Explanation on Faber’s part was short and simple. The nephew whom he
designed as the heir to his wealth had largely outstripped the liberal
allowance made to him, had incurred heavy debts; and in order to
extricate himself from the debts, had plunged into ruinous speculations.
Faber had come back to England to save his heir from prison or outlawry,
at the expense of more than three-fourths of the destined inheritance.
To add to all, the young man had married a young lady without fortune;
the uncle only heard of this marriage on arriving in England.
The spendthrift was hiding from his creditors in the house of his
father-in-law, in one of the western counties. Faber there sought
him; and on becoming acquainted with his wife, grew reconciled to the
marriage, and formed hopes of his nephew’s future redemption. He
spoke, indeed, of the young wife with great affection. She was good and
sensible; willing and anxious to encounter any privation by which her
husband might reprieve the effects of his folly. “So,” said Faber, “on
consultation with this excellent creature--for my poor nephew is so
broken down by repentance, that others must think for him how to exalt
repentance into reform--my plans were determined. I shall remove my
prodigal from all scenes of temptation. He has youth, strength, plenty
of energy, hitherto misdirected. I shall take him from the Old World
into the New. I have decided on Australia. The fortune still left to me,
small here, will be ample capital there. It is not enough to maintain us
separately, so we must all live together. Besides, I feel that, though
I have neither the strength or the experience which could best serve a
young settler on a strange soil, still, under my eye, my poor boy will
be at once more prudent and more persevering. We sail next week.”
Faber spoke so cheerfully that I knew not how to express compassion;
yet, at his age, after a career of such prolonged and distinguished
labour, to resign the ease and comforts of the civilized state for
the hardships and rudeness of an infant colony, seemed to me a dreary
prospect; and, as delicately, as tenderly as I could to one whom I loved
and honoured as a father, I placed at his disposal the fortune which, in
great part, I owed to him,--pressing him at least to take from it enough
to secure to himself, in his own country, a home suited to his years
and worthy of his station. He rejected all my offers, however earnestly
urged on him, with his usual modest and gentle dignity; and assuring me
that he looked forward with great interest to a residence in lands new
to his experience, and affording ample scope for the hardy enjoyments
which had always most allured his tastes, he hastened to change the
subject.
“And who, think you, is the admirable helpmate my scape-grace has had
the saving good luck to find? A daughter of the worthy man who undertook
the care of poor Dr. Lloyd’s orphans,--the orphans who owed so much to
your generous exertions to secure a provision for them; and that child,
now just risen from her father’s grave, is my pet companion, my darling
ewe lamb,--Dr. Lloyd’s daughter Amy.”
Here the child joined us, quickening her pace as she recognized the old
man, and nestling to his side as she glanced wistfully towards myself.
A winning, candid, lovable child’s face, somewhat melancholy, somewhat
more thoughtful than is common to the face of childhood, but calm,
intelligent, and ineffably mild. Presently she stole from the old man,
and put her hand in mine.
“Are you not the kind gentleman who came to see him that night when he
passed away from us, and who, they all say at home, was so good to my
brothers and me? Yes, I recollect you now.” And she put her pure face to
mine, wooing me to kiss it.
I kind! I good! I--I! Alas! she little knew, little guessed, the
wrathful imprecation her father had bequeathed to me that fatal night!
I did not dare to kiss Dr. Lloyd’s orphan daughter, but my tears fell
over her hand. She took them as signs of pity, and, in her infant
thankfulness, silently kissed me.
“Oh, my friend!” I murmured to Faber, “I have much that I yearn to say
to you--alone--alone! Come to my house with me, be at least my guest as
long as you stay in this town.”
“Willingly,” said Faber, looking at me more intently than he had done
before, and with the true eye of the practised Healer, at once soft and
penetrating.
He rose, took my arm, and whispering a word in the ear of the little
girl, she went on before us, turning her head, as she gained the gate,
for another look at her father’s grave. As we walked to my house, Julius
Faber spoke to me much of this child. Her brothers were all at school;
she was greatly attached to his nephew’s wife; she had become yet more
attached to Faber himself, though on so short an acquaintance; it had
been settled that she was to accompany the emigrants to Australia.
“There,” said he, “the sum, that some munificent, but unknown friend
of her father has settled on her, will provide her no mean dower for a
colonist’s wife, when the time comes for her to bring a blessing to
some other hearth than ours.” He went on to say that she had wished
to accompany him to L----, in order to visit her father’s grave before
crossing the wide seas; “and she has taken such fond care of me all the
way, that you might fancy I were the child of the two. I come back to
this town, partly to dispose of a few poor houses in it which still
belong to me, principally to bid you farewell before quitting the Old
World, no doubt forever. So, on arriving to-day, I left Amy by herself
in the churchyard while I went to your house, but you were from home.
