But one may illustrate what did look like a coincidence by the experience of the same friend.  He inhabited, as a young married man, a flat in a house belonging to an acquaintance.  The hall was covered by a kind of glass roof, over part of its extent.  He was staying in the country with his wife, and as they travelled home the lady was beset with an irresistible conviction that something terrible had occurred, not to her children.  On reaching their house they found that one of their maids had fallen through the glass roof and killed herself.  They also learned that the girl’s sister had arrived at the house, immediately after the accident, explaining that she was driven to come by a sense that something dreadful had happened.  The lawyer, too, who represented the owner of the house, had appeared, unsummoned, from a conviction, which he could not resist, that for some reason unknown he was wanted there.[1] Here, then, was not an hallucination, but an emotional effect simultaneously reaching the consciousness of three persons, and coinciding with an unknown crisis.[2]

Cases in which a person feels urged to an act (2) are also recorded.  Indeed, the lawyer’s in our anecdote is such an instance.  Not to trouble ourselves (3) with ‘voices,’ hallucinations of sight, coinciding with a distant unknown crisis, are traced from a mere feeling that somebody is in the room, followed by a mental, or mind’s eye picture of a person dying at a distance, up to a kind of ‘vision’ of a person or scene, and so on to hallucinations appealing, at once, to touch, sight, and hearing.  As some hundreds of these narratives of coincidental hallucinations in every degree have been collected from witnesses at first hand, often personally known, and usually personally cross-questioned, by the student, it is difficult to deny that there is a prima facie case for inquiry.[3]

There is here no question of ‘spirits,’ with all their physical and metaphysical difficulties.  Nor is there any desire to shirk the fact that many ‘presentiments’ and hallucinations of the sane coincide with no ascertainable fact.  We only provisionally posit the possibility of an influence, in its nature unknown, of one mind on another at a distance, such influence translating itself into an hallucination.  An inquiry into this subject, in the ethnographic and modern fields, may be new but involves no ‘superstition.’

We now return to Mr. Tylor, who treats of hallucinations among other experiences which led early savage thinkers to believe in ghosts or separable souls, the origin of religion.

As to the causes of hallucinations in general, Mr. Tylor has something to say, but it is nothing systematic.  ‘Sickness, exhaustion, and excitement’ cause savages to behold ‘human spectres,’ in ‘the objective reality’ of which they believe.  But if an educated modern, not sick, nor exhausted, nor excited, has an hallucination of a friend’s presence, he, too, believes that