" This gentleman,
walking alone in a certain cloister at Cambridge, met a casual
acquaintance, a well-known London clergyman, and was just about
shaking hands with him, when the clergyman vanished. Nothing in
particular happened to either of them; the clergyman was not in the
seer's mind at the moment.
This is a good example of a solitary hallucination in the experience
of a very cool-headed observer. The _causes_ of such experiences are
still a mystery to science. Even people who believe in "mental
telegraphy," say when a distant person, at death or in any other
crisis, impresses himself as present on the senses of a friend, cannot
account for an experience like that of the diplomatist, an experience
not very uncommon, and little noticed except when it happens to
coincide with some remarkable event. {56b} Nor are such
hallucinations of an origin easily detected, like those of delirium,
insanity, intoxication, grief, anxiety, or remorse. We can only
suppose that a past impression of the aspect of a friend is recalled
by some association of ideas so vividly that (though we are not
_consciously_ thinking of him) we conceive the friend to be actually
present in the body when he is absent.
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