t of human nature. Meanwhile the comparatively few persons
who can see pictures in a clear depth, may be as innocently employed
while so doing, as if they were watching the clouds, or the embers.
'May be,' one must say, for crystal-seers are very apt to fall back
on our old friend, the animistic hypothesis, and to explain what
they see, or fancy they see, by the theory that 'spirits' are at the
bottom of it all. In Mrs. de Morgan's work From Matter to Spirit,
suggestions of this kind are not absent: 'As an explanation of
crystal-seeing, a spiritual drawing was once made, representing a
spirit directing on the crystal a stream of influence,' and so
forth. Mrs. de Morgan herself seemed rather to hold that the act of
staring at a crystal mesmerises the observer. The person who looks
at it often becomes sleepy. 'Sometimes the eyes close, at other
times tears flow.' People who become sleepy, or cry, or get
hypnotised, will probably consult their own health and comfort by
leaving crystal balls alone.

There are others, however, who are no more hypnotised by crystal-
gazing than tea-drinking, or gardening, or reading a book, and who
can still enjoy visions as beautiful as those of the opium eater,
without any of the reaction. Their condition remains perfectly
normal, that is, they are wide awake to all that is going on. In
some way their fancy is enlivened, and they can behold, in the
glass, just such vivid pictures as many persons habitually see
between sleeping and waking, illusions hypnagogiques. These
'hypnagogic illusions' Pontus de Tyard described in a pretty sonnet,
more than three hundred years ago. Maury, in his book on dreams has
recorded, and analysed them. They represent faces, places, a page
of print, a flame of fire, and so forth, and it is one of their
peculiarities that the faces rapidly shift and alter, generally from
beautiful to ugly. A crystal-seer seems to be a person who can see,
in a glass, while awake and with open eyes, visions akin to those
which perhaps the majority of people see with shut eyes, between
sleeping and waking. {214} It seems probable that people who, when
they think, see a mental picture of the subject of their thoughts,
people who are good 'visualisers,' are likely to succeed best with
the crystal, some of them can 'visualise' purposely, in the crystal,
while others cannot. Many who are very bad 'visualisers,' like the
writer, who think in words, not in pictures, see br