And now I must congratulate you on the reputation you have so rapidly
acquired, which has even surpassed my predictions.”
“You are aware,” said I, falteringly, “of the extraordinary charge from
which that part of my reputation dearest to all men has just emerged!”
He had but seen a short account in a weekly journal, written after my
release. He asked details, which I postponed.
Reaching my home, I hastened to provide for the comfort of my two
unexpected guests; strove to rally myself, to be cheerful. Not till
night, when Julius Faber and I were alone together, did I touch on
what was weighing at my heart. Then, drawing to his side, I told him
all,--all of which the substance is herein written, from the deathscene
in Dr. Lloyd’s chamber to the hour in which I had seen Dr. Lloyd’s child
at her father’s grave. Some of the incidents and conversations which had
most impressed me I had already committed to writing, in the fear
that, otherwise, my fancy might forge for its own thraldom the links
of reminiscence which my memory might let fall from its chain. Faber
listened with a silence only interrupted by short pertinent questions;
and when I had done, he remained thoughtful for some moments; then the
great physician replied thus:--
“I take for granted your conviction of the reality of all you tell
me, even of the Luminous Shadow, of the bodiless Voice; but, before
admitting the reality itself, we must abide by the old maxim, not to
accept as cause to effect those agencies which belong to the
Marvellous, when causes less improbable for the effect can be rationally
conjectured. In this case are there not such causes? Certainly there
are--”
“There are?”
“Listen; you are one of those men who attempt to stifle their own
imagination. But in all completed intellect, imagination exists, and
will force its way; deny it healthful vents, and it may stray into
morbid channels. The death-room of Dr. Lloyd deeply impressed your
heart, far more than your pride would own. This is clear from the
pains you took to exonerate your conscience, in your generosity to the
orphans. As the heart was moved, so was the imagination stirred; and,
unaware to yourself, prepared for much that subsequently appealed to
it. Your sudden love, conceived in the very grounds of the house so
associated with recollections in themselves strange and romantic;
the peculiar temperament and nature of the girl to whom your love was
attracted; her own visionary beliefs, and the keen anxiety which infused
into your love a deeper poetry of sentiment,--all insensibly tended to
induce the imagination to dwell on the Wonderful; and, in overstriving
to reconcile each rarer phenomenon to the most positive laws of Nature,
your very intellect could discover no solution but in the Preternatural.
“You visit a man who tells you he has seen Sir Philip Derval’s ghost; on
that very evening, you hear a strange story, in which Sir Philip’s name
is mixed up with a tale of murder, implicating two mysterious pretenders
to magic,--Louis Grayle and the Sage of Aleppo. The tale so interests
your fancy that even the glaring impossibility of a not unimportant part
of it escapes your notice,--namely, the account of a criminal trial in
which the circumstantial evidence was more easily attainable than in all
the rest of the narrative, but which could not legally have taken place
as told. Thus it is whenever the mind begins, unconsciously, to admit
the shadow of the Supernatural; the Obvious is lost to the eye that
plunges its gaze into the Obscure. Almost immediately afterwards you
become acquainted with a young stranger, whose traits of character
interest and perplex, attract yet revolt you. All this time you are
engaged in a physiological work which severely tasks the brain, and in
which you examine the intricate question of soul distinct from mind.
“And, here, I can conceive a cause deep-hid amongst what metaphysicians
would call latent associations, for a train of thought which disposed
you to accept the fantastic impressions afterwards made on you by
the scene in the Museum and the visionary talk of Sir Philip Derval.
Doubtless, when at college you first studied metaphysical speculation
you would have glanced over Beattie’s ‘Essay on Truth’ as one of the
works written in opposition to your favourite, David Hume.”
“Yes, I read the book, but I have long since forgotten its arguments.”
