Apparitions appear. Apparitions are not necessarily Ghosts.
Superstition, Common-sense, and Science. Hallucinations: their
kinds, and causes. Aristotle. Mr. Gurney's definition. Various
sources of Hallucination, external and internal. The Organ of
Sense. The Sensory Centre. The Higher Tracts of the Brain. Nature
of Evidence. Dr. Hibbert. Claverhouse. Lady Lee. Dr. Donne. Dr.
Hibbert's complaint of want of evidence. His neglect of
contemporary cases. Criticism of his tales. The question of
coincidental Hallucinations. The Calculus of Probabilities: M.
Richet, MM. Binet et Fere; their Conclusions. A step beyond
Hibbert. Examples of empty and unexciting Wraiths. Our ignorance
of causes of Solitary Hallucinations. The theory of 'Telepathy'.
Savage metaphysics of M. d'Assier. Breakdown of theory of
Telepathy, when hallucinatory figure causes changes in physical
objects. Animals as Ghost-seers: difficult to explain this by
Telepathy. Strange case of a cat. General propriety and lack of
superstition in cats. The Beresford Ghost, well-meaning but
probably mythical. Mrs. Henry Sidgwick: her severity as regards
conscientious Ghosts. Case of Mr. Harry. Case of Miss Morton. A
difficult case. Examples in favour of old-fashioned theory of
Ghosts. Contradictory cases. Perplexities of the anxious inquirer.
Only one thing is certain about apparitions, namely this, that they
do appear. They really are perceived. Now, as popular language
confuses apparitions with ghosts, this statement sounds like an
expression of the belief that ghosts appear. It has, of course, no
such meaning. When Le Loyer, in 1586, boldly set out to found a
'science of spectres,' he carefully distinguished between his
method, and the want of method observable in the telling of ghost
stories. He began by drawing up long lists of apparitions which are
_not_ spectres, or ghosts, but the results of madness, malady,
drink, fanaticism, illusions and so forth. It is true that Le
Loyer, with all his deductions, left plenty of genuine spectres for
the amusement of his readers. Like him we must be careful not to
confound 'apparitions,' with 'ghosts'.
When a fist, applied to the eye, makes us 'see stars'; when a liver
not in good working order makes us see muscae volitantes, or
'spiders'; when alcohol produces 'the horrors,'--visions of
threatening persons or animals,--when a lesion of the brain, or
delirium, or a disease of the organs of sense causes visions, or
when they occur to starved and enthusiastic ascetics, all these
false perceptions are just as much 'apparitions,' as the view of a
friend at a distance, beheld at the moment of his death, or as the
unrecognised spectre seen in a haunted house.
In popular phrase, however, the two last kinds of apparitions are
called 'ghosts,' or 'wraiths,' and the popular tendency is to think
of these, and of these alone, when 'apparitions' are mentioned. On
the other hand the tendency of common-sense is to rank the two last
sorts of apparition, the wraith and ghost, with all the other kinds,
which are undeniably caused by accident, by malady, mental or
bodily, or by mere confusion and misapprehension, as when one,
seeing a post in the moonlight, takes it for a ghost. Science,
following a third path, would class all perceptions which 'have not
the basis in fact that they seem to have' as 'hallucinations'. The
stars seen after a blow on the eye are hallucinations,--there are no
real stars in view,--and the friend, whose body seems to fill space
before our sight when his body is really on a death-bed far away;--
and again, the appearance of the living friend whom we see in the
drawing-room while he is really in the smoking-room or in
Timbuctoo,--are hallucinations also. The common-sense of the matter
is stated by Aristotle. 'The reason of the hallucinations is that
appearances present themselves, not only when the _object of sense_
is itself in motion, but also when the _sense_ is stirred, as it
would be by the presence of the object' (De Insomn., ii. 460, b, 23-
26).
The ghost in a haunted house is taken for a figure, say, of a monk,
or of a monthly nurse, or what not, but no monthly nurse or monk is
in the establishment. The 'percept,' is a 'percept,' for those who
perceive it; the apparition is an apparition, for _them_, but the
perception is hallucinatory.
