.

Having thus justified our evidence for the savage _belief_ in supernormal
phenomena, as before anthropologists, we turned to a court of
psychologists in defence of our evidence for the _fact_ of exactly the
same supernormal phenomena in civilised experience. We pointed out that
for subjective psychological experiences, say of telepathy, we had
precisely the same evidence as all non-experimental psychology must and
does rest upon. Nay, we have even experimental evidence, in experiments in
thought-transference. We have chiefly, however, statements of subjective
experience. For the coincidence of such experience with unknown events we
have such evidence as, in practical life, is admitted by courts of law.

Experimental psychology, of course, relies on experiments conducted under
the eyes of the expert, for example, by hypnotism or otherwise, under Dr.
Hack Tuke, Professor James, M. Richet, M. Janet. The evidence is
the conduct rather than the statements of the subject. There is
also physiological experiment, by vivisection (I regret to say) and
post-mortem dissection. But non-experimental psychology reposes on the
self-examination of the student, and on the statements of psychological
experiences made to him by persons whom he thinks he can trust. The
psychologist, however, if he be, as Mr. Galton says, 'unimaginative in the
strict but unusual sense of that ambiguous word,' needs Mr. Galton's 'word
of warning.' He is asked 'to resist a too frequent tendency to assume that
the minds of every other sane and healthy person must be like his own. The
psychologist should inquire into the minds of others as he should into
those of animals of different races, and be prepared to find much to which
his own experience can afford little if any clue.'[5] Mr. Galton had to
warn the unimaginative psychologist in this way, because he was about to
unfold his discovery of the faculty which presents numbers to some minds
as visualised coloured numerals, 'so vivid as to be undistinguishable from
reality, except by the aid of accidental circumstances.'

Mr. Galton also found in his inquiries that occasional hallucinations of
the sane are much more prevalent than he had supposed, or than science had
ever taken into account. All this was entirely new to psychologists,
many of whom still (at least many popular psychologists of the press)
appear to be unacquainted with the circumstances. One of them informed me,
quite gravely, that '_he_ never