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HALLUCINATORY MANIFESTATIONS.

BY DR. RICHARDSON, F.R.S.

SAL

ALVERTE, in his remarkable work on the occult sciences, states that the principle by which he has been guided in all his researches is that which distinguishes two very different forms of civilisation: the fixed form, which in times past prevailed universally throughout the world, and the perfectible form, or that which prevails in communities that have become learned in letters, science, and art. The natural tendency of man is to love and seek the marvellous; and as the love of the wonderful always prefers the most surprising to the most natural accounts, the natural is too frequently neglected. At the same time the most surprising phenomenon does not long continue potent to surprise even when it is real, while surprising unrealities pass away as fast as they come. "Credulous man," says this learned author, may be deceived once, or more frequently, but his credulity is not a sufficient instrument to govern his whole existence. The wonderful excites only a transient admiration, for man is led by his passions, and chiefly by hope and by fear."

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The psychological argument thus adduced is an argument always to be remembered when we have before us the subject of natural as opposed to supernatural readings of any class of phenomena, of which we become individually or collectively conversant; and in overlooking this position, men of science, I venture to think, often err. They, disdaining the fixed principle of human thought and action, in their strain after the perfectible, treat as childish or even as idiotic all notions of phenomena that become marvellous by surprise, and unanswerable by immediate illustration. This has been peculiarly the fact in respect to those manifestations which assume to be mental receptions derived from uncommon, unexplained, and unknown causes.

I propose in this short and simple essay to avoid all prejudice and reproach, acknowledging the ancient and fixed principle of belief as something worthy of deep regard; as the

reason.

conservative restraining element in the politics of the world of I shall aim, nevertheless, to sustain the principle of the perfectible form of thought, as at once the most advantageous and the most endurable.

I begin at once, then, by admitting phenomena. From the first of man until now, as we know him, there have been opened to him an ever-recurring series of phenomena, provable by a ready reference to experience, but which are not rendered so familiar to him by their frequent repetition as to lose their novelty in their repetition.

The phenomena are all of the senses; necessarily so, because every recognised phenomenon is sensual, in the completed meaning of that term. The universe enters into the man by the doors for its entrance, and according to the capacity of the man he becomes homogeneous with the universe so long as he lives in it: that is to say, so long as he is in the condition to receive it.

Of the man we know something; of the universe we know little. There may be in it motions, or material forms in motion, which are not at all times present, which are not perceived equally at any time, and which, on the fixed principle, are as real as common things; one only singular, in fact, from being uncommon, and in not being accounted for, when recognised, by an immediate and obvious explanation. As the phenomena, however, are all sensual, so they are developed according to the working value of the senses, if I may so express myself. The ear is the most ready organ concerned in the recognition of occult phenomena; it hears sounds the mind does not appreciate the source of. The eye is the next susceptible organ; it sees forms and shapes for which the mind finds no ready explanation. The tactile sense, and even the common sensitive surfaces, come under influence; they appreciate blasts or blows or heats or colds, the causes of which are incomprehensible. Less frequently the olfactory 'sense is invaded, and conveys impressions of odours agreeable or loathsome, of which the mind can form no instant estimate whence they came or wherefore.

All, in a word, that is surprisingly phenomenal is by a surprise through a sense, and it increases in wonder as it includes the work of the greatest number of senses. That ghost of Hamlet's father seen only, were but half enough; heard only, but half enough. Seen and heard, it is the less a ghost, the more a wonder.

I, for one, do not consider it at all a remarkable circumstance that the fixed ideal as to the cause of obscure phenomena should be that of an outward or external reality appealing to the mental organs through the sensual. It is the common

experience that whatever is recognisable is; and if this were not the common and universal belief, the world would wander on in vain doubting and fear. Sometimes by accident we meet with persons who are actually possessed with unbelief in what is the common experience of the majority; to those who constitute the majority these persons are insane.

Every allowance must therefore be made for the fixed belief on the reality of obscure manifestations, and indeed the allowance will be enforced until the major part of mankind is educated to see that there is a method of accounting for the manifestations which destroys the supernatural reality, and assigns the wonderful to the natural. To this latter explanation of the phenomena most men of science have now come: they claim the perfectible principle as the standard under which they reason.

Considered by the method thus noticed, the obscure manifestations we have admitted are not derived from objects in the outside universe at all, but belong entirely to the individual. They are simply due to aberration of function in one or other of the organic parts concerned in the processes of common human observation they are, in a word, not receipts by the man, but interruptions within him, or reflects from him.

What I have called, after Salverte, the perfectible principle of opinion, is not deemed by its supporters to be a principle perfected, but one leading towards perfected discovery. It is devoid of dogma, and proclaims only what seems to be the nearest approach towards what is true. In this sense the following is in brief outline the exposition of the nature of the occult phenomena now under consideration-hallucinatory manifestations.