So far, everybody is agreed: the differences begin when we ask what
causes hallucinations, and what different classes of hallucinations
exist? Taking the second question first, we find hallucinations
divided into those which the percipient (or percipients) believes,
at the moment, and perhaps later, to be real; and those which his
judgment pronounces to be _false_. Famous cases of the latter class
are the idola which beset Nicolai, who studied them, and wrote an
account of them. After a period of trouble and trial, and neglect
of blood-letting, Nicolai saw, first a dead man whom he had known,
and, later, crowds of people, dead, living, known or unknown. The
malady yielded to leeches. {183} Examples of the first sort of
apparitions taken by the judgment to be _real_, are common in
madness, in the intemperate, and in ghost stories. The maniac
believes in his visionary attendant or enemy, the drunkard in his
rats and snakes, the ghost-seer often supposes that he has actually
seen an acquaintance (where no mistaken identity is possible) and
only learns later that the person,--dead, or alive and well,--was at
a distance. Thus the writer is acquainted with the story of a
gentleman who, when at work in his study at a distance from England,
saw a colleague in his profession enter the room. 'Just wait till I
finish this business,' he said, but when he had hastily concluded
his letter, or whatever he was engaged on, his friend had
disappeared. That was the day of his friend's death, in England.
Here then the hallucination was taken for a reality; indeed, there
was nothing to suggest that it was anything else. Mr. Gurney has
defined a hallucination as 'a percept which lacks, but which can
only by distinct reflection be recognised as lacking, the objective
basis which it suggests'--and by 'objective basis,' he means 'the
possibility of being shared by all persons with normal senses'.
Nobody but the 'percipient' was present on the occasion just
described, so we cannot say whether other people would have seen the
visitor, or not. But reflection could not recognise the unreality
of this 'percept,' till it was found that, in fact, the visitor had
vanished, and had never been in the neighbourhood at all.
Here then, are two classes of hallucinations, those which reflection
shows us to be false (as if a sane man were to have the
hallucination of a crocodile, or of a dead friend, entering the
room), and those which reflection does not, at the moment, show to
be false, as if a friend were to enter, who could be proved to have
been absent.
In either case, what causes the hallucination, or are there various
possible sorts of causes? Now defects in the eye, or in the optic
nerve, to speak roughly, may cause hallucinations _from without_.
An injured external organ conveys a false and distorted message to
the brain and to the intelligence. A nascent malady of the ear may
produce buzzings, and these may develop into hallucinatory voices.
Here be hallucinations _from without_. But when a patient begins
with a hallucination of the intellect, as that inquisitors are
plotting to catch him, or witches to enchant him, and when he later
comes to _see_ inquisitors and witches, where there are none, we
have, apparently, a hallucination _from within_. Again, some
persons, like Blake the painter, _voluntarily_ start a
hallucination. 'Draw me Edward I.,' a friend would say, Blake
would, _voluntarily_, establish a hallucination of the monarch on a
chair, in a good light, and sketch him, if nobody came between his
eye and the royal sitter. Here, then, are examples of
hallucinations begotten _from within_, either voluntarily, by a
singular exercise of fancy, or involuntarily, as the suggestion of
madness, of cerebral disease, or abnormal cerebral activity.
Again a certain amount of intensity of activity, at a 'sensory
centre' in the brain, will start a 'percept'. Activity of the
necessary force at the right place, may be _normally_ caused by the
organ of sense, say the eye, when fixed on a real object, say a
candlestick. (1) Or the necessary activity at the sensory centre
may be produced, _abnormally_, by irritation of the eye, or along
the line of nerve from the eye to the 'sensory centre'. (2) Or
thirdly, there may be a morbid, but spontaneous activity in the
sensory centre itself. (3) In case one, we have a natural
sensation converted into a perception of a real object. In case
two, we have an abnormal origin of a perception of something unreal,
a hallucination, begotten _from without_, that is by a vice in an
external organ, the eye. In case three, we have the origin of an
abnormal perception of something _unreal_, a hallucination, begotten
by a vicious activity _within_, in the sensory centre. But, while
all these three sets of stimuli set the machinery in motion, it is
the 'highest parts of the brain' that, in response to the stimuli,
create the full perception, real or hallucinatory.
But there remains a fourth way of setting the machinery in motion.
The first way, in normal sensation and perception, was the natural
action of the organ of sense, stimulated by a material object. The
second way was by the stimulus of a vice in the organ of sense. The
third way was a vicious activity in a sensory centre. All three
stimuli reach the 'central terminus' of the brain, and are there
created into perceptions, the first real and normal, the second a
hallucination from an organ of sense, _from without_, the third a
hallucination from a sensory centre, _from within_. The fourth way
is illustrated when the machinery is set a-going from the 'central
terminus' itself, 'from the higher parts of the brain, from the
seats of ideation and memory'. Now, as long as these parts only
produce and retain ideas or memories in the usual way, we think, or
we remember, but we have no hallucination. But when the activity
starting from the central terminus 'escapes downwards,' in
sufficient force, it reaches the 'lower centre' and the organ of
sense, and then the idea, or memory, stands visibly before us as a
hallucination.
