really remote; would supply to the savage reasoner a certain amount of
affirmative evidence. It is part of Mr. Tylor's contention that savages
(like some children) are subject to the difficulty which most of us may
have occasionally felt in deciding 'Did this really happen, or did I dream
it?' Thus, ordinary dreams would offer to the early thinker some
evidence that other men's souls could visit his, as he believes that his
can visit them.
But men, we may assume, were not, at the assumed stage of thought, so
besotted as not to take a great practical distinction between sleeping
and waking experience on the whole. As has been shown, the distinction
is made by the lowest savages of our acquaintance. One clear _waking_
hallucination, on the other hand, of the presence of a person really
absent, could not but tell more with the early philosopher than a score of
dreams, for to be easily forgotten is of the essence of a dream. Savages,
indeed, oddly enough, have hit on our theory, 'dreams go by contraries.'
Dr. Callaway illustrates this for the Zulus, and Mr. Scott for the
Mang'anza. Thus they _do_ discriminate between sleeping and waking. We
must therefore examine _waking_ hallucinations in the field of actual
experience, and on such recent evidence as may be accessible. If these
hallucinations agree, in a certain ratio, beyond what fortuitous
coincidence can explain, with real but unknown events, then such
hallucinations would greatly strengthen, in the mind of an early
thinker, the savage theory that a man at a distance may, voluntarily or
involuntarily, project his spirit on a journey, and be seen where he is
not present.
When Mr. Tylor wrote his book, the study of the occasional waking
hallucinations of the sane and healthy was in its infancy. Much, indeed,
had been written about hallucinations, but these were mainly the chronic
false perceptions of maniacs, of drunkards, and of persons in bad
health such as Nicolai and Mrs. A. The hallucinations of persons of
genius--Jeanne d'Arc, Luther, Socrates, Pascal, were by some attributed
to lunacy in these famous people. Scarcely any writers before Mr. Galton
had recognised the occurrence of hallucinations once in a life, perhaps,
among healthy, sober, and mentally sound people. If these were known to
occur, they were dismissed as dreams of an unconscious sleep. This is
still practically the hypothesis of Dr. Parish, as we shall see later.
But in the last twenty years the infrequent hallucinations of the sane
have been recognised by Mr. Galton, and discussed by Professor James,
Mr. Gurney, Dr. Parish, and many other writers.
Two results have followed. First, 'ghosts' are shown to be, when not
illusions caused by mistaking one object for another, then hallucinations.
As these most frequently represent a living person who is not present, by
parity of reason the appearance of a dead person is on the same level, is
not a space-filling 'ghost,' but merely an hallucination. Such an
appearance can, _prima facie_, suggest no reasonable inference as to the
continued existence of the dead. On the other hand, the new studies have
raised the perhaps insoluble question, 'Do not hallucinations of the sane,
representing the living, coincide more frequently than mere luck can
account for, with the death or other crisis of the person apparently
seen?' If this could be proved, then there would seem to be a causal
_nexus_, a relation of cause and effect between the hallucination and the
coincident crisis. That connection would be provisionally explained by
some not understood action of the mind or brain of the person in the
crisis, on that of the person who has the hallucination. This is no new
idea; only the name, Telepathy, is modern. Of course, if all this were
accepted, it would be the next step to ask whether hallucinations
representing the dead show any signs of being caused by some action on the
side of the departed. That is a topic on which the little that we have to
say must be said later.
In the meantime the reader who has persevered so far is apt to go no
further. The prejudice against 'wraiths' and 'ghosts' is very strong; but,
then, our innocent phantasms are neither (as we understand their nature)
ghosts nor wraiths. Kant broke the edges of his metaphysical tools
against, not these phantasms, but the logically inconceivable entities
which were at once material and non-material, at once 'spiritual' and
'space-filling.' There is no such difficulty about hallucinations, which,
whatever else may be said about them, are familiar facts of experience.
The only real objections are the statements that hallucinations are
always _morbid_ (which is no longer the universal belief of physiologists
and psychologists), and that the alleged coincidences of a phantasm of a
person with the unknown death of that person at a distance are 'pure
flukes.' That is the question to which we recur later.
In the meantime, the defenders of the theory, that there is some not
understood connection of cause and effect between the death or other
crisis at one end and the perception representing the person affected by
the crisis at the other end, point out that such hallucinations, or other
effects on the percipient, exist in a regular rising scale of potency and
perceptibility. Suppose that 'A's' death in Yorkshire is to affect the
consciousness of 'B' in Surrey before he knows anything about the fact
(suppose it for the sake of argument), then the effect may take place
(1) on 'B's' emotions, producing a vague _malaise_ and gloom; (2) on his
motor nerves, urging him to some act; (3) or may translate itself into his
senses, as a touch felt, a voice heard, a figure seen; or (4) may render
itself as a phrase or an idea.
