Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 2.djvu/220

206 APPARITIONS were generally phantasms of his friends and acquaintances; or, in other words, copies of his past impressions and per ceptions, so renovated and verified as to create an illusion of reality." Another example is the case of a Mrs A., attested by Sir David Brewster in his Natural Magic, and repeated by Professor Huxley in his Elementary Physiology. Mrs A. s illusions were often grotesque and terrible, and she could not always connect them with any past impres sion. Different philosophical explanations are given of these cases of disordered vision. Dr Hibbert, in his Philosophy of Apparitions, conceives that the organs of sense are the actual medium through which past feelings are renovated ; or, in other words, that when, from strong mental excitement, ideas have become as vivid as past impressions, or even more so, this intensity is induced by, or rather productive of, an absolute affection of those par ticular parts of the organic structure on which sensations depend, in the same way precisely as the salivary glands are knov/n to be occasionally as much excited by the idea o some favourite food as if the said body itself were actually present, stimulating the papillce of the fauces. It would have been more simple if Dr Hibbert had said that imagination, in some states, reacts upon the organ of sense and renovates past feelings or sensations, the natural antecedents or necessary concomitants of certain percep tions, with an intensity sufficient to create an illusion of reality. A further explanation is given by Sir David Brewster, who has remarked -as a physical fact that, " when the eye is not exposed to the impressions of external objects, or when it is insensible to these objects in consequence of being engrossed with its own operations, any object of mental contemplation, which has either been called up by the memory or created by the imagination, will be seen as distinctly as if it had been formed from the vision of a real object. In examining these mental impressions," he adds, " I have found that they follow the motions of the eye-ball exactly like the spectral impressions of luminous objects, and that they resemble them also in their apparent im mobility when the eye-ball is displaced by an external force. If this result shall be found generally true by others, it will follow that the objects of mental contemplation may be seen as distinctly as external objects, and will occupy the same local position in the axis of vision as if they had been formed by the agency of light." This goes to the very root of the theory of apparitions, all the phenomena of which seem to depend upon the relative intensities of the two classes of impressions, and upon the manner of their acci dental combination. In perfect health the mind not only possesses a control over its powers, but the impressions of external objects alone occupy its attention, and the play of imagination is consequently checked, except in sleep, when its operations are relatively more feeble and faint. But in the unhealthy state of the mind, when its attention is partly withdrawn from the contemplation of external ob jects, the impressions of its own creation, or rather repro duction, will either overpower external objects, or combine themselves with the impressions of them, and thus generate illusions which in the one case appear alone, while in the other they are seen projected among those external objects to which the eye-ball is directed, in the manner explained by Dr Brewster. To these physical causes of subjective apparitions, the forces of the imagination, of long desire, of strained attention, are supposed to contribute their influence. " Enthusiastic feelings of an impressive and solemn nature," says Sir Walter Scott, " occur both in private and public life, which seem to add ocular testimony to an inter course 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 he 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 other wise attached. And if any event, such as the death of the person dreamt of, chances to take place, so as to corre spond 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 circum stances touching the evidence may not unreasonably be considered as complete." Now this is the point namely, the possibility of fre quent coincidence where the advocates of the reality of apparitions join issue with the sceptics. They do not deny that some people have been subject to hallucinations. They say with De Foe, " we have, we believe, as true a notion of the power of imagination as we ought to have. We believe that we form as many apparitions in our fancies as we behold with our eyes, and a great many more. But it does not follow from thence that there are no such things in nature." It is when apparitions of men dying are seen at a distance from the place of their death, or when different witnesses, at different times, behold the same apparition in a certain place, that the explanation of mere fancy or subjective illusion becomes hard to accept. It is unfair of Scott to say that the coincidence between death and distant apparition in dream or waking vision is one which "must frequently happen." Mankind has agreed with Dr Johnson to consider the event not fortuitous. Nothing is explained, if llie multitude of such stories are sup- ported by evidence, by speaking of a coincidence. As Joab says in Voltaire s play, c est Id le miracle. Again, to con vert Nicolai s visions into genuine apparitions, or to make Mrs A. what Professor Huxley calls a mine of ghost stories, what they saw should have been also seen by others, or should have been followed by some significant event. To give an example of a genuine ghost story as contrasted with a hallucination : It happened to a lady, a distant relative of the writer, to waken one morning in Edinburgh, and see, as she thought, her father standing by her side. He was dressed in his full uniform as a general in the East India Company s army, and seemed to her to press his hand on his side with a look of pain, and then to dis appear. The lady mentioned what she supposed she had seen to the clergyman with whom she was residing. He

took a note of the date of the occurrence, which happened