This, omitting many technical details, and much that is matter of
more dispute than common, is a statement, rough, and as popular as
possible, of the ideas expressed in Mr. Gurney's remarkable essay on
hallucinations. {186} Here, then, we have a rude working notion of
various ways in which hallucinations may be produced. But there are
many degrees in being hallucinated, or enphantosme, as the old
French has it. If we are interested in the most popular kind of
hallucinations, ghosts and wraiths, we first discard like Le Loyer,
the evidence of many kinds of witnesses, diversely but undeniably
hallucinated. A man whose eyes are so vicious as habitually to give
him false information is not accepted as a witness, nor a man whose
brain is drugged with alcohol, nor a man whose 'central terminus' is
abandoned to religious excitement, to remorse, to grief, to anxiety,
to an apprehension of secret enemies, nor even to a habit of being
hallucinated, though, like Nicolai, he knows that his visionary
friends are unreal. Thus we would not listen credulously to a ghost
story out of his own experience from a man whose eyes were
untrustworthy, nor from a short-sighted man who had recognised a
dead or dying friend on the street, nor from a drunkard. A tale of
a vision of a religious character from Pascal, or from a Red Indian
boy during his Medicine Fast, or even from a colonel of dragoons who
fell at Prestonpans, might be interesting, but would not be evidence
for our special purpose. The ghosts beheld by conscience-stricken
murderers, by sorrowing widowers, by spiritualists in dark rooms,
haunted by humbugs, or those seen by lunatics, or by children, or by
timid people in lonely old houses, or by people who, though sane at
the time, go mad twenty years later, or by sane people habitually
visionary, these and many other ghosts, we must begin, like Le
Loyer, by rejecting. These witnesses have too much cerebral
activity at the wrong time and place. They start their
hallucinations from the external terminus, the unhealthy organ of
sense; from the morbid central terminus; or from some dilapidated
cerebral station along the line. But, when we have, in a sane man's
experience, say one hallucination whether that hallucination does,
or does not coincide with a crisis in the life, or perhaps with the
death of the person who seems to be seen, what are we to think? Or
again, when several witnesses simultaneously have the same
hallucination,--not to be explained as a common misinterpretation of
a real object,--what are we to think? This is the true question of
ghosts and wraiths. That apparitions, so named by the world, do
appear, is certain, just as it is certain that visionary rats appear
to drunkards in delirium tremens. But, as we are only to take the
evidence of sane and healthy witnesses, who were neither in anxiety,
grief, or other excitement, when they perceived their one
hallucination, there seems to be a difference between their
hallucinations and those of alcoholism, fanaticism, sorrow, or
anxiety. Now the common mistakes in dealing with this topic have
been to make too much, or to make too little, of the coincidences
between the hallucinatory appearance of an absent person, and his
death, or some other grave crisis affecting him. Too little is made
of such coincidences by Dr. Hibbert, in his Philosophy of
Apparitions (p. 231). He 'attempts a physical explanation of many
ghost stories which may be considered most authentic'. So he says,
but he only touches on three, the apparition of Claverhouse, on the
night of Killiecrankie, to Lord Balcarres, in an Edinburgh prison;
the apparition of her dead mother to Miss Lee, in 1662; and the
apparition of his wife, who had born a dead child on that day in
England, to Dr. Donne in Paris, early in the seventeenth century.
Dr. Hibbert dedicated his book, in 1825, to Sir Walter Scott, of
Abbotsford, Bart., President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Sir
Walter, at heart as great a ghost-hunter as ever lived, was
conceived to have a scientific interest in the 'mental principles to
which certain popular illusions may be referred'. Thus Dr.
Hibbert's business, if he would satisfy the President of the Royal
Society of Edinburgh, was to 'provide a physical explanation of many
ghost stories which may be considered most authentic'. In our
prosaic age, he would have begun with those most recent, such as the
tall man in brown, viewed by Sir Walter on the moor near Ashestiel,
and other still remembered contemporary hallucinations. Far from
that, Dr. Hibbert deliberately goes back two centuries for all the
three stories which represent the 'many' of his promise. The
Wynyard ghost was near him, Mrs Ricketts's haunted house was near
him, plenty of other cases were lying ready to his hand. {189} But
he went back two centuries, and then,--complained of lack of
evidence about 'interesting particulars'! Dr. Hibbert represents
the science and common-sense of seventy years ago, and his criticism
probably represents the contemporary ideas about evidence.
The Balcarres tale, as told by him, is that the Earl was 'in prison,
in Edinburgh Castle, on the suspicion of Jacobitism'. 'Suspicion'
is good; he was the King's agent for civil, as Dundee was for
military affairs in Scotland. He and Dundee, and Ailesbury, stood
by the King in London, to the last. Lord Balcarres himself, in his
memoirs, tells James II. how he was confined, 'in close prison,' in
Edinburgh, till the castle was surrendered to the Prince of Orange.
