These rare facts have not escaped a ghost-hunter so intelligent as Mrs. Henry Sidgwick.  This lady is almost too sportsmanlike, for a psychical researcher, in her habit of giving an apparition the benefit of every imaginable doubt which may absolve him from the charge of being a real genuine ghost.  ‘It is true,’ she says, ’that ghosts are alleged sometimes to produce a physical effect on the external world;’ but to admit this is ’to come into prima facie collision with the physical sciences’ (an awful risk to run), so Mrs. Sidgwick, in a rather cavalier manner leaves ghosts who produce physical effects to be dealt with among the phenomena alleged to occur at seances.  Now this is hardly fair to the spontaneous apparition, who is doing his very best to demonstrate his existence in the only convincing way.  The phenomena of seances are looked on with deserved distrust, and, generally, may be regarded as an outworn mode of swindling.  Yet it is to this society that Mrs. Sidgwick relegates the most meritorious and conscientious class of apparitions.

Let us examine a few instances of the ghost who visibly moves material objects.  We take one (already cited) from Mrs. Sidgwick’s own article. {205} In this case a gentleman named John D. Harry scolded his daughters for saying that they had seen a ghost, with which he himself was perfectly familiar.  ‘The figure,’ a fair woman draped in white, ’on seven or eight occasions appeared in my bedroom, and twice in the library, and on one occasion it lifted up the mosquito-curtains, and looked closely into my face’.  Now, could a hallucination lift a mosquito-curtain, or even produce the impression that it did so, while the curtain was really unmoved?  Clearly a hallucination, however artful, and well got up, could do no such thing.  Therefore a being—­a ghost with very little maidenly reserve—­haunted the bedroom of Mr. Harry, if he tells a true tale.  Again (p. 115), a lady (on whose veracity I am ready to pledge my all) had doors opened for her frequently, ’as if a hand had turned the handle’.  And once she not only saw the door open, but a grey woman came in.  Another witness, years afterwards, beheld the same figure and the same performance.  Once more, Miss A. M.’s mother followed a ghost, who opened a door and entered a room, where she could not be found when she was wanted (p. 121).  Again, {206} a lady saw a ghost which, ’with one hand, the left, drew back the curtain’.  There are many other cases in which apparitions are seen in houses where mysterious thumps and raps occur, especially in General Campbell’s experience (p. 483).  If the apparition gave the thumps then he (or, in this instance, she) was material, and could produce effects on matter.  Indeed, this ghost was seen to take up and lay down some books, and to tuck in the bed-clothes.  Hallucinations (which are all in one’s eye or sensory centre, or cerebral central terminus), cannot draw curtains,