Missing time

We were living at 3, Henry Street, Pentonville. The two windows in the room were shut tight and fastened ; and as near as I can remember, it must have been between 2 and 3 in the morning. The music lasted several minutes. She further says that, when the sounds began, her mother exclaimed, Anne, do you hear that ? — so that her niother's statement is not quite exact ; but she confirms the fact that some hours passed before they ventured to describe their impressions to one another. 224 COLLECTIVE CASES. [chap. The foregoing instances may perhaps suffice to show that a purely psychical account of these joint experiences — as due either partly or wholly to a thought-transference between the percipients — ^is at all events possible ; and that acceptance of the phenomena as genuine, i.e., as percepts truly described, does not imply any materiahstic theory of phantasmal beings who travel about through space (sometimes in their carriages) on their own account. And possibly a certain number of my readers may further agree with me in supposing some, at any rate, of these cases to have been in their inception purely subjective, and will not feel the need of invoking for them an unknown or 'post-mortem agency, however little disposed to rule the possibility of such agency out of court. I cannot, indeed, deny a certain force to an objection which Mr. Myers urges,^ that we know of no instances where a hallucination which can be connected with insanity or other distinctly morbid conditions in the person impressed, and which is thus quite clearly proved to be purely subjective, has become collective in the way supposed. But then neither do we know of instances where a person in one of these morbid conditions has exercised any other form of telepathic influence. We have no instances of telepathic impressions of the deaths of dying lunatics. The ultimate conditions of telepathic agency are as little known to us as the ultimate conditions of telepathic percipience ; and transient hallucinations of the sane, such as those of the preceding examples, differ so greatly in their nature and ostensible conditions from the types of hallucination to which Mr. Myers points as never transferred, that it seems rash to assume that they may not differ also in the particular point of transferability. At any rate, whatever the difficulties of that view, it is one that may be provisionally entertained by those who see equal difficulties in any other ; and whatever my own surmises as to future discovery may be, in the present state of the evide