coincidental hallucinations are laid to the door of 'telepathy,'
to 'a telepathic impact from the mind of an absent agent,' who is
dying, or in some other state of rare or exciting experience,
perhaps being married, as in Col. Meadows Taylor's case. This is a
theory as old as Lavaterus, and was proclaimed by Mayo in the middle
of the century; while, substituting 'angels' for human agents,
Frazer of Tiree used it, in 1700, to explain second sight. Nay, it
is the Norse theory of a 'sending' by a sorcerer, as we read in the
Icelandic sagas. But, admitting that telepathy may be a cause of
hallucinations, we often find the effect where the cause is not
alleged to exist. Nobody, perhaps, will explain our nine empty
hallucinations by 'telepathy,' yet, from the supposed effects of
telepathy they were indistinguishable. Are all such cases of casual
hallucination in the sane to be explained by telepathy, by an impact
of force from a distant brain on the central terminus of our own
brains? At all events, a casual hallucination of the presence of an
absent friend need obviously cause us very little anxiety. We need
not adopt the hypothesis of the Maoris.

The telepathic theory has the advantage of cutting down the
marvellous to the minimum. It also accounts for that old puzzle,
the clothes worn by the ghosts. These are reproduced by the
'agent's' theory of himself, perhaps with some unconscious
assistance from 'the percipient'. For lack of this light on the
matter, M. d'Assier, a positivist, who believed in spectres had to
suggest that the ghosts wear the ghosts of garments! Thus
positivism, in this disciple, returned to the artless metaphysics of
savages. Telepathy saves the believer from such a humiliating
relapse, and, perhaps, telepathy also may be made to explain
'collective' hallucinations, when several people see the same
apparition. If a distant mind can thus demoralise the central
terminus of one brain, it may do as much for two or more brains, or
they may demoralise each other.

All this is very promising, but telepathy breaks down when the
apparition causes some change in the relations of material objects.
If there be a physical effect which endures after the phantasm has
vanished, then there was an actual agent, a real being, a 'ghost' on
the scene. For instance, the lady in Scott's ballad, 'The Eve of
St. John,' might see and might hear the ghost of her lover by a
telepathic hallucination of two sense