Crystal Gazing

A Welsh clergyman once told a visiting folklorist, with some pride, that his parishioners were not superstitious. There were no ghosts in his parish.

Half an hour later the guest asked the village schoolchildren where a bwggan, the local spook, could be seen. There was not a child in the school who couldn't put him on the track of one.

Thomas opens his book with this story for a reason. The clergyman had not looked; he had decided. Declaring a thing absent is not the same as finding out, and a whole educated class had taken exactly his position on crystal gazing: nothing there, because nothing could be there.

The usual charge is that believing in ghosts or crystal gazing is superstitious, and the whole business rubbish. Thomas pushes back on something quieter than belief.

Plenty of worthy people, he says, flatly refuse to credit that others, just as truthful as they are, might see or hear what they cannot. Those others may be having what psychologists call hallucinations, and so be neither liars nor superstitious when they report a ghost, or a picture in a glass of water.

Then he does the awkward thing: he asks the incredulous what, exactly, the superstition consists in. It is, he notes drily, by no means easy to get an explicit reply.

Thomas's ground here is not a hunch. The international Census of Hallucinations, gathered in 1889–92, had asked thousands of ordinary people about their experiences, and the answer was plain: a considerable number of sane and healthy people occasionally see or hear things with no outside cause.

Nothing in those visions comes from light striking the eye or sound striking the ear. The sensation starts inside the person, probably in the brain.

That shifts the whole argument. Whether such visions happen is no longer in dispute; they do, to people otherwise indistinguishable from their neighbours. What stays open is where they come from, and Thomas leaves one door ajar: if telepathy is real, some may have a source outside the seer.

When Thomas says someone who reports a vision may be neither a liar nor superstitious, what is he claiming?

• That the census showed such visions reveal hidden facts
• That her vision proves a spirit or distant mind was at work
• That only healthy, educated people are capable of real visions
• That she may truly have had the experience, whatever its cause✓Correct answer

The claim is about the experience, not its source: sane people do see things with no outside cause, so reporting one is not lying. Whether a spirit, the brain or telepathy produced it is a separate question he deliberately leaves open.

The sharpest target in the chapter is Mr Clodd, a president of the Folklore Society, who denounced psychical researchers for entertaining spirits at all. His reasoning ran: tribal peoples explain many things by spirits; many of those things are not caused by spirits; therefore spirits do not exist.

Thomas answers with a parody. In the early days of steam, some farm labourers stared at one of the new engines and solved the puzzle: there must be horses inside, turning the wheels. There were no horses inside. Therefore, by the same logic, horses do not exist.

The joke carries a real principle: "a mistaken explanation of one phenomenon does not invalidate the same explanation as applied to another phenomenon."

What does the horse-in-the-engine parody show is wrong with Clodd's argument?

• Steam engines and spirits are equally hard for science to explain
• Uneducated observers usually guess right about unfamiliar machines
• One wrong use of an explanation doesn't rule it out everywhere✓Correct answer
• Spirits must exist, because so many cultures believed in them

The labourers were wrong about this engine, yet horses still exist; people may be wrong to blame spirits for many events, yet that cannot settle whether spirits exist. Thomas is not arguing the reverse, that widespread belief proves spirits real, only that Clodd's "therefore" does not follow.