of these experiences
would not have put them at his disposal, but, if he could get no
materials, he was in no position to form a theory. All this would
have been recognised in any other matter, but in this obscure branch
of psychology, beset, as it is, by superstition, science was content
to be casual.

The error which lies at the opposite pole from Dr. Hibbert's mistake
in not collecting instances, is the error of collecting only
affirmative instances. We hear constantly about 'hallucinations of
sight, sound, or touch, which suggest the presence of an absent
person, and which occur simultaneously with some exceptional crisis
in that person's life, or, most frequently of all, with his death'.
{192} Now Mr. Gurney himself was much too fair a reasoner to avoid
the collection of instantiae contradictoraes, examples in which the
hallucination occurs, but does not coincide with any crisis whatever
in the life of the absent person who seems to be present. Of these
cases, Dr. Hibbert could find only one on record, in the Mercure
Gallant, January, 1690. The writer tells us how he dreamed that a
dead relation of his came to his bedside, and announced that he must
die that day. Unlike Miss Lee, he went on living. Yet the dream
impressed him so much that he noted it down in writing as soon as he
awoke. Dr. Johnson also mentions an instantia contradictoria. A
friend of Boswell's, near Kilmarnock, heard his brother's voice call
him by name: now his brother was dead, or dying, in America.
Johnson capped this by his tale of having, when at Oxford, heard his
name pronounced by his mother. She was then at Lichfield, but
nothing ensued. In Dr. Hibbert's opinion, this proves that
coincidences, when they do occur, are purely matters of chance.
{193a} There are many hallucinations, a death may correspond with
one of them, that case is noted, the others are forgotten. Yet the
coincidences are so many, or so striking, that when a Maori woman
has a hallucination representing her absent husband, she may marry
without giving him recognised ground for resentment, if he happens
to be alive. This curious fact proves that the coincidence between
death and hallucinatory presence has been marked enough to suggest a
belief which can modify savage jealousy. {193b}

By comparing coincidental with non-coincidental hallucinations known
to him, Mr. Gurney is said to have decided that the chances against
a death coinciding with a hallucinat