stories of marvellous things, but with a theory
to which I refer those marvellous things, I have
a particularly mysterious theory to propound—
something dark and infinite—the electricity, in
short, of the immaterial world.

If I succeed in generalising very perplexing
and awful appearances by a law, however strange,
which shall be felt efficient; if I can substitute
one mystery for many; I feel as if I should
render some service to mankind. Thus shall I
encounter superstition, in her very den, and slay
her, let me hope, by the mere admission of light:
for, like that singular eyeless creature, the
Proteus, she dies when out of her caverned
darkness. A recognised law kills her; but an
inadequate law is her sustenance. In truth, the
explainers of apparitions by trite causes are her
dearest friends. Delusions of the senses, curious
coincidences, figments of imagination, are felt to
be causes so poor and lame, of apparitional
wonders, that they only serve as goads to incessant
speculation of an unhealthy and irritative
kind. The desire and the power to
investigate the unknown, are in us—are part and
parcel of our existence. Starve the desire,
thwart the faculty, give them inappropriate
nutrition, and, like all other thwarted desires
and faculties, they take their revenge.

I proceed to propound my theory of forebodings,
warnings, apparitions, and the like. I
have been consulted, as a Physician, in great
numbers of such cases; I have founded my
theory on my experience and my reasoning
from it.

The moral electricity to which I refer these
undoubted phenomena of our being—the mighty
law which is to explain them all, while itself
rests unexplained, and is shrined in the very
cloud from which its lightnings flash—is, briefly,
the influence of one human being on another, and
of God upon us all.

In order to explain myself, I am afraid I must
be somewhat metaphysical; rather, according to
my idea, I should say, I rejoice I must be
metaphysical: for my explanation will, from that
necessity, acquire more of the mystical element,
which I consider to be indispensable to explanations
of the marvellous.

Plunging boldly, then, into the far-down depths
of the subject, I remark that all ultimate changes
of the antecedents to sensation are in ourselves
—that feeling, sight, and hearing, are personal
attributes—subjective faculties, which
concentrate all outward and objective phenomena
into a man's own consciousness; that,
consequently, what lies out of ourselves is known
to us primarily by its effects. Those who are
grounded in this important truth, may next
proceed to consider how far we can classify
and designate things external. From the
subjective we step to the objective. On consideration,
we find that the objective is only
capable of a twofold division, that is to say,
the external universe, and man himself: each
human being becoming objective to each, according
as these dualities come within the field of
reciprocal observation.

Deducing God from His works, we have the
external world as the representative of the
thoughts of God, and our brother man as the
reflection to us of our own existence—the objective
representation of our inward consciousness.
With the external world we communicate by
the aid of our senses; but, if we admit either
intuitions implanted from the beginning (which
philosophy seems now disposed to admit), or
God communicating with us through his works
mediately, or through our minds immediately
(which latter, theology expressly asserts), we
arrive at something beyond the mere senses,
in the same way, we arrive at man communicating
with man by means of his external
senses. We see, we hear, we shake hands with,
and so feel a friend, and, apparently, we recognise
the presence of another person in a room by
no other means than we do that of the tree in
the garden. But, many phenomena—of which
more hereafter—conspire to make an observant
man suspect that, beneath the senses, is a deeper
recognition of the existence of other men
—that not only the idea of external man
is essential and innate, but that the influence
man has on man is peculiar, and not explicable
by the mere action of the senses, or even of the
mind.

There is a vast difference between the real
external world and the seeming external world.
It is well known that there is a world of internal
vision, a phantom world within us, which many
and very different causes may invest with apparent
substance. The cerebral excitement of
fever, those obstructions or organic changes of the
brain which produce insanity. Even less: some
such fulness of blood-vessels as caused the Berlin
bookseller Nicolai to behold ocular spectra, may,
as well as many other physical states of being,
bring about apparent externity of objects which
are really within the camera obscura of the
mind. I well remember a late celebrated
physician of Birmingham telling me an anecdote
respecting himself, which bears upon this point.
He was sitting writing at a late hour in his
study, when, lifting up his eyes, he saw, as he
thought, his maid Betty standing close to his elbow
with a lighted bedroom candle in her hand.
Supposing this to be a hint that Betty wanted him
to go to bed, or rather was herself sleepy, he
said to