Phantasms of the Living, Vol. I

§ 12. The date of the event befalling the agent is often provided in the news of that event; in these days of mail and telegraphs, this news often arrives close enough to the percipient’s experience for the date to be accurately recalled . . . . . . . . 142-144

§ 13. If a longer interval elapses, the percipient may too readily assume their experience fell on the critical day; as time passes, their certainty is likely to increase rather than decrease. Still, if the coincidence was noted at the time and others were alerted to it, a strong case for its reality can be made even after a long period . . . 144-146

§ 14. These evidential conditions may be organized into a graduated scale . . . . . . . 146-148

§ 15. Second-hand evidence (except for one specific type) is excluded from the main body of this work. However, the Supplement contains a number of second-hand cases received from people who knew the original witnesses and had the opportunity to thoroughly understand their accounts . . . . . . . . . 148-149

In transmitted evidence, all risks of error are intensified, as there is no "deeply-graven sense of reality" to check exaggeration or invention. We provide instances where alleged evidence crumbled under critical examination . . . 149-154

A frequent inaccuracy in transmitted evidence is the shortening of the transmission chain—where second or third-hand information is presented as first-hand, and the coincidence is almost always suspiciously exact . . . . . . . 154-157

§ 16. We have attempted to separate cases by their evidential value, reserving the main text for those where the prima facie Original: "prima facie" (at first sight/on its face). probability of the facts is strong. Even if facts are correctly reported, their weight in the argument for telepathy depends on their class; for instance, purely emotional impressions and dreams are weak categories . . . . . . . . 158

The value of evidence is also affected by the mental qualities of the witnesses. Each case must be judged on its merits; readers of these records have an equal opportunity to judge as we did, except for...