PHANTASMS OF THE LIVING.* THESE two weighty volumes would be
of very much greater use for the purpose for which they were compiled, if they were pro- vided with a much fuller index than we have here presented to us. What we should wish to see would be a very elaborate index of all the eases which can pretend to adequate authentica- tion, not only under the names of the persons concerned, bat under the heading of the most characteristic feature of any case in which what the writers call a " telepathic " impression was conveyed. Thus, where the matter unconsciously telegraphed, as it were, concerned, as in one case, an operation on the eye, or, as in another case, a fall down stairs, it might be indexed under these heads as well as under the names of the persons con- cerned; while all the very numerous cases of the indication of a. distant death might be indexed under that heading, as well as under the names of the persons informed of it, and the persona whose death was thus communicated. We make this suggestion because, as it seems to ns, these two ponderous volumes will long . be useful and indeed constantly used by those who wish to ascer- tain what the extreme limits of the human faculties are in relation to exceptional phenomena of this kind. Not only have the gentlemen who have collected this great stock of
• Phantasms of the Living. By Edmund Gurney, Frederio W. H. Myer", M.A., and Frank Podnsore, M. e.. London Blow or the Society for Psych:oal Research, 14 Dean's Yard, S.W. ; and Trabner and Oo.
valuable data gone through a great deal of labour, and gone through it with a most praiseworthy determination to expose all the weak points of the evidence with which they were dealing, but we cannot too heartily praise the sobriety of judgment with which they have drawn their conclusions. Far from wishing to magnify what they have established, they are most careful to minimise it, and always warn their readers against those hasty leaps of inference to which undisciplined minds are so liable.
We must say, however, that, to us, the word " telepathy " seems, in the larger number of cases, a very bad word to express the phenomena described. It is a good word in a few cases, bat only in a few. It is a perfect word in such a case as that of Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Severn's experience at Brantwood, on Lake Coniston. Mr. Severn having gone for an early sail on the lake, Mrs. Severn, being still in bed, wakes up at 7 o'clock with a etart, feeling that she had been cut by a heavy blow on the lip and that the lip was bleeding ; and when she at length removes the handkerchief from her mouth, she is astonished to find no sign of blood, and only then realises how impossible it was that anything could have struck her there. When Mr. Severn came in to breakfast, he is observed to be constantly putting his handkerchief up to his month, and then it comes out that, a sudden wind coming on, Mr. Severn's lip was violently struck, by the tiller as it swung round. His wife in bed had felt the blow as a sudden blow to herself. Now, that is the true communication of a feeling from one person to another at a distance, and that is, as we conceive, true telepathy. And here is another case of true telepathy :-
"Our informant is Mrs. Reay, of 99 Holland Road, Kensington. 'August 14th, 1884.—I will endeavour to write you an account of the incident, related for you by my friend, Mr. E. Moon. His sister was staying with me at the time. It was in February, but I don't remember what year. We were sitting chatting over our 5 o'clock tea ; I was perfectly well at the time, and much amused with her conversation. As I had several notes to write before dinner, I asked her to leave me alone, or I feared I should not get them finished. She did so, and I went to the writing-table and began to write. All at once a dreadful feeling of illness and faintness came over me, and I felt that I was dying. I had no power to get up to ring the bell for assistance, but sat with my head in my hands utterly helpless. My maid came into the room for the tea-things. I thought I would keep her with me, but felt better while she was there, so did not mention my illness to her, thinking it had passed away. However, as soon as I lost the sound of her footsteps, it all came back upon me worse than ever. In vain I tried to get up and ring the bell or call for help; I could not move, and thought I was certainly dying. When the dressing-bell rang it roused mo again, and I made a great effort to rise and go to my room, which I did ; but when my maid came in I was standing by the fire, leaning upon the mantelpiece, trembling all over. She at once came to me and asked what was the matter. I said I did not know, but that I felt very ill indeed. The dinner hour had arrived, and my husband bad not come home. Then, for the first time, it flashed upon my mind that some- thing bad happened to him when I was taken ill at the writing-table. This was the first time I had thought about him, so that it was no anxiety on my part about him that had caused my illness. The next half-hoar was spent in great suspense, then he arrived at home with his messenger with him ; he was almost in an unconscious state, and remained no for about twenty-foar hours. When he was well enough for me to ask him about his illness, he said he had been very well indeed all day, but just as be was preparing to leave his office he became suddenly very ill (just the same time that I was taken ill at the writing.table), and his messenger had to get a cab and come home with him ; he was quite unable to be left by himself.