When, therefore, we are considering whether the phantasms of dying persons may most fitly be considered as phantasms of the dead or of the living, we find little support from analogy on the side of posthumous apparitions. And on the other hand, as already hinted, we have many cases where the apparition has coincided with violent shocks,—carriage accidents, fainting fits, epileptic fits, &c., which nevertheless left the agent,—as we call the person whose semblance is seen,—as much alive as before. In some cases the accident is almost a fatal one; as when a man’s phantom is seen at the moment when he is half-drowned and insensible. In such a case it would seem illogical to allow the mere fact of his restoration or non-restoration to life to rank his phantom as that of a living person in the one case, of a dead person in the other. It seems simpler to suppose that if two men fall overboard to-day and their respective phantoms are seen by their friends at the moment,—then, though one man should be restored to life and the other not,—yet if the first phantom was that of a living man, so also was the second.
Nay more, even if the apparition be seen some hours later than the moment of apparent death, there are still reasons which prevent us from decisively classing it as the apparition of a dead man. In the first place, the moment of actual death is a very uncertain thing. When the heart’s action stops the organism continues for some time in a state very different from that of ordinary inanimate matter. In such an inquiry as ours it is safer to speak, not of death, but of “the process of dissolution,” and to allow for the possible prolongation of some form of psychical energy even when, for instance, the attempt to restore respiration to a drowned man has definitely failed. And in the second place, we find in the case of phantasms corresponding to some accident or crisis which befalls a living friend, that there seems often to be a latent period before the phantasm becomes definite or externalised to the percipient’s eye or ear. Sometimes a vague malaise seems first to be generated, and then when other stimuli are deadened,—as at night or in some period of repose,—the indefinite grief or uneasiness takes shape in the voice or figure of the friend who in fact passed through his moment of peril some hours before. It is quite possible that a deferment of this kind may sometimes intervene between the moment of death and the phantasmal announcement thereof to a distant friend.
These, then, are reasons, suggested by actual experience, for ascribing our phantasms at death to living rather than to dead men. And there is another consideration, of a more general order, which points in the same direction. We must not rashly multiply the problems involved in this difficult inquiry. Now Science, it is needless to say, offers no assurance that man survives the tomb; and although in Christian countries our survival is an established doctrine, this does not carry with it any dogma as to the possibility that communications should reach us from departed spirits. The hypothesis, then, that apparitions are ever directly caused by dead persons is one which ordinary scientific caution bids us to be very slow in introducing. Should it afterwards be established that departed spirits can communicate with us, the interpretation placed upon various cases contained in these volumes may need revision. But for the present it is certainly safer to inquire how far they can be explained by the influences or impressions which, as we know by actual experiment, living persons can under certain circumstances exert or effect on one another, in those obscure supersensory modes which we have provisionally massed together under the title of Telepathy.
§ 18. The main theses of this book, then, are now capable of being stated in a very simple form.
I. Experiment proves that telepathy—the supersensory 1 transference of thoughts and feelings from one mind to another,—is a fact in Nature.
II. Testimony proves that phantasms (impressions, voices, or figures) of persons undergoing some crisis,—especially death,—are perceived by their friends and relatives with a frequency which mere chance cannot explain.
III. These phantasms then, whatever else they may be, are instances of the supersensory action of one mind on another. The second thesis therefore confirms, and is confirmed by, the first. For if telepathy exists, we should anticipate that it would exhibit some spontaneous manifestations, on a scale more striking than our experimental ones. And, on the other hand, apparitions are rendered more credible and comprehensible by an analogy which for the first time links them with the results of actual experiment.
Such are the central theses of this work,—theses on which its authors, and the friends whom they have mainly consulted, are in entire agreement. The first thesis may, of course, be impugned by urging that our experiments are fallacious. The second thesis may be impugned by urging that our testimony is insufficient. The third thesis, as I have here worded it, is hardly open to separate attack; being a corollary which readily follows if the first two theses are taken as proved.
This, however, is only the case so long as the third thesis, which asserts the analogy between thought-transference and apparitions—between experimental and spontaneous telepathy—is stated in a vague and general form. So soon as we attempt to give more precision to this analogy—to discuss how far the unknown agency at work can be supposed to be the same in both cases—or how far the apparitions may be referable to quite other, though cognate, laws,—we enter on a field where even those who have accepted the analogy in general terms are likely to find the evidence leading them to somewhat divergent conclusions. Of two men independently studying our records of apparitions, the one will almost inevitably press their analogy to simple telepathy further than the other. And each will be able to plead that he has been guided as far as possible by an instinct of scientific caution in thus judging of matters strange and new. The first will say that “causes are not to be multiplied without necessity,” and that we have now in telepathy a vera causa whose furthest possibilities we ought to exhaust before invoking still stranger, still remoter agencies, whose very existence we are not in a position to prove. He will feel bound therefore to dwell on the noints on which our knowledge either of telepathy, or of the mechanism of hallucinations in general, throws some light; and he will set aside as at present inexplicable such peculiarities of our evidence as cannot well be brought within this scheme.
The second inquirer, on the other hand, will perhaps feel strongly that telepathy, as we now know it, is probably little more than a mere preliminary conception, a simplified mode of representing to ourselves a group of phenomena which, as involving relations between minds, may probably be more complex than those which involve even the highest known forms of matter. He will feel that, while we hold one clue alone, we must be careful not to overrate its efficacy; we must be on the watch for other approaches, for hints of inter-relation between disparate and scattered phenomena.
It is to the first of these two attitudes of mind,—the attitude which deprecates extraneous theorising,—that Mr. Gurney and Mr. Podmore have inclined; and the committal of the bulk of this work to Mr. Gurney’s execution indicates not only that he has been able to devote the greatest amount of time and energy to the task, but also that his view is on the whole the most nearly central among the opinions which we have felt it incumbent on us to consult. We have no wish, however, to affect a closer agreement than actually exists; and in a “Note on a Suggested Mode of Psychical Interaction,” which will be found in Vol. II., I shall submit a view which differs from Mr. Gurney’s on some theoretical points.
§ 19. The theories contained in this book, however, bear a small proportion to the mass of collected facts. A few