them is that if the percipient knew that the person appearing was dead, the apparition may be merely a subjective hallucination. And even if the death was not known, it might be surmised, and the apparition might be the result of expectancy if the person appearing was known to be ill or in danger. But there are some cases in which a certain amount of detail is conveyed, rendering a subjective explanation not very probable. For instance, Captain Colt had a vision of his brother, in a kneeling position, with a bullet wound in his right temple. He described the vision to several people in the house before any news came, so the case does not rest on his word alone. In due time information arrived that his brother had been killed. He had been shot through the right temple, had fallen among a heap of others, and was found in a kneeling position. In his pocket was a letter from Capt. Colt asking him, if anything happened to him, to make his presence known in the room in which as a matter of fact the apparition was seen. The vision, it was found, occurred a few hours after the death. Mr Myers gives full details in Human Personality. In this case the bullet-wound and the kneeling position are points of correct detail which are hardly explicable on a subjective theory. The best sceptical theory is that the incident was telepathic, the wounded brother sending out his telepathic message after being shot. This is possible, but hardly probable; for death in the case of a bullet-wound through the temple must be almost instantaneous.

Spontaneous cases of this kind and of this degree of evidentiality are rare, but there is a large mass of evidence of the same general character. The S.P.R. once carried out an extensive inquiry, receiving answers from 17,000 people, and tabulating the results in a volume of the Proceedings. The final conclusion, expressed in weighed and guarded words, was that “Between deaths and apparitions of the dying person a connexion exists which is not due to chance alone”. This was signed, among other members of the Committee, by Professor Sidgwick, whom Professor James once called “the most exasperatingly critical mind in England”. Some of the apparitions occur before the person’s actual death, but usually in such cases he is already unconscious and the spirit practically free. As to those occurring after, the main difficulty about admitting them as proof of survival is, as just said, the possibility that although they may appear after the death of the person, the telepathic impulse may have been sent out before, and may have remained latent for some time in the mind of the percipient. This has been carefully considered by investigators, and in many cases there are reasons for regarding it as an insufficient theory. On the whole, the evidence tends more and more to suggest that in at least some instances these happenings are due to the agency of a discarnate mind. The proof is cumulative, and no single case can be crucial. There is no coerciveness about it, and each can invent his own hypothesis. But those who have considered the subject most carefully have come to the provisional conclusion that the agency of the so-called dead is in some cases a reasonable, and indeed the most reasonable, supposition. There are of course many narratives of this kind in the Bible,[4] the Lives of the Saints, and other literature, but these records, being of pre-scientific date, and lacking the corroborative testimony which we now require, are of a lower order of evidentiality. The new evidence, however, is throwing a backward light on many of these ancient stories, and making them credible once more. To me personally, the Bible is a much more living book than it used to be. I believe that many things in it which I used to regard as myths may have been facts.

NORMAL CLAIRVOYANCE

There are instances, then, of people occasionally having visions which seem to be in some way caused by departed persons. Sometimes the percipient has only one experience of the kind in his life; more often he has several, for this seeing power is somehow temperamental—a sort of gift, like the alleged second sight of the Highlander. It was well known to St Paul, as his reference to “discerning of