[Footnote 65: See No. 23, chap. iv.] [Footnote 66: Miss X.'s notes have been in some cases slightly abbreviated, in order to save space. Full details of the experiments will be found in _Proc. S.P.R._, vol. vi. pp. 377-397.] [Footnote 67: Miss X. kindly submitted her diaries for inspection to Mrs. Sidgwick, who has carefully examined them.] [Footnote 68: Excluding two in which the distance was only a few yards.] [Footnote 69: A familiar name given to Miss G. by Mr. and Mrs. Kirk.] [Footnote 70: Mr. Kirk explains later that this dog had been lost six years before. They had all been much attached to him, and his loss was still an occasional topic of conversation and of dreams by Mr. Kirk.] CHAPTER VI. GENERAL CRITICISM OF THE EVIDENCE FOR SPONTANEOUS THOUGHT-TRANSFERENCE. If the reader has been able to accept my estimate of the evidence brought forward in the preceding chapters, the possibility of the transmission of ideas and sensations, otherwise than through the known channels of the senses, must be held to be proved by the experiments there recorded. That proof can be impugned only on the ground that the precautions taken against communication between agent and percipient by normal means were insufficient. For if the precautions are admitted to have been sufficient, there can be no question that the results were not due to chance. It is not necessary here to enter into nice calculations of the probabilities. If, for instance, the odds in favour of some other cause than chance for the results recorded on pp. 66-69 were to be expressed in figures, the total sum would compete with or outstrip the stupendous ciphers employed by the astronomer to denote the distance of Sirius, or the weight of the Sun. But the kind of evidence now to be considered--the coincidence of some spontaneous affection of the percipient with some event in the life-history of the person presumed to be the agent, as when one sees the apparition of a friend at the time of his death--is of inferior cogency in two ways. The coincidences are neither so numerous nor so exact; and the risk of error in the record is far greater. On the one hand, therefore, there is a greater probability that the percipient's affection, even if correctly described, was unconnected with the state of the person supposed to be the agent; on the other hand we have, in most cases, less assurance that the description given of his experience is in its essential features accurate. The part played by coincident hallucination in the question of telepathy may be illustrated from another branch of scientific inquiry. For some years the "Germ Theory" rested mainly on observations of the distribution of certain diseases, their periodic character and their mode of propagation and development; phenomena which, though sufficiently striking, are not in themselves susceptible of exact interpretation. It was not until the minute organisms, whose existence had been so long suspected, had been