Of these, (1) the emotional effect is, of course, the vaguest. We may all
have had a sudden fit of gloom which we could not explain. People rarely
act on such impressions, and, when they do, are often wrong. Thus a
friend of my own was suddenly so overwhelmed, at golf, with inexplicable
misery (though winning his match) that he apologised to his opponent and
walked home from the ninth hole. Nothing was wrong at home. Probably some
real ground of apprehension had obscurely occurred to his mind and
expressed itself in his emotion.
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 it is 'objective,' is his friend in flesh and blood, till
he finds out his mistake, by examination or reflection. As Professor
William James remarks, in his 'Principles of Psychology,' such solitary
hallucinations of the sane and healthy, once in a life-time, are difficult
to account for, and are by no means rare. 'Sometimes,' Mr. Tylor observes,
'the phantom has the characteristic quality of not being visible to all of
an assembled company,' and he adds 'to assert or imply that they are
visible sometimes, and to some persons, but not always, or to everyone,
is to lay down an explanation of facts which is not, indeed, our usual
modern explanation, but which is a perfectly rational and intelligible
product of early science.'
It is, indeed, nor has later science produced any rational and
intelligible explanation of collective hallucinations, shared by several
persons at once, and perhaps not perceived by others who are present. Mr.
Tylor, it is true, asserts that 'in civilised countries a rumour of some
one having seen a phantom is enough to bring a sight of it to others whose
minds are in a properly receptive state.' But this is arguing in a circle;
What is 'a properly receptive state'? If illness, overwork, 'expectant
attention,' make 'a properly receptive state,' I should have seen several
phantoms in several 'haunted houses.' But the only thing of the sort I
ever saw occurred when I was thinking of nothing less, when I was in good
health, and when I did not know (nor did I learn till long after) that it
was the right and usual phantom to see. Mr. Podmore remarks that various
members of the Psychical Society have sojourned in various 'haunted
houses,' 'some of them in a state of expectancy and nervous excitement,'
which never caused them to see phantoms, for they saw none.[4]
Mr. Tylor treats of waking hallucinations in much the same manner as he
deals with 'travelling clairvoyance.' He does not study them 'in the field
of experience.' He is not concerned with the truth of the facts, important
as we think it would be, but with his theory that hallucinations, among
other causes, would naturally give rise to the belief in spirits, and thus
to the early philosophy of Animism. Now, certainly, the hallucination of a
person's presence, say at the moment of his death at a distance, would
suggest to a savage that something of the dying man's, something
symbolised in the word 'shadow,' or 'breath' _(spiritus)_, had come to say
farewell. The modern 'spiritualistic' theory, again, that the dead man's
'spirit' is actually present to the percipient, in space, corresponds to,
and is derived from, the animistic philosophy of the savage. But we may
believe in such 'death-wraiths,' or hallucinatory appearances of
the dying, without being either savages or spiritualists. We may
believe without pretending to explain, or we may advance the theory of
'Telepathy,' Hegel's 'magical tie,' according to which the distant mind
somehow impresses itself, in a more or less perfect hallucination, on the
mind of the person who perceives the wraith. If this be so, or even if no
explanation be offered, the truth of the stories of coincidental
apparitions becomes important, as pointing to a new region of psychical
inquiry. Then the evidence of savages as to hallucinations of their own,
coincident with the death of their absent friends, will confirm,
_quantum valeat_, the evidence of many modern observers in all ranks of
life, and all degrees of culture, from Lord Brougham to an old nurse.[5]
As to hallucinations coincident with the death of the person apparently
seen, Mr. Tylor says: 'Narratives of this class I can here only specify
without arguing on them, they are abundantly in circulation.'[6] Now, the
modern hallucinations themselves can scarcely, perhaps, be called
'survivals from savagery,' though the opinion that an hallucination of a
person must be his 'spirit' is really such a survival. It is with that
opinion, with Animism in its hallucinatory origins, that Mr. Tylor is
concerned, not with the hallucinations themselves or with the evidence
for their veridical existence.
Mr. Tylor gives three anecdotes, narrated to him, in two cases, by the
seers, of phantasms of the living beheld by them (and in one case by a
companion also) when the real person was dying at a distance. He adds: 'My
own view is that nothing but dreams and visions could have ever put into
men's minds such an idea as that of souls being ethereal images of
bodies.'[7] The idea may be perfectly erroneous; but if the occurrence
of such coincidental appearances as Mr. Tylor tells us about could be
shown to be too frequent for mere chance to produce, then there would be
a presumption in favour of some unknown faculties in our nature--a proper
theme for anthropology.
