An account

March 16th, 1885. It was directly I came out of my room, before I went down stairs, that ray sister told me the dream she wrote to you about, and which she had dreamed between night and morning. tt tt .> ' Clara de H. Harris. are merely the sprinkling of fragments of genuine hallucination on a background of true perception ; and it is surely not more difficult to suppose that a mind which is telepathically affected can project its sensory delusion on some real figure which bears a general resemblance to the agent, than that it can project it in vacancy. But of course the coincidence with A's death of an illusion in which the perceiver mistook B for A would have far less force as evidence for telepathy than the coincidence with A's death of a hallucination representing him, simply because purely subjective mistakes as to identity are far commoner things than purely subjective hallucinations. To find the probability that a person will by accident make a particular mistake of identity on a particular day of his life, we must multiply the fraction ,,^ber of dlys of ms me ^1 ^^e number of similar mistakes, in similar circumstances of light, distance, &c,, that he makes altogether; and we must divide the result by the number of acquaintances any one of whom, if chance alone acted, is as likely as the one who died on the particular day to be the one wrongly identified on that day. This process may reduce the probability of a telepathic explanation of the coincidence from odds of millions to 1 (as found in the case of hallucinations, pp. 18-20) to odds of thousands to 1 ; but in a cumulative argument, odds of that magnitude are clearly not to be neglected. However, with regard to the following specimens, or most of them, such considerations are hardly needed. They seem pretty certainly to be cases of hallucination, and stand, for instance, on different ground from the incidents mentioned above (Vol. I., pp. 123-4), where the hypothesis of mistaken identity seemed fairly plausible. The first account is from the Chevalier Sebastiano Fenzi, of the Palazzo Fenzi, Florence, a corresponding member of the S.P.R. The peculiar melancholy described as preceding the vision may possibly exemplify the gradual emergence of telepathic impressions into consciousness, which was exemplified in Chap. XII., § 3. November 13th, 1883. (243) Some months before his demise, my brother (Senator Carlo Fenzi) one day, as we were driving to town together from our villa of St. Andrea, told me that if he should be summoned first, he would endeav