The 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 senses.  But if

The sable score, of fingers four,
Remained on the board impressed

by the spectre, then there was no telepathic hallucination, but an actual being of an awful kind was in Smailholm Tower.  Again, the cases in which dogs and horses, as Paracelsus avers, display terror when men and women behold a phantasm, are not easily accounted for by telepathy, especially when the beast is alarmed before the man or woman suspects the presence of anything unusual.  There is, of course, the notion that