The hallucinations of which we hear most are those in which a person
sees the phantom of another person, who, unknown to him, is in or near
the hour of death. Mr. Tylor, in addition to his three instances in
civilised life, alludes to one in savage life, with references to other
cases.[8] We turn to his savage instance, offering it at full length from
the original.[9]
'Among the Maoris' (says Mr. Shortland) 'it is always ominous to see the
figure of an absent person. If the figure is very shadowy, and its face is
not seen, death, although he may ere long be expected, has not seized his
prey. If the face of the absent person is seen, the omen forewarns the
beholder that he is already dead.'
The following statement is from the mouth of an eyewitness:
'A party of natives left their village, with the intention of being
absent some time, on a pig-hunting expedition. One night, while they
were seated in the open air around a blazing fire, the figure of a
relative who had been left ill at home was seen to approach. The
apparition appeared to two of the party only, and vanished immediately
on their making an exclamation of surprise. When they returned to the
village they inquired for the sick man, and then learnt that he had
died about the time he was said to have been seen.'
I now give Maori cases, communicated to me by Mr. Tregear, F.R.G.S.,
author of a 'Maori Comparative Dictionary.'
A very intelligent Maori chief said to me, 'I have seen but two ghosts.
I was a boy at school in Auckland, and one morning was asleep in bed
when I found myself aroused by some one shaking me by the shoulder. I
looked up, and saw bending over me the well-known form of my uncle, whom
I supposed to be at the Bay of Islands. I spoke to him, but the form
became dim and vanished. The next mail brought me the news of his
death. Years passed away, and I saw no ghost or spirit--not even when
my father and mother died, and I was absent in each case. Then one day I
was sitting reading, when a dark shadow fell across my book. I looked
up, and saw a man standing between me and the window. His back was
turned towards me. I saw from his figure that he was a Maori, and I
called out to him, "Oh friend!" He turned round, and I saw my other
uncle, Ihaka. The form faded away as the other had done. I had not
expected to hear of my uncle's death, for I had seen him hale and strong
a few hours before. However, he had gone into the house of a missionary,
and he (with several white people) was poisoned by eating of a pie made
from tinned meat, the tin having been opened and the meat left in it all
night. That is all I myself had seen of spirits.'
One more Maori example may be offered:[10]
From Mr. Francis Dart Fenton, formerly in the Native Department of the
Government, Auckland, New Zealand. He gave the account in writing to his
friend, Captain J.H. Crosse, of Monkstown, Cork, from whom we received
it. In 1852, when the incident occurred, Mr. Fenton was 'engaged in
forming a settlement on the banks of the Waikato.'
'March 25, 1860
'Two sawyers, Frank Philps and Jack Mulholland, were engaged cutting
timber for the Rev. R. Maunsell at the mouth of the Awaroa creek--a very
lonely place, a vast swamp, no people within miles of them. As usual,
they had a Maori with them to assist in felling trees. He came from
Tihorewam, a village on the other side of the river, about six miles
off. As Frank and the native were cross-cutting a tree, the native
stopped suddenly, and said, "What are you come for?" looking in the
direction of Frank. Frank replied, "What do you mean?" He said, "I am
not speaking to you; I am speaking to my brother." Frank said, "Where is
he?" The native replied, "Behind you. What do you want?" (to the other
Maori), Frank looked round and saw nobody. The native no longer saw
anyone, but bid down the saw and said, "I shall go across the river; my
brother is dead."
'Frank laughed at him, and reminded him that be had left him quite well
on Sunday (five days before), and there had been no communication since.
The Maori spoke no more, but got into his canoe and pulled across. When
he arrived at the landing-place, he met people coming to fetch him. His
brother had just died. I knew him well.'
In answer to inquiries as to his authority for this narrative, Mr. Fenton
writes:
'December 18, 1883.
'I knew all the parties concerned well, and it is quite true, _valeat
quantum_, as the lawyers say. Incidents of this sort are not infrequent
among the Maoris.
'F.D. FENTON,
_'Late Chief Judge, Native Law-Court of N.Z.'_
Here is a somewhat analogous example from Tierra del Fuego:
'Jemmy Button was very superstitious' (says Admiral Fitzroy, speaking of
a Fuegian brought to England). 'While at sea, on board the "Beagle," he
said one morning to Mr. Bynoe that in the night some man came to the
side of his hammock and whispered in his ear that his father was dead.