In Dr. Hibbert's tale, the spectre of Dundee enters Balcarres's room
at night, 'draws his curtain,' looks at him for some time, and walks
out of the room, Lord Balcarres believing it to be Dundee himself.
Dr. Hibbert never even asks for the authority on which this legend
reposes, certainly Balcarres does not tell the tale in his own
report, or memoirs, for James II. (Bannatyne Club, 1841). The
doctor then grumbles that he does not know 'a syllable of the state
of Lord Balcarres's health at the time'. The friend of Bayle and of
Marlborough, an honourable politician, a man at once loyal and
plain-spoken in dealings with his master, Lord Balcarres's word
would go for much, if he gave it. {190} But Dr. Hibbert asks for no
authority, cites none. He only argues that, 'agreeably to the well-
known doctrine of chances,' Balcarres might as well have this
hallucination at the time of Dundee's death as at any other (p.
232). Now, that is a question which we cannot settle, without
knowing whether Lord Balcarres was subject to hallucinations. If he
was, cadit quaestio, if he was _not_, then the case is different.
It is, manifestly, a problem in statistics, and only by statistics
of wide scope, can it be solved. {191} But Dr. Hibbert was content
to produce his easy solution, without working out the problem.
His second case is of 1662, and was taken down, he says, by the
Bishop of Gloucester, from the lips of the father of Miss Lee. This
young lady, in bed, saw a light, then a hallucination which called
itself her mother. The figure prophesied the daughter's death at
noon next day and at noon next day the daughter died. A physician,
when she announced her vision, attended her, bled her, and could
find nothing wrong in her health. Dr. Hibbert conjectures that her
medical attendant did not know his business. 'The coincidence was
_a fortunate one_,' that is all his criticism. Where there is no
coincidence, the stories, he says, are forgotten. For that very
reason, he should have collected contemporary stories, capable of
being investigated, but that did not occur to Dr. Hibbert. His last
case is the apparition of Mrs. Donne, with a dead child, to Dr.
Donne, in Paris, as recorded by Walton. As Donne was a poet, very
fond of his wife, and very anxious about her health, this case is
not evidential, and may be dismissed for 'a fortuitous coincidence'
(p. 332).
Certainly Dr. Hibbert could come to no conclusion, save his own, on
the evidence he adduces. But it was by his own fault that he chose
only evidence very remote, incapable of being cross-examined, and
scanty, while we know that plenty of contemporary evidence was
within his reach. Possibly the possessors of these experiences
would not have put them at his disposal, but, if he could get no
materials, he was in no position to form a theory. All this would
have been recognised in any other matter, but in this obscure branch
of psychology, beset, as it is, by superstition, science was content
to be casual.
The error which lies at the opposite pole from Dr. Hibbert's mistake
in not collecting instances, is the error of collecting only
affirmative instances. We hear constantly about 'hallucinations of
sight, sound, or touch, which suggest the presence of an absent
person, and which occur simultaneously with some exceptional crisis
in that person's life, or, most frequently of all, with his death'.
{192} Now Mr. Gurney himself was much too fair a reasoner to avoid
the collection of instantiae contradictoraes, examples in which the
hallucination occurs, but does not coincide with any crisis whatever
in the life of the absent person who seems to be present. Of these
cases, Dr. Hibbert could find only one on record, in the Mercure
Gallant, January, 1690. The writer tells us how he dreamed that a
dead relation of his came to his bedside, and announced that he must
die that day. Unlike Miss Lee, he went on living. Yet the dream
impressed him so much that he noted it down in writing as soon as he
awoke. Dr. Johnson also mentions an instantia contradictoria. A
friend of Boswell's, near Kilmarnock, heard his brother's voice call
him by name: now his brother was dead, or dying, in America.
Johnson capped this by his tale of having, when at Oxford, heard his
name pronounced by his mother. She was then at Lichfield, but
nothing ensued. In Dr. Hibbert's opinion, this proves that
coincidences, when they do occur, are purely matters of chance.
{193a} There are many hallucinations, a death may correspond with
one of them, that case is noted, the others are forgotten. Yet the
coincidences are so many, or so striking, that when a Maori woman
has a hallucination representing her absent husband, she may marry
without giving him recognised ground for resentment, if he happens
to be alive. This curious fact proves that the coincidence between
death and hallucinatory presence has been marked enough to suggest a
belief which can modify savage jealousy. {193b}
By comparing coincidental with non-coincidental hallucinations known
to him, Mr. Gurney is said to have decided that the chances against
a death coinciding with a hallucination, were forty to one,--long
odds. {194a} But it is clear that only a very large collection of
facts would give us any materials for a decision. Suppose that some
20,000 people answer such questions as:--