Apparitions, Ghosts, and Hallucinations - Page 2

rank the two last sorts of apparition, the wraith and ghost, with all the other kinds, which are undeniably caused by accident, by malady, mental or bodily, or by mere confusion and misapprehension, as when one, seeing a post in the moonlight, takes it for a ghost. Science, following a third path, would class all perceptions which 'have not the basis in fact that they seem to have' as 'hallucinations'. The stars seen after a blow on the eye are hallucinations,--there are no real stars in view,--and the friend, whose body seems to fill space before our sight when his body is really on a death-bed far away;-- and again, the appearance of the living friend whom we see in the drawing-room while he is really in the smoking-room or in Timbuctoo,--are hallucinations also. The common-sense of the matter is stated by Aristotle. 'The reason of the hallucinations is that appearances present themselves, not only when the object of sense is itself in motion, but also when the sense is stirred, as it would be by the presence of the object' (De Insomn., ii. 460, b, 23- 26).

The ghost in a haunted house is taken for a figure, say, of a monk, or of a monthly nurse, or what not, but no monthly nurse or monk is in the establishment. The 'percept,' is a 'percept,' for those who perceive it; the apparition is an apparition, for them, but the perception is hallucinatory.

So far, everybody is agreed: the differences begin when we ask what causes hallucinations, and what different classes of hallucinations exist? Taking the second question first, we find hallucinations divided into those which the percipient (or percipients) believes, at the moment, and perhaps later, to be real; and those which his judgment pronounces to be false. Famous cases of the latter class are the idola which beset Nicolai, who studied them, and wrote an account of them. After a period of trouble and trial, and neglect of blood-letting, Nicolai saw, first a dead man whom he had known, and, later, crowds of people, dead, living, known or unknown. The malady yielded to leeches. {183} Examples of the first sort of apparitions taken by the judgment to be real, are common in madness, in the intemperate, and in ghost stories. The maniac believes in his visionary attendant or enemy, the drunkard in his rats and snakes, the ghost-seer often supposes that he has actually seen an acquaintance (where no mistaken identity is possible) and only learns later that the person,--dead, or alive and well,--was at a distance. Thus the writer is acquainted with the story of a gentleman who, when at work in his study at a distance from England, saw a colleague in his profession enter the room. 'Just wait till I finish this business,' he said, but when he had hastily concluded his letter, or whatever he was engaged on, his friend had disappeared. That was the day of his friend's death, in England. Here then the hallucination was taken for a reality; indeed, there was nothing to suggest that it was