He fully believed that such was the case,' and he was perfectly
right.... 'He reminded Bennett of the dream.'[11]
Mr. Darwin also mentions this case, a coincidental auditory hallucination.
I have found no other savage cases quite to the point. This is,
undeniably, 'a puir show for Kirkintilloch,' a meagre collection of savage
death-wraiths, but it may be so meagre by reason of want of research, or
of lack of records, travellers usually pooh-poohing the benighted
superstitions of the heathen, or fearing to seem superstitious if they
chronicle instances. However few the instances, they are, undeniably,
exact parallels to those recorded in civilised life.
In filling up the lacuna in Mr. Tylor's anthropological work, in asking
questions as to the proportion between phantasms of the living which
coincide with a crisis in the experience of the person seen, and those
which do not, it is obviously necessary to reject all evidence of people
who were ill, or anxious, or overworked, or in poignant grief at the time
of the hallucination. It will be seen later that neither grief nor amatory
passion (dominating the association of our ideas as they do) beget many
phantasms. Our business, however, is with the false perceptions of persons
trustworthy, as far as we know, sane, healthy, not usually visionary, and
in an unperturbed state of mind.
There remains a normal cause of subjective hallucinations, expectancy.
This appears to be a real cause of hallucination or, at least, of
illusion. Waiting for the sound of a carriage you may hear it often before
it comes, you taking other sounds for that which you desire. Again, in an
inquiry embracing 17,000 people, the S.P.R. collected thirteen cases of an
hallucinatory appearance of one person to another who was _expecting_ his
arrival. Once more, it is very conceivable that a trifle, the accidental
opening of a door, a noise of a familiar kind in an unfamiliar place, may
touch the brain into originating an hallucination of a person passing
through the door, or of the place where the sound now heard used once to
be familiar. Expectancy, again, and nervousness, might doubtless cause an
hallucination to a person who felt uncomfortable in a house with a name to
be 'haunted,' though, as we have seen, the effect is far less common than
the cause. All these sorts of causes are undoubtedly more apt to be
prevalent among superstitious savages than among educated Europeans.
And it stands to reason that savages, where one man 'thinks he sees
something,' will be readier than we are to think they 'see something' too.
Yet collective hallucinations, which are shared by several persons at
once, are especially puzzling. Even if they occur when all are in a
strained condition of expectancy, it is odd that all see them in _the same
way_.[12] Examples will occur later. When there is no excitement, the
mystery is increased. We may note that, among the expectant multitudes who
looked on while Bernadette was viewing the Blessed Virgin at Lourdes, not
one person, however superstitious or hysterical, pretended to share the
vision. Again, only one person, and he on doubtful evidence, is asserted
to have shared, once, the visions of Jeanne d'Arc. In both cases all the
conditions said to produce collective hallucination were present in the
highest degree. Yet no collective hallucination occurred.
Narratives about hallucinations coincident with a death, narratives well
attested, are abundant in modern times, so abundant that one need only
refer the curious to Messrs. Gurney and Myers's two large volumes,
'Phantasms of the Living,' and to the S.P.R 'Report of Census of
Hallucinations' (1894). Mr. Tylor says: 'The spiritualistic theory
specially insists on cases of apparitions, where the person's death
corresponds more or less nearly with the time when some friend perceives
his phantom.' But visionaries, he remarks truly, often see phantoms of
living persons when nothing occurs. That is the case, and the question
arises whether more such phantoms are viewed (_not_ by 'visionaries')
in connection with the death or other crisis of the person whose
hallucinatory appearance is perceived, than ought to occur, if there be no
connection of some unknown cause between deaths and appearances. As Mr.
Tylor observes, 'Man, as yet in a low intellectual condition, came to
associate in thought those things which he found by experience to be
connected in fact.'[13] Did early man, then, find _in experience_ that
apparitions of his friends were 'connected in fact' with their deaths?
And, if so, was that discovered connection in fact the origin of his
belief that an hallucinatory appearance of an absent person sometimes
announced his death?
That the belief exists in New Zealand we saw, and find confirmed by this
instance, one of 'many such relations,' says the author. A Maori chief was
long absent on the war-path. One day he entered his wife's hut, and sat
mute by the hearth. She ran to bring witnesses, but on her return the
phantasm was no longer visible. The woman soon afterwards married again.
Her husband then returned in perfect health, and pardoned the lady, as
she had acted on what, to a Maori mind, seemed good legal evidence of
his decease. Of course, even if she fabled, the story is evidence to the
existence of the belief.[14]