Vanishing suddenly

The appointment was forgotten by my friend, as he stated in his apology when I entered his office. Telepathy from an unconscious region of the defaulter's mind would scarcely be a plausible explanation of this occurrence. At first sight it may perhaps seem strange that the ordinary every-day sort of expectancy which existed in these cases should be a sufficient cause for so rare and startling a delusion. But remembering that in the majority of startling delusions of the sort there is no 1 The following case, from Mrs. Smith, of 9, Morden Road, Blackheath, is a typical one. My father and mother lived, when young, near St. Albans, in a house separated by three fields from the high road. My father had been staying in Warwickshire, and was returning by the night mail coach. My mother had risen early to be ready for his return, and after seeing that breakfast and a bright fire were ready for his reception, she took her work to the window and sat there awaiting my father's return. She presently looked up and saw him approaching ; she watched him until close to the house, when she went to the house door intending to meet him, but he had vanished. Half an hour afterwards he really arrived. My mother was a Quakeress of exceeding truthfulness, and possessing to the full the perfect self-command and self-repression inculcated by her sect. I have often heard her say that she never had seen my father more distinctly than on that occasion. xi.] AMBIGUOUS CASES. 517 assignable cause at all, and that a person may therefore be on the very verge of hallucination without knowing it, we may not unreasonably suppose that a very slight ostensible cause might give the final impulse. It must be noticed, moreover, that in these arrival-cases the alternative to the hypothesis of the subjective origin of the hallucination is by no means clear. For what would the telepathic explanation involve ? That on the agent's part the mere sense of being about to arrive, with thoughts perhaps affectionately turning to the percipient, is adequate to generate a telepathic impulse. Now have we any right to make such an assumption ? § 8. This question, it will be seen, brings us round to the head of ambiguity numbered 1 in the above list ; — where the doubt was whether a supposed agent's condition is abnormal enough for a synchronous hallucination of the percipient to form with it a coincidence deserving of attention. And it happens that it is only in the arrival-cases that this question has practically been difficult to decide. Many individual inci