“Well in that essay, Beattie(1) cites the extraordinary instance of
Simon Browne, a learned and pious clergyman, who seriously disbelieved
the existence of his own soul; and imagined that, by interposition of
Divine power, his soul was annulled, and nothing left but a principle of
animal life, which he held in common with the brutes! When, years ago, a
thoughtful imaginative student, you came on that story, probably enough
you would have paused, revolved in your own mind and fancy what kind
of a creature a man might be, if, retaining human life and merely
human understanding, he was deprived of the powers and properties which
reasoners have ascribed to the existence of soul. Something in this
young man, unconsciously to yourself, revives that forgotten train of
meditative ideas. His dread of death as the final cessation of being,
his brute-like want of sympathy with his kind, his incapacity to
comprehend the motives which carry man on to scheme and to build for a
future that extends beyond his grave,--all start up before you at the
very moment your reason is overtasked, your imagination fevered, in
seeking the solution of problems which, to a philosophy based upon your
system, must always remain insoluble. The young man’s conversation not
only thus excites your fancies,--it disturbs your affections. He speaks
not only of drugs that renew youth, but of charms that secure love. You
tremble for your Lilian while you hear him! And the brain thus tasked,
the imagination thus inflamed, the heart thus agitated, you are
presented to Sir Philip Derval, whose ghost your patient had supposed he
saw weeks ago.
“This person, a seeker after an occult philosophy, which had possibly
acquainted him with some secrets in nature beyond the pale of our
conventional experience, though, when analyzed, they might prove to be
quite reconcilable with sober science, startles you with an undefined
mysterious charge against the young man who had previously seemed to you
different from ordinary mortals. In a room stored with the dead things
of the brute soulless world, your brain becomes intoxicated with
the fumes of some vapour which produces effects not uncommon in the
superstitious practices of the East; your brain, thus excited, brings
distinctly before you the vague impressions it had before received.
Margrave becomes identified with the Louis Grayle of whom you had
previously heard an obscure and, legendary tale, and all the anomalies
in his character are explained by his being that which you had
contended, in your physiological work, it was quite possible for man
to be,--namely, mind and body without soul! You were startled by the
monster which man would be were your own theory possible; and in order
to reconcile the contradictions in this very monster, you account
for knowledge, and for powers that mind without soul could not have
attained, by ascribing to this prodigy broken memories of a former
existence, demon attributes from former proficiency in evil magic.
My friend, there is nothing here which your own study of morbid
idiosyncracies should not suffice to solve.”
“So, then,” said I, “you would reduce all that have affected my senses
as realities into the deceit of illusions? But,” I added, in a whisper,
terrified by my own question, “do not physiologists agree in this:
namely, that though illusory phantasms may haunt the sane as well as the
insane, the sane know that they are only illusions, and the insane do
not.”
“Such a distinction,” answered Faber, “is far too arbitrary and rigid
for more than a very general and qualified acceptance. Muller, indeed,
who is perhaps the highest authority on such a subject, says, with
prudent reserve, ‘When a person who is not insane sees spectres
and believes, them to be real, his intellect must be imperfectly
exercised.’(2) He would, indeed, be a bold physician who maintained that
every man who believed he had really seen a ghost was of unsound mind.
In Dr. Abercrombie’s interesting account of spectral illusions, he tells
us of a servant-girl who believed she saw, at the foot of her bed,
the apparition of Curran, in a sailor’s jacket and an immense pair of
whiskers.(3) No doubt the spectre was an illusion, and Dr. Abercrombie
very ingeniously suggests the association of ideas by which the
apparition was conjured up with the grotesque adjuncts of the jacket
and the whiskers; but the servant-girl, in believing the reality of the
apparition, was certainly not insane. When I read in the American
public journals(4) of ‘spirit manifestations,’ in which large numbers of
persons, of at least the average degree of education, declare that they
have actually witnessed various phantasms, much more extraordinary
than all which you have confided to me, and arrive, at once, at the
conclusion that they are thus put into direct communication with
departed souls, I must assume that they are under an illusion; but I
should be utterly unwarranted in supposing that, because they credited
that illusion, they were insane. I should only say with Muller, that in
their reasoning on the phenomena presented to them, ‘their intellect was
imperfectly exercised.’ And an impression made on the senses, being in
itself sufficiently rare to excite our wonder, may be strengthened till
it takes the form of a positive fact, by various coincidences which
are accepted as corroborative testimony, yet which are, nevertheless,
nothing more than coincidences found in every day matters of business,
but only emphatically noticed when we can exclaim, ‘How astonishing!’
