Voices

January 8th, 1884. The following fact was often narrated in my presence by my father, who has been dead upwards of thirty years. He was once invited, when a young man, to breakfast on the ground floor at St. James's Palace, to meet a particular friend. He was punctual to the appointed hour ; but not so the expected guest. The hour had struck, but neither party present was willing to sit down without the mutual friend. They had not long to wait for seeming satisfaction, for as each stood at a window opposite the thoroughfare to the park, both exclaimed at the same moment, ' Oh ! there he is,' and the host, so fully satisfied in his ocular assurance, went to the door on the other side of the house, to welcome his friend, instead of waiting for his announcement. He stood there in vain ; the friend never appeared, to the great astonishment of all present ; for two persons standing at different windows agreed that they saw him pass at the identical moment. Within an hour, a man-servant appeared to announce that his master, the expected guest, was found dead in his bed that morning. My father was a member of the Madras C. S.; the name of his host I forget. Here the eyes of two persons were concerned ; but they were in an expectant state of mind, which is eminently favourable to such mistakes. In another case, two gentlemen crossed Piccadilly under the impression that they saw a friend, who, as it turned out, died in India on that day. But it is needless to multiply instances ; in all of them the figure seen has been out of doors, and at some yards' distance ; and these being the very circumstances in which we know that spurious recognitions often take place, there is nothing surprising in an occasional coincidence of the sort described. Similarly, a person may hear a call, perhaps of his own Christian name, outside his house, and may mistake the voice for that of a friend ; and, in due course, as our informants sometimes say, the news of that friend's iv.] FOR SPONTANEOUS TELEPATHY. 125 death may arrive.1 But it is only to an inconsiderable fraction of the evidence here presented that such explanations could by any possibility be applied. The large majority of the alleged experiences are, on the face of them, subjective phenomena, in the sense that they are independent of any real objects in the environment, and of any mistakes possible in connection with such objects, and are due to a peculiar affection of the percipient's own mind. This mode of regarding them (and the reservations with which the word subjec