We have already hinted that events of an ordinary kind—illusions,
cases of mistaken identity, or hallucination—are probably the
ground-work in part of the Highland belief in second sight. Of
course, if a certain proportion of hallucinations were or could be
taken for “veridical,” attention would be given to these alone: the
others would be neglected. The Psychical Society has collected and
examined hundreds of these cases in modern life.
The Society may find out, experimentally, whether second sight can
be acquired in the manner described by Mr. Kirk—whether by the
hair tether, or by merely putting the foot under that of a seer.
Thus contact is used in thought reading, as, in second sight, the
seer by contact communicates his hallucination. Second sight itself
is now called telepathy, which, however, does not essentially
advance our knowledge of the subject. It is either very common, or
people who choose to claim the possession of it are very common.
In our society it is mere matter for idle tales; in the Highlands
the second sight was a belief and a system. Mr. Pepys and Dr.
Johnson investigated the matter, and Dr. Johnson came away open to
conviction, but unconvinced. The Psychical Society is now examining
second sight in the Highlands. It is interesting to learn that the
Presbyterian seers justified their visions out of the Bible, which
also justified the burning of these gifted men on occasion. Mr.
Kirk is tolerant enough to ascribe their visions to a “bounty of
Providence.” This may have passed, north of the Highland line, but in
Fife and the south the seers would speedily have been accommodated
with a stake and tar-barrel. The writings of Wodrow and Mr. Robert
Blair of St. Andrews (1650-60) prove that if a savoury preacher
wrought marvels, he was inspired, but if an amateur did the very same
things,—prophesied, healed diseases, and so forth,—he, or she, was
likely to be haled before the Presbytery, and possibly dragged to
the stake. In the Highlands these invidious distinctions were less
forcibly drawn. Mr. Kirk treats the whole question in his curiously
cold scientific way. If these things occur, they are in the realm of
Nature, and are results of causes which may be variously conjectured.
They may be providential, or a sport of evolution, derived from “a
complexionall Quality of the first acquirer,” which often becomes
hereditary in his lineage.
Lord Tarbott’s letter to an inquirer, Robert Boyle, is added by Mr.
Kirk to his little treatise, with his own annotations. His belief
that the Fairy sights could only be seen while the eyes are kept
steady without twinkling, is attested by a well-known anecdote. On
the afternoon of Culloden, a little girl, staying with Lord Lovat at
Gortuleg, was reading in a window-seat. Chancing to look out, she
saw a company of headlong riders hastening to the castle. Believing
them to be the _Sleagh Maith_, she tried hard to keep her eyes from
twinkling, that she might not lose the vision. But these, alas! were
no Fairies, they were Prince Charles and his men flying from the
victorious English. The tale proves that the belief long survived the
day of the minister of Aberfoyle. Lord Tarbott mentions, also, the
vision of the shroud on the breast of a man about to die, which seems
to be alluded to in the prophecy of Theoclymenus in the _Odyssey_.
Lord Tarbott’s tales are of the familiar kind, there are dozens
of such in _Theophilus Insulanus_. Mr. Kirk’s notes are chiefly
remarkable for his citation of Walter Grahame’s “evil eye,” which
killed what he praised,—a world-wide superstition, too common to need
supporting by foreign and classical examples.
Unluckily, at this point Mr. Kirk abandons what we may call his
scientific attitude. He has accounted for his “supernatural” affairs
as not supernatural at all, but phenomena in Nature, and subject,
like other phenomena, to laws. But now it occurs to him to explain
the conduct of his _Sleagh Maith_ as the result of missionary zeal on
their part: “they endeavour to convince us of a Deity;” though, on
the face of his argument, a Co-walker no more proves a Deity than
does an ordinary “walker.” He may have been reading “the learned
Dr. Mor” (More the Platonist), and may have altered his ideas. His
account of a girl who learned, or rather composed, a long poem by
aid of “our nimble and courteous spirits,” affords an early example
of what is called “an inspirational medium.” It is unlucky that Mr.