In your case such coincidences have been, indeed, very signal, and might
well aggravate the perplexities into which your reason was thrown. Sir
Philip Derval’s murder, the missing casket, the exciting nature of the
manuscript, in which a superstitious interest is already enlisted by
your expectation to find in it the key to the narrator’s boasted powers,
and his reasons for the astounding denunciation of the man whom you
suspect to be his murderer,--in all this there is much to confirm, nay,
to cause, an illusion; and for that very reason, when examined by strict
laws of evidence, in all this there is but additional proof that the
illusion was--only illusion. Your affections contribute to strengthen
your fancy in its war on your reason. The girl you so passionately love
develops, to your disquietude and terror, the visionary temperament
which, at her age, is ever liable to fantastic caprices. She hears
Margrave’s song, which you say has a wildness of charm that affects
and thrills even you. Who does not know the power of music? and of all
music, there is none so potential as that of the human voice. Thus, in
some languages, charm and song are identical expressions; and even when
a critic, in our own sober newspapers, extols a Malibran or a Grisi, you
may be sure that he will call her ‘enchantress.’ Well, this lady, your
betrothed, in whom the nervous system is extremely impressionable, hears
a voice which, even to your ear, is strangely melodious, and sees a form
and face which, even to your eye, are endowed with a singular character
of beauty. Her fancy is impressed by what she thus hears and sees; and
impressed the more because, by a coincidence not very uncommon, a face
like that which she beholds has before been presented to her in a dream
or a revery. In the nobleness of genuine, confiding, reverential love,
rather than impute to your beloved a levity of sentiment that would seem
to you a treason, you accept the chimera of ‘magical fascination.’
In this frame of mind you sit down to read the memoir of a mystical
enthusiast. Do you begin now to account for the Luminous Shadow? A
dream! And a dream no less because your eyes were open and you believed
yourself awake. The diseased imagination resembles those mirrors which,
being themselves distorted, represent distorted pictures as correct.
“And even this Memoir of Sir Philip Derval’s--can you be quite sure that
you actually read the part which relates to Haroun and Louis Grayle? You
say that, while perusing the manuscript, you saw the Luminous Shadow,
and became insensible. The old woman says you were fast asleep. May you
not really have fallen into a slumber, and in that slumber have dreamed
the parts of the tale that relate to Grayle,--dreamed that you beheld
the Shadow? Do you remember what is said so well by Dr. Abercrombie,
to authorize the explanation I suggest to you: ‘A person under the
influence of some strong mental impression falls asleep for a few
seconds, perhaps without being sensible of it: some scene or person
appears in a dream, and he starts up under the conviction that it was a
spectral appearance.’” (5)
“But,” said I, “the apparition was seen by me again, and when,
certainly, I was not sleeping.”
“True; and who should know better than a physician so well read as
yourself that a spectral illusion once beheld is always apt to return
again in the same form? Thus, Goethe was long haunted by one image,--the
phantom of a flower unfolding itself, and developing new flowers.(6)
Thus, one of our most distinguished philosophers tells us of a lady
known to himself, who would see her husband, hear him move and speak,
when he was not even in the house.(7) But instances of the facility with
which phantasms, once admitted, repeat themselves to the senses, are
numberless. Many are recorded by Hibbert and Abercrombie, and
every physician in extensive practice can add largely, from his own
experience, to the list. Intense self-concentration is, in itself, a
mighty magician. The magicians of the East inculcate the necessity
of fast, solitude, and meditation for the due development of their
imaginary powers. And I have no doubt with effect; because fast,
solitude, and meditation--in other words, thought or fancy intensely
concentred--will both raise apparitions and produce the invoker’s belief
in them. Spinello, striving to conceive the image of Lucifer for his
picture of the Fallen Angels, was at last actually haunted by the Shadow
of the Fiend. Newton himself has been subjected to a phantom, though
to him, Son of Light, the spectre presented was that of the sun! You
remember the account that Newton gives to Locke of this visionary
appearance. He says that ‘though he had looked at the sun with his
right eye only, and not with the left, yet his fancy began to make an
impression upon his left eye as well as his right; for if he shut his
right and looked upon the clouds, or a book, or any bright object with
his left eye, he could see the sun almost as plain as with the right, if
he did but intend his fancy a little while on it;’ nay, ‘for some months
after, as often as he began to meditate on the phenomena, the spectrum
of the sun began to return, even though he lay in bed at midnight, with
his curtains drawn!’ Seeing, then, how any vivid impression once made
will recur, what wonder that you should behold in your prison the
Shining Shadow that had first startled you in a wizard’s chamber when
poring over the records of a murdered visionary? The more minutely
you analyze your own hallucinations--pardon me the word--the more they
assume the usual characteristics of a dream; contradictory, illogical,
even in the marvels they represent. Can any two persons be more totally
unlike each other, not merely as to form and years, but as to all the
elements of character, than the Grayle of whom you read, or believe
you read, and the Margrave in whom you evidently think that Grayle is
existent still? The one represented, you say, as gloomy, saturnine, with
vehement passions, but with an original grandeur of thought and will,
consumed by an internal remorse; the other you paint to me as a joyous
and wayward darling of Nature, acute yet frivolous, free from even
the ordinary passions of youth, taking delight in innocent amusements,
incapable of continuous study, without a single pang of repentance
for the crimes you so fancifully impute to him. And now, when your
suspicions, so romantically conceived, are dispelled by positive facts,
now, when it is clear that Margrave neither murdered Sir Philip Derval
nor abstracted the memoir, you still, unconsciously to yourself, draw
on your imagination in order to excuse the suspicion your pride of
intellect declines to banish, and suppose that this youthful sorcerer
tempted the madman to the murder, the woman to the theft--”
“But you forget the madman said ‘that he was led on by the Luminous
Shadow of a beautiful youth,’ that the woman said also that she was
impelled by some mysterious agency.”
