An uncle, a tall man, dies about that moment, and it is remarked that although Mr. Hill knew his uncle to be ill, the anxiety which he may have felt would hardly have given rise to an unrecognised and formidable apparition.

There are cases also where a percipient who has had an apparition of a friend shortly after that friend's known death has had veridical hallucinations at other times, and has never had any hallucination of purely subjective origin. Such a percipient may naturally suppose that his apparition of the departed friend possessed the same veridical character which was common to the rest, although it was not per se evidential, since the fact of the death was already known.

For the present, however, it will be better to return to the cases which are free from this important primâ facie drawback-cases where the percipient was, at any rate, unaware that the death, which the phantasm seemed to indicate, had in fact taken place.

710. In the first place, there are a few cases where a percipient is informed of a death by a veridical phantasm, and then some hours afterwards a similar phantasm, differing perhaps in detail, recurs.

Such was the case of Archdeacon Farler (i. p. 414), who twice during one night saw the dripping figure of a friend who, as it turned out, had been drowned during the previous day. Even the first appearance was several hours after the death, but this we might explain by the latency of the impression till a season of quiet. The second appearance may have been a kind of recrudescence of the first; but if the theory of latency be discarded, so that the first appearance (if more than a mere chancecoincidence) is held to depend upon some energy excited by the deceased person after death, it would afford some ground for regarding the second appearance as also veridical. The figure in this case was once more seen a fortnight later, and on this occasion, as Archdeacon Farler informs me, in ordinary garb, with no special trace of accident.

A similar repetition occurs (as noted by Gurney, vol. ii. p. 237, note). in the cases of Major Moncrieff (i. p. 415); of Mr. Keulemans (i. p. 444), where the second phantasm was held by the percipient to convey a fresh veridical picture; of Mr. Hernaman (i. p. 561), where, however, the agent was alive, though dying, at the time of each appearance; in the case of Mrs. Ellis (ii. p. 59); in the case of Mrs. D. (ii. p. 467); of Mrs. Fairman (ii. p. 482), and of Mr. F. J. Jones (ii. p. 500), where the death was again due to drowning, and the act of dying cannot, therefore, have been very prolonged. We may note also Mrs. Reed's case (ii. p. 237), where a phantom is seen three times, the first two visions being apparently about the time of death, the third (occurring to a different percipient, whether independently or not is not clear) a few hours later. And in Captain Ayre's case (ii. p. 256), a phantom seen by one percipient at about the time of the agent's death is followed by hallucinatory sounds heard by the same and by another percipient for some three hours longer,

VOL. II.

B

till the news of the death arrives. In the case of Mrs. Cox, again (ii. p. 235), a child sees a phantom at about 9 P.M., and Mrs. Cox sees the same figure, but in a different attitude, at about midnight, the exact hour of the corresponding death being unknown. In the case of Miss Harriss (ii. p. 117), a hallucinatory voice, about the time of the death, but not suggesting the decedent, is followed by a dream the next night, which presents the dead person as in the act of dying. One or two other cases might be added to this list, and it is plain that the matter is one towards which observation should be specially directed.

711. Turning now to the cases where the phantasm is not repeated, but occurs some hours after death, let us take a few narratives where the interval of time is pretty certain, and consider how far the hypothesis of latency looks probable in each instance.

Where there is no actual hallucination, but only a feeling of unique malaise or distress following at a few hours' interval on a friend's death at a distance, as in Archdeacon Wilson's case (i. p. 280), it is very hard to picture to ourselves what has taken place. Some injurious shock communicated to the percipient's brain at the moment of the agent's death may conceivably have slowly worked itself into consciousness. The delay may have been due, so to say, to physiological rather than to psychical

causes.

Next take a case like that of Mrs. Wheatcroft (i. p. 420), or of Mrs. Evens (ii. p. 690), or Mr. Wingfield (quoted in 429 C), or Sister Bertha (quoted below in 743 A), where a definite hallucination of sight or sound occurs some hours after the death, but in the middle of the night. It is in a case of this sort that we can most readily suppose that a "telepathic impact" received during the day has lain dormant until other excitations were hushed, and has externalised itself as a hallucination after the first sleep, just as when we wake from a first sleep some subject of interest or anxiety, which has been thrust out of our thoughts during the day, will often well upwards into consciousness with quite a new distinctness and force. But on the other hand, in the case (for instance) of Mrs. Teale (ii. p. 693), there is a deferment of some eight hours, and then the hallucination occurs while the percipient is sitting wide awake in the middle of her family. And in one of the most remarkable dream-cases in our collection (given in section 427), Mrs. Storie's experience does not resemble the mere emergence of a latent impression. It is long and complex, and suggests some sort of clairvoyance; but if it be "telepathic clairvoyance,” that is, a picture transferred from the decedent's mind, then it almost requires us to suppose that a post-mortem picture was thus transferred, a view of the accident and its consequences fuller than any which could have flashed through the dying man's mind during his moment of sudden and violent death from "the striking off of the top of the skull" by a railway train.

