"December 19, 1799." . . . At one in the morning, arriving at a decent inn (in Sweden),we decided to stop for the night, and found a couple of comfortablerooms. Tired with the cold of yesterday, I was glad to take advantageof a hot bath before I turned in. And here a most remarkable thinghappened to me--so remarkable that I must tell the story from thebeginning."After I left the High School, I went with G---, my most intimatefriend, to attend the classes in the University. . . . We actuallycommitted the folly of drawing up an agreement, written with ourblood, to the effect that whichever of us died the first should appearto the other, and thus solve any doubts we had entertained of 'thelife after death'. G--- went to India, years passed, and," says LordBrougham, "I had nearly forgotten his existence. I had taken, as Ihave said, a warm bath, and while lying in it and enjoying the comfortof the heat, I turned my head round, looking towards the chair onwhich I had deposited my clothes, as I was about to get out of thebath. On the chair sat G---, looking calmly at me. How I got out ofthe bath I know not, but on recovering my senses I found myselfsprawling on the floor. The apparition, or whatever it was that hadtaken the likeness of G---, had disappeared. . . . So strongly was Iaffected by it that I have here written down the whole history, withthe date, 19th December, and all the particulars as they are now freshbefore me. No doubt I had fallen asleep" (he has just said that hewas awake and on the point of leaving the bath), "and that theappearance presented so distinctly to my eyes was a dream I cannot fora moment doubt. . . ."On 16th October, 1862, Lord Brougham copied this extract for hisAutobiography, and says that on his arrival in Edinburgh he received aletter from India, announcing that G--- had died on 19th December. Heremarks "singular coincidence!" and adds that, considering the vastnumber of dreams, the number of coincidences is perhaps fewer than afair calculation of chances would warrant us to expect.This is a concession to common-sense, and argues an ignorance of thefact that sane and (apparently) waking men may have hallucinations.On the theory that we _may_ have inappreciable moments of sleep whenwe think ourselves awake, it is not an ordinary but an extraordinarycoincidence that Brougham should have had that peculiar moment of the"dream" of G--- on the day or night of G---'s death, while thecircumstance that he had made a compact with G--- multiplies the oddsagainst accident in a ratio which mathematicians may calculate.Brougham was used to dreams, like other people; he was not shocked bythem. This "dream" "produced such a shock that I had no inclinationto talk about it". Even on Brougham's showing, then, this dream was athing unique in his experience, and not one of the swarm of visions ofsleep. Thus his including it among these, while his whole languageshows that he himself did not really reckon it among these, is anexample of the fallacies of common-sense. He completes his fallacy bysaying, "It is not much more wonderful than that a person whom we hadno reason to expect should appear to us at the very moment we had beenthinking or speaking of him". But Lord Brougham had _not_ beenspeaking or thinking of G---; "there had been nothing to call him tomy recollection," he says. To give his logic any value, he shouldconstantly when (as far as he knew) awake, have had dreams that"shocked" him. Then _one_ coincidence would have had no assignablecause save ordinary accident.If Lord Brougham fabled in 1799 or in 1862, he did so to make a"sensation". And then he tried to undo it by arguing that hisexperience was a thoroughly commonplace affair.We now give a very old story, "The Dying Mother". If the reader willcompare it with Mr. Cleave's case, "An Astral Body," in this chapter,he will be struck by the resemblance. Mr. Cleave and Mrs. Goffe wereboth in a trance. Both wished to see persons at a distance. Bothsaw, and each was seen, Mrs. Goffe by her children's nurse; Mr. Cleaveby the person whom he wished to see, but _not_ by a small boy alsopresent.
