Page:The Naturalisation of the Supernatural.pdf/268

248 very coldest weather—to please me—wore a hat or cap in the garden. The laundress often watched him walking up and down the garden paths, noticing the wind playing with his wavy hair. She even, at times, would get up on a stool to watch him, especially when Margaret was with him. She says they looked so bright and happy together. She has left us owing to her health, and her daughter married quite lately.

Mr. and Mrs. Benecke heard of the vision only after the news of the disappearance had reached England, on the 20th July.

Here it would seem that Mrs. Nichols saw the apparition because she happened to be on the spot to which the dying man's thoughts would inevitably turn. And the obvious interpretation of the incident—the interpretation which in fact obtained generally until the work of the Society for Psychical Research had familiarised another explanation— is that the spirit was actually present, and able to assume visible shape. How such a theory can be reconciled with the requirements of physical science we need not here pause to consider. The fact of the apparition occurring at that time and in that place was, it may be conceded, due in some sort to the agency of the man whom the apparition represented. But the apparition itself, the figure seen, we cannot doubt, was a dream projected from the brain of the seer. It would be impossible to treat this case as differing fundamentally from the great mass of cases reported to us. And as already shown, all analogy and the direct testimony of our own experiments point to these apparitions being essentially hallucinatory in their nature. The dreamlike