were breaking a little household rule in the hall, so they ’ran straightway into the pantry, meeting Miss H.G.E. on the way.’  Miss C.E. and Miss E. and the working-woman all heard the noise as of a key in the lock, but nobody is said to have ‘seen the father cross the hall’ (as Herr Parish asserts).  ’Miss H.G.E. was of opinion that Miss E. (now dead) saw nothing, and Miss C.E. was inclined to agree with her.’  Miss E. and the work-woman (now dead) were ’emphatic as to the father having entered the house;’ but this the two only inferred from hearing the noise, after which they fled to the pantry.  Now, granting that some other noise was mistaken for that of the key in the lock, we have here, not (as Herr Parish declares) a collective yet discrepant hallucination—­the discrepancy being caused ’by the difference of connected associations’—­ but a solitary hallucination.  Herr Parish, however, inadvertently converts a solitary into a collective hallucination, and then uses the example to explain collective hallucinations in general.  He asserts that Miss E. ‘saw her father cross the hall.’  Miss E.’s sisters think that she saw no such matter.  Now, suppose that Mr. E. had died at the moment, and that the case was claimed on our part as a ’collective coincidental hallucination,’ How righteously Herr Parish might exclaim that all the evidence was against its being collective!  The sound in the lock, heard by three persons, would be, and probably was, another noise misinterpreted.  And, in any case, there is no evidence for its having produced two hallucinations; the evidence is in exactly the opposite direction.

Here, then, Herr Parish, with the printed story under his eyes, once more illustrates want of attention.  In one way his errors improve his case.  ’If I, a grave man of science, go on telling distorted legends out of my own head, while the facts are plain in print before me,’ Herr Parish may reason, ’how much more are the popular tales about coincidental hallucinations likely to be distorted?’ It is really a very strong argument, but not exactly the argument which Herr Parish conceives himself to be presenting.[15]

This unlucky inexactitude is chronic, as we have shown, in Herr Parish’s work, and is probably to be explained by inattention to facts, by ‘expectation’ of suitable facts, and by ‘anxiety’ to prove a theory.  He explains the similar or identical reports of witnesses to a collective hallucination by ’the case with which such appearances adapt themselves in recollection’ (p. 313), especially, of course, after lapse of time.  And then he unconsciously illustrates his case by the case with which printed facts under his very eyes adapt themselves, quite erroneously, to his own memory and personal bias as he copies them on to his paper.

Finally he argues that even if collective hallucinations are also ’with comparative frequency’ coincidental, that is to be explained thus:  ‘The rarity and the degree of interest compelled by it’ (by such an hallucination) ’will naturally tend to connect itself with some other prominent event; and, conversely, the occurrence of such an event as the death or mortal danger of a friend is most calculated to produce memory illusions of this kind.’