Kirk did not publish this work, of which he had a copy. The ordinary
“spiritual” poetry may be written, as Dr. Johnson said of _Ossian_,
“by any one who would abandon his mind to it.” When Mr. Kirk
maintains that Neolithic arrow-heads could not have been executed “by
all the Airt of man,” he relapses from his usual odd common-sense. He
also believes in men who are magically shot-proof, like Claverhouse,
who had to be shot by a silver bullet; like Archbishop Sharp, on
whom his pious assassins erroneously held that their bullets took
no effect; and like certain soldiers mentioned by Dugald Dalgetty
of Drumthwacket. This absurd belief was very generally held by
the Covenanters. Where his local superstitions and those of his
generation are not concerned, Mr. Kirk recovers his clearness of
intellect. In Purgatory he finds only the pre-Christian Hades, “our
Secret Republick,” with an ecclesiastical colouring—“additional
Fictions of Monks’ doting and crazied Heads.” Mr. Kirk did not
perceive the danger involved in his own argument. If a Highland
second-sighted man answers to a Hebrew prophet in his visions and
trances, a Hebrew prophet is in danger of being no more considered
than a Highland second-sighted man. However, it is to Mr. Kirk’s
praise that he shows no persecuting disposition as far as witches are
concerned (though he has seen them pricked), and that he argues very
fairly from his premisses, and within his limits.[28] He recognises
the unity of spiritual phenomena and of popular beliefs, whether it
springs from a common well-head of delusion in our nature, or whether
it really has a source in the observation of peculiar and rather rare
phenomena.
To the Edinburgh edition of 1815 (probably the only one) the editor
added the work of Theophilus Insulanus on Second Sight. This is
not rare nor expensive, and we do not reproduce it. One case of
“telepathy” may be quoted from Theophilus.
“Donald Beaton, residenter in Hammir, related that, in his passage
from Glasgow to the Isle of Sky, he stopped at Tippermory, a known
harbour in the Isle of Mull.” Here some one gave him a loin of
venison. Donald, whose wife’s mother was a seer, to try her powers,
wished that piece of venison in her hands. “The same night the seer,
who lived with her daughter, his wife, apprehended she saw him enter
the house with a shapeless lump in his hands—she knew not what, but
it resembled flesh, which gave herself and her daughter great joy, as
they had despaired of him by his long absence.” This is “telepathy,”
if telepathy there be.
Another picturesque tale shows how, on the night before the Rout
of Moy, Patrick M‘Caskill met the famed M‘Rimmon (_sic_), M‘Leod’s
piper, in the town of Inverness, and saw him contract into the
size of a boy of five or six, and expand again into his athletic
proportions. M‘Rimmon was killed in the Rout of Moy—an attempt
to surprise and seize Prince Charles. Before leaving Skye he had
prophesied—
“M‘Leod shall come back,
But M‘Rimmon shall never.”
The editor is acquainted with a splendid case of second sight in
Kensington. The seer was an accomplished English gentleman, and
mentioned his vision at the moment to a witness who remembers and
corroborates the statement. Thus the Hebrides and Highlands have no
monopoly of second sight.
The researches of M. Charcot, M. Richet, and other psychologists do
not at present help us much in the matter of veridical second sight.
It is not a hallucination “suggested” to a hypnotised subject, but
an impression produced by a remote person or event on a subject who
has not been hypnotised at all. For example, Dr. Adam Clarke, in his
_Life_ (vol. ii. p. 16) tells us of Mr. Tracy Clarke, who, being in
the Isle of Man with his son, dreamed that he had visited his wife in
Liverpool. He told his son that Mrs. Clarke was looking very well,
but, contrary to her habit, was sleeping in the best bedroom. On the
day when Mr. Clarke said this, Mrs. Clarke, who had been sleeping in
her best bedroom, told the little son who lay in her room that she
had heard his father ride up to the house, stable his horse, open
the door, come upstairs, and walk round her bed, but that she could
not see him. This is a case at least of second hearing, and has no
hypnotic explanation.
We end in the candid spirit of Dr. Johnson, as far as the
Polter-Geist and second sight are concerned—willing to be convinced,
but far indeed from conviction. As to the Fairy belief, we conceive
it to be a complex matter, from which tradition, with its memory of
earth-dwellers, is not wholly absent, while more is due to a survival
of the pre-Christian Hades, and to the belief in local spirits—the
Vuis of Melanesia, the Nereids of ancient and modern Greece, the
Lares of Rome, the fateful Mœræ and Hathors—old imaginings of a world
not yet “dispeopled of its dreams.”[29]
[Illustration: Puss-in-Boots smells a rat.]