Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/689

Rh wonderfully illustrated in the dagger-scene of "Macbeth." Intent on murder, with "courage screwed to the sticking-place," Macbeth is about to enter the king's chamber, when he is startled and dismayed by an apparition of a bloody dagger in the air. For a moment he questions the reliability of his sight, and exclaims:

"Is this a dagger which I see before me, &ensp;The handle towards my hand?"

He can not believe the testimony of his eyes, and therefore seeks confirmation in the sense of touch:

". . . Come, let me clutch thee: I have thee not, and yet I see thee still."

Failing to grasp the dagger, he wonderingly asks:

"Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible &ensp;To feeling as to sight?"

And then, as if reason were struggling to gain supremacy over the senses, he continues:

A dagger of the mind, a false creation Proceeding from a heat-oppressed brain?"

How suggestive, how replete with truth was this prophetic utterance; and yet the intensity of his mind's tension—because of the deed to be done and the vision of the instrument for its execution—still makes the terrible idea the dominating factor of his mind, and subordinates the senses to its rule! He is not yet able to entirely dispel the hallucination, and he compares the apparition to the trusted blade at his side:

"I see thee yet, in form as palpable &ensp;As this which now I draw. . . . I see thee still, &ensp;And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood &ensp;Which was not so before"

And then, as if the blood upon the dagger had, by its horrid suggestiveness, steadied his brain, Reason once more resumes her seat and denies the apparition, by asserting—

". . . There's no such thing; &ensp;It is the bloody business which informs &ensp;Thus to mine eyes."

These false perceptions, these illusions and hallucinations, while they do not necessarily indicate any mental unsoundness, have been, however, the fruitful source of those apparitions, whether of demons, fairies, or ghosts, which have added to the credulity of man, intensified his superstitions, and made possible the organization of human error under such forms of belief as are typically illustrated by witchcraft and spiritualism.

So loner as an individual is conscious that the illusions and