—Esncv REAM' Mr. Reay, Secretary of the London and North-Western Railway, con- firms as follows:—` September 18th, 1884.—I perfectly well recollect, on the evening of my severe and sudden attack of illness, my wife asking me some questions about it, when, after hearing what I had to nay, she told me that almost at the same instant of time (soon after 5 p.m.), when writing, she was seized with n fit of trembling and nervous depression, as if she were dying. She went to her room, and remained there in the same state until the dinner boor, and as I did not arrive by that time she instinctively felt that something bad happened to me, and was on the point of sending to the office to inquire when I left, when I was brought home in a cab. At the time of my seizare I was writing, and it was with much difficulty that I was enabled to finish the letter.—S. RELY: In answer to inquiries, Mrs. Reay adds :—` I never at any other time in my life bad the slightest approach to the sensations I experienced when the sudden illness came over me, under the circumstances mentioned to you. I never in my life fainted, nor have I any tendency that way. The feeling which came over me was a dreadful trembling, with prostra- tion, and a feeling that I was going to die; and I had no power to rise from the writing-table to ring for assistance. I have never had the same feeling since, and never before that time.' "
And there are a few other eases of the same kind. But, as a rule, what is here called telepathy, that is, a feeling transmitted from a distance, is not really telepathy at all, but a distinct vision of what is happening to another person, and not in any sense the reproduction by sympathy of that other person's feelings in another organism. Here, for instance, is a case :—
" From Mr. and Mrs. Wilson, of Wale House, Winding Road,
Halifax May, 1884.—About the yew 1858, on a Sunday afternoon, as I sat with my wife by my fireside in Halifax (my brothers Tom and George having gone to Africa), in awaking from a nap, I saw my brothers in Portugal in a row in the street over a dog which I saw Tom take by the tail, and, with a swing round, pitch over a bridge into the water. I told my wife what I had seen, and the impression was no strong that I wrote the particulars, together with the date, with a pencil on the cupboard door. In about a month after, I had a letter from my brothers, stating that they had arrived safely in Africa, and mentioning that on their way they called at Lisbon, and there got into a row through Tom's throwing a dog orer a bridge into the water, and that they had narrowly escaped getting locked up about it. The information contained in the letter showed also that the time of the incident corresponded exactly to the time of my vision.—JOHN AMBLER WILSON.'—' The foregoing statement is quite true.—SALLAII ANN WILSON.' In answer to inquiries, Mr. Wilson
says March 30th, 1885.—I did not know that my brothers were likely to go near Lisbon. I do not remember either churches or ships. I was standing on a bridge over a river, and all along, so far as I saw, were woodyards with wooden workshops. With regard to the letter in which my brothers spoke of the accident, I never keep letters.' "
Now, that is a good instance of an impression of a distant event, all the better because the matter is trivial and in a sense ludicrous, and not at all likely to have been the subject of any imaginative reverie. But it is not telepathy. If it had been, Mr. Wilson would have felt that he was swinging the dog into the river, and that he was in collision with the Lisbon authorities in consequence of that hasty act, whereas he felt nothing of the sort. The distinction appears to us very important, if only on this account, that telepathy, properly speaking, is a contagion of feeling, while a vision of what happens at a distance is pure percipience. The former misleads. Mrs. Severn supposed for a time that she had had a heavy blow on the mouth, which was not the fact. Mrs. Rosy thought she was dying, when it was her husband who was ill, no that she, again, was greatly misled. But in the ordinary class of cases called telepathic, there is no misleading experience at all, but a true vision of something far beyond the ordinary reach of the senses. We have always objected to the so-called explanation of such visions by what is called a " theory " of brain-waves, because if a brain-wave explained anything, which it does not, it would certainly rather explain the class of experiences of which Mrs. Arthur Severn and Mrs. Reay give us examples, than experiences like that of Mr. Wilson. It may be supposed that some close sympathy is at the root of these visions, since they rarely occur to people who are not either• closely related or at least closely attached to those whose distant experience is thus apprehended from afar. But it is one thing to say that close sympathy or attachment may enable a man to perceive what happens at a great distance, and quite another to say that it is the psychological experience passed through in a distant organism which is bodily transmitted to the percipient in such cases as these. If it could be so, it would result in illusions of sensation like Mrs. Severn's and Mrs. Reap's, not in percipience at all.
