Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 13.djvu/728

708 which particularly agitated and distressed him, he suddenly saw at the distance often paces a figure—the standing figure of a deceased person. He asked his wife if she could not see it, but she, as she saw nothing, was alarmed and sent for a physician. When he went into another room it followed him. After troubling him for a day it disappeared, but was followed by several other distinct figures; some of them the figures of persons he knew, but most of them of persons he did not know. "After I had recovered," he says, "from the first impression of terror, I never felt myself particularly agitated by these apparitions, as I considered them to be what they really were—the extraordinary consequences of indisposition; on the contrary, I endeavored as much as possible to preserve my composure of mind, that I might remain distinctly conscious of what passed within me." He could trace no connection between the figures and his thoughts, nor could he call up at his own pleasure the phantoms of acquaintances which he tried to call up by vivid imagination of them; however accurately and intensely he pictured their figures to his mind, he never once succeeded in his desire to see them externally, although the figures of these very persons would often present themselves involuntarily. He saw the figures when alone and in company, in the daytime and in the night; when he shut his eyes they sometimes disappeared, sometimes not; they were as distinct as if they were real beings, but he had no trouble in distinguishing them from real figures. After four weeks they began to speak, sometimes to one another, but most often to him: their speeches were short and not disagreeable. Being recommended to lose some blood, he consented. During the operation the room swarmed with human figures, but a few hours afterward they moved more slowly, became gradually paler, and finally vanished. This example proves very clearly that a person may be haunted with apparitions, and yet observe them and reason about their nature as sanely as any indifferent outsider could do. It illustrates very well, too, the second mode of origin; for it is reasonable to suppose that they were produced by congestion of blood in the brain acting upon the sensory centres, and that they were dissipated by the removal of the congestion by bloodletting, This is the more probable, as cases have been recorded in which the suppression of an habitual discharge of blood from the body has been followed by hallucinations, and others again in which hallucinations have been cured by the abstraction of blood.

Exhaustion of the nerve-centres themselves by excessive fatigue, mental and bodily, or by starvation, or by disease, will cause a person to see visions sometimes. I may call to mind the well-known case of Brutus, who, as he sat alone at night in his tent before the decisive battle of Philippi, rapt in meditation, saw on raising his eyes a monstrous and horrible spectre standing silently by his side. "Who art thou?" he asked. The spectre answered: "I am thy evil genius, Brutus. Thou wilt see me at Philippi." He replied, "I will meet thee