Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 13.djvu/729

Rh there." The religious ascetic who withdrew himself from the society of men to some solitary place in the desert or to some cave in the hills, there passing his lonely life in prayer and meditation, and mortifying his body with long fastings and frequent scourgings, brought himself to such a state of irritable exhaustion that he commonly saw, according to his mood of feeling, either visions of angels and saints who consoled him in his sufferings, or visions of devils who tempted and tormented him. The shipwrecked sailor, when delirious from the exhaustion produced by want of food and drink, sometimes has attractive visions of green fields and pleasant streams, and cannot be prevented from throwing himself overboard in the mad desire to reach them. The dying person, in the last stage of exhaustion from a wasting disease, has had his deathbed visions of joy or of horror; the good man, whose mind was at rest, has been comforted by visions of heaven; the wicked man, whose troubled conscience would not let him die in peace, has been terrified with spectres of horror—the murderer, perhaps, by the accusing apparition of his victim. These were thought at one time to be supernatural visitations; they are known now to be for the most part hallucinations, such as occur in the last stage of flickering life, when, to use Shakespeare's words—