are therefore explained by our theory, and it is further
confirmed by the hallucinations of animals, and especially by the
delirium of dogs and other animals affected by hydrophobia, or by
cerebral excitement artificially produced by alcoholic and exhilarating
drugs.

If a man is habitually subject to many and various hallucinations, and
his sane judgment esteems them to be such, they are undoubtedly unusual
phenomena, but they do not in any way injure the rational exercise of
the mind. It is only when he believes the images to be real that the
abnormal state begins, termed delirium if it is of short duration, and
madness if it is permanent. We must examine hallucination under these
new conditions.

In the delirium of fever, or in various forms of disease, the cerebral
excitement is so great that not only the deliberate exercise of reason,
but the power of estimating external objects is lost, and the organs of
the senses are so completely altered, that the perceptions themselves
are exaggerated and confused. In this state hallucination reaches its
highest point, and the patient sees, hears, and feels, directly or
indirectly, strange and terrible things: wild beasts, enemies of all
kind, torments; or again, pleasing and agreeable images. Independently
of the alteration in various sensations produced by the morbid
alteration of the special organs which induce them, the real cause of
this phenomenon consists in the objection of mental sensations and
images. Such an objection of images or sensations, considered in the act
which transforms them into a reality, depends on the same cause as all
other acts of perception; there is always an entification of the
phenomenon, which in this case is a vivid internal image, appearing to
be external and real.

The entification of images is still more direct and powerful because in
this morbid crisis the necessary corrections made by reason cannot take
place, since the sick man is for the time deprived of it, and he is in
fact a dreamer, whose condition is intensified by abnormal excitement.
Entification is now displayed in its nude and native state, and serves
to explain the constant mental process, and the true nature of the
representations of the intellect. The transition is easy from delirium
to madness, for although an insane person is not always delirious, but
sometimes calm and composed, yet there is a fundamental resemblance to
delirium in the change in his states of conscious