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BOOK IV.

OF APPEARANCES COMMONLY CALLED APPARITIONS

CHAPTER I.

TOUCHING HALLUCINATION.

THE evidence for a future life derived from an occasional appearance of the dead, provided that appearance prove to be an objective phenomenon, and provided we do not misconceive its character, is of the highest grade. If it be important, then, to obtain a valuable contribution to the proofs of the soul's immortality, what more worthy of our attention than the subject of apparitions?

But in proportion to its importance and to its extraordinary character is the urgent propriety that it be scrupulously, even distrustfully, examined, and that its reality be tested with dispassionate care.

For its discussion involves the theory of hallucination; a branch of inquiry which has much engaged, as indeed it ought, the attention of modern physiologists.

That pure hallucinations occur, we cannot rationally doubt; but what are, and what are not, hallucinations, it may be more difficult to determine than superficial observers are wont to imagine.

Hallucination, according to the usual definition, consists of ideas and sensations conveying unreal impressions. It is an example of false testimony (not always credited) apparently given by the senses in a diseased or abnormal state of the human organization.

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THE IMAGE ON THE RETINA.

"It is evident," says Calmeil, "that if the same material combination which takes place in the brain of a man at the sight of a tree, of a dog, of a horse, is capable of being reproduced at a moment when these objects are no longer within sight, then that man will persist in believing that he still sees a horse, a dog, or a tree."*

It is a curious question, not yet fully settled by medical writers on the subject, whether hallucinations of the sight cause an actual image on the retina. Burdach, Müller, Baillarger, and others, who maintain the affirmative, remind us that patients who have recovered from an attack of hallucination always say, 'I saw; I heard;' thus speaking as of actual sensations. Dechambres and De Boismont, who assume the negative, adduce in support of their opinion the facts that a patient who has lost his leg will still complain of cold or pain in the toes of the amputated foot, and that men blind from amaurosis, where there is paralysis of the optic nerve, are still subject to visual hallucinations. The latter seems the better opinion. How can a mere mental conception (as Dechambre has argued) produce an image in the eye? And to what purpose? For, if the conception is already existing in the brain, what need of the eye to convey it thither? If it could be proved, in any given case, that a real image had been produced on the surface of the retina, it would, I think, go far to prove,

*"De la Folie," vol. i. p. 113.

I have not access to the German originals; but both Burdach and Müller have been translated into French by Jourdain; see Burdach's "Traité de Physiologie," Paris, 1839, vol. v. p. 206, and Müller's "Manuel de Physiologie," Paris, 1845, vol. ii. p. 686.

Baillarger; "Des Hallucinations, &c.," published in the "Mémoires de l'Academie Royale de Médecine," vol. xii. p. 369.

? Dechambre's "Analyse de l'Ouvrage du Docteur Szafkowski sur les Hallucinations," published in the "Gazette Médicale" for 1850, p. 274.

I am indebted to De Boismont for most of these references. See his work, "Des Hallucinations," Paris, 1852, chap. 16.

EFFECTS OF IMAGINATION.

305

also, that an objective reality must have been present to produce it. And so also of sonorous undulations actually received by the tympanum.

This will more clearly appear if we take instances of hallucination of other senses,-as of smell and touch Professor Bennett, of Scotland, in a pamphlet against Mesmerism,* vouches for two examples adduced by him to prove the power of imagination. He relates the first as follows:-"A clergyman told me that, some time ago, suspicions were entertained in his parish of a woman who was supposed to have poisoned her newly-born infant. The coffin was exhumed, and the procuratorfiscal, who attended with the medical men to examine the body, declared that he already perceived the odor of decomposition, which made him feel faint; and, in consequence, he withdrew. But on opening the coffin it was found to be empty; and it was afterward ascertained that no child had been born, and, consequently, no murder committed." Are we to suppose that the olfactory nerve was acted upon by an odor when the odor was not there? But here is the other case, from the same pamphlet. "A butcher was brought into the shop of Mr. McFarlane, the druggist, from the market-place opposite, laboring under a terrible accident. The man, in trying to hook up a heavy piece of meat above his head, slipped, and the sharp hook penetrated his arm, so that he himself was suspended. On being examined, he was pale, almost pulseless, and expressed himself as suffering acute agony. The arm could not be moved without causing excessive pain, and in cutting off the sleeve he frequently cried out; yet when the arm was exposed it was found to be perfectly uninjured, the hook having only traversed the sleeve of his coat!" What acted, in this case, on the nerves of sensation? There