A whole series of mysterious manifestations, and these of the simplest kind, are connected purely with the physical conditions which modify the natural mode of conveyance of an object or act to the senses: the mirage, the double sun, the monster in the fog, the reflected sound (echo), even the reflected image in the clear stream; these the mysterious manifestations of the earliest history of man, when the fixed principle of his thought had no rival-are now acknowledged, all but universally, to admit of a physical exposition that strips them of their mystery. Such obscure manifestations as remain, and are not traceable to external influences, are discoverable in the processes for observation possessed by the observer, in his senses, and the parts to which they minister.

For the full action of every part accomplished by and through the senses there are many factors. There is a collective organ for condensing the external fact that is brought to the man, a seeing organ, a hearing organ, touch, taste, and smelling

organs; there is in each organ also a receiving nervous surface; there is from this surface, leading unto the man, a communicating nervous cord; and, at last, ending the communicating cord is a nervous centre, in ready communication with a congeries of nervous centres, for taking up the impression conveyed, for fixing it, and for bringing it into union with other impressions that have already been received, fixed, associated. Suppose all these parts at all times natural, at all times in harmony, then everything that seems unnatural would be fairly ascribed to the reception of actual outward manifestations that are not of the common denomination of nature. Suppose, on the other hand, that these parts. are not always in harmonious working order, then the design unfolds itself that there may be impressions, made by or within the man, that are mysterious, unreal in so far as the true reading of the outer universe is concerned, and, in a word, hallucinatory.

And this is what physical science teaches, that each of the parts named as factors are, at times, disturbed or deranged in function. The collecting organ may be at fault; the receiving nervous surface may be at fault; the communicating cord may be at fault; the receiving centre may be at fault: and, in accordance with error of function in one or more of the parts, there will be aberration varying from that which is simply physical to that which is psychological in the most refined degree. The simplest illustration of derangements of function are met with when there is perversion of action in the collecting organ, as in the eye, in instances of colour blindness or of muscæ volitantes-floating specks appearing in the field of vision. More complex, is a condition in which the reception of an impression on the receiving nervous surface of an organ of sense is too long retained, so that the impression remains when the first cause of it is gone.

Sir Isaac Newton, looking too intently at the sun, had left upon his vision a vivid picture of the sun, a phantom to some men, to him a phenomenon, painfully persistent, but understood by him as a pure physical fact. I knew once a gentleman who had a peculiar impression of an odour left on his olfactory surface, and for months it remained a source of constant discomfort, anxiety, and even timidity. In vision an aberration of function in the receiving surface may occur from mere strain to see in obscurity. Thus in looking at an object in partial darkness, as at night, when the stars are beclouded, an object, steadily and strainingly gazed at, seems to come and go, or, as is commonly said, to vanish and reappear.

There are various states of the nervous organization in which the conduction of external impressions from the organs of

sense to the sensorium is so perverted that modifications of external impressions are both induced and sustained. The delicate muscular mechanism by which the two great organs of the senses, the eye and the ear, have their various parts correctly adapted, are under refined nervous control, and easily loose their adaptations when the nervous control is either defective or changed from its natural use. The nervous atmosphere through which impressions vibrate from the receiving surface to the receiving centres is susceptible of change, and thus under various circumstances there is an easy step to perverted appreciation of external things. We have many known agents which exert their power by thus interfering with the healthy relations that should subsist between the organs of sense, the conducting way, and the mental centres to which all impressions are finally delivered. Alcohol taken in excess leads to such disturbance of balance of action, and therewith to false. impressions of external objects-phantoms not made by the imagination, but constructed out of perverted sensual action. Opium, haschish, and some vapours and gases made to enter the body, induce the same perversions. So that objects that are really before the observer to the perverted sight appear far distant, or larger or smaller than they are. Slight sounds are exaggerated into tempestuous noises, and sensations of smell, taste, and touch, are either exalted into undue activity or lost altogether.

In connection with this subject I may observe that the tendency of recent physiological research is to the effect that in certain conditions of the body there are produced, within the body itself, some organic products which in the most potent manner affect the organs of the senses, and interfere with their function. In a recent investigation on the action of organic compounds of the sulphur series, I found that the most marked changes in the reception of impressions could be induced by certain of these bodies, together with symptoms of hysteria and of muscular debility singularly analogous to those states of the body in which debility of the motor organs is attended with what is called excessive nervous susceptibility and excitability. In certain diseased states these same organic products exhale from the body, or pass off by the secretions, as products derived from organic chemical changes progressing within the organism.

It would be an easy task to fill page upon page with illustrations of translations of external objects into mysterious manifestations under the mere influence of perverted functions of the senses and their dependent parts; but I must forbear, and content myself with one remark in reference to these phenomena. The remark is this: that the man, under any of the influences cited, is never supposed to be anything less than de