one of the REAL q's at all, and to affirm that the
word 'resemblance' exhaustively describes its relation to the
reality?

Well, as a matter of fact, every actual feeling DOES show us, quite
as flagrantly as the gun, which q it points to; and practically in
concrete cases the matter is decided by an element we have hitherto
left out. Let us pass from abstractions to possible instances, and
ask our obliging deus ex machina to frame for us a richer world. Let
him send me, for example, a dream of the death of a certain man, and
let him simultaneously cause the man to die. How would our practical
instinct spontaneously decide whether this were a case of cognition
of the reality, or only a sort of marvellous coincidence of a
resembling reality with my dream? Just such puzzling cases as this
are what the 'society for psychical research' is busily
collecting and trying to interpret in the most reasonable way.

If my dream were the only one of the kind I ever had in my life, if
the context of the death in the dream differed in many particulars
from the real death's context, and if my dream led me to no action
about the death, unquestionably we should all call it a strange
coincidence, and naught besides. But if the death in the dream had a
long context, agreeing point for point with every feature that
attended the real death; if I were constantly having such
dreams, all equally perfect, and if on awaking I had a habit of
ACTING immediately as if they were true and so getting 'the start'
of my more tardily instructed neighbors,--we should in all
probability have to admit that I had some mysterious kind of
clairvoyant power, that my dreams in an inscrutable way meant just
those realities they figured, and that the word 'coincidence' failed