six minutes." Experiments like this, which were repeated in great
variety, seem to prove that below the upper consciousness the hypnotic
consciousness persists, engrossed with the suggestion and able to
express itself through the involuntarily moving hand.

Gurney shares, therefore, with Janet and Binet, the {311} credit of
demonstrating the simultaneous existence of two different strata of
consciousness, ignorant of each other, in the same person. The
'extra-consciousness,' as one may call it, can be kept on tap, as it
were, by the method of automatic writing. This discovery marks a new
era in experimental psychology, and it is impossible to overrate its
importance. But Gurney's greatest piece of work is his laborious
'Phantasms of the Living.' As an example of the drudgery stowed away
in the volumes, it may suffice to say that in looking up the proofs for
the alleged physical phenomena of witchcraft, Gurney reports a careful
search through two hundred and sixty books on the subject, with the
result of finding no first-hand evidence recorded in the trials except
the confessions of the victims themselves; and these, of course, are
presumptively due to either torture or hallucination. This statement,
made in an unobtrusive note, is only one instance of the care displayed
throughout the volumes. In the course of these, Gurney discusses about
seven hundred cases of apparitions which he collected. A large number
of these were 'veridical,' in the sense of coinciding with some
calamity happening to the person who appeared. Gurney's explanation is
that the mind of the person undergoing the calamity was at that moment
able to impress the mind of the percipient with an hallucination.

Apparitions, on this 'telepathic' theory, may be called 'objective'
facts, although they are not 'material' facts. In order to test the
likelihood of such veridical hallucinations being due to mere chance,
Gurney instituted the 'census of hallucinations,' which has been
continued with the result of obtaining answers from over twenty-five
thousand persons, asked {312} at random in different countries whether,
when in good health and awake, they had ever heard a voice, seen a
form, or felt a touch which no material presence could account for.
The result seems to be, roughly speaking, that in England about one
adult in ten has had such an experience at least once in his life, and
that of the experiences themselves a large number coincide wit