Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/292

 E. GURNET, ETC., PHANTASMS OF THE LIVING. 279 cluster, comparatively thick at first and gradually becoming more and more sparse, in the few days that follow deaths, would strongly indicate some common bond of connexion between the phenomena and the deaths, even if such a thing as telepathy in connexion with living persons had never been observed. But as a matter of fact, we find the cluster of cases as thick just before life has ceased as just after. Hence the presumption of a single common cause for the whole group." Yes. Could we but be sure that the record of the misses had been kept as carefully as that of the hits ! The state of the percipient does not seem to be in the generality of cases abnormal apart from the fact of percipiency. There is a somewhat marked preponderance of female percipients (58 per cent.). But this preponderance of female informants may, Mr. Gurney thinks, probably be due to their having, as a rule, more leisure than men for writing on matters unconnected with busi- ness. According to the state of the percipient the cases fall into four classes (1) where the percipient is in the hypnotic condi- tion ; (2) dream-cases ; (3) borderland cases, which occur on the dim borderland between sleep and normal wakefulness ; and (4) where the percipient is normally wide-awake and in full posses- sion of his or her faculties. Feelings of uneasiness or depression may precede or accompany percipience ; but these may perhaps be regarded, on the transference-hypothesis, as telepathic in their origin. In passing to the state of rapport between agent and percipient, we come to a point of central interest and importance. In the early stages of experimental transference the occurrence of the phenomena depends on a specific rapport previously induced by mesmeric or hypnotic operations. To the authors this mesmeric rapport (in some, at any rate, of its manifestations) seems nothing more than the faculty of thought-transference confined to a single agent and percipient, and intensified in degree by the very condi- tions which limit its scope. In the case of experimental ideal transference there does not seem to be any very definite bond between the agent and the percipient. For the rest, in phantas- mal transference, the rapport has usually, we are told, been that of kinship or affection. But in the analysis of the table of num- bered cases, Mr. Gurney says : " It will be seen that only in 47 per cent, of these cases is any blood-relationship known to have existed between the parties ; and since in many cases the rela- tives of the percipient will have naturally belonged also to the circle of his intimate friends, it seems reasonable to conclude that consanguinity, as such, has little if any predisposing influence in the transmission of telepathic impressions ". The bond of affec- tion would thus seem to constitute the closest rapport. But Mr. Gurney regards collective cases as " strongly indicative of a rap- port of a different sort consisting not in old-established sympathy, but in similarity of immediate mental occupation. I suspect,"