It is almost the same with the incident related in Bishop Wilberforce's life :—
" The Bishop was in his library at Caddesdon, with three or four of his clergy, writing with him at the same table. Tho Bishop suddenly raised his hand to his head, and exclaimed, ' I am certain that some- thing has happened to one of my sons.' It afterwards transpired that just at that time his eldest son's foot (who was at sea) was badly crushed by an accident on board his ship. The Bishop himself records the circumstance in a letter to Miss Noel, dated March 4th, 1847; he writes: • It is curious that at the time of his accident I was so pos- sessed with the depressing consciousness of some evil having befallen my son Herbert, that at last, on the third day after, the 13th, I wrote down that I was quite unable to shake off the impression that some- thing had happened to him, and noted this down for remembrance.' " The Bishop did not feel a sudden pain in his own foot, but was sure that something painful had happened to his son, though without being able even to specify the kind of misfortune at all. The percipience, therefore, was very imperfect, and nearer to presentiment than percipience; but it was, at all events, not a sensation transmitted by sympathy from afar. And the vast number of these telepathic impressions are still more distinctly cases of perception. The emotion felt by those who have these impressions borne in upon them, is not the emotion felt by those in reference to whose good-fortune or misfortune (oftener misfortune than good-fortune, but there are instances given of the latter kind also) they occur. The scene rendered visible to them for a moment is not viewed through the eyes of the person who is chiefly concerned in it. On the contrary, the effect of these so-called " telepathic " impressions is, in nine cases out of ten, to convey a vision of some distant occurrence, and to inspire the emotion which that occurrence would naturally inspire not in the mind of the person whom it chiefly concerned, but in the mind of the person thus strangely warned of what was happening. Nor can it often be explained, as in a few in- stances it might be, as a transference of the impression produced on one spectator actually present, to another person at a dis- tance, both because there often is not any such spectator actually on the scene, and also because even where there is, the link of sympathy is much closer, as a role, between the sufferer whose misfortune is flashed over miles or scores or hundreds orthousands of miles to the distant percipient, than it is between the spec- tator of the event and the person who thus suddenly learns at a distance what has happened. It is not easy to suppose, for instance, that the man who, while reading in one of the Inns of Court, saw his brother (was it not P) fall down stairs at a West- End party, could have seen what he did through the mediation of the mind of some comparatively indifferent spectator who would probably have been utterly unknown to him. The trans- mission of such a perception as that from the mind of a compare- tively indifferent observer to one closely interested in the event, would be odder, perhaps, than an independent vision of the event at a distance of two or three miles. Besides, as we have said, there is very often no one present through whose direct vision the im- pression from a distance could be translated. On the whole, in the greater number of so-called " telepathic " impressions, we must suppose either that the stir of emotion felt at a distance in some way awakens the mind of those who are in very close sympathy, to a power of mental vision independent of the eyes, of which in ordinary states we knownothing ; or thatby supernatural volition such a vision is conveyed. But it will not do, even if we assume that a strong emotion felt at a distance by one closely related to us may arouse a corresponding emotion, to identify that stir of feeling,—which would be, as we have seen, essen- tially misleading,—with any true vision of the facts in which this original emotion arose. The two things are perfectly dis- tinct, and the knowledge of the facts, independent of the feeling, is quite as distinct and separate a marvel as the trans- mission of the feeling itself. Nor is there anything to show that, in most of the cases, the feeling of the sufferer is trans- mitted. For example, in the case which we will give as our last -extract, the brother certainly did not feel any of the emotion natural to a dying man, though he did feel the emotion natural to the brother of a dying man :— "Another is the following, received in 1882 from Captain G. F. Russell Colt, of Gartsherrie, Coatbridge, N.B. I was at home for my holidays, and residing with my father and mother, not here, but at another old family place in Mid-Lothian, built by an ancestor in Mary Queen of Scots' time, called Inveresk House. My bedroom was a curious old room, long and narrow, with a window at one end of the room and a door at the other. My bed was on the right of the window, looking towards the door. I bad a very dear brother (my eldest brother), Oliver, lieutenant in the 7th Royal Fasiliers. He was about 19 years old, and bad at that time been some months before Sebastopol. I corresponded frequently with him; and once when he wrote in low spirits, not being well, I said in answer that he was to cheer np, but that if anything did