Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/200

 184 HENRY RUTGERS MARSHALL: except under conditions of individualistic restraint which are foreign to the habits of the savage ; he would therefore with difficulty recognise them as definite impulses, as dis- tinct leadings ; and they would be likely first to gain marked attention if they happened to appear in the form of hal- lucinations which would startle the one who saw the hallucinatory vision or heard the hallucinatory voice, and would gain power with him, and with the neighbours to whom he told his tale, because of his and their crude animistic beliefs, which naturally led them to look for the manifestation of spirit life in all objects around them. It of course cannot be claimed that all hallucinations occasion emphasis of the later formed and higher impulses, for hallucinations are morbid phenomena and naturally appear persistently in neurotic patients. On the other hand, however, it is true that a great deal of hallucination does emphasise in a morbid way the higher impulses and does produce ethical mania and religious melancholia : Emerson l went so far indeed as to remark that a ' : certain tendency to insanity has always attended the opening of the religious sense of men as if they had been ' blasted with excess of light ' ". But all that concerns us here is to note, that the condi- tions which tend to induce these hallucinatory states are the very conditions which would restrain all tendency to indi- vidualistic reaction and would leave opportunity for the less forceful but broader impulses to assert themselves. In extreme states of hallucinatory impression the one im- pressed falls into what we know as the trance state. In trance states some or all of the senses which bring to us our knowledge of the outer world are usually benumbed : the person "stares at vacancy" perhaps, or pays no attention whatever to his or her surroundings, and in general shows a total lack of that power to concentrate the attention upon the outer world at large which is so necessary for the per- ception of those objective conditions in the environment which lead to individualistic reactions. The one who per- ceives the hallucination may indeed fall into a state which is so morbid as to be indistinguishable from catalepsy. Where hallucination is not accompanied by such morbid conditions, we nevertheless have of necessity a repression of reaction to environmental stimuli, and a concentration of thought upon states of purely subjective origin ; how else can we explain the higher emphasis of those subjective 1 Compare his essay " The Over Soul ".