y be affected by a
hallucination of the presence of a dead man or woman, but he, or she
(granting their continued existence after death), may know nothing
of the matter. In the same way, there are stories of people who
have consciously tried to make others, at a distance, think of them.
The subjects of these experiments have, it is said, had a
hallucination of the presence of the experimenter. But _he_ is
unaware of his success, and has no control over the actions of what
old writers, and some new theosophists, call his 'astral body'.
Suppose, then, that something conscious endures after death.
Suppose that some one thinks he sees the dead. It does not follow
that the surviving consciousness (ex hypothesi) of the dead person
who seems to be seen, is aware that he is 'manifesting' himself. As
Mr. Myers puts it, 'ghosts must therefore, as a rule, represent--not
conscious or central currents of intelligence--but mere automatic
projections from consciousnesses which have their centres
elsewhere,' [Greek]: as Homer makes Achilles say, 'there is no
heart in them.' {156} All this is not inconceivable. But all this
does not explain the facts, namely, the noises, often very loud, and
the movements of objects, and the lights which are the common or
infrequent accompaniments of apparitions in haunted houses. Now we
have (always on much the same level of evidence) accounts of similar
noises, and movements of untouched objects, occurring where living
persons of peculiar constitution are present, or in haunted houses.
These things we discuss in an essay on 'The Logic of Table-turning'.
By parity of reasoning, or at least by an obvious analogy, we are
led to infer that more than 'an automatic projection from the
consciousness' of a dead man is present where he is not only seen,
but heard, making noises, and perhaps moving objects. If this be
admitted then psychical conjecture is pushed back on something very
like the old theory of haunted houses, namely, that a ghost, or
spiritual entity, is present and active there.

Long ago, in a little tale called 'Castle Perilous' (published in a
volume named The Wrong Paradise), the author made an affable sprite
explain all these phenomena. 'We suffer, we ghosts,' he said in
effect, 'from a malady akin to aphasia in the living. We know what
we want to say, and how we wish to appear, but, just as a patient in
aphasia uses the wrong word, we use the wrong manifestation.' This
he illu