the hypothesis of the superstitious will fix on this as a miracle, still more will that hypothesis be strengthened, if future or distant events, not consciously known, are beheld.  Such things must occasionally occur, by chance, in the myriad confusions of dreams, and, to the same extent, in crystal visions.  Miss X.’s three cases of possible telepathy in her own experience are trivial, and do not seem to rise beyond the possibility of fortuitous coincidence:  and her possible clairvoyant visions she leaves to the judgment of the reader, ’to interpret as clairvoyance, or coincidence, or prevision, or whatever else he will’.  The crystal-gazer known to the author once managed to see the person (unknown to her) who was in the mind of the other party in the experiment.  But she has made scarcely any experiments of this description.

The inferences to be drawn from crystal-gazing are not unimportant.  First, we note that the practice is very ancient and widely diffused, among civilised and uncivilised people.  In this diffusion it answers to the other practices, the magical rites of Australian blacks, Greeks, Eskimo; to the stories of ‘death-bed wraiths,’ of rappings, and so forth.  Now this uniformity, as far as regards the latter phenomena, may be explained by transmission of ideas, or by the uniformity of human nature, while the phenomena themselves may be mere inventions like other myths.  In the case of crystal-gazing, however, we can scarcely push scepticism so far as to deny that the facts exist, that hallucinations are actually provoked.  The inference is that a presumption is raised in favour of the actuality of the other phenomena universally reported.  They, too, may conceivably be hallucinatory; the rappings and haunting noises may be auditory, as the crystal visions are ocular hallucinations.  The sounds so widely attested may not cause vibrations in the air, just as the visions are not really in the crystal ball.  As the unconscious self suggests the pictures in the ball, so it may suggest the unexplained noises.  But while, as a rule, only one gazer sees the visions, the sounds (usually but not invariably) are heard by all present.  On the whole, the one case wherein we find facts, if only facts of hallucination, at the bottom of the belief in a world-wide and world-old practice, rather tends in the direction of belief in the other facts, not less universally alleged.  We know too much about mythology to agree with Dr. Johnson, in holding that ’a belief, which prevails as far as human nature is diffused, could become universal only by its truth,’ that ’those who never heard of one another would not have agreed in a tale which nothing but experience could make credible’.  But, on the other hand, a belief is not necessarily untrue, because it is universally diffused.