ety,
to an apprehension of secret enemies, nor even to a habit of being
hallucinated, though, like Nicolai, he knows that his visionary
friends are unreal. Thus we would not listen credulously to a ghost
story out of his own experience from a man whose eyes were
untrustworthy, nor from a short-sighted man who had recognised a
dead or dying friend on the street, nor from a drunkard. A tale of
a vision of a religious character from Pascal, or from a Red Indian
boy during his Medicine Fast, or even from a colonel of dragoons who
fell at Prestonpans, might be interesting, but would not be evidence
for our special purpose. The ghosts beheld by conscience-stricken
murderers, by sorrowing widowers, by spiritualists in dark rooms,
haunted by humbugs, or those seen by lunatics, or by children, or by
timid people in lonely old houses, or by people who, though sane at
the time, go mad twenty years later, or by sane people habitually
visionary, these and many other ghosts, we must begin, like Le
Loyer, by rejecting. These witnesses have too much cerebral
activity at the wrong time and place. They start their
hallucinations from the external terminus, the unhealthy organ of
sense; from the morbid central terminus; or from some dilapidated
cerebral station along the line. But, when we have, in a sane man's
experience, say one hallucination whether that hallucination does,
or does not coincide with a crisis in the life, or perhaps with the
death of the person who seems to be seen, what are we to think? Or
again, when several witnesses simultaneously have the same
hallucination,--not to be explained as a common misinterpretation of
a real object,--what are we to think? This is the true question of
ghosts and wraiths. That apparitions, so named by the world, do
appear, is certain, just as it is certain that visionary rats appear
to drunkards in delirium tremens. But, as we are only to take the
evidence of sane and healthy witnesses, who were neither in anxiety,
grief, or other excitement, when they perceived their one
hallucination, there seems to be a difference between their
hallucinations and those of alcoholism, fanaticism, sorrow, or
anxiety. Now the common mistakes in dealing with this topic have
been to make too much, or to make too little, of the coincidences
between the hallucinatory appearance of an absent person, and his
death, or some other grave crisis affecting him. Too little is made
of such coincidences by D