I quite understand it, but I don't see how it comes to seem good logic to Herr Parish. The other theory is funnier still. Jones never had an hallucination before. 'The rarity and the degree of interest compelled by it' made Jones 'connect it with some other prominent event,' say, the death of his aunt, which, really, occurred, say, nine months afterwards. But this is a mere case of _evidence_, which it is the affair of the S.P.R. to criticise. Herr Parish is in the happy position called in American speculative circles 'a straddle.' If a man has an hallucination when alone, he was in circumstances conducive to the sleeping state. So the hallucination is probably a dream. But, if the seer was in company, who all had the same hallucination, then they all had the same _points de repère_, and the same adaptive memories. So Herr Parish kills with both barrels. If anything extraneous could encourage a belief in coincidental and veridical hallucinations, it would be these 'Oppositions of Science.' If a learned and fair opponent can find no better proofs than logic and (unconscious) perversions of facts like the logic and the statements of Herr Parish, the case for telepathic hallucinations may seem strong indeed. But we must grant him the existence of the adaptive and mythopoeic powers of memory, which he asserts, and also illustrates. I grant, too, that a census of 17,000 inquiries may only have 'skimmed the cream off' (p. 87). Another dip of the net, bringing up 17,000 fresh answers, might alter the whole aspect of the case, one way or the other. Moreover, we cannot get scientific evidence in this way of inquiry. If the public were interested in the question, and understood its nature, and if everybody who had an hallucination at once recorded it in black and white, duly attested on oath before a magistrate, by persons to whom he reported, before the coincidence was known, and if all such records, coincidental or not, were kept in the British Museum for fifty years, then an examination of them might teach us something. But all this is quite impossible. We may form a belief, on this point of veridical hallucinations, for ourselves, but beyond that it is impossible to advance. Still, Science might read her brief! [Footnote 1: Walter Scott.] [Footnote 2: Parish, p. 278.] [Footnote 3: Ibid. pp. 282, 283.] [Footnote 4: P. 287, Mr. Sims, _Proceedings_, x. 230.] [Footnote 5: Parish pp. 288, 289.] [Footnote 6: _Report_, p. 68.] [Footnote 7: P. 274, note 1.] [Footnote 8: Parish, p. 290.] [Footnote 9: _Report_, p. 297.] [Footnote 10: Parish, p. 290.] [Footnote 11: Pp. 291, 292.] [Footnote 12: Moll, _Hypnotism_, p. 1.] [Footnote 13 _Proceedings_, vol. vi. p. 433.] [Footnote 14: Parish, p. 313.] [Footnote 15: Compare _Report_, pp. 181-83, with Parish, pp. 190 and 313, 314.] APPENDIX B THE POLTERGEIST AND HIS EXPLAINERS.