If once we assume that the deceased person's mind could continue to

act on living persons after his bodily death, then the confused horror of the series of pictures which were presented to Mrs. Storie's view-mixed, it should be said, with an element of fresh departure which there was nothing in the accident itself to suggest-would correspond well enough to what one can imagine a man's feelings a few hours after such a death to be. This is trespassing, no doubt, on hazardous ground; but if once we admit communication from the other side of death as a working hypothesis, we must allow ourselves to imagine something as to the attitude of the communicating mind, and the least violent supposition will be that that mind is still in part at least occupied with the same thoughts which last occupied it on earth. The case cited below (in 744) of the gardener Bard and Mrs. de Fréville well illustrates this view. And it is possible that there may be some interpretation of this kind for some of the cases where a funeral scene, or a dead body, is what the phantasm presents. In the remarkable case in 664 where a lady sees the body of a well-known London physician -about ten hours after death-lying in a bare unfurnished room (a cottage hospital abroad), the description, as we have it, would certainly fit best with some kind of telepathic clairvoyance prolonged after deathsome power on the deceased person's part to cause the percipient to share the picture which might at that moment be occupying his own mind.

712. It will be seen that these phenomena are not of so simple a type as to admit of our considering them from the point of view of time-relations alone. Whatever else, indeed, a "ghost" may be, it is probably one of the most complex phenomena in nature. It is a function of two unknown variables--the incarnate spirit's sensitivity and the discarnate spirit's capacity of self-manifestation. Our attempt, therefore, to study such intercourse may begin at either end of the communicationwith the percipient or with the agent. We shall have to ask, How does the incarnate mind receive the message? and we shall have to ask also, How does the discarnate mind originate and convey it?

Now it is by pressing the former of these two questions that we have, I think, the best chance at present of gaining fresh light. So long as we are considering the incarnate mind we are, to some extent at least, on known ground; and we may hope to discern analogies in some other among that mind's operations to that possibly most perplexing of all its operations which consists in taking cognisance of messages from unembodied minds, and from an unseen world. I think, therefore, that "the surest way, though most about," as Bacon would say, to the comprehension of this sudden and startling phenomenon lies in the study of other rare mental phenomena which can be observed more at leisure, just as "the surest way, though most about," to the comprehension of some blazing inaccessible star has lain in the patient study of the spectra of the incandescence of terrestrial substances which lie about our feet. I am in hopes that by the study of various forms of subliminal consciousness, subliminal faculty, subliminal perception, we may ultimately obtain a

conception of our own total being and operation which may show us the incarnate mind's perception of the discarnate mind's message as no isolated anomaly, but an orderly exercise of natural and innate powers, frequently observed in action in somewhat similar ways.

It is, I say, from this human or terrene side that I should prefer, were it possible, to study in the first instance all our cases. Could we not only share but interpret the percipient's subjective feelings, could we compare those feelings with the feelings evoked by ordinary vision or telepathy among living men, we might get at a more intimate knowledge of what is happening than any observation from outside of the details of an apparition can supply. But this, of course, is not possible in any systematic way; occasional glimpses, inferences, comparisons, are all that we can attain to as yet. On the other hand, it is comparatively easy to arrange the whole group of our cases in some series depending on their observed external character and details. They can, indeed, be arranged in more than one series of this kind-the difficulty is in selecting the most instructive. That which I shall here select is in some points arbitrary, but it has the advantage of bringing out the wide range of variation in the clearness and content of these apparitional communications, here arranged mainly in a descending series, beginning with those cases where fullest knowledge or purpose is shown, and ending with those where the indication of intelligence becomes feeblest, dying away at last into vague sounds and sights without recognisable significance.

