e exacted by torture, it might be thought that the fancies of the
examiners supplied the phenomena, to which the sufferers merely gave an
enforced and worthless assent. But the confessions were as often voluntary
as forced, and were indeed rather triumphant bravadoes than confessions of
anything that the sufferers themselves deemed shameful. It was a true
belief in the minds of the parties affected. The question has already been
asked, were they _en rapport_ with the rest of the diseased multitude, in
whose minds the common delusion existed? The question presupposes a mental
sympathy and participation, by one mind, of images existing in another,
which is one of the alleged manifestations of clairvoyance. But there is
another mode of accounting for these and similar phenomena, which as yet
obtains the approval of physicians, more than any suggestions of
clairvoyant communications. It is, that there are certain states of the
body in which the patient truly believes himself to see particular
objects, to do particular acts, and to possess special powers, which to
the rest of the world have no existence, but in respect of the patient
himself are realities as visible, tangible, and perceptible, as the actual
existences which surround him. For example, it is a fact which admits of
no dispute, that a certain quantity of alcohol taken into the human
stomach will cause the drinker to fall into _delirium tremens_; and that
in that state the patient will, with his waking eyes, see objects of a
particular kind; in nine cases out of ten, the forms of rats and mice
running over his bed, and about his person. There is no public delusion
here, no popular mind possessed with a fixed idea of these appearances, to
which the individual delusions might be referred; yet the swallower of the
alcohol in Dublin, and the swallower of the alcohol in Calcutta, will both
see exactly the same sorts of appearances, and will both express precisely
the same horror and disgust at their supposed tormentors. Is it the case,
then, that, as the forms of rats and mice come into the minds of men in
one kind of mental sickness, the forms of men and women riding on goats
and broomsticks through the air, and the other apparatus of the
witch-sabbaths, may have been but the manifestations of another disordered
state of the mental organism, a symptom merely and concomitant of an
epidemical disease? It is easy enough to understand how symptoms so simple
as the appearanc