Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/894

812 desire to see the color and size of his eyes, that I might tell of them afterward, but this favor I never won. All my efforts only caused the vision to disappear" "As the clouds draw to themselves the vapors of earth, so does he draw our souls to himself, ravishes them out of themselves, brings them upon the clouds of his majesty to heaven with him, and begins to reveal to them the mysteries of the kingdom which he has prepared for them. . . . In these ecstasies the soul seems to leave the body. Hence the natural warmth diminishes, the limbs slowly grow cold, although one feels the while most comfortable. In the prayer of union, in which we find ourselves already in our native country, we can almost always resist the divine attraction, though it be with difficulty and with great effort, but not in ecstasy; all resistance is then usually impossible. Before one thinks there comes a shock so sudden and mighty that one sees and feels as if that cloud from heaven, or that divine eagle, had swept one away and borne one off in flight." "This condition is a sleep of the mental powers, in which they, without being wholly merged in God, yet can not tell how they work. The pleasure, the bliss, is incomparably greater than in the preceding state of prayer. The soul is overflowed with the water of God's grace, which flows full to the banks. She can not and will not go either forward or backward, and only glows with the desire to enjoy such transcendent majesty. . . . My state then seems to me an absolute death to all worldly things and a ravishment in God. I know no fit simile for what the soul then feels. She no longer knows what she does, whether she talks, is silent, laughs, or weeps. It is like a blissful delirium, a heavenly madness, in which one learns true wisdom; in short, it is a sort of most exquisite bliss."

With these few illustrations I must turn from the forms of trance which appear to result from the hypertrophy of some mental state to a very different type. From the theoretical point of view we would expect to find the lines of cleavage—so to speak—in disordination taking different directions in different people. In the cases of which I have been speaking the mental co-ordination would seem to be pretty much dissolved or displaced. In other cases, to which I shall return later—those of so-called secondary—personality we shall find the lines of cleavage relatively few, and constant in their direction and location. But to the trance states proper belong those forms of disordination in which the inner life of thought is left intact while dissociated from movement, from sensation, or from both. The chronic cases in which some movements or some sensations only are lost are grouped under hysteria rather than under trance; the more complete and transitory forms properly belong to trance.

Of the second of these three conceivable cases, in which all