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,
and 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 he 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,[2] 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 Bâle, in the family of Messrs. Bernoullie,
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 he 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.
[Footnote 2: Long the president of the Berlin Academy, and much favoured
by Frederick II., till he 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 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.