did n't know you 'd dropped it." The same subconscious something may
recollect what we have forgotten. A lady accustomed to taking
salicylate of soda for muscular rheumatism wakes one early winter
morning with an aching neck. In the twilight she takes what she
supposes to be her customary powder from a drawer, dissolves it in a
glass of water, and is about to drink it down, when she feels a sharp
slap on her shoulder and hears a voice in her ear saying, "Taste it!"
On examination, she finds she has got a morphine powder by mistake.
The natural interpretation is that a sleeping memory of the morphine
powders awoke in this quasi-explosive way. A like explanation offers
itself as most plausible for the following case: A lady, with little
time to catch the train, and the expressman about to call, is excitedly
looking for the lost key of a packed trunk. Hurrying upstairs with a
bunch of keys, proved useless, in her hand, she hears an 'objective'
voice distinctly say, "Try the key of the cake-box." Being tried, it
fits. This also may well have been the effect of forgotten experience.

Now, the effect is doubtless due to the same hallucinatory mechanism;
but the source is less easily assigned as we ascend the scale of cases.
A lady, for instance, goes after breakfast to see about one of her
servants who has become ill over night. She is startled at distinctly
reading over the bedroom door in gilt letters the word 'small-pox.'
The doctor is sent for, and ere long pronounces small-pox to be the
disease, although the lady says, "The thought of {323} the girl's
having small-pox never entered my mind till I saw the apparent
inscription." Then come other cases of warning; for example, that of a
youth sitting in a wagon under a shed, who suddenly hears his dead
mother's voice say, "Stephen, get away from here quick!" and jumps out
just in time to see the shed-roof fall.

After this come the experiences of persons appearing to distant friends
at or near the hour of death. Then, too, we have the trance-visions
and utterances, which may appear astonishingly profuse and continuous,
and maintain a fairly high intellectual level. For all these higher
phenomena, it seems to me that while the proximate mechanism is that of
'hallucination,' it is straining an hypothesis unduly to name any
ordinary subconscious mental operation--such as expectation,
recollection, or inference from inattentive perception--as the ultimate
cause tha