happen to him, he most let me know by appearing to me in my room, where we had often as boys together sat at night and indulged in a surreptitious pipe and chat. This letter (I found subsequently) he received as he was starting to receive the Sacrament from a clergyman who has since related the fact to me. Having done this, he went to the entrench- ments and never returned, as in a few hours afterwards, the storming of the Redan commenced. He, on the captain of his com- pany falling, took his place, and led his men bravely on. He had met led them within the walls, though already wounded in several places, when a ballet struck him on the right temple and he fell amongst heaps of others, where he was found in a sort of kneeling posture (being propped up by other dead bodies) thirty-six hours afterwards. His death took place, or rather he fell, though he may not have died immediately, on the 8th September, 1855. That night I awoke suddenly, and saw facing the window of my room, by my bedside, eurrounded by a light sort of phosphorescent mist, as it were, my brother kneeling. I tried to speak but could not. I buried my head in the bedclothes, not at all afraid (because we bad all been brought up not to believe in ghosts or apparitions), but simply to collect my ideas, because I had not been thinking or dream- ing of him, and, indeed, had forgotten all about what I had written to him a fortnight before. I decided that it must be fancy, and the moonlight playing on a towel, or something out of place. But on looking up, there he was again, looking lovingly, imploringly, and sadly at me. I tried again to speak, but found myself tongue-tied. I could not utter a sound. I sprang out of bed, glanced through the window, and saw that there was no moon, but it was very dark and raining hard, by the sound against the panes. I turned, and still saw poor Oliver. I shut my eyes, walked through it, and reached the door of the room. As I turned the handle, before leaving the room, I looked once more back. The apparition turned round his head slowly, and again looked anxiously and lovingly at me, and I saw then for the first time a wound on the right temple, with a red stream from it. His face was of a waxy pale tint, bat transparent. looking, and so was the reddish mark. But it is almost im- possible to describe his appearance. I only know I shall never forget it. I left the room and went into a friend's room, and lay on the sofa the rest of the night. I told him why. I told others in the house, but when I told my father, he ordered me not to repeat each nonsense, and especially not to let my mother know. On the Monday following, he received a note from Sir Alexander Milne to say that the Redan was stormed, but no particulars. I told my friend to let me know if he saw the name among the killed and wounded before me. About a fortnight later he came to my bed- room in his mother's house in Athole Crescent, in Edinburgh, with a very grave face. I said, suppose it is to tell me the sad news I expect; and he said, ' Yes' Both the colonel of the regiment and one or two officers who saw the body confirmed the fact that the appearance was much according to my description, and the death- wound was exactly where I had seen it. But none could say whether he actually died at the moment. His appearance, if so, most have been some hours after death, as he appeared to me a few minutes after 2 in the morning. Months later, a small prayer-book and the letter I had written to him were returned to Invereek, found in the inner breast pocket of the tnnio which he were at his death. I have them now.' The account in the London Gazette Extraordinary of September 22nd, 1855, shows that the storming of the Redan began shortly after noon on September 8th, and lasted upwards of an hour and a half. We learn from Russell's account that the dead, the dying, and the uninjured, were all lying in piles together ;' and it would seem that the search for the wounded was still continuing on the morning of the 9th. The exact time of Lieutenant Oliver Colt's death is uncertain. In a farther communication, Captain Colt says ; —` My father received Admiral Milne's menage just as we were starting in the drag—a large party--on a visit to some ruler, several miles off. He was driving, and I was sitting next to him, and he remarked, "It was well I told you not to say anything about having seen your brother Oliver to your mother. I hope you will forbid it to be mentioned by any one whom you told, as it might doubly alarm her now, since this news." '" We deny that this was a case of " telepathy " in its strict sense at all. If it had been, Mr. Colt should have felt the wound in his own forehead, instead of perceiving it in his brother's fore- head,—should have felt the shock of dying in a crowd of soldiers mowed down by the enemy's fire, instead of the solitary pang by which he was assured that he had lost a brother.
We cannot thank the editors of this book too heartily for the labour which this weighty collection of carious facts and equally curious experiments,—the experiments on the transference of impressions are amongst the most striking and satisfactory parts of the book,—must have cost them. It will long be re- garded as the most serious attempt hitherto made to record the least explicable of psychical impressions, and to estimate their value.
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