5. (A) A person of distinction, walking in a certain Cambridge quadrangle, met a very well-known clergyman.  The former held out his hand, but there was before him only open space.  No feeling of excitement or anxiety followed.

6. (A) The writer, standing before dinner, at a table in a large and brilliantly lit hall, saw the door of the drawing-room open, and a little girl, related to himself, come out, and run across the hall into another room.  He spoke to her, but she did not answer.  He instantly entered the drawing-room, where the child was sitting in a white evening-dress.  When she ran across the hall, the moment before, she was dressed in dark blue serge.  No explanation of the puzzle could be discovered, but it is fair to add that no anxiety was excited.

7. (A) A young lady had a cold, and was wearing a brown shawl.  After lunch she went to her room.  A few minutes later, her sister came out, saw her in the hall, and went upstairs after her, telling her an anecdote.  At the top of the stairs, the brown-shawled sister vanished.  The elder sister was in her room, in a white shawl.  She was visible, when absent on another occasion, to another spectator.

In two other cases (A) ladies, in their usual health, saw their husbands in their rooms, when, in fact, they were in the drawing-room or study.  Here then are eight cases of non-coincidental hallucination, some of people awake, some of people probably on the verge of sleep, which are wholly without ‘coincidence,’ wholly unveridical.  None of the ‘percipients’ was addicted to seeing ‘visions about.’ {199}

On the other side, though the writer knows several people who have ‘seen ghosts’ in haunted houses, and other odd phenomena, he knows nobody, at first hand, who has seen a ‘veridical hallucination,’ or rather, knows only one, a very young one indeed.  Thus, between these personally collected statistics of spectral ‘sells’ on one part, and the world-wide diffusion of belief in ‘coincidental’ hallucination on the other, the human mind is left in a balance which mathematics, and the Calculus of Probabilities (especially if one does not understand it) fail to affect.

Meanwhile, we still do not know what causes these solitary hallucinations of the sane.  They can hardly come from diseased organs of sense, for these would not confine themselves to a single mistaken message of great vivacity.  And why should either the ‘sensory centre’ or the ‘central terminus’ just once in a lifetime develop this uncanny activity, and represent to us a person to whom we may be wholly indifferent?  The explanation is less difficult when the person represented is a husband or child, but even then, why does the activity occur once, and only once, and not in a moment of anxiety?