Telepathy is a logical explanation of many of the ghostly visitations of which the Society for Psychical…
- Date of account
- Published 1897
- Source
- Hours with the Ghosts or, Nineteenth Century Witchcraft Illustrated Investigations into the Phenomena of Spiritualism and Theosophy
- Reference
- Hours with the Ghosts or, Nineteenth Century Witchcraft Illustrated Investigations into the Phenomena of Spiritualism and Theosophy · selected passage 23
- Rights
- public_domain
- Language
- English
- Record updated
- 2026-08-24
Record summary
Telepathy is a logical explanation of many of the ghostly visitations of which the Society for Psychical Research has collected such a mass of data
Published source text
Read the available text below. Archive transcriptions may contain OCR errors; later context is labelled separately. A recorded claim is not a finding that it happened.
Source passage
Source text · mention onlyTelepathy is a logical explanation of many of the ghostly visitations of which the Society for Psychical Research has collected such a mass of data. For example: A dies, let us say in India and B, a near relative or friend, residing in England, sees a vision of A in a dream or in the waking state. A clasps his hands, and seems to utter the words, "I am dying". When the news comes of A's death, the time of the occurrence coincides with the seeing of the vision. The spiritualist's theory is that the ghost of A was an actual entity. One of the difficulties in the way of such an hypothesis is the clothing of the deceased--_can that, too, be disembodied?_ Thought transference (conscious or unconscious), I think, is the only rational explanation of such phantasms. The vision seen by the percipient is not an objective but a subjective thing--a hallucination produced by the unknown force called telepathy. The vision need not coincide exactly with the date of the death of the transmitter but may make its appearance years afterwards, remaining latent in the subjective mind of the percipient. It may, as is frequently the case, be revealed by a medium in a séance.
Historical context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyThis source supplies historical scientific, skeptical or conventional context. Its terminology and conclusions may not reflect current scholarship.
Modern context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyLattice uses this as an alternative-explanation source, not as an automatic dismissal of testimony. Claims still need to be compared with the actual evidence and current knowledge.
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