What then, we may ask, does probably happen in the moment of death, when the organism has become wasted and enfeebled by disease, and when the nucleus of the man, the inner personality, has compacted itself together into close compass in preparation for its long journey? What happens to all those marginal desires which have chiefly occupied themselves with the affairs of the body or lower mind—those innumerable little spirits and imps which (as we discover in dreams, or by closely watching our waking thoughts) are continually planning and scheming their own little successes and gratifications? What happens to the thousand and one intelligences which carry on the functions and processes of the organism? and whose labors, now that the bodily life is coming to an end, are no more needed? Is there not a danger—or at least a likelihood—of this strange masquerade of dreamland, of these painful obsessions of disease, being repeated with ever-increased intensity? True, that if the organism has been kept so well in hand during life as to cause all outlying passions and desires to weaken and become quiescent simultaneously with the body—or at least to go back quietly into the kennels of a long sleep—like a pack of hounds when the chase is over—then these phantoms, these obsessions, may in that last hour be conspicuous by their absence. But since in the vast majority of cases this is not, and cannot be so, it seems more probable that as a rule the departing soul will make its exit, not only through the perishing bodily part, but through a mass of debris, as it may be called, of the mind (chiefly though perhaps not entirely “the animal mind”), through a cloud of tags and tatters of mentality, thrown off in the final crisis. It seems probable that just as the actual body, bereft at death of its one pervading vitality, breaks out in a mass of corruption or minute multitudinous life, so there is a _tendency_, at any rate, for the lower mind to break out into a strange ghostly rabble—a cloud of phantasms, exhaled and projected from the dying person. Of these phantasms most, no doubt, are only visible to the patient himself (though that does not render them any more agreeable as visitors); others are discernible by clairvoyants present; while others again are distinctly seen even by persons at a distance in space or time—as in the numerous and well-authenticated instances of “wraiths.” The picture is not altogether pleasant, but it has a certain general congruity with admitted facts, and with a fairly-accepted body of tradition and theory; and provisionally I suppose we may accept it.