treat beneath the
shade of the palms of Engaddi, who beguiled their weary hours in the
chanting of psalms by the bitter waters of the Dead Sea; from the
philosophic Hindu, who sought for happiness in bodily inaction and
mental exercise, to these Christian solitaries, the stages of delusion
are numerous and successive. It would not be difficult to present
examples of each step in the career of debasement. To one who is
acquainted with the working and accidents of the human brain, it will
not be surprizing that an asylum for hermits who had become hopelessly
insane was instituted at Jerusalem.

[Sidenote: Causes of hallucinations.]

The biographies of these recluses, for ages a source of consolation to
the faithful in their temptations, are not to be regarded as mere works
of fiction, though they abound in supernatural occurrences, and are the
forerunners of the daemonology of the Middle Ages. The whole world was a
scene of daemoniac adventures, of miracles and wonders. So far from being
mere impostures, they relate nothing more than may be witnessed at any
time under similar conditions. In the brain of man, impressions of
whatever he has seen or heard, of whatever has been made manifest to him
by his other senses, nay, even the vestiges of his former thoughts, are
stored up. These traces are most vivid at first, but, by degrees, they
decline in force, though they probably never completely die out. During
our waking hours, while we are perpetually receiving new impressions
from things that surround us, such vestiges are overpowered, and cannot
attract the attention of the mind. But in the period of sleep, when
external influences cease, they present themselves to our regard, and
the mind submitting to the delusion, groups them into the fantastic
forms of dreams. By the use of opium and other drugs which can blunt our
sensibility to passing events, these phantasms may be made to emerge.
They also offer themselves in the delirium of fevers and in the hour of
death.

[Sidenote: Supernatural appearances.]

It is immaterial in what manner or by what agency our susceptibility to
the impressions of surrounding objects is benumbed, whether by drugs, or
sleep, or disease, as soon as their force is no greater than that of
forms already registered in the brain, those forms will emerge before
us, and dreams or apparitions are the result. So liable is the mind to
practise deception on itself, that with the utmost difficulty it is