The telepathic theory has the advantage of cutting down the
marvellous to the minimum. It also accounts for that old puzzle,
the clothes worn by the ghosts. These are reproduced by the
'agent's' theory of himself, perhaps with some unconscious
assistance from 'the percipient'. For lack of this light on the
matter, M. d'Assier, a positivist, who believed in spectres had to
suggest that the ghosts wear the ghosts of garments! Thus
positivism, in this disciple, returned to the artless metaphysics of
savages. Telepathy saves the believer from such a humiliating
relapse, and, perhaps, telepathy also may be made to explain
'collective' hallucinations, when several people see the same
apparition. If a distant mind can thus demoralise the central
terminus of one brain, it may do as much for two or more brains, or
they may demoralise each other.
All this is very promising, but telepathy breaks down when the
apparition causes some change in the relations of material objects.
If there be a physical effect which endures after the phantasm has
vanished, then there was an actual agent, a real being, a 'ghost' on
the scene. For instance, the lady in Scott's ballad, 'The Eve of
St. John,' might see and might hear the ghost of her lover by a
telepathic hallucination of two senses. But if
The sable score, of fingers four,
Remained on the board impressed
by the spectre, then there was no telepathic hallucination, but an
actual being of an awful kind was in Smailholm Tower. Again, the
cases in which dogs and horses, as Paracelsus avers, display terror
when men and women behold a phantasm, are not easily accounted for
by telepathy, especially when the beast is alarmed _before_ the man
or woman suspects the presence of anything unusual. There is, of
course, the notion that the horse shies, or the dog turns craven, in
sympathy with its master's exhibition of fear. Owners of dogs and
horses may counterfeit horror and see whether their favourites do
sympathise. Cats don't. In one of three cases known to us where a
cat showed consciousness of a spectral presence, the apparition
_took the form of a cat_. The evidence is only that of Richard
Bovet, in his Pandemonium; or, the Devil's Cloyster (1684). In Mr.
J. G. Wood's Man and Beast, a lady tells a story of being alone, in
firelight, playing with a favourite cat, Lady Catherine. Suddenly
puss bristled all over, her back rose in an arch, and the lady,
looking up, saw a hideously malignant female watching her. Lady
Catherine now rushed wildly round the room, leaped at the upper
panels of the door, and seemed to have gone mad. This new terror
recalled the lady to herself. She shrieked, and the phantasm
vanished. She saw it on a later day. In a third case, a cat merely
kept a watchful eye on the ghost, and adopted a dignified attitude
of calm expectancy. If beasts can be telepathically affected, then
beasts have more of a 'psychical' element in their composition than
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