Voices

It was not one sentence or two, but one side full of a small sheet of note-paper, such as he usually wrote on, but I don't carry long letters about with me, and could not tell you the wording now. I scribbled down my waking dream as to Dr. Pusey's words, being iv.] FOB SPONTANEOUS TELEPATHY. 135 impression to some one who made a note of it, or who distinctly remembers that it was so mentioned ; and whenever this has been done, we have endeavoured to get written corroboration from this second person. Evidence of this class affords comparatively little opportunity for the various sorts of error which have been passed in review. N o amount of carelessness of narration, or of love of the marvellous, would enable a witness to time his evidence in correspondence with an event of which he was ignorant, nor to fix on the right person with whom to connect his alleged experience. Errors of memory are equally unlikely to take a form which makes the impression correspond with an unknown event ; and danger from that source is, moreover, at a minimum, in cases which are distinguished by the very fact that the impression has been itself recorded immediately, or very shortly, after its occurrence. But apart from the actual records of the experience in writing or in someone else's memory, it may have produced action of a sufficiently distinct sort on the percipient's part ; for instance, it may have so disturbed him as to make him take a journey, or write at once for tidings of the agent's condition. Such immediate action, which can often be substantiated by others, affords a strong independent proof that the impression had occurred, and had been of an unusual kind. And even if he has done none of these things, yet if amazed at the vivid sense of his presence and voice, and all I wrote down was in the note. Now everything here depends on the exact accuracy of the words. They were admittedly an answer to a letter, and their general tenor might easily have been surmised ; unless, therefore, the words were identical, the case could be explained as a hallucination of hearing of a sufficiently ordinary type. We have obtained no complete assurance as to the verbal identity : and we have not been able to compare the letter with the note made at the time, which has probably been destroyed. A similar criticism will apply to the following well-known case, written down in the first instance by the Rev. Joseph Wilkins, a Dissenting minister at Weymouth (who died in 1800), and endorsed by the late Dr. Abercrombie, of Edinburgh, a man, I need