Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/293

 280 CEITICAL NOTICES I he says, " that such a rapport might be induced by a common environment by partnership in that particular piece of the ' life of relation ' within which the hallucination happens to fall." In nine cases there seems to have been a previous compact between the parties that the one who died first should endeavour to make the other sensible of his presence ; in one case the percipient had requested his brother to appear to him ; and in one case, narrated by Miss Bird, the traveller and authoress, there was a promise on the part of the person who died. Then there seem some curiously anomalous cases w^here the phantasm is that of someone the per- cipient has never seen, but is more or less intimately connected with someone else present to whom, however, the phantasmal vision is not manifested. For example, Helen Alexander, maid to Lady Waldegrave, was lying ill of typhoid fever. Her fellow- servant had a vision of a person entering the room, whom she instantly felt to be the mother of the sick woman. She had a brass candlestick in her hand, a red shawl over her shoulders, and a flannel petticoat on which had a hole in the front. She subse- quently learnt that the phantasmal visitant, petticoat and candle- stick, exactly answered to the real articles. Perhaps, however, this case may be regarded as that of the direct transference of a vivid mental picture from the sick girl to her fellow-servant. Taking all the cases into consideration, it is difficult to formulate anything like definite laws of the rapport, unless the preponderance of the death-cases be regarded in that light. I have drawn attention to the marked difference (especially the change of 'voice') between the ideal and the phantasmal cases; and this is a fact to which attention is as clearly drawn in the work itself. But it naturally suggests the pertinent question, How can these phantasmal phenomena be brought under the category of thought-transference ? Mr. Gurney displays not a little ingenuity in correlating the two ; and that for a good and valid reason. "Whatever my own surmises as to future discovery may be," he says, " in the present state of the evidence I feel as much bound here to prove the theory of thought-transference before admitting causes of an obscurer kind, as in a former chapter to prove the theory of unconscious physical indications before admitting the reality of thought-transference." Making use, then, of the well-known psychological fact that the objects that we see are largely ideal constructions that we build up at the bidding of some suggestion external to ourselves, and that the details are added by the percipient from the accumulated stores of his own experience, Mr. Gurney brings it to bear upon the question of hallucinations, and points out that what is lacking in them is the suggestion from a real something external to our- selves. The definition of a sensory hallucination would thus be, to use his own words, " a percept which lacks, but which can only by distinct reflection be recognised as lacking, the objective basis which it suggests". No little stress is laid on the originality