Lehal Library

in which a horse drawing an open carriage with two occupants was seen independently at different times and in different places, in broad daylight, by four people who, far from expecting it, were astonished, and one of them terrified, at the sight. They are described as suffering from "collective hallucination", which meant that they were seeing something which did not exist because it was obviously not the material horse, cart and people that they were seeing. I hold, however, that though deceived by what they saw, they were not deceived in thinking that they saw something. That the picture was there, projected in some, at present, inscrutable way from the material object, and that the percipients cannot therefore be described as the victims of hallucination. The lexicographers define hallucination as "an unfounded notion; belief in unreality; a baseless or distorted conception", and "In pathology and psychology: the apparent perception of some external thing to which no real object corresponds"; giving as synonyms "Delusion, illusion". Edmund Gurney asserted that "the hallucinated person not only imagined such and such a thing, but imagined that he saw such and such a thing", and he also spoke of "an hallucination telepathically induced". To avoid all such ambiguities, the unhappy word will only appear in the text here as used by other writers. The psychics of past centuries were often as quaint as their surgery, but the Church has recorded spiritual adventures which there is no reason to disbelieve. There is much help to such achievements in prayer and fasting. Levitation was almost a commonplace, and several stories have come down to us of the Somatic Double.