than she could see what was going on in the room.
'Her father returned home nearly a week afterwards, and was perfectly
astounded when told by his wife and family what he had been doing on
that particular evening; and, although previous to that date he was a
thorough sceptic as to clairvoyance, he frankly admitted that my
clairvoyant was perfectly correct in every particular. He also informed
us that the book referred to was a new one, which he had purchased after
he had left his home, so that there was no possibility of his daughter
guessing that he had the book before him. I may add that the letter in
due course appeared in the paper; and I saw and handled the book.'
A number of cases of so-called 'clairvoyance' will be found in the
'Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research.'[22] As the authors of
these essays remark, even after discounting, in each case, fraud,
malobservation, and misreporting, the residue of cases can seldom justify
either the savage theory of the wandering soul (which is not here
seriously proposed) or Hegel's theory that the _fuehlende Seele_ is
unconditioned by space. For, if thought transference be a fact, the
apparent clairvoyant may only be reading the mind of a person at a
distance. The results, however, when successful, would naturally suggest
to the savage thinker the belief in the wandering soul, or corroborate it
if it had already been suggested by the common phenomena of dreaming.
To these instances of knowledge acquired otherwise than by the recognised
channels of sense we might add the Scottish tales of 'second sight.' That
phrase is merely a local term covering examples of what is called
'clairvoyance'--views of things remote in space, hallucinations of sight
that coincide with some notable event, premonitions of things future, and
so on. The belief and hallucinatory experiences are still very common in
the Highlands, where I have myself collected many recent instances. Mr.
Tylor observes that the examples 'prove a little too much; they vouch not
only for human apparitions, but for such phantoms as demon dogs, and for
still more fanciful symbolic omens.' This is perfectly true. I have found
no cases of demon dogs; but wandering lights, probably of meteoric or
miasmatic origin, are certainly regarded as tokens of death. This is
obviously a superstitious hypothesis, the lights being real phenomena
misconstrued. Again, funerals are not uncommonly seen where no funeral is
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