Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/191

 Rh for his funeral. Not only were his friends deceived in his case, which was one of coma, but he himself was doubly illusioned, for he both thought that he was dead and that his spirit had entered paradise. His soul, as he thought, was borne aloft, to celestial altitudes, and was enraptured with visions of the Deity and angelic hosts. He seemed to dwell in an enchanted region of limitless light and inconceivable splendor. At last an angel came to him and told him that he must go back. Darkness, like an overawing shadow, shut out the celestial glories, and, full of sudden horror, he uttered a deep groan. This dismal utterance was heard by those around him, and prevented him from being buried alive, after all the preparations had been made for the removal of the body.

In certain forms of physical prostration, the mind seems to the patient to be capable of unusual freedom; to be in and out of the body at the same time, to be able to make impressions at a distance, and to have a knowledge of itself and of events transpiring around it quite beyond the usual range of the faculties. In analyzing these seeming powers, it is impossible to separate the imaginary from what may be real, and to determine the exact limit of mental action. Plutarch relates that a certain profligate and profane man, named Thespesius, fell from a great height and was taken up apparently dead. He remained in a state of seeming insensibility for three days, but on the day appointed for the funeral unexpectedly revived, and from this time a remarkable change was observed in his moral conduct and character. On inquiry being made as to the cause of the sudden reformation, he said that, in his state of apparent insensibility, he had been made so clearly to see the relation of mind to matter as to be convinced of the future existence of the soul. After his injury he had supposed himself to be dead, and his spirit to be separated from the body. He had seemed to float in an abysm of light, and to be surrounded by spirits transcendently bright and glorious. One of the latter at last announced to him that he must return to the flesh again, when he suddenly seemed to reappear on earth, as a being from another world. In 1733, Johann Schwerzeger, after a long illness, fell into a comatose state, from which he recovered. He said that he had seen as in a vision his whole life pass before him, even events which, before his sickness, he seemed to have quite forgotten. He further stated that he thought he was about to enter a state of rest and happiness, when he was recalled to the world; that he was sorry to have come back, but that he should remain here but two days. His death fulfilled the prediction.

But perhaps the most remarkable of all phenomena of this nature is a certain power a few patients have seemed to possess of "withdrawing from sensation," of becoming at will insensible to pain, and of producing a resemblance of death. Colonel Townsend, an Englishman, who died at the end of the last century, had in his last sickness the