But the kind of evidence now to be considered--the coincidence of some spontaneous affection of the percipient…
- Date of account
- Published 1894
- Source
- Apparitions and thought-transference: an examination of the evidence for telepathy
- Reference
- Apparitions and thought-transference: an examination of the evidence for telepathy · selected passage 98
- Rights
- public_domain
- Language
- English
- Record updated
- 2026-08-24
Record summary
But the kind of evidence now to be considered--the coincidence of some spontaneous affection of the percipient with some event in the life-history of the person presumed to be the agent, as when one sees the apparition of a friend at the time of his death--is of inferior cogency in two ways
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 onlyBut the kind of evidence now to be considered--the coincidence of some spontaneous affection of the percipient with some event in the life-history of the person presumed to be the agent, as when one sees the apparition of a friend at the time of his death--is of inferior cogency in two ways. The coincidences are neither so numerous nor so exact; and the risk of error in the record is far greater. On the one hand, therefore, there is a greater probability that the percipient's affection, even if correctly described, was unconnected with the state of the person supposed to be the agent; on the other hand we have, in most cases, less assurance that the description given of his experience is in its essential features accurate. The part played by coincident hallucination in the question of telepathy may be illustrated from another branch of scientific inquiry. For some years the "Germ Theory" rested mainly on observations of the distribution of certain diseases, their periodic character and their mode of propagation and development; phenomena which, though sufficiently striking, are not in themselves susceptible of exact interpretation.
Historical context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyThis comes from historical psychical research. Methods, witness handling and standards of evidence differ from present-day research and should be assessed from the cited passage and edition.
Modern context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyThe passage can support a history of claims and recurring descriptions. It does not establish a paranormal mechanism, and competing psychological, social and physical explanations remain relevant.
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