ake generous allowance
for the number of such apparitions forgotten by those to whom the
question had been put, investigation showing that the great majority of
hallucinations reported were given as of comparatively recent
occurrence, and that there was a rapid decrease as the years of
occurrence became more remote.

As a final result, therefore, the committee found about thirty death
coincidences out of thirteen hundred cases, or a proportion of one in
forty-three. Computing from the average annual death-rate for England
and Wales, it was calculated that the probability that any one person
would die on a given day was about one in nineteen thousand; in other
words, out of every nineteen thousand apparitions of living persons,
there should occur, by chance alone, one death coincidence. The actual
proportion, however, as established by the inquiry, was equivalent to
about four hundred and forty in nineteen thousand, or four hundred and
forty times the most probable number, and this when the apparitions
reported were considered merely collectively as having been seen at any
time within twelve hours after death. Not a few, as a matter of fact,
were reported as having been seen within one hour after death, and for
these the improbability of occurrence by chance alone was manifestly
twelve times four hundred and forty. In view of these considerations the
committee felt warranted in declaring that "between deaths and
apparitions of dying persons a connection exists which is not due to
chance."[J]

Had Lord Brougham lived to study the statistics of this remarkable
census of hallucinations, he might have formed a higher opinion of his
ghost; but he would also have been in a better position to deny its
supernatural attributes. For, if the Society for Psychical Research has
made it impossible to doubt the existence of such ghosts as that which
he beheld during his travels in Sweden, it has likewise made discoveries
which afford a really substantial reason for asserting that they no more
hail from the world beyond than do ghosts that are unmistakably the
creations of fancy or fraud. This results from the society's
investigations of thought transference or telepathy, to use the term now
commonly employed.

At an early stage of the experiments undertaken to determine the
possibility of transmitting thought from mind to mind without the
intervention of any known means of communication, it was found that when
success attended the