striking ones. There would, of course, be some force in Mr. Peirce’s objection, if my census-list of non-coincidental hallucinations would have been considerably larger than it is but for the condition as to health (or as to anxiety—see his 5th objection). But I have explained (p. 7) that the interrogatories were put in separate parts—questions as to the person’s bodily or mental state at the time of the experience being kept separate from the question as to the fact of the experience; and the number of yeses struck off the list used in the computation, on the ground of an exceptional bodily or mental state at all comparable to that which existed in a few of the coincidental cases, amounted at most to two or three.
5th. I cannot admit the objection in more than one of the cases referred to, and only partially in that one.
The percipient in Case 702 says, “I had no idea of the lady’s being ill, and had neither been anxious about her nor thinking about her.”
The percipient in Case 174 was not personally intimate with the gentleman who died; and, though she was “aware that he was in a critical condition,” she says, “At the time of his death he had been quite out of my thoughts and mind.”
The percipient in Case 182 “had not been thinking about her [the girl who died] at all; she was an acquaintance and neighbor, but not an intimate friend.”
The percipient in Case 184, having absolutely no ground for anxiety, was naturally not anxious. This boy was perfectly well when he parted from him, and he had since received excellent accounts of him, including an “assurance of the child’s perfect health,” within three days of the experience described.
The percipient in Case 28 knew that his friend had had an attack of indigestion, and had been given some medicine for it by a chemist. A medical man “thought he wanted a day or two of rest, but expressed no opinion that anything was serious”; and even this not very appalling professional diagnosis did not come to the percipient’s knowledge till afterwards.
The percipient in Case 195 was not expecting the death of a relative who “had been ailing for years,” and whose “death occurred rather suddenly.” The attitude of mind of young persons towards chronic invalids whom they are not personally tending, and whose death is not held to be imminent, is too habitual and continuous, and not sufficiently exciting or abnormal, to be fairly described as anxiety, for the purpose of the present argument.
A similar remark applies in Case 27. The percipient had heard two months before that his friend had a complaint which was likely sooner or later to be fatal, but was “in no immediate apprehension of his death.” No more had been heard of him, and the fact that “his name had not been mentioned for weeks” between Mr. R. and his wife is a tolerably conclusive sign that he was not occupying a foremost position in their thoughts. I can scarcely think Mr. Peirce seriously believes that the hallucination here was due to anxiety.1
In Case 172, the percipient says that her friend “had been for some time seriously ill, and I was anxious about her, though I did not know that death was near.” Here again, though the word “anxious” is used, the anxiety, such as it was, was chronic, not acute; and I certainly should not have felt justified in making such a condition of mind the ground for not reckoning the hallucination, had it happened to fall on the other side of the account, as a non-coincidental instance.
As regards Case 231, I can only quote my own remark,—that it would be pedantic to apply the hypothesis that anxiety may produce purely subjective hallucinations “to cases which occur in the thick of a war, where the idea of death is constant and familiar. In such circumstances, the mental attitude caused by the knowledge that a comrade is in peril seems scarcely parallel to that which similar knowledge might produce among those who are sitting brooding at home. At any rate, if anxiety for the fate of absent comrades be a natural and known source of hallucinations during campaigns, it is odd that, among several hundreds of cases of subjective hallucination, I find no second instance of the phenomenon.”
In Case 240, the percipient, Mrs. E., knew the person whose face she saw to be ill, but “did not know he was so near death.” They were not on friendly terms at the time, and there was probably no anxiety; but the sick man lived only five miles off, and it is possible that Mrs. E.’s mind reverted to him more frequently than to other absent acquaintances. It might be safer, therefore, to drop this case from the list.
Anxiety is clearly a condition which admits of all degrees, while at the same time it cannot be accurately measured; but all that logic demands is that coincidental cases should be excluded when the anxiety was acute enough to be regarded with any probability as the sufficient cause of the hallucination. A person who has been for some time ill, but whose condition has not been seriously dwelt on, is in fact not a bit more likely to be represented in a friend’s hallucination than the friend’s most robust acquaintance. Such, at any rate, is the conclusion to which a wide study of subjective hallucinations has led me. And, to be on the safe side, I have included in the purely subjective group (any increase of which, of course, tells against my argument) “several cases where there was such an amount of anxiety or expectancy on the part of the hallucinated person as would prevent us, if it were present in a coincidental case, from including such a case in our telepathic evidence.”
6th. Case 175. Mr. Peirce ought to have quoted a few additional words: “I only am sure that as the figure disappeared [N.B., not after it disappeared] I was as wide awake as I am now.”
Case 195. Surely a second-hand informant’s use of the word “dream” cannot weigh against the “while yet fully awake” of the percipient, and her statement that she “sat up to see what it was,” and looked round the room to discover if the appearance could be due to some reflection.
Case 702. I cannot understand Mr. Peirce’s remark, which contradicts the percipient’s emphatic statement. He most expressly distinguishes the dream from the waking experience.
Case 28. The “nap” is an inference of Mr. Peirce’s from the fact that the percipient had just leaned back on the couch. The inference is incorrect, and surely ought not to have been put forward as though it was a fact which appeared in the evidence.
Still more inexcusable is the assertion that the percipient in Case 201 was napping. She was reading Kingsley’s Miscellanies, and she says: “I then [i.e., after the apparition] tested myself as to whether I had been sleeping, seeing that it was 10 minutes since I lay down. I said to myself what I thought I had read, began my chapter again, and in 10 minutes had reached the same point.”
In saying that “it is difficult to admit any case where the percipient was in bed,” Mr. Peirce has apparently not observed that similar non-coincidental cases, where the hallucinated person was in bed, but awake, have been reckoned on the other side of the account. (See Vol. II, p. 12, second note.) It is not less legitimate, and decidedly more instructive, to admit such cases on both sides than to reject them on both sides. It is worth adding—what Mr. Peirce has not perceived—that for purposes of comparison with the census-cases, the question is not whether people were awake, but whether they believed they were awake.
7th. Case 170. I have myself drawn attention to the peculiarity of this experience, as regards recognition. The case, however, is one which I am inclined to drop from the list, for a reason which will appear later.
Case 201. Mr. Peirce has misquoted the account. He makes the percipient say, “I could not say who it was.” Her words are, “I knew the face quite well, but could not say whose it was, but the suit of clothes impressed me strongly as being exactly like one which my husband had given to a servant named Ramsay the previous year.” She suggests what seems a very reasonable explanation of the fact that the face, though familiar, did not at once suggest its owner.
Case 236. I cannot think on what Mr. Peirce founds his assertion—which is contrary to the fact—that the percipient had been shown the testimony of a second witness. She states clearly that the apparition reminded her of her brother; and this is independently confirmed by another person to whom she described her experience immediately after it occurred.
Case 249. The important point is surely not how much of