As regards "thought transference," their most prominent inquirers believed that it is an actual process; the society, as a society, is committed to no opinion except the opinion that research is desirable. Starting from the power of one living mind to affect another distant mind, or brain, with a thought, a sensation, an impression of sight or hearing, Messrs. Gurney and Myers wrote Phantasms of the Living. This is a huge collection, in two volumes, of stories of wraiths—"spirits of the living," as the Highlanders say—projecting themselves in various ways on the consciousness of other living persons at a distance. These experiences seemed often to coincide more or less exactly with the death or other crisis (in one case a fall down-stairs), or with a dream, of the person who seemed to make himself apparent. The society then instituted a new census; some 17,000 persons returned answers to questions about such hallucinations of their own, when they had enjoyed any.
After careful criticism, excluding all doubtful cases, the committee occupied with this task decided that there was a far larger proportion, on the evidence, of hallucinations coincident with the death or other crisis of the person who made himself apparent at a distance than could be accounted for by chance.
The word "hallucination" was here used to denote the seeing or hearing by a person in sound health of anything which, as a matter of fact, was not present. Of course the false experiences of fever or delirium tremens, or of senses chronically deranged, are also hallucinations. The society, however, inquired merely as to the hallucinations, perhaps occurring once in a lifetime, of sane and healthy people, and asked, did these coincide with events unknown, at a distance? In that case there would be a presumption that there was some connection of cause and event between the crisis of the distant A and the hallucination of B.
Having concluded that there is such a connection of an unexplained nature, the writers of the society gave it the technical name "telepathy"—"sensation produced from a distance."
Mind or brain, remote, affects apparently the mind or brain of another, or of several persons at once, "through no recognized channel of the senses."
Apparitions of the living being thus accounted for, how are we to explain apparitions of the dead? The evidence for these was much less copious, and, necessarily, much less satisfactory. No coincident crisis in the affairs of the dead could, of course, be detected, as in the case of the living. Again, even if we grant that telepathy between the living is a fact in nature, a ghost of the dead can hardly hope to prove his identity.
To take a case: A young American commercial traveller, alone in his room at a hotel, suddenly saw his dead sister standing beside him. He rose to embrace her, but she fled like the shade of the mother of Odysseus in Homer. He went to his distant home, and told his parents, adding that on the cheek of his sister there was a scratch which he had not seen in her lifetime. The mother explained that in arranging, when alone, flowers around the dead body of the sister in the coffin, she had accidentally scratched the face, but concealed the mark with powder.
Now, if telepathy exists, the mother, brooding over the memory of the daughter, might transmit the whole vision of the dead, scratch and all, to the mind of her distant son.
This theory would cover all cases in which the appearance of the dead communicated in any way any information to the seer, if that information had ever been in the knowledge of any living person. That person, unconsciously, might telegraph the facts in a vision to the percipient. Living mind would be, somehow, in electric contact, as it were, with living mind: the agency of the dead would be a superfluous hypothesis. We might come to an opinion that there exists a kind of atmosphere of mind, common to all of us, and a vibration of the mind of A in Ceylon may be communicated in a hallucination to that of B in Chicago. Thus B's knowledge about the dead C may be imparted in a vision or hallucination representing C to A at any distance. Say that A in a house had a quite casual vision of an old woman in black. A's mind may unconsciously communicate that vision to various people in the same house, and we have a haunted house!
All this is at least thinkable, and so
