Cock Lane and Common-Sense

APPARITIONS, GHOSTS, AND HALLUCINATIONS

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 Féré; 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 muscæ 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. 120 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. 121 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 enphantosmé, 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. 122 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. 123 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 quæstio, 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. 124 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’. 125 Now Mr. Gurney himself was much too fair a reasoner to avoid the collection of instantiæ contradictoræs, 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. 126 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. 127

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. 128 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: —

1. Have you ever had any hallucination?

2. Was there any coincidence between the hallucination and facts at the time unknown to you?

The majority of sane people will be able to answer the first question in the negative.

Of those who answer both questions in the affirmative, several things are to be said. First, we must allow for jokes, then for illusions of memory. Corroborative contemporary evidence must be produced. Again, of the 20,000, many are likely to be selected instances. The inquirer is tempted to go to a person who, as he or she already knows, has a story to tell. Again, the inquirers are likely to be persons who take an interest in the subject on the affirmative side, and their acquaintances may have been partly chosen because they were of the same intellectual complexion. 129

All these drawbacks are acknowledged to exist, and are allowed for, and, as far as possible, provided against, by the very fair-minded people who have conducted this inquisition. Thus Mr. Henry Sidgwick, in 1889, said, ‘I do not think we can be satisfied with less than 50,000 answers’. 130 But these 50,000 answers have not been received. When we reflect that, to our knowledge, out of twenty-five questions asked among our acquaintances in one place, none would be answered in the affirmative: while, by selecting, we could get twenty-five affirmative replies, the delicacy and difficulty of the inquisition becomes painfully evident. Mr. Sidgwick, after making deductions on all sides of the most sportsmanlike character, still holds that the coincidences are more numerous by far than the Calculus of Probabilities admits. This is a question for the advanced mathematician. M. Richet once made some experiments which illustrate the problem. One man in a room thought of a series of names which, ex hypothesi, he kept to himself. Three persons sat at a table, which, as tables will do, ‘tilted,’ and each tilt rang an electric bell. Two other persons, concealed from the view of the table tilters, ran through an alphabet with a pencil, marking each letter at which the bell rang. These letters were compared with the names secretly thought of by the person at neither table.

Here the non-mathematical reader will exclaim: ‘Total failure, except in case 7!’ And, about that case, he will have his private doubts. But, arguing mathematically, M. Richet proves that the table was right, beyond the limits of mere chance, by fourteen to two. He concludes, on the whole of his experiments, that, probably, intellectual force in one brain may be echoed in another brain. But MM. Binet and Féré, who report this, decide that ‘the calculation of chances is, for the most part, incapable of affording a peremptory proof; it produces uncertainty, disquietude, and doubt’. 131 ‘Yet something is gained by substituting doubt for systematic denial. Richet has obtained this important result, that henceforth the possibility of mental suggestion cannot be met with contemptuous rejection.’