Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/288

VI. CRITICAL NOTICES. Phantasms of the Living. By EDMUND GUENEY, MA, (late Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge), FEEDERIC W. H. MYEES, M.A. (late Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge), and FEANK PODMOEE, M.A. 2 Vols. London : Eooms of the Society for Psychical Eesearch, also Triibner & Co., 1886. Pp. Ixxxiv., 573 ; xxvii., 773. What should be our philosophic attitude towards alleged facts, apparently well attested, of which we can give no satisfac- tory physical explanation ? This question will probably suggest itself to many of the readers of Phantasms of the Living ; and it will receive many answers, verbally expressed or practically acted on. Between those who greedily swallow as accredited ghost-stories the accounts of mysterious appearances here pre- sented to us and those who reject them with ridicule and scorn, there will lie a great body of " common sense " folk who are content to entirely ignore them. But there may also be some to agree with the present writer who, in already noticing these volumes in Nature, said : With regard to spontaneous telepathy, notwith- standing the large amount of evidence so carefully collected and criticised, I prefer to credit the whole to a suspense account. And what is Telepathy ? In the words of our authors it is " the, ability of one mind to impress or be impressed by another mind otherwise than through the recognised channels of sense. We call the owner of the impressing mind the agent, and the owner of the impressed mind the percipient; and we describe the fact of the impression shortly by the term telepathy. 1 ' So far good ; but before proceeding further we naturally inquire what, in the authors' view, is the relation between the mind and its " owner ". Mr. Gurney, who is responsible for all but some eighty pages (by Mr. Myers) in these volumes and whose work throughout displays extraordinary skill and candour, declares at the very beginning that "Mental facts are indissolubly linked with the very class of material facts that science can least penetrate with the most complex sort of changes in the most subtly- woven sort of matter the molecu- lar activities of brain-tissue ". But elsewhere he tells us that the difficulty of rounding-off the idea of personality and measuring human existence by the limits of the phenomenal self suggests " a deeper solution than the mere connexion of various streams of psychic life with a single organism"; namely, "that the stray fragments of ' unconscious intelligence,' and the alternating selves of ' double consciousness,' belong really to a more fundamental unity, which finds in what we call life very imperfect conditions of manifestation". On the whole, I take it, Mr. Gurney would not be prepared to maintain the indissoluble connexion between