places may be
seen and described by clairvoyance, or _vue a distance_.

Now Hegel accepted as genuine the facts which we here adduce merely for
the sake of argument, and by way of illustrations. But he did not regard
the clairvoyant consciousness (or whatever we call it) which, _ex
hypothesi_, is untrammelled by space, or even by time, as occupying what
we style the _upper_ end of the psychical spectrum. On the contrary, he
placed it at the _lower_ end. Hegel's upper end 'loses itself in light;'
the lower end, _qui voit tant de choses_, as La Fontaine's shepherd says,
is _not_ 'a sublime mental phase, and capable of conveying general
truths.' Time and space do not thwart the consciousness at Hegel's _lower_
end, which springs from 'the great soul of nature.' But that lower end,
though it may see for Jeanne d'Arc at Valcouleurs a battle at Rouvray, a
hundred leagues away, does not communicate any lofty philosophic
truths.[14] The phenomena of clairvoyance, in Hegel's opinion, merely
indicate that the 'material' is really 'ideal,' which, perhaps, is as much
as we can ask from them. 'The somnambulist and clairvoyant see without
eyes, and carry their visions directly into regions where the waiting
consciousness of orderly intelligence cannot enter' (Wallace). Hegel
admits, however, that 'in ordinary self-possessed conscious life' there
are traces of the 'magic tie,' 'especially between female friends of
delicate nerves,' to whom he adds husband and wife, and members of the
same family. He gives (without date or source) a case of a girl in Germany
who saw her brother lying dead in a hospital at Valladolid. Her brother
was at the time in the hospital, but it was another man in the nest bed
who was dead. 'It is thus impossible to make out whether what the
clairvoyants really see preponderates over what they deceive themselves
in.'

As long as the facts which Hegel accepted are not officially welcomed by
science, it may seem superfluous to dispute as to whether they are
attained by the lower or the higher stratum of our consciousness. But
perhaps the question here at issue may be elucidated by some remarks of
Dr. Max Dessoir. Psychology, he says, has proved that in every conception
and idea an image or group of images must be present. These mental images
are the recrudescence or recurrence of perceptions. We see a tree, or a
man, or a dog, and whenever we have before our minds the conception or
idea of any of these things the