The evidence of a man like Dr. Maxwell, especially when we have
to do with a so-to-speak personal incident, possesses an
importance on which it is needless to insist. We have here,
therefore, several days beforehand, the very clear prevision of
an event which, moreover, in no way concerns the percipient: a
curious detail, but one which is not uncommon in these cases. The
mistake in reading Leutschland for Deutschland, which would have
been quite natural in real life, adds a note of probability and
authenticity to the phenomenon. As for the final act, the
foundering of the vessel in the place of a simple heaving to, we
must see in this, as Dr. J. W. Pickering and W. A. Sadgrove
suggest, "the subconscious dramatization of a subliminal
inference of the percipient." Such dramatization, moreover, are
instinctive and almost general in this class of visions.

If this were an isolated case, it would certainly not be right to
attach decisive importance to it; "but," Dr. Maxwell observes,
"the same sensitive has given me other curious instances; and
these cases, compared with others which I myself have observed or
with those of which I have received first-hand accounts, render
the hypothesis of coincidence very improbable, though they do not
absolutely exclude it."[1]

[1] Maxwell: Metapsychical Phenomena, p. 202.


4

Another and perhaps more convincing case, more strictly