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140 the recognized channels of sense. Of course dreams have a bearing upon this subject, and to them the Society has paid a great deal of attention.

The Society, as represented in the two bulky volumes entitled "Phantasms of the Living," edited by Edmund Gurney, Frederic W. H. Myers, and Frank Podmore, does not claim that the cases which they have presented, drawn from dreams, would be sufficient to prove the truth of telepathy. They confess that they are on doubtful ground, and say: For (1) the details of the reality, when known, will be very apt to be read back into the dream, through the general tendency to make vague things distinct; and (2) the great multitude of dreams may seem to afford almost limitless scope for accidental correspondences of a dream with an actual occurrence resembling the one dreamt of. Any answer to this last objection must depend on statistics, which, until lately, there has been no attempt to obtain; and though an answer of a sort can be given, it is not such a one as would justify us in basing a theory of telepathy on the facts of dreams alone. They acknowledge that, dreams being often somewhat dim and shapeless things, "subsequent knowledge of events may easily have the effect of giving body and definiteness to the recollection of a dream." They concede that "millions of people dream every night, and in dreams, if anywhere, the range of possibilities seems infinite." But when they come to present the subsequent cases, their reasoning upon them is in many instances unscientific in its destitution of rigor. For example, in cases of partial fulfilment where a person dreamed of death, and the dream did not occur until a number of hours after the death, they call that a deferment of percipience. They say that the impression when it first arrived "was unable; to compete at the moment with the vivid sensory impressions and the crowd of ideas and images that had