"The Mesmeric Mania of 1851," Edinburgh, 1851.

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EXAMPLES OF VARIOUS

was not the slightest lesion to do this; yet the effect on the brain was exactly the same as if these nerves had been actually irritated, and that, too, in the most serious

manner.

The senses which most frequently seem to delude us are sight and hearing. Dr. Carpenter mentions the case of a lady, a near relative of his, who, "having been frightened in childhood by a black cat which sprang up from beneath her pillow just as she was laying her head upon it, was accustomed for many years afterward, whenever she was at all indisposed, to see a black cat on the ground before her; and, although perfectly aware of the spectral character of the appearance, yet she could never avoid lifting her foot as if to step over the cat when it appeared to be lying in her path."* Another lady, mentioned by Calmeil, continued, for upward of ten years, to imagine that a multitude of birds were constantly on the wing, flying close to her head; and she never sat down to dinner without setting aside crumbs of bread for her visionary attendants.†

So of auditory hallucinations, where the sense of hearing appears to play us false. Writers on the subject record the cases of patients who have been pursued for years, or through life, by unknown voices, sounds of bells, strains of music, hissing, barking, and the like. In many cases the sounds seemed, to the hallucinated, to proceed from tombs, from caverns, from beneath the ground; sometimes the voice was imagined to be internal, as from the breast or other portions of the body.‡

"Principles of Human Physiology," 5th ed., London, 1855, p. 564.

† Calmeil, vol. i. p. 11. I do not cite more apocryphal cases, as when Pic, in his life of the noted Benedictine Savonarola, tells us that the Holy Ghost, on several occasions, lit on the shoulders of the pious monk, who was lost in admiration of its golden plumage; and that when the divine bird introduced its beak into his ear he heard a murmur of a most peculiar description.-J. F. Pic, in Vitâ Savonarola, p. 124.

Calmeil, work cited, vol. i. p. 8.

PHASES OF HALLUCINATION.

307

Calmeil relates the example of an aged courtier who, imagining that he heard rivals continually defaming him in presence of his sovereign, used constantly to exclaim, "They lie! you are deceived! I am calumniated, my prince."* And he mentions the case of another monomaniac who could not, without a fit of rage, hear pronounced the name of a town which recalled to him painful recollections. Children at the breast, the birds of the air, bells from every clock-tower, repeated, to his diseased hearing, the detested name.

These all appear to be cases of simple hallucination; against which, it may be remarked, perfect soundness of mind is no guarantee. Hallucination is not insanity. It is found, sometimes, disconnected not only from insanity, but from monomania in its mildest type. I knew well a lady who, more than once, distinctly saw feet ascending the stairs before her. Yet neither her physician nor she herself ever regarded this apparent marvel in other light than as an optical vagary dependent on her state of health.

In each of the cases above cited, it will be remarked that one person only was misled by deception of sense. And this brings me to speak of an important distinction made by the best writers on this subject: the difference, namely, between hallucination and illusion: the former being held to mean a false perception of that which has no existence whatever; the latter, an incorrect perception of something which actually exists. The lady who raised her foot to step over a black cat, when, in point of fact, there was nothing there to step over, is deemed to be the victim of a hallucination. Nicolai, the Berlin bookseller, is usually cited as one of the most noted cases; and his memoir on the subject, addressed to the Royal Society of Berlin, of which he

* Calmeil, work cited, vol i. p. 7.

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