“I do not forget those coincidences; but how your learning would dismiss
them as nugatory were your imagination not disposed to exaggerate them!
When you read the authentic histories of any popular illusion, such
as the spurious inspirations of the Jansenist Convulsionaries, the
apparitions that invaded convents, as deposed in the trial of Urbain
Grandier, the confessions of witches and wizards in places the
most remote from each other, or, at this day, the tales of
‘spirit-manifestation’ recorded in half the towns and villages of
America,--do not all the superstitious impressions of a particular time
have a common family likeness? What one sees, another sees, though there
has been no communication between the two. I cannot tell you why these
phantasms thus partake of the nature of an atmospheric epidemic; the
fact remains incontestable. And strange as may be the coincidence
between your impressions of a mystic agency and those of some other
brains not cognizant of the chimeras of your own, still, is it not
simpler philosophy to say, ‘They are coincidences of the same nature
which made witches in the same epoch all tell much the same story of
the broomsticks they rode and the sabbats at which they danced to the
fiend’s piping,’ and there leave the matter, as in science we must leave
many of the most elementary and familiar phenomena inexplicable as to
their causes,--is not this, I say, more philosophical than to insist
upon an explanation which accepts the supernatural rather than leave the
extraordinary unaccounted for?”
“As you speak,” said I, resting my downcast face upon my hand, “I should
speak to any patient who had confided to me the tale I have told to
you.”
“And yet the explanation does not wholly satisfy you? Very likely: to
some phenomena there is, as yet, no explanation. Perhaps Newton himself
could not explain quite to his own satisfaction why he was haunted at
midnight by the spectrum of a sun; though I have no doubt that some
later philosopher whose ingenuity has been stimulated by Newton’s
account, has, by this time, suggested a rational solution of
that enigma.(8) To return to your own case. I have offered such
interpretations of the mysteries that confound you as appear to me
authorized by physiological science. Should you adduce other facts which
physiological science wants the data to resolve into phenomena always
natural, however rare, still hold fast to that simple saying of Goethe:
‘Mysteries are not necessarily miracles.’ And if all which physiological
science comprehends in its experience wholly fails us, I may then
hazard certain conjectures in which, by acknowledging ignorance, one is
compelled to recognize the Marvellous (for as where knowledge enters,
the Marvellous recedes, so where knowledge falters, the Marvellous
advances); yet still, even in those conjectures, I will distinguish the
Marvellous from the Supernatural. But, for the present, I advise you to
accept the guess that may best quiet the fevered imagination which any
bolder guess would only more excite.”
“You are right,” said I, rising proudly to the full height of my
stature, my head erect and my heart defying. “And so let this subject
be renewed no more between us. I will brood over it no more myself.
I regain the unclouded realm of my human intelligence; and, in that
intelligence, I mock the sorcerer and disdain the spectre.”
(1) Beattie’s “Essay on Truth,” part i. c. ii. 3. The story of Simon
Browne is to be found in “The Adventurer.”
(2) Miller’s Physiology of the Senses, p. 394.
(3) Abercrombie on the Intellectual Powers, p. 281. (15th edition.)
(4) At the date of Faber’s conversation with Allen Fenwick, the
(so-called) spirit manifestations had not spread from America over
Europe. But if they had, Faber’s views would, no doubt, have remained
the same.
(5) Abercrombie on the Intellectual Powers, p. 278. (15th edition.)
