sh,
'_the one sister saw her father cross the hall_ after entering; the other
saw the dog (the usual companion of his walks) run past her door.' Father
and dog had not left the dining-room. Herr Parish decides that the same
_point de repere_ (the apparent noise of a key in the lock of the front
door) 'acted by way of suggestion on both sisters,' producing, however,
different hallucinations, 'in virtue of the difference of the connected
associations.' One girl associated the sound with her honoured sire, the
other with his faithful hound; so one saw a dog, and the other saw an
elderly gentleman. Now, first, if so, this should _always_ be occurring,
for we all have different associations of ideas. Thus, we are in a haunted
house; there is a noise of a rattling window; I associate it with a
burglar, Brown with a milkman, Miss Jones with a lady in green, Miss Smith
with a knight in armour. That collection of phantasms should then be
simultaneously on view, like the dog and old gentleman; all our reports
should vary. But this does not occur. Most unluckily for Herr Parish, he
illustrates his theory by telling a story which happens not to be
correctly reported. At first I thought that a fallacy of memory, or an
optical delusion, had betrayed him again, as in his legend of the
waistcoat. But I am now inclined to believe that what really occurred was
this: Herr Parish brought out his book in German, before the Report of the
Census of Hallucinations was published. In his German edition he probably
quoted a story which precisely suited his theory of the origin of
collective hallucinations. This anecdote he had found in Prof. Sidgwick's
Presidential Address of July 1890.[13] As stated by Prof. Sidgwick, the
case just fitted Herr Parish, who refers to it on p. 190, and again on
p. 314. He gives no reference, but his version reads like a traditional
variant of Prof. Sidgwick's. Now Prof. Sidgwick's version was erroneous,
as is proved by the elaborate account of the case in the Report of the
Census, which Herr Parish had before him, but neglected when he prepared
his English edition. The story was wrong, alas! in the very point where,
for Herr Parish's purpose, it ought to have been right. The hallucination
is believed not to have been collective, yet Herr Parish uses it to
explain collective hallucinations. Doubtless he overlooked the accurate
version in the Report.[14]

The facts, as there reported, were not what he narrates, but as