boy would, consciously or unconsciously, revert to that
agreement with the friend of his youth, and thence would arise the
desire to let him know that the plighted word had not been forgotten.
Across the vast intervening space, by what mechanism we as yet do not
know, the message would flash instantaneously, to remain unapprehended,
perhaps for hours after the death of the sender, until, in the quiet of
the Swedish inn and resting from the fatigues of the journey, Brougham's
mental faculties passed momentarily into the condition necessary for its
objective realization.

Then, precisely as in experimental telepathy the receiver sees a
hallucinatory image of the trinket or the book; with a suddenness and
vividness that could not fail to shock him, the message would find
expression by the creation before Brougham's startled eyes of a
hallucinatory image of the friend who, as he was to learn later, had
died that same day thousands of miles from Sweden. Knowing nothing of
the possibilities of the human mind, as revealed, if only faintly, by
the labors of a later generation, it was inevitable he should believe he
had no alternative between dismissing the experience as a peculiar dream
or admitting that in very truth he had looked upon a ghost.

FOOTNOTES:

[J] The committee's report will be found in the tenth volume of the
"Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research."

[K] Translation from the "Journal of the Society for Psychical
Research," Vol. IV. p. 218.

[L] I had originally written "impossible," but a critic of my "Riddle of
Personality," in which this point was taken up, has convinced me that
"absurd" is the better word. The critic in question writes: "what
evidence has the author that an apparition of the living is not a
spirit? Why may not the spirit of the living person have left his body
and appeared to his friend? Such is the view of many people, and it
coincides with certain phenomena in dreams." But, to raise only one
objection: If the apparition appear at a moment when the person seen is
actively engaged elsewhere--it may be in writing a book, or preaching a
sermon--what is it that is seen, and what is it that is writing or
preaching? Is the "spirit" present in both places at the same time--in
the shadowy apparition, and in the living, breathing, busily-occupied
human entity? Assuredly, if it be not "impossible" to raise the cry of
spirits in such a case, it would at all events seem "absurd" to do