This author, not more to be admired for his intelligence than his
candour, and who is entitled to praise for a higher degree of original
thought than that to which he modestly pretends, relates a curious
anecdote illustrating “the analogy between dreaming and spectral
illusion, which he received from the gentleman to which it occurred,--an
eminent medical friend:” “Having sat up late one evening, under
considerable anxiety for one of his children, who was ill, he fell
asleep in his chair, and had a frightful dream, in which the prominent
figure was an immense baboon. He awoke with the fright, got up
instantly, and walked to a table which was in the middle of the room.
He was then quite awake, and quite conscious of the articles around him;
but close by the wall in the end of the apartment he distinctly saw the
baboon making the same grimaces which he had seen in his dreams; and
this spectre continued visible for about half a minute.” Now, a man
who saw only a baboon would be quite ready to admit that it was but an
optical illusion; but if, instead of a baboon, he had seen an intimate
friend, and that friend, by some coincidence of time, had died about
that date, he would be a very strong-minded man if he admitted for the
mystery of seeing his friend the same natural solution which he would
readily admit for seeing a baboon.
(6) See Muller’s observations on this phenomenon, “Physiology of the
Senses,” Baley’s translation, p. 1395.
(7) Sir David Brewster’s Letters on Natural Magic, p. 39.
(8) Newton’s explanation is as follows: “This story I tell you to let
you understand, that in the observation related by Mr. Boyle, the man’s
fancy probably concurred with the impression made by the sun’s light
to produce that phantasm of the sun which he constantly saw in bright
objects, and so your question about the cause of this phantasm involves
another about the power of the fancy, which I must confess is too hard a
knot for me to untie. To place this effect in a constant motion is hard,
because the sun ought then to appear perpetually. It seems rather
to consist in a disposition of the sensorium to move the imagination
strongly, and to be easily moved both by the imagination and by the
light as often as bright objects are looked upon.”--Letter from Sir I.
Newton to Locke, Lord Kinq’s Life of Locke, vol. i. pp. 405-408.
Dr. Roget (Animal and Vegetable Physiology considered with reference to
Natural Theology, “Bridgewater Treatise,” pp. 524, 525) thus refers to
this phenomenon, which he states “all of us may experience “:--
“When the impressions are very vivid” (Dr. Roget is speaking of visual
impressions), “another phenomenon often takes place,--namely, their
subsequent recurrence after a certain interval, during which they are
not felt, and quite independently of any renewed application of the
cause which had originally excited them.” (I mark by italics the words
which more precisely coincide with Julius Faber’s explanations.) “If,
for example, we look steadfastly at the sun for a second or two, and
then immediately close our eyes, the image, or spectrum, of the sun
remains for a long time present to the mind, as if the light were still
acting on the retina. It then gradually fades and disappears; but if
we continue to keep the eyes shut, the same impression will, after
a certain time, recur, and again vanish: and this phenomenon will be
repeated at intervals, the sensation becoming fainter at each renewal.
It is probable that these reappearances of the image, after the
light which produced the original impression has been withdrawn, are
occasioned by spontaneous affections of the retina itself which are
conveyed to the sensorium. In other cases, where the impressions are
less strong, the physical changes producing these changes are perhaps
confined to the sensorium.”
It may be said that there is this difference between the spectrum of the
sun and such a phantom as that which perplexed Allen Fenwick,--namely,
that the sun has been actually beheld before its visionary appearance
can be reproduced, and that Allen Fenwick only imagines he has seen the
apparition which repeats itself to his fancy. “But there are grounds for
the suspicion” (says Dr. Hibbert, “Philosophy of Apparitions,” p. 250),
“that when ideas of vision are vivified to the height of sensation, a
corresponding affection of the optic nerve accompanies the illusion.”
Muller (“Physiology of the Senses,” p. 1392, Baley’s translation) states
the same opinion still more strongly; and Sir David Brewster, quoted
by Dr. Hibbert (p. 251) says: “In examining these mental impressions, I
have found that they follow the motions of the eyeball exactly like the
spectral impressions of luminous objects, and that they resemble them
also in their apparent immobility when the eye is displaced by an
external force. If this result (which I state with much diffidence, from
having only my own experience in its favour) 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.” Hence the impression of an image once conveyed to the
senses, no matter how, whether by actual or illusory vision, is liable
to renewal, “independently of any renewed application of the cause which
had originally excited it,” and the image can be seen in that renewal
“as distinctly as external objects,” for indeed “the revival of the
fantastic figure really does affect those points of the retina which had
been previously impressed.”