713. But I shall begin (see 713 A) with a small group of cases, which I admit to be anomalous and non-evidential-for we cannot prove that they were more than subjective experiences-yet which certainly should not be lost, filling as they do, in all their grotesqueness, a niche in our series otherwise as yet vacant. If man's spirit is separated at death from his organism, there must needs be cases where that separation, although apparently, is not really complete. There must be subjective sensations corresponding to the objective external facts of apparent death and subsequent resuscitation. Nor need it surprise those who may have followed my general argument, if those subjective sensations should prove to be dreamlike and fantastic. Here, as so often in our inquiries, the very oddity and unexpectedness of the details-the absence of that solemnity which one would think the dying man's own mind would have infused into the occasion-may point to the existence of some reality beneath the grotesque symbolism of the transitional dream.

The transitional dream, I call it, for it seems to me not improbable— remote though such a view may be from current notions-that the passage from one state to another may sometimes be accompanied with some temporary lack of adjustment between experiences taking place in such different environments-between the systems of symbolism belonging to the one and to the other state. But the reason why I refer to the cases in this place is that here we have perhaps our nearest possible

approach-in M. Bertrand's case the account, but for remoteness, might have been evidential enough-to the sensations of the spirit which is endeavouring to manifest itself;-an inside view of a would-be apparition. The narratives suggest, moreover, that spirits recently freed from the body may enjoy a fuller perception of earthly scenes than it is afterwards possible to retain, and that thus the predominance of apparitions of the recently dead may be to some extent explained.

714. We have, indeed, very few cases where actual apparitions give evidence of any continuity in the knowledge possessed by a spirit of friends on earth. Such evidence is, naturally enough, more often furnished by automatic script or utterance. But there is one case where a spirit is recorded as appearing repeatedly-in guardian angel fashionand especially as foreseeing and sympathising with the survivor's future marriage.

The account of this case, given by Mr. E. Mamtchitch, is taken from the "Report on the Census of Hallucinations" in the Proceedings S.P.R., vol. x. pp. 387-91.

ST. PETERSBURG, April 29th, 1891.

Comme il s'agira des apparitions de Palladia, je dois dire auparavant quelques mots sur sa personne. Elle était la fille d'un riche propriétaire russe, mort un mois avant sa naissance. Sa mère, dans son désespoir, voua son enfant futur au couvent. De là son nom, usité parmi les religieuses. Deux ans après, sa mère mourut, et l'orpheline, jusqu'à l'âge de 14 ans, fut élevée dans un couvent de Moscou par sa tante, qui en était la supérieure.

En 1870, étant encore étudiant à l'université de Moscou, je fis la connaissance du frère de Palladia, étudiant comme moi, et il fut souvent question entre nous de rendre à la société la nonne malgrè soi; mais ce plan ne fut réalisé qu'en 1872. J'étais venu en été à Moscou, pour voir l'exposition, et j'y rencontrai par hasard le frère de Palladia. J'appris qu'il était en train de l'envoyer en Crimée pour cause de santé, et je le secondai de mon mieux. C'est alors que je vis Palladia pour la première fois; elle avait 14 ans ; quoique haute de taille, elle était fort chétive et déjà poitrinaire. A la prière de son frère, j'accompagnai Palladia et sa sœur, Mme. P. S., en Crimée, où elles restèrent pour passer l'hiver, et moi, deux semaines après, je revins à Kieff.

En été 1873 je rencontrai par hasard Palladia et sa sœur à Odessa, où elles étaient venues pour consulter les médecins, quoique Palladia avait l'air de se porter assez bien. Le 27 Août, pendant que je faisais la lecture aux deux dames, Palladia mourut subitement d'un anévrisme, à l'âge de 15 ans.

Deux ans après la mort de Palladia, en 1875, me trouvant à Kieff, il m'arriva, par une soirée du mois de Décembre, d'assister pour la première fois à une séance spiritique ; j'entendis des coups dans la table; cela ne m'étonna nullement, car j'était sûr que c'était une plaisanterie. De retour chez moi, je voulus voir si les mêmes coups se produiraient chez moi ; je me mis dans la même pose, les mains sur la table. Bientôt des coups se firent entendre. Imitant le procédé dont j'avais été le temoin, je commençai à réciter l'alphabet; le nom de Palladia me fut indiqué. Je fus étonné, presque effrayé ; ne pouvant me tranquilliser, je me mis de nouveau à la table, et je demandai à Palladia, qu'avait-elle à me dire? La réponse fut: "Replacer l'ange, il tombe." Je ne