——“now could I prophecy,
_But that_ the icy hand of death,” &c.
EV. Well, I will not controvert your creed, Astrophel; rather let me
illustrate some of your apparent mysteries by simple analogy.
As in these extreme moments of life, so in the hour of extreme danger,
when an awful fate is impending, and the world and our sacred
friendships are about to be lost to us, a vision of our absent friends
will pass before us with all the light of reality. We read in the
writings of Dr. Conolly of a person who, in danger of being swamped on
the Eddystone rock, saw the phantoms of his family passing distinctly
before him; and these are the words of the English Opium-Eater:—“I was
once told by a near relative of mine that, having in her childhood
fallen into a river, and being on the very verge of death but for the
critical assistance which reached her, she saw in a _moment_ her whole
life in its minutest incidents arrayed before her simultaneously, as in
a mirror, and she had a faculty developed as suddenly for comprehending
the whole and every part.”
Now, although the coming on of death is often attended by that slight
delirium indicated by the babbling of green fields, and the playing with
flowers, and the picking of the bedclothes, and the smiling on the
fingers’ ends, yet in others some oppressive or morbid _cause of
insanity_ may be removed by the moribund condition. In the words of
Aretæus,—“the system has thrown off many of its impurities, and the
soul, left naked, was free to exercise such energies as it still
possessed.”
I will glance in illustration at these interesting cases:—from
Zimmerman, of an insane woman of Zurich, who, “a few hours before her
death, became perfectly sensible and wonderfully eloquent;”—from Dr.
Perceval, of a female idiot, who, as she was dying of consumption,
evinced the highest powers of intellect;—from Dr. Marshall, of the
maniac, who became completely rational some hours previous to his
dissolution;—and from Dr. Hancock, of the Quaker, who, from the
condition of a drivelling idiot, became shortly before his death so
completely rational, as to call his family together, and, as his spirit
was passing from him, bestow on them with pathetic solemnity his last
benediction.
Thus your impressive records are clearly explained by pathology; and,
perhaps unconscious of this, Mrs. Opie has a fine illustration in her
“Father and Daughter:”—the mind of the maniac parent being illumined
before his death by a beam of reason.
But in the languid brain of an idiot excitement may even produce
rationality.
Samuel Tuke tells us of a domestic servant, who lapsed into a state of
complete idiocy. Some time after, she fell into typhus fever, and as
this progressed, there was a real development of mental power. At that
stage when delirium lighted up the minds of others, _she_ was rational,
because the excitement merely brought up the nervous energy to its
proper point. As the fever abated, however, she sunk into her idiot
apathy, and thus continued until she died. It was but the _transient
gleam_ of reason.