An account

I really forget whether it appeared immediately at the time of our dear sister's death; but I know my impression at the time was that it foreshadowed such an event, the news of which in due course came by mail. In conversation, Mr. de Guerin told me that the figure appeared selfluminous (see Chap. XII., § 7). He is certain that his own and Mrs. Elmslie's visions were on the same night, and that his own was about 11 o'clock. He cannot be certain whether the death took place at 11 o'clock p.m., of the previous day, in which case it must have preceded the visions by some twelve hours ; or 1 1 o'clock p.m. of the same day, in which case it must have followed the visions by about twelve hours. Mr. de Guerin further told me that, though in a decline, his sister had been very decidedly better of late, and he was in no sort of anxiety about her. The last account had been that she was gaining strength and flesh. The death was extraordinarily sudden. § 3. I turn now to the second of the two theories above propounded — the theory that one percipient catches the hallucination from another by a process of thought-transference. This is certainly the explanation that would suggest itself in telepathic cases where one of the percipients has previously had no relations, or only slight relations, with the distant agent. But clearly the most conclusive evidence for the theory of infection would be derived from cases involving no distant agent at all ; cases which in their inception are pathologic, not telepathic — purely subjective delusions on the part of some one present — but which proceed to communicate themselves to some other person or persons. If it can be shown that this self-propagation is an occasional property of hallucinations as such, there will be no difficulty in extending the same explanation to cases where the hallucination is in its inception due to a distant agent. If B's purely subjective hallucination may affect C, it is only what we should a 'priori expect that B's telepathic hallucination might affect C : such communicability would merely be one more of those points of resemblance, which we have already seen to be so numerous, between the purely subjective and telepathic classes. And as collective hallucinations even of subjective or non- veridical origin {i.e., not due to the critical situation of some distant agent) would constitute in themselves a form of thought-transference, no excuse is needed for examining them here at some length. What evidence, then, do we find that hallucinations of the senses, as s