Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/753

Rh physiognomy. Landscapes present themselves much more rarely, but more distinctly, and, on the few occasions I remember, have been highly picturesque and pleasing, with a certain, but very limited power of varying them by an effort of will, which is not the case with the other sort of impressions. Of course," he adds, "I am now speaking of waking impressions, in perfect health, and under no sort of excitement."

There is, of course, as Sir John Herschel observes, one marked distinction between these spectra and the abstract forms referred to at the beginning of this paper: "The human features have nothing abstract in their form, and they are so intimately connected with our mental impressions that the associative principle may easily find, in casual and irregular patches of darkness caused by slight local pressure on the retina, the physiognomic exponent of our mental state. Even landscape scenery, to one habitually moved by the aspects of Nature in association with feeling, may be considered in the same predicament. We all know," he adds, "how easy it is to imagine faces in casual blots, and to fancy pictures in the fire."

However this may be, I am inclined to think that we have here an, as yet, unacknowledged source of many widely-prevailing conceptions of the "world unseen."

If we are to believe with the eminent German mythologist, Dr. Swartz, that there was a time, strange as it may now appear, "when men had not yet learned to suspect any collusion between their eyes and their fancy;" when fast-scudding clouds were flying horses or fleeting swans; when the rolling masses of vapor in the west, as the day declined, were mountains in the far-off cloud-land—not in the sense of poetic figments, but in sober reality—we can scarcely doubt but that the shadowy resemblances of which we have just spoken would be, in like manner, regarded as real existences.

Even stopping short of this extreme view of the case, I think it is difficult to suggest a more probable origin for that universally-prevailing belief, which peoples the darkness with shadowy forms—the thousand fleeting shapes which

"Make night hideous;"

or of that equally wide-spread faith in the existence of hidden realms of enchantment, of which we have types in the mystic caves of Eastern story, and the glimpses of fairy-land in our own folk-lore.

It will be observed that the phenomena above described present themselves in health, and in the absence of all excitement.

Where these two conditions are wanting, both voluntary and involuntary spectra present themselves with greater frequency and distinctness. Medical works abound in such cases, and Sir J. Herschel gives several suggestive examples from his own personal experience, which space forbids my quoting here.