|
LETTER I
Visual Nerve, those upon the Ear next considered
Delusions of the Touch chiefly experienced in Sleep Delusions. of the
Taste And of the Smelling Sum of the Argument.
You have asked of me, my dear friend, that I should assist the Family
Library with the history of a dark chapter in human nature, which the
increasing civilization of all well-instructed countries has now almost
blotted out, though the subject attracted no ordinary degree of
consideration in the older times of their history.
Among much reading of my earlier days, it is no doubt true that I
travelled a good deal in the twilight regions of superstitious
disquisitions. Many hours have I lost I would their debt were less !
in examining, old as well as more recent narratives of this character, and
even in looking into some of the criminal trials so frequent in early
days, upon a subject which our fathers considered as a matter of the last
importance. And, of late years, the very curious extracts published by Mr.
Pitcairn, from the Criminal Records of Scotland, are, besides their
historical value, of a nature so much calculated to illustrate the
credulity of our ancestors on such subjects, that, by perusing them, I
have been induced more recently to recall what I bad read and thought upon
the subject at a former period.
As, however, my information is only miscellaneous, and I make no
pretensions, either to combat the systems of those by whom I am
anticipated in consideration of the subject, or to erect any new one of my
own, my purpose is, after a general account of Demonology and Witchcraft,
to confine myself to narratives of remarkable cases, and to the
observations which naturally and easily arise out of them; in the
confidence that such a plan is, at the present time of day, more likely to
suit the pages of a popular miscellany, than an attempt to reduce the
contents of many hundred tomes, from the largest to the smallest size,
into an abridgement, which, however compressed, must remain greatly too
large for the reader's powers of patience. A few general remarks on the
nature of Demonology, and the original cause of the almost universal
belief in communication betwixt mortals and beings of a power superior to
themselves, and of a nature not to be comprehended by human organs, are a
necessary introduction to the subject.
The general, or, it may be termed, the universal belief of the
inhabitants of the earth, in the existence of spirits separated from the
encumbrance and incapacities of the body, is grounded on the consciousness
of the divinity that speaks in our bosoms, and demonstrates to all men,
except the few who are hardened to the celestial voice, that there is
within us a portion of the divine substance, which is not subject to the
law of death and dissolution, but which, when the body is no longer fit
for its abode, shall seek its own place, as a sentinel dismissed from his
post. Unaided by revelation, it cannot be hoped that mere earthly reason
should be able to form any rational or precise conjecture concerning the
destination of the soul when parted from the body ; but the conviction
that such an indestructible essence exists, the belief expressed by the
poet in a different sense, Non omnis moriar , must infer the
existence of many millions of spirits who have not been annihilated,
though they have become invisible to mortals who still see, hear, and
perceive, only by means of the imperfect organs of humanity. Probability
may lead some of the most reflecting to anticipate a state of future
rewards and punishments; as those experienced in the education of the deaf
and dumb find that their pupils, even while cut off from all instruction
by ordinary means, have been able to farm, out of their own unassisted
conjectures, some ideas of the existence of a Deity, and of the
distinction between the soul and body a circumstance which proves how
naturally these truths arise in the human mind. The principle that they do
so arise, being taught or communicated, leads to further conclusions.
These spirits, in a state of separate existence, being admitted to
exist, are not, it may be supposed, indifferent to the affairs of
mortality, perhaps not incapable of influencing them. It is true that, in
a more advanced state of society, the philosopher may challenge the
possibility of a separate appearance of a disembodied spirit, unless in
the case of a direct miracle, to which, being a suspension of the laws of
nature, directly wrought by the Maker of these laws, for some express
purpose, no bound or restraint can possibly be assigned. But under this
necessary limitation and exception, philosophers might plausibly argue
that, when the soul is divorced from the body, it loses all those
qualities which made it, when clothed with a mortal shape, obvious to the
organs of its fellow-men. The abstract idea of a spirit certainly implies
that it has neither substance, form, shape, voice, or anything which can
render its presence visible or sensible to human faculties. But these
sceptic doubts of philosophers on the possibility of the appearance of
such separated spirits, do not arise till a certain degree of information
has dawned upon a country, and even then only reach a very small
proportion of reflecting and better-informed members of society. To the
multitude, the indubitable fact, that so many millions of spirits exist
around and even amongst us, seems sufficient to support the belief that
they are, in certain instances at least, by some means or other, able to
communicate with the world of humanity. The more numerous part of mankind
cannot form in their mind the idea of the spirit of the deceased existing,
without possessing or having the power to assume the appearance which
their acquaintance bore during his life, and do not push their researches
beyond this point.
Enthusiastic feelings of an impressive and solemn nature occur both in
private and public life, which seem to add ocular testimony to an
intercourse betwixt earth and the world beyond it. For example, the son
who has been lately deprived of his father feels a sudden crisis approach,
in which he is anxious to have recourse to his sagacious advice or a
bereaved husband earnestly desires again to behold the form of which the
grave has deprived him for ever or, to use a darker yet very common
instance, the wretched man who has dipped his hand in his
fellow-creature's blood, is haunted by the apprehension that the phantom
of the slain stands by the bedside of his murderer. In all or any of these
cases, who shall doubt that imagination, favoured by circumstances, has
power to summon up to the organ of sight, spectres which only exist in the
mind of those by whom their apparition seems to be witnessed?
If we add, that such a vision may take place in the course of one of
those lively dreams in which the patient, except in respect to the single
subject of one strong impression, is, or seems, sensible of the real
particulars of the scene around him, a state of slumber which often
occurs; if be is so far conscious, for example, as to know that he is
lying on his own bed, and surrounded by his own familiar furniture at the
time when the supposed apparition is manifested, it becomes almost in vain
to argue with the visionary against the reality of his dream, since the
spectre, though itself purely fanciful, is inserted amidst so many
circumstances which he feels must be true beyond the reach of doubt or
question. That which is undeniably certain becomes, in a manner, a warrant
for the reality of the appearance to which doubt would have been otherwise
attached. And if any event, such as the death of the person dreamt of,
chances to take place, so as to correspond with the nature and the time of
the apparition, the coincidence, though one which must be frequent, since
our dreams usually refer to the accomplishment of that which haunts our
minds when awake, and often presage the most probable events, seems
perfect, and the chain of circumstances touching the evidence may not
unreasonably be considered as complete. Such a concatenation, we repeat,
must frequently take place, when it is considered of what stuff dreams are
made how naturally they turn upon those who occupy our mind while awake,
and, when a soldier is exposed to death in battle, when a sailor is
incurring the dangers of the sea, when a beloved wife or relative is
attacked by disease, how readily our sleeping imagination rushes to the
very point of alarm, which when waking it had shuddered to anticipate. The
number of instances in which such lively dreams have been quoted, and both
asserted and received as spiritual communications, is very great at all
periods; in ignorant times, where the natural cause of dreaming is
misapprehended and confused with an idea of mysticism, it is much greater.
Yet, perhaps, considering the many thousands of dreams which must, night
after night, pass through the imagination of individuals, the number of
coincidences between the vision and real event are fewer and less
remarkable than a fair calculation of chances would warrant us to expect.
But in countries where such presaging dreams are subjects of attention,
the number of those which seemed to be coupled with the corresponding
issue, is large enough to spread a very general belief of a positive
communication betwixt the living and the dead.
Somnambulism and other nocturnal deceptions frequently lend their aid
to the formation of such phantasmata as are formed in this middle
state, betwixt sleeping and waking. A most respectable person, whose
active life had been spent as master and part owner of a large merchant
vessel in the Lisbon trade, gave the writer an account of such an instance
which came under his observation. He was lying in the Tagus, when he was
put to great anxiety and alarm by the following incident and its
consequences. One of his crew was murdered by a Portuguese assassin, and a
report arose that the ghost of the slain man haunted the vessel. Sailors
are generally superstitious, and those of my friend's vessel became
unwilling to remain on board the ship; and it was probable they might
desert rather then return to England with the ghost for a passenger. To
prevent so
great a calamity, the captain determined to examine the story to the
bottom. He soon found that, though all pretended to have seen lights and
heard noises, and so forth, the weight of the evidence lay upon the
statement of one of his own mates, an Irishman and a Catholic, which might
increase his tendency to superstition, but in other respects a veracious,
honest, and sensible person, whom Captain had no reason to suspect would
wilfully deceive him. He affirmed to Captain S with the deepest
obtestations, that the spectre of the murdered man appeared to him almost
nightly, took him from his place in the vessel, and, according to his own
expression, worried his life out. He made these communications with a
degree of horror which intimated the reality of his distress and
apprehensions. The captain, without any argument at the time, privately
resolved to watch the motions of the ghost-seer in the night; whether
alone, or with a witness, I have forgotten. As the ship bell struck
twelve, the sleeper started up, with a ghastly and disturbed countenance,
and lighting a candle, proceeded to the galley or cook-room of the vessel.
He sate down with his eyes open, staring before him as on some terrible
object which he beheld with horror, yet from which he could not withhold
his eyes. After a short space be arose, took up a tin can or decanter,
filled it with water, muttering to himself all the while mixed salt in
the water, and sprinkled it about the galley. Finally, he sighed deeply,
like one relieved from a heavy burden, and, returning to his hammock,
slept soundly. In the next morning the haunted man told the usual precise
story of his apparition, with the additional circumstances, that the ghost
had led him to the galley, but that be had fortunately, he knew not how,
obtained possession of some holy water, and succeeded in getting rid of
his unwelcome visitor. The visionary was then informed of the real
transactions of the night, with so many particulars as to satisfy him he
had been the dupe of his imagination; be acquiesced in his commander's
reasoning,
and the dream, as often happens in these cases, returned no more after
its imposture had been detected, In this case, we find the excited
imagination acting upon the half-waking senses, which were intelligent
enough for the purpose of making him sensible where he was, but not
sufficiently so to judge truly of the objects before him.
But it is not only private life alone, or that tenor of thought which
has been depressed into melancholy by gloomy anticipations respecting the
future, which disposes the mind to mid-day fantasies, or to nightly
apparitions a state of eager anxiety, or excited exertion, is equally
favourable to the indulgence of such supernatural communications. The
anticipation of a dubious battle, with all the doubt and uncertainty of
its event, and the conviction that it must involve his own fate and that
of his country, was powerful enough to conjure up to the anxious eye of
Brutus the spectre of his murdered friend Caesar, respecting whose death
he perhaps thought himself less justified than at the Ides of March,
since, instead of having achieved the freedom of Rome, the event had only
been the renewal of civil wars, and the issue might appear most likely to
conclude in the total subjection of liberty. It is not miraculous that the
masculine spirit of Marcus Brutus, surrounded by darkness and solitude,
distracted probably by recollection of the kindness and favour of the
great individual whom he bad put to death to avenge the wrongs of his
country, though by the slaughter of his own friend, should at length place
before his eyes in person the appearance which termed itself his evil
genius, and promised again to meet him at Philippi. Brutus own intentions,
and his knowledge of the military art, had probably long since assured him
that the decision of the civil war must take place at or near that place;
and, allowing that his own imagination supplied that part of his dialogue
with the spectre, there is nothing else which might not be fashioned in a
vivid dream or a waking reverie, approaching, in absorbing and engrossing
character, the usual matter of which dreams consist. That Brutus, well
acquainted with the opinions of the Platonists, should be disposed to
receive without doubt the idea that he had seen a real apparition, and was
not likely to scrutinize very minutely the supposed vision, may be
naturally conceived; and it is also natural to think, that although no one
saw the figure but himself, his contemporaries were little disposed to
examine the testimony of a man so eminent, by the strict rules of
cross-examination and conflicting evidence, which they might have thought
applicable to another person, and a less dignified occasion.
Even in the field of death, and amid the mortal tug of combat itself,
strong belief has wrought the same wonder, which we have hitherto
mentioned as occurring in solitude and amid darkness; and those who were
themselves on the verge of the world of spirits, or employed in
dispatching others to these gloomy regions, conceived they beheld the
apparitions of those beings whom their national mythology associated with
such scenes. In such moments of undecided battle, amid the violence,
hurry, and confusion of ideas incident to the situation, the ancients
supposed that they saw their deities, Castor and Pollux, fighting in the
van for their encouragement; the heathen Scandinavian beheld the Choosers
of the slain; and the Catholics were no less easily led to recognize the
warlike Saint George or Saint James in the very front of the strife,
showing them the way to conquest. Such apparitions being generally visible
to a multitude, have in all times been supported by the greatest strength
of testimony. When the common feeling of danger, and the animating burst
of enthusiasm, act on the feelings of many men at once, their minds hold a
natural correspondence with each other, as it is said is the case with
stringed instruments tuned to the same pitch, of which, when one is
played, the chords of the others are supposed to vibrate in unison with
the tones produced. If an artful or enthusiastic individual exclaims, in
the heat of action, that he perceives
an apparition of the romantic kind which has been intimated, his
companions catch at the idea with emulation, and most are willing to
sacrifice the conviction of their own senses, rather than allow that they
did not witness the same favourable emblem, from which all draw confidence
and hope. One warrior catches the idea from another; all are alike eager
to acknowledge the present miracle, and the battle is won before the
mistake is discovered.' In such cases, the number of persons present,
which would otherwise lead to detection of the fallacy, becomes the means
of strengthening it.
Of this disposition, to see as much of the supernatural as is seen by
others around, or, in other words, to trust to the eyes of others rather
than to our own, we may take the liberty to quote two remarkable
instances.
The first is from the Historia Verdadera of Don Bernal Dias del
Castillo, one of the companions of the celebrated Cortez in his Mexican
conquest. After having given an account of a great victory over extreme
odds, he mentions the report inserted in the contemporary Chronicle of
Gomara, that Saint Iago had appeared on a white horse in van of the
combat, and led on his beloved Spaniards to victory. It is very curious to
observe the Castilian cavalier's internal conviction that the rumour arose
out of a mistake, the cause of which he explains from his own observation;
whilst, at the same time, he does not venture to disown the miracle. The
honest Conquestador owns that he himself did not see this animating vision
; nay, that he beheld an individual cavalier, named Francisco de Morla,
mounted on a chestnut horse, and fighting strenuously in the very place
where Saint James is said to have appeared. But instead of proceeding to
draw the necessary inference, the devout Conquestador exclaims Sinner
that I am, what am I that I should have beheld the blessed apostle!
The other instance of the infectious character of superstition occurs
in a Scottish book, and there can be little doubt that it refers, in its
first origin, to some uncommon appearance of the aurora borealis, or the
northern lights, which do not appear to have been seen in Scotland so
frequently as to be accounted a common and familiar atmospherical
phenomenon, until the beginning of the eighteenth century. The passage is
striking and curious, for the narrator, Peter Walker, though an
enthusiast, was a man of credit, and does not even affect to have seen the
wonders, the reality of which he unscrupulously adopts on the testimony of
others, to whose eyes lie trusted rather than to his own. The conversion
of the sceptical gentleman of whom he speaks is highly illustrative of
popular credulity carried away into enthusiasm, or into imposture, by the
evidence of those around, and at once shows the imperfection of such a
general testimony, and the ease with which it is procured, since the
general excitement of the moment impels even the more cold-blooded and
judicious persons present to catch up the ideas and echo the exclamations
of the majority, who, from the first, had considered the heavenly
phenomenon as a supernatural weapon-schaw, held for the purpose of a sign
and warning of civil wars to come.
In the year 1686, in the months of June and July, says the honest
chronicler, many yet alive can witness that about the Crossford Boat,
two miles beneath Lanark, especially at the Mains, on the water of Clyde,
many people gathered together for several afternoons, where there were
showers of bonnets, bats, guns, and swords, which covered the trees and
the ground; companies of men in arms marching in order upon the waterside;
companies meeting companies, going all through other, and then all falling
to the ground and disappearing; other companies immediately appeared,
marching the same way. I went there three afternoons together, and, as I
observed, there were two-thirds of the people that were together saw, and
a third that saw not; and, though I could see nothing, there was
such a fright and trembling on those that did see, that was discernible to
all
from those that saw not. There was a gentleman standing next to me who
spoke as too many gentlemen and others speak, who said, 'A pack of damned
witches and warlocks that have the second sight! the devil ha't do I see;'
and immediately there was a discernible change in his countenance. With as
much fear and trembling as any woman I saw there, he called out, ' All you
that do not see, say nothing; for I persuade you it is matter of fact, and
discernible to all that is not stone-blind.' And those who did see told
what works (i.e. , locks) the guns had, and their length and
wideness, and what handles the swords had, whether small or three-barr'd,
or Highland guards, and the closing knots of the bonnets, black or blue;
and those who did see them there, whenever they went abroad, saw a bonnet
and a sword drop in the way.*
This singular phenomenon, in which a multitude believed, although only
two-thirds of them saw what must, if real, have been equally obvious to
all, may be compared with the exploit of the humourist, who planted
himself in an attitude of astonishment, with his eyes riveted on the
well-known bronze lion that graces the front of Northumberland House in
the Strand, and having attracted the attention of those who looked at him
by muttering, By heaven it wags! it wags again ! contrived in a few
minutes to blockade the whole street with an immense crowd, some
conceiving that they had absolutely seen the lion of Percy wag his tail,
others expecting to witness the same phenomenon.
On such occasions as we have hitherto mentioned, we have supposed that
the ghost-seer has been in full possession of his ordinary powers of
perception, unless in the case of dreamers, in whom they may have been
obscured by temporary slumber, and the possibility of correcting vagaries
of the imagination rendered more difficult by want of the ordinary appeal
to the evidence of the bodily senses. In other respects their blood beat
temperately, they possessed the ordinary capacity of ascertaining the
truth or discerning the falsehood of external appearances by an appeal to
the organ of sight. Unfortunately, however, as is now universally known
and admitted, there certainly exists more than one disorder known to
professional men of which one important symptom is a disposition to see
apparitions.
This frightful disorder is not properly insanity, although it is
somewhat allied to that most horrible of maladies, and may, in many
constitutions, be the means of bringing it oil, and although such
hallucinations are proper to both. The difference I conceive to be that,
in cases of insanity, the mind of the patient is principally affected,
while the senses, or organic system, offer in vain to the lunatic their
decided testimony against the fantasy of a deranged imagination. Perhaps
the nature of this collision between a disturbed imagination and organs
of sense possessed of their usual accuracy cannot be better described
than in the embarrassment expressed by an insane patient confined in the
Infirmary of Edinburgh. The poor man's malady had taken a gay turn. The
house, in his idea, was his own, and he contrived to account for all that
seemed inconsistent with his imaginary right of property there were many
patients in it, but that was owing to the benevolence of his nature, which
made him love to see the relief of distress. He went little, or rather
never abroad but then his habits were of a domestic and rather sedentary
character. He did not see much company but he daily received visits from
the first characters in the renowned medical school of this city, and he
could not therefore be much in want of society. With so many supposed
comforts around him with so many visions of wealth and splendour one
thing alone disturbed the peace of the poor optimist, and would indeed
have confounded most bons vivants. He was curious, he said, in
his table, choice in his selection of cooks, bad every day a dinner of
three regular courses and a dessert ; and yet, somehow or other,
everything he eat tasted of porridge. This dilemma could be no
great wonder to the friend to whom the poor patient communicated it, who
knew the lunatic eat nothing but this simple aliment at any of his meals.
The case was obvious. The disease lay in the extreme vivacity of the
patient's imagination, deluded in other, instances, yet not absolutely
powerful enough to contend with the honest evidence of his stomach and
palate, which, like Lord Peter's brethren in The Tale of a Tub, were
indignant at the attempt to impose boiled oatmeal upon them, instead of
such a banquet as Ude would have displayed when peers were to partake of
it. Here, therefore, is one instance of actual insanity, in which the
sense of taste controlled and attempted to restrain the ideal hypothesis
adopted by a deranged imagination. But the disorder to which I previously
alluded is entirely of a bodily character, and consists principally in a
disease of the visual organs, which present to the patient a set of
spectres or appearances which have no actual existence. It is a disease of
the same nature which renders many men incapable of distinguishing
colours; only the patients go a step further, and pervert the external
form of objects. In their case, therefore, contrary to that of the maniac,
it is not the mind, or rather the imagination, which imposes upon and
overpowers the evidence of the senses, but the sense of seeing (or
bearing) which betrays its duty and conveys false ideas to a sane
intellect
More than one learned physician, who have given their attestations to
the existence of this most distressing complaint, have agreed that it
actually occurs, and is occasioned by different causes. The most frequent
source of the malady is in the dissipated and intemperate habits of those
who, by a continued series of intoxication, become subject to what is
popularly called the Blue Devils, instances of which mental disorder may
be known to most who have lived for any period of their lives in society
where hard drinking was a common vice. The joyous visions suggested, by
intoxication when the habit is first acquired, in time disappear, and are
supplied by frightful impressions and scenes, which destroy the
tranquillity of the unhappy debauchee. Apparitions of the most unpleasant
appearance are his companions in solitude, and intrude even upon his hours
of society: and when by an alteration of habits, the mind is cleared of
these frightful ideas, it requires but the slightest renewal of the
association to bring back the full tide of misery upon the repentant
libertine,
Of this the following instance was told to the author by a gentleman
connected with the sufferer. A young man of fortune, who had led what is
called so gay a life as considerably to injure both his health and
fortune, was at length obliged to consult the physician upon the means of
restoring, at least, the former. One of his principal complaints was the
frequent presence of a set of apparitions, resembling a band of figures
dressed in green, who performed in his drawing-room a singular dance, to
which he was compelled to bear witness, though he knew, to his great
annoyance, that the whole corps de ballet existed only in his own
imagination. His physician immediately informed him that he had lived upon
town too long and too fast not to require an exchange to a more healthy
and natural course of life. He therefore prescribed a gentle course of
medicine, but earnestly recommended to his patient to retire to his own
house in the country, observe a temperate diet and early hours, practising
regular exercise, on the same principle avoiding fatigue, and assured him
that by doing so he might bid adieu to black spirits and white, blue,
green, and grey, with all their trumpery. The patient observed the advice,
and prospered. His physician, after the interval of a month, received a
grateful letter from him, acknowledging the success of his regimen. The
greens goblins had disappeared, and with them the unpleasant train of
emotions to which their visits had given rise, and the patient had ordered
his town-house to be disfurnished and sold, while the furniture was to be
sent down to his residence in the country, where he was determined in
future to spend his life, without exposing himself to the temptations of
town. One would have supposed this a well-devised scheme for health. But,
alas ! no sooner had the furniture of the London drawing-room been placed
in order in the gallery of the old manor-house, than the former delusion
returned in full force : the green figurantes , whom the patient's
depraved imagination had so long associated with these moveables, came
capering and frisking to accompany them, exclaiming with great glee, as if
the sufferer should have been rejoiced to see them, Here we all are
here we all are ! The visionary, if I recollect right, was so much
shocked at their appearance, that he retired abroad, in despair that any
part of Britain could shelter him from the daily persecution of this
domestic ballet.
There is reason to believe that such cases are numerous, and that they
may perhaps arise not only from the debility of stomach brought on by
excess in wine or spirits, which derangement often sensibly affects the
eyes and sense of sight, but also because the mind becomes habitually
predominated over by a train of fantastic visions, the consequence of
frequent intoxication; and is thus, like a dislocated joint, apt again to
go wrong, even when a different cause occasions the derangement.
It is easy to be supposed that habitual excitement by means of any
other intoxicating drug, as opium, or its various substitutes, must expose
those who practise the dangerous custom to the same inconvenience. Very
frequent use of the nitrous oxide which affects the senses so strongly,
and produces a short but singular state of ecstasy, would probably be
found to occasion this species of disorder. But there are many other
causes which medical men find attended with the same symptom, of embodying
before the eyes of a patient imaginary illusions which are visible to no
one else. This persecution of spectral deceptions is also found to exist
when no excesses of the patient can be alleged as the cause, owing,
doubtless, to a deranged state of the blood or nervous system.
The learned and acute Dr. Ferriar of Manchester was the first who
brought before the English public the leading case, as it may be called,
in this department, namely, that of Mons. Nicolai, the celebrated
bookseller of Berlin. This gentleman was not a man merely of books, but of
letters, and had the moral courage to lay before the Philosophical Society
of Berlin an account of his own sufferings, from having been, by disease,
subjected to a series of spectral illusions. The leading circumstances of
this case may be stated very shortly, as it has been repeatedly before the
public, and is insisted on by Dr. Ferriar, Dr. Hibbert, and others who
have assumed Demonology as a subject. Nicolai traces his illness remotely
to a series of disagreeable incidents which had happened to him in the
beginning of the year 1791. The depression of spirits which was occasioned
by these unpleasant occurrences, was aided by the consequences of
neglecting a course of periodical bleeding which he had been accustomed to
observe. This state of health brought on the disposition to see
phantasmata , who visited, or it may be more properly said frequented,
the apartments of the learned bookseller, presenting crowds of persons who
moved and acted before him, nay, even spoke to and addressed him. These
phantoms afforded nothing unpleasant to the imagination of the visionary
either in sight or expression, and the patient was possessed of too much
firmness to be otherwise affected by their presence than with a species of
curiosity, as he remained convinced from the beginning to the end of the
disorder, that these singular effects were merely symptoms of the state of
his health, and did not in any other respect regard them as a subject of
apprehension. After a certain time, and some use of medicine, the phantoms
became less distinct in their outline, less vivid in their colouring,
faded, as it were, on the eye of the patient, and at length totally
disappeared.
The case of Nicolai has unquestionably been that of many whose love of
science has not been able to overcome their natural reluctance to
communicate to the public the particulars attending the visitation of a
disease so peculiar. That such illnesses have been experienced, and have
ended fatally, there can be no doubt; though it is by no means to be
inferred, that the symptom of importance to our present discussion has, on
all occasions, been produced from the same identical cause.
Dr. Hibbert, who has most ingeniously, as well as philosophically,
handled this subject, has treated it also in a medical point of view, with
science to which we make no pretence, and a precision of detail to which
our superficial investigation affords us no room for extending ourselves.
The visitation of spectral phenomena is described by this learned
gentleman as incidental to sundry complaints; and he mentions, in
particular, that the symptom occurs not only in plethora, as in the case
of the learned Prussian we have just mentioned, but is a frequent hectic
symptom often an associate of febrile and inflammatory
disorders-frequently accompanying inflammation of the brain-a concomitant
also of highly excited nervous irritability equally connected with
hypochondria and finally united in some cases with gout, and in others
with the effects of excitation produced by several gases. In all these
cases there seems to be a morbid degree of sensibility, with which this
symptom is ready to ally itself, and which, though inaccurate as a medical
definition, may be held sufficiently descriptive of one character of the
various kinds of disorder with which this painful symptom may be found
allied.
A very singular and interesting illustration of such combinations as
Dr. Hibbert has recorded of the spectral illusion with an actual disorder,
and that of a dangerous kind, was frequently related in society by the
late learned and accomplished Dr. Gregory of Edinburgh, and sometimes, I
believe, quoted by him in his lectures. The narrative, to the author's
best recollection, was as follows: A patient of Dr. Gregory, a person,
it is understood, of some rank, having requested the doctor's advice, made
the following extraordinary statement of his complaint. I am in the
habit, he said, of dining at five, and exactly as the hour of six
arrives I am subjected to the following painful visitation. The door of
the room, even when I have been weak enough to bolt it, which I have
sometimes done, flies wide open; an old hag, like one of those who haunted
the heath of Forres, enters with a frowning and incensed countenance,
comes straight up to me with every demonstration of spite and indignation
which could characterize her who haunted the merchant Abudah in the
Oriental tale; she rushes upon me, says something, but so hastily that I
cannot discover the purport, and then strikes me a severe blow with her
staff. I fall from my chair in a swoon, which is of longer or shorter
endurance. To the recurrence of this apparition I am daily subjected. And
such is my new and singular complaint. The doctor immediately asked
whether his patient had invited any one to sit with him when he expected
such a visitation. He was answered in the negative. The nature of the
complaint, he said, was so singular, it was so likely to be imputed to
fancy, or even to mental derangement, that he bad shrunk from
communicating the circumstance to anyone. Then, said the doctor, with
your permission, I will dine with you to-day, tete-a-tete , and we
will see if your malignant old woman will venture to join our company.
The patient accepted the proposal with hope and gratitude, for he had
expected ridicule rather than sympathy. They met at dinner, and Dr.
Gregory, who suspected some nervous disorder, exerted his powers of
conversation, well known to be of the most varied and brilliant character,
to keep the attention of his host engaged, and prevent him from thinking
on the approach of the fated hour, to which he was accustomed to look
forward with so much terror. He succeeded in his purpose better than he
bad hoped, The hour of six came almost unnoticed, and it was hoped might
pass away without any evil consequence; but it was scarce a moment struck
when the owner of the house exclaimed, in an alarmed voice, The hag comes
again ! and dropped back in his chair in a swoon, in the way lie had
himself described. The physician caused him to be let blood, and satisfied
himself that the periodical shocks of which his patient complained arose
from a tendency to apoplexy.
The phantom with the crutch was only a species of machinery, such as
that with which fancy is found to supply the disorder called Ephialtes
, or nightmare, or indeed any other external impression upon our organs in
sleep, which the patient's morbid imagination may introduce into the dream
preceding the swoon. In the nightmare an oppression and suffocation is
felt, and our fancy instantly conjures up a spectre to lie on our bosom.
In like manner it may be remarked, that any sudden noise which the
slumberer hears, without being actually awakened by it any casual touch
of his person occurring in the same manner becomes instantly adopted in
his dream, and accommodated to the tenor of the current train of thought,
whatever that may happen to be; and nothing is more remarkable than the
rapidity with which imagination supplies a complete explanation of the
interruption, according to the previous train of ideas expressed in the
dream, even when scarce a moment of time is allowed for that purpose. In
dreaming, for example, of a duel, the external sound becomes, in the
twinkling of an eye, the discharge of the combatants' pistols; is an
orator haranguing in his sleep, the sound becomes the applause of his
supposed audience; is the dreamer wandering among supposed ruins, the
noise is that of the fall of some part of the mass. In short, an
explanatory system is adopted during sleep with such extreme rapidity,
that supposing the intruding alarm to have been the first call of some
person to awaken the slumberer, the explanation, though requiring some
process of argument or deduction, is usually formed and perfect before the
second effort of the speaker has restored the dreamer to the waking world
and its realities. So rapid and intuitive is the succession of ideas in
sleep, as to remind us of the vision of the prophet Mahommed, in which he
saw the whole wonders of heaven and hell, though the jar of water which
fell when his ecstasy commenced, had not spilled its contents when he
returned to ordinary existence.
A second, and equally remarkable instance, was communicated to the
author by the medical man under whose observation it fell, but who was, of
course, desirous to keep private the name of the hero of so singular a
history. Of the friend by whom the facts were attested I can only say,
that if I found myself at liberty to name him, the rank which he holds in
his profession, as well as his attainments in science and philosophy, form
an undisputed claim to the most implicit credit.
It was the fortune of this gentleman to be called in to attend the
illness of a person now long deceased, who in his lifetime stood, as I
understand, high in a particular department of the law, which often placed
the property of others at his discretion and control, and whose conduct,
therefore, being open to public observation, he had for many years borne
the character of a man of unusual steadiness, good sense, arid integrity.
He was, at the time of my friend's visits, confined principally to his
sick-room, sometimes to bed, yet occasionally attending to business, and
exerting his mind, apparently with all its usual strength and energy, to
the conduct of important affairs intrusted to him; nor did there, to a
superficial observer, appear anything in his conduct, while so engaged,
that could argue vacillation of intellect, or depression of mind. His
outward symptoms of malady argued no acute or alarming disease. But
slowness of pulse, absence of appetite, difficulty of digestion, and
constant depression of spirits, seemed to draw their origin from some
hidden cause, which the patient was determined to conceal. The deep gloom
of the unfortunate gentleman the embarrassment, which he could not
conceal from his friendly physician the briefness and obvious constraint
with which he answered the interrogations of his medical adviser, induced
my friend to take other methods for prosecuting his inquiries. He applied
to the sufferer's family, to learn, if possible, the source of that secret
grief which was gnawing the heart and sucking the life-blood of his
unfortunate patient. The persons applied to, after conversing together
previously, denied all knowledge of any cause for the burden which
obviously affected their relative. So far as they knew and they thought
they could hardly be deceived his worldly affairs were prosperous; no
family loss had occurred which could be followed with such persevering
distress; no entanglements of affection could be supposed to apply to his
age, and no sensation of severe remorse could be consistent with his
character. The medical gentleman had finally recourse to serious argument
with the invalid himself, and urged to him the folly of devoting himself
to a lingering and melancholy death, rather than tell the subject of
affliction which was thus wasting him. He specially pressed upon him the
injury which he was doing to his own character, by suffering it to be
inferred that the secret cause of his dejection and its consequences was
something too scandalous or flagitious to be made known, bequeathing in
this manner to his family a suspected and dishonoured name, and leaving a
memory with which might be associated the idea of guilt, which the
criminal had died without confessing. The patient, more moved by this
species of appeal than by any which had yet been urged, expressed his
desire to speak out frankly to Dr. . Every one else was removed, and the
door of the sick-room made secure, when he began his confession in the
following manner :
You cannot, my dear friend, be more conscious than I, that I am in
the course of dying under the oppression of the fatal disease which
consumes my vital powers; but neither can you understand the nature of my
complaint, and manner in which it acts upon me, nor, if you did, I fear,
could your zeal and skill avail to rid me of it. It is possible,
said the physician, that my skill may not equal my wish of serving you;
yet medical science has many resources, of which those unacquainted with
its powers never can form an estimate. But until you plainly tell me your
symptoms of complaint, it is impossible for either of us to say what may
or may not be in my power, or within that of medicine. I may answer
you, replied the patient, that my case is not a Singular one, since we
read of it in the famous novel of Le Sage. You remember, doubtless, the
disease of which the Duke d'Olivarez is there stated to have died? Of
the idea, answered the medical gentleman, that he was haunted by an
apparition, to the actual existence of which he gave no credit, but died,
nevertheless, because he was overcome and heart-broken by its imaginary
presence. I, my dearest doctor, said the sick man, am in that very
case; and so painful and abhorrent is the presence of the persecuting
vision, that my reason is totally inadequate to combat the effects of my
morbid imagination, and I am sensible I am dying, a wasted victim to an
imaginary disease. The medical gentleman listened with anxiety to his
patient's statement, and for the present judiciously avoiding any
contradiction of the sick man's preconceived fancy, contented himself with
more minute inquiry into the nature of the apparition with which be
conceived himself haunted, and into the history of the mode by which so
singular a disease had made itself master of his imagination, secured, as
it seemed, by strong powers of the understanding, against an attack so
irregular. The sick person replied by stating that its advances were
gradual, and at first not of a terrible or even disagreeable character. To
illustrate this, he gave the following account of the progress of his
disease:
My visions, he said, commenced two or three years since, when I
found myself from time to time embarrassed by the presence of a large cat,
which came and disappeared I could not exactly tell how, till the truth
was finally forced upon me, and I was compelled to regard it as no
domestic household cat, but as a bubble of the elements, which had no
existence save in my deranged visual organs or depraved imagination. Still
I had not that positive objection to the animal entertained by a late
gallant Highland chieftain, who has been seen to change to all the colours
of his own plaid if a cat by accident happened to be in the room with him,
even though he did not see it. On the contrary, I am rather a friend to
cats, and endured with so much equanimity the presence of my imaginary
attendant, that it had become almost indifferent to me; when, within the
course of a few months, it gave place to, or was succeeded by, a spectre
of a more important sort, or which at least had a more imposing
appearance. This was no other than the apparition of a gentleman-usher,
dressed as if to wait upon a Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, a Lord High
Commissioner of the Kirk, or any other who bears on his brow the rank and
stamp of delegated sovereignty.
This personage, arrayed in a court dress, with bag and sword,
tamboured waistcoat, and chapeau-bras, glided beside me like the ghost of
Beau Nash; and, whether in my own house or in another, ascended the stairs
before me, as if to announce me in the drawing-room, and at sometimes
appeared to mingle with the company, though it was sufficiently evident
that they were not aware of his presence, and that I alone was sensible of
the visionary honours which this imaginary being seemed desirous to render
me. This freak of the fancy did not produce much impression on me, though
it led me to entertain doubts on the nature of my disorder and alarm for
the effect it might produce on my intellects. But that modification of my
disease also had its appointed duration. After a few months the phantom of
the gentleman-usher was seen no more, but was succeeded by one horrible to
the sight and distressing to the imagination, being no other than the
image of death itself the apparition of a skeleton . Alone or in
company, said the unfortunate invalid, the presence of this last
phantom never quits me. I in vain tell myself a hundred times over that it
is no reality, but merely an image summoned up by the morbid acuteness of
my own excited imagination and deranged organs of sight. But what avail
such reflections, while the emblem at once and presage of mortality is
before my eyes, and while I feel myself, though in fancy only, the
companion of a phantom representing a ghastly inhabitant of the grave,
even while I yet breathe on the earth? Science, philosophy, even religion,
has no cure for such a disorder; and I feel too surely that I shall die
the victim to so melancholy a disease, although I have no belief whatever
in the reality of the phantom which it places before me.
The physician was distressed to perceive, from these details, how
strongly this visionary apparition was fixed in the imagination of his
patient. He ingeniously urged the sick man, who was then in bed, with
questions concerning the circumstances of the phantom's appearance,
trusting he might lead him, as a sensible man, into such contradictions
and inconsistencies as might bring his common-sense, which seemed to be
unimpaired, so strongly into the field as might combat successfully the
fantastic disorder which produced such fatal effects. This skeleton,
then, said the doctor, seems to you to be always present to your eyes?
It is my fate, unhappily, answered the invalid, always to see it.
Then I understand, continued the physician, it is now present to your
imagination? To my imagination it certainly is so, replied the sick
man. And in what part of the chamber do you now conceive the apparition
to appear? the physician inquired. Immediately at the foot of my bed.
When the curtains are left a little open, answered the invalid, the
skeleton, to my thinking, is placed between them, and fills the vacant
space. You say you are sensible of the delusion, said his friend;
have you firmness to convince yourself of the truth of this? Can you take
courage enough to rise and place yourself in the spot so seeming to be
occupied, and convince yourself of the illusion? The poor man sighed, and
shook his head negatively. Well, said the doctor, we will try the
experiment otherwise. Accordingly, he rose from his chair by the bedside,
and placing himself between the two half-drawn curtains at the foot of the
bed, indicated as the place occupied by the apparition, asked if the
spectre was still visible? Not entirely so, replied the patient,
because your person is betwixt him and me; but I observe his skull peering
above your shoulder.
It is alleged the man of science started on the instant, despite
philosophy, on receiving an answer ascertaining, with such minuteness,
that the ideal spectre was close to his own person. He resorted to other
means of investigation and cure, but with equally indifferent success. The
patient sunk into deeper and deeper dejection, and died in the same
distress of mind in which he had spent the latter months of his life; and
his case remains a melancholy instance of the power of imagination to kill
the body, even when its fantastic terrors cannot overcome the intellect,
of the unfortunate persons who suffer under them. The patient, in the
present case, sunk under his malady; and the circumstances of his singular
disorder remaining concealed, he did not, by his death and last illness,
lose any of his well-merited reputation for prudence and sagacity which
had attended him during the whole course of his life.
Having added these two remarkable instances to the general train of
similar facts quoted by Ferriar, Hibbert, and other writers who have more
recently considered the subject, there can, we think, be little doubt of
the proposition, that the external organs may, from various causes, become
so much deranged as to make false representations to the mind; and that,
in such cases, men, in the literal sense, really see the empty and
false forms and hear the ideal sounds which, in a more primitive
state of society, are naturally enough referred to the action of demons or
disembodied spirits. In such unhappy cases the patient is intellectually
in the condition of a general whose spies have been bribed by the enemy,
and who must engage himself in the difficult and delicate task of
examining and correcting, by his own powers of argument, the probability
of the reports which are too inconsistent to be trusted to.
But there is a corollary to this proposition, which is worthy of
notice. The same species of organic derangement which, as a continued
habit of his deranged vision, presented the subject of our last tale with
the successive apparitions of his cat, his gentleman-usher, and the fatal
skeleton, may occupy, for a brief or almost momentary space, the vision of
men who are otherwise perfectly clear-sighted. Transitory deceptions are
thus presented to the organs which, when they occur to men of strength of
mind and of education, give way to scrutiny, and their character being
once investigated, the true takes the place of the unreal representation.
But in ignorant times those instances in which any object is
misrepresented, whether through the action of the senses, or of the
imagination, or the combined influence of both, for however short a space
of time, may be admitted as direct evidence of a supernatural apparition;
a proof the more difficult to be disputed if the phantom has been
personally witnessed by a man of sense and estimation, who, perhaps
satisfied in the general as to the actual existence of apparitions, has
not taken time or trouble to correct his first impressions. This species
of deception is so frequent that one of the greatest poets of the present
time answered a lady who asked him if he believed in ghosts: No,
madam; I have seen too many myself. I may mention one or two instances of
the kind, to which no doubt can be attached.
The first shall be the apparition of Maupertuis to a brother professor
in the Royal Society of Berlin.
This extraordinary circumstance appeared in the Transactions of the
Society, but is thus stated by M. Thiebault in his Recollections of
Frederick the Great and the Court of Berlin. It is necessary to premise
that M. Gleditsch, to whom the circumstance happened, was a botanist of
eminence, holding the professorship of natural philosophy at Berlin, and
respected as a man of an habitually serious, simple, and tranquil
character.
A short time after the death of Maupertuis,*
M. Gleditsch being obliged to traverse the hall in which the Academy held
its sittings, having some arrangements to make in the cabinet of natural
history, which was under his charge, and being willing to complete them on
the Thursday before the meeting, he perceived, on entering the hall, the
apparition of M. de Maupertuis, upright and stationary, in the first angle
on his left hand, having his eyes fixed on him. This was about three
o'clock, afternoon. The professor of natural philosophy was too well
acquainted with physical science to suppose that his late president, who
had died at Bβle, in the family of Messrs. Bernoulhe, could have found his
way back to Berlin in person. He regarded the apparition in no other light
than as a phantom produced by some derangement of his own proper organs.
M. Gleditsch went to his own business, without stopping longer than to
ascertain exactly the appearance of that object. But be related the vision
to his brethren, and assured them that it was as defined and perfect as
the actual person of Maupertuis could have presented.
When it is recollected that Maupertuis died at a distance from Berlin,
once the scene of his triumphs overwhelmed by the petulant ridicule of
Voltaire, and out of favour with Frederick, with whom to be ridiculous was
to be worthless we can hardly wonder at the imagination even of a man of
physical science calling up his Eidolon in the hall of his former
greatness.
The sober-minded professor did not, however, push his investigation to
the point to which it was carried by a gallant soldier, from whose mouth a
particular friend of the author received the following circumstances of a
similar story.
Captain C was a native of Britain, but bred in the Irish Brigade.
He was a man of the most dauntless courage, which he displayed in some
uncommonly desperate adventures during the first years of the French
Revolution, being repeatedly employed by the royal family in very
dangerous commissions. After the King's death he came over to England, and
it was then the following circumstance took place.
Captain C was a Catholic, and, in his hour of adversity at least,
sincerely attached to the duties of his religion. His confessor was a
clergyman who was residing as chaplain to a man of rank in the west of
England, about four miles from the place where Captain C lived. On
riding over one morning to see this gentleman, his penitent had the
misfortune to find him very ill from a dangerous complaint. He retired in
great distress and apprehension of his friend's life, and the feeling
brought back upon him many other painful and disagreeable recollections.
These occupied him till the hour of retiring to bed, when, to his great
astonishment, he saw in the room the figure of the absent confessor. He
addressed it, but received no answer the eyes alone were impressed by
the appearance. Determined to push the matter to the end, Captain C
advanced on the phantom, which appeared to retreat gradually before him.
In this manner he followed it round the bed, when it seemed to sink down
on an elbow-chair, and remain there in a sitting posture. To ascertain
positively the nature of the apparition, the soldier himself sate down on
the same chair, ascertaining thus, beyond question, that the whole was
illusion; yet he owned that, had his friend died about the same time, he
would not well have known what name to give to his vision. But as the
confessor recovered, and, in Dr. Johnson's phrase, nothing came of it,
the incident was only remarkable as showing that men of the strongest
nerves are not exempted from such delusions.
Another illusion of the same nature we have the best reason for
vouching as a fact, though, for certain reasons, we do not give the names
of the parties. Not long after the death of a late illustrious poet, who
had filled, while living, a great station in the eye of the public, a
literary friend, to whom the deceased had been well known, was engaged,
during the darkening twilight of an autumn evening, in perusing one of the
publications which professed to detail the habits and opinions of the
distinguished individual who was now no more. As the reader had enjoyed
the intimacy of the deceased to a considerable degree, he was deeply
interested in the publication, which contained some particulars relating
to himself and other friends. A visitor was sitting in the apartment, who
was also engaged in reading. Their sitting-room opened into an
entrance-hall, rather fantastically fitted up with articles of armour,
skins of wild animals, and the like. It was when laying down his book, and
passing into this hall, through which the moon was beginning to shine,
that the individual of whom I speak saw, right before him, and in a
standing posture, the exact representation of his departed friend, whose
recollection had been so strongly brought to his imagination. He stopped
for a single moment, so as to notice the wonderful accuracy with which
fancy had impressed upon the bodily eye the peculiarities of dress and
posture of the illustrious poet. Sensible, however, of the delusion, he
felt no sentiment save that of wonder at the extraordinary accuracy of the
resemblance, and stepped onwards towards the figure, which resolved
itself, as he approached, into the various materials of which it was
composed. These were merely a screen, occupied by great-coats, shawls,
plaids, and such other articles as usually are found in a country
entrance-hall. The spectator returned to the spot from which he had seen
the illusion, and endeavoured, with all his power, to recall the image
which had been so singularly vivid. But this was beyond his capacity; and
the person who had witnessed the apparition, or, more properly, whose
excited state had been the means of raising it, had only to return into
the apartment, and tell his young friend under what a striking
hallucination he had for a moment laboured.
There is every reason to believe that instances of this kind are
frequent among persons of a certain temperament, and when such occur in an
early period of society, they are almost certain to be considered as real
supernatural appearances. They differ from those of Nicolai, and others
formerly noticed, as being of short duration, and constituting no habitual
or constitutional derangement of the system. The apparition of Maupertuis
to Monsieur Gleditsch, that of the Catholic clergyman to Captain C ,
that of a late poet to his friend, are of the latter character. They bear
to the former the analogy, as we may say, which a sudden and temporary
fever-fit has to a serious feverish illness. But, even for this very
reason, it is more difficult to bring such momentary impressions back to
their real sphere of optical illusions, since they accord much better with
our idea of glimpses of the future world than those in which the vision is
continued or repeated for hours, days, and months, affording opportunities
of discovering, from other circumstances, that the symptom originates in
deranged health.
Before concluding these observations upon the deceptions of the senses,
we must remark that the eye is the organ most essential to the purpose of
realizing to our mind the appearance of external objects, and that when
the visual organ becomes depraved for a greater or less time, and to a
farther or more limited extent, its misrepresentation of the objects of
sight is peculiarly apt to terminate in such hallucinations as those we
have been detailing. Yet the other senses or organs, in their turn, and to
the extent of their power, are as ready, in their various departments, as
the sight itself, to retain false or doubtful impressions, which mislead,
instead of informing, the party to whom they are addressed.
Thus, in regard to the ear, the next organ in importance to the eye, we
are repeatedly deceived by such sounds as are imperfectly gathered up and
erroneously apprehended. From the false impressions received from this
organ also arise consequences similar to those derived from erroneous
reports made by the organs of sight. A whole class of superstitious
observances arise, and are grounded upon inaccurate and imperfect hearing.
To the excited and imperfect state of the ear we owe the existence of what
Milton sublimely calls
The airy tongues that
syllable men's names, On shores, in desert sands, and wildernesses.
These also appear such natural causes of alarm, that we do not
sympathize more readily with Robinson Crusoe's apprehensions when he
witnesses the print of the savage's foot in the sand, than in those which
arise from his being waked from sleep by some one calling his name in the
solitary island, where there existed no man but the shipwrecked mariner
himself. Amidst the train of superstitions deduced from the imperfections
of the ear, we may quote that visionary summons which the natives of the
Hebrides acknowledged as one sure sign of approaching fate. The voice of
some absent, or probably some deceased, relative was, in such cases, heard
as repeating the party's name. Sometimes the aerial summoner intimated his
own death, and at others it was no uncommon circumstance that the person
who fancied himself so called, died in consequence; for the same reason
that the negro pines to death who is laid under the ban of an Obi woman,
or the Cambro-Briton, whose name is put into the famous cursing well, with
the usual ceremonies, devoting him to the infernal gods, wastes away and
dies, as one doomed to do so. It may be remarked also, that Dr. Johnson
retained a deep impression that, while he was opening the door of his
college chambers, he heard the voice of his mother, then at many miles'
distance, call him by his name; and it appears he was rather disappointed
that no event of consequence followed a summons sounding so decidedly
supernatural. It is unnecessary to dwell on this sort of auricular
deception, of which most men's recollection will supply instances. The
following may he stated as one serving to show by what slender accidents
the human ear may be imposed upon. The author was walking, about two years
since, in a wild and solitary scene with a young friend, who laboured
under the infirmity of a severe deafness, when he heard what he conceived
to be the cry of a distant pack of hounds, sounding intermittedly. As the
season was summer, this, on a moment's reflection, satisfied the hearer
that it could not be the clamour of an actual chase, and yet his ears
repeatedly brought back the supposed cry. He called upon his own dogs, of
which two or three were with the walking party. They came in quietly, and
obviously had no accession to the sounds which had caught the author's
attention, so that he could not help saying to his companion, I am
doubly sorry for your infirmity at this moment, for I could otherwise have
let you hear the cry of the Wild Huntsman. As the young gentleman used a
hearing tube, he turned when spoken to, and, in doing so, the cause of the
phenomenon became apparent. The supposed distant sound was in fact a nigh
one, being the singing of the Wind in the instrument which the young
gentleman was obliged to use, but which, from various circumstances, had
never occurred to his elder friend as likely to produce the sounds he had
heard.
It is scarce necessary to add, that the highly imaginative superstition
of the Wild Huntsman in Germany seems to have had its origin in strong
fancy, operating upon the auricular deceptions, respecting the numerous
sounds likely to occur in the dark recesses of pathless forests. The same
clew may be found to the kindred Scottish belief, so finely embodied by
the nameless author of Albania:
There, since of old the
haughty Thanes of Ross Were wont, with clans and ready vassals thronged,
To wake the bounding stag or guilty wolf; There oft is heard at midnight
or at noon, Beginning faint, but rising still more loud, And louder, voice
of hunters, and of hounds, And horns hoarse-winded, blowing far and keen.
Forthwith the hubbub multiplies, the air Labours with louder shouts and
rifer din Of close pursuit, the broken cry of deer Mangled by throttling
dogs, the shouts of men, And hoofs, thick-beating on the hollow hill:
Sudden the grazing heifer in the vale Starts at the tumult, and the
herdsman's ears Tingle with inward dread. Aghast he eyes The upland ridge,
and every mountain round, But not one trace of living wight discerns, Nor
knows, o'erawed and trembling as he stands, To what or whom he owes his
idle fear To ghost, to witch, to fairy, or to fiend, But wonders, and no
end of wondering finds.*
It must also be remembered, that to the auricular deceptions practised
by the means of ventriloquism or otherwise,
may be traced many, of the most successful impostures which credulity
has received as supernatural communications.
The sense of touch seems less liable to perversion than either that of
sight or smell, nor are there many cases in which it can become accessary
to such false intelligence as the eye and ear, collecting their objects
from a greater distance and by less accurate enquiry, are but too ready to
convey. Yet there is one circumstance in which the Sense of touch as well
as others is very apt to betray its possessor into inaccuracy, in respect
to the circumstances which it impresses on its owner. The case occurs
during sleep, when the dreamer touches with his hand some other part of
his own person. He is clearly, in this case, both the actor and patient,
both the proprietor of the member touching, and of that which is touched;
while, to increase the complication, the hand is both toucher of the limb
on which it rests, and receives an impression of touch from it; and the
same is the case with the limb, which at one and the same time receives an
impression from the band, and conveys to the mind a report respecting the
size, substance, and the like, of the member touching. Now, as during
sleep the patient is unconscious that both limbs are his own identical
property, his mind is apt to be much disturbed by the complication of
sensations arising from two parts of his person being at once acted upon,
and from their reciprocal action; and false impressions are thus received,
which, accurately enquired into, would afford a clew to many puzzling
phenomena in the theory of dreams. This peculiarity of the organ of touch,
as also that it is confined to no particular organ, but is diffused over
the whole person of the man, is noticed by Lucretius:
Ut si forte mana, quam
vis jam corporis, ipse Tute tibi partem ferias, ζque experiare.
A remarkable instance of such an illusion was told me by a late
nobleman. He had fallen asleep, with some uneasy feelings arising from
indigestion. They operated in their usual course of visionary terrors. At
length they were all summed up in the apprehension that the phantom of a
dead man held the sleeper by the wrist, and endeavoured to drag him out of
bed. He awaked in horror, and still felt the cold dead grasp of a corpse's
hand on his right wrist. It was a minute before he discovered that his own
left hand was in a state of numbness, and with it he had accidentally
encircled his right arm.
The taste and the smell, like the touch, convey more direct
intelligence than the eye and the ear, and are less likely than those
senses to aid in misleading the imagination. We have seen the palate, in
the case of the porridge-fed lunatic, enter its protest against the
acquiescence of eyes, ears, and touch, in the gay visions which gilded the
patient's confinement. The palate, however, is subject to imposition as
well as the other senses. The best and most acute bon vivant loses
his power of discriminating betwixt different kinds of wine, if he is
prevented from assisting his palate by the aid of his eyes, that is, if
the glasses of each are administered indiscriminately while he is
blindfolded. Nay, we are authorized to believe that individuals have died
in consequence of having supposed themselves to have taken poison, when,
in reality, the draught they had swallowed as such was of an innoxious or
restorative quality. The delusions of the stomach can seldom bear upon our
present subject, and are not otherwise connected with supernatural
appearances, than as a good dinner and its accompaniments are essential in
fitting out a daring Tam of Shanter, who is fittest to encounter them when
the poet's observation is not unlikely to apply
Inspiring bauld John
Barleycorn, What dangers thou canst make us scorn! Wi' tippenny we fear
nae evil, Wi' usquebae we'll face the devil. The swats sae ream'd in
Tammie's noddle, Fair play, he caredna deils a bodle!
Neither has the sense of smell, in its ordinary state, much connexion
with our present subject. Mr. Aubrey tells us, indeed, of an apparition
which disappeared with a curious perfume as well as a most melodious
twang; and popular belief ascribes to the presence of infernal spirits a
strong relish of the sulphureous element of which they are inhabitants.
Such accompaniments, therefore, are usually united with other materials
for imposture. If, as a general opinion assures us, which is not
positively discountenanced 'by Dr. Hibbert, by the inhalation of certain
gases or poisonous herbs, necromancers can dispose a person to believe he
sees phantoms, it is likely that the nostrils are made to inhale such
suffumigation as well as the mouth.
*
I have now arrived, by a devious path, at the conclusion of this
letter, the object of which is to show from what attributes of our nature,
whether mental or corporeal, arises that predisposition to believe in
supernatural occurrences. It is, I think, conclusive that mankind, from a
very early period, have their minds prepared for such events by the
consciousness of the existence of a spiritual world, inferring in the
general proposition the undeniable truth that each man, from the monarch
to the beggar, who has once acted his part on the stage, continues to
exist, and may again, even in a disembodied state, if such is the pleasure
of Heaven, for aught that we know to the contrary, be permitted or
ordained to mingle amongst those who yet remain in the body. The abstract
possibility of apparitions must be admitted by every one who believes in a
Deity, and His superintending omnipotence. But imagination is apt to
intrude its explanations and inferences founded on inadequate evidence.
Sometimes our violent and inordinate passions, originating in sorrow for
our friends, remorse for our crimes, our eagerness of patriotism, or our
deep sense of devotion these or other violent excitements of a moral
character, in the visions of night, or the rapt ecstasy of the day,
persuade us that we witness, with our eyes and ears, an actual instance of
that supernatural communication, the possibility of which cannot be
denied. At other times the corporeal organs impose upon the mind, while
the eye and the ear, diseased, deranged, or misled, convey false
impressions to the patient. Very often both the mental delusion and the
physical deception exist at the same time, and men's belief of the
phenomena presented to them, however erroneously, by the senses, is the
firmer and more readily granted, that the physical impression corresponded
with the mental excitement.
So many causes acting thus upon each other in various degrees, or
sometimes separately, it must happen early in the infancy of every society
that there should occur many apparently well-authenticated instances of
supernatural intercourse, satisfactory enough to authenticate peculiar
examples of the general proposition which is impressed upon us by belief
of the immortality of the soul. These examples of undeniable apparitions
(for they are apprehended to be incontrovertible), fall like the seed of
the husbandman into fertile and prepared soil, and are usually followed by
a plentiful crop of superstitious figments, which derive their sources
from circumstances and enactments in sacred and profane history, hastily
adopted, and perverted from their genuine reading. This shall be the
subject of my next letter.
*
Walker's Lives,
Edinburgh, 1827, vol. i. p. xxxvi. It is evident that honest Peter
believed in the apparition of this martial gear on the principle of
Partridge's terror for the ghost of Hamlet not that lie was afraid
himself, but because Garrick showed such evident marks of terror. * Long
the president of the Berlin Academy, and much favoured by Frederick II.,
till be was overwhelmed by the ridicule of Voltaire. He retired, in a
species of disgrace, to his native country of Switzerland, and died there
shortly afterwards. * The poem of Albania is, in its original folio
edition, so extremely scarce that I have only seen a copy belonging to the
amiable and ingenious Dr. Beattie, besides the one which I myself possess,
printed in the earlier part of last century. It was reprinted by my late
friend Dr. Leyden in a small volume entitled Scottish Descriptive
Poems. Albania contains the above, and many other poetical passages of
the highest merit. * Most ancient authors, who pretend to treat of the wonders
of natural magic, give receipts for calling up phantoms. The lighting
lamps fed by peculiar kinds of medicated oil, and the use of
suffumigations, of strong and deleterious herbs, are the means
recommended. From these authorities, perhaps, a professor of legerdemain
assured Dr. Alderson of Hull, that he could compose a preparation of
antimony, sulphur, and other drugs, which, when burnt in a confined room,
would have the effect of causing the patient to suppose he saw phantoms.
See Hibbert on Apparitions, p. 120.
|
