Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/294

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E. GUBNEY, ETC., PHANTASMS OF THE LIVING. 281 of construction involved in every sensory hallucination, and a stepping-stone is thus laid to enable us to cross from ideal to phantasmal transference. For the difference, from the results of experimental thought-transference, which telepathic phantasms exhibit in representing what is not consciously occupying the agent's mind to wit, his own form or voice ceases to be a diffi- culty in proportion as the extent of the impression transferred from the agent to the percipient can be conceived to be small, and the percipient's own contribution to the phantasm can be conceived to be large. The details of the phantasmal appearance and the whole setting of the phantasmal picture may thus be drawn from the storehouse of the percipient's own memory, or may partake of the bizarrerie of what is literally a waking-dream. Where, however, the phantasm includes details of dress or aspect which could not be supplied by the percipient's mind, Mr. Gurney thinks it may be attributed to a conscious or sub-conscious image of his own appearance, or of some feature of it, in the agent's mind, which is telepathically conveyed as such to the mind of the percipient. Still, granting all that Mr. Gurney would have us grant, there are great difficulties in applying the thought-transference hypo- thesis to a great number of the cases. Take, for example, the case before quoted of Mrs. Bettany's vision of her swooning mother. It is difficult to see how thought-transference can be made to explain this case. Or take the case of the lady whose black nurse saw a phantasm of the lady's brother who was dying in Tobago. The nurse did not know the brother, and the lady did not see the phantasm. I think that many students of the evidence presented in these volumes will find difficulty in apply- ing in a considerable number of cases the hypothesis of thought- transference. One is almost surprised to find Mr. Gurney speak- ing quite so confidently as he does when, after giving a general criticism of the evidence and pointing out its various liabilities to error, he says : " What, then, is the likelihood that all these various causes all these errors of inference, lapses of memory and exaggerations and perversions of narration will issue in a consistent body of evidence presenting one well-defined type of phenomenon, free in every case from excrescences or inconsistent features, and explicable, and completely explicable, by one equally well-defined hypothesis ? " Is the body of evidence altogether consistent ? Does it present one well-defined type of phenomenon ? Is it completely explicable by one hypothesis ? And is that hypo- thesis well defined ? Mr. Myers cannot answer in the affirmative to all these ques- tions. He is not able to rest content with the hypothesis Of thought-transference. And in a " Note on a Suggested Mode of Psychical Interaction " he puts forward independent clairvoyance as an explanation of some at least of the phenomena. More than this, " correspondently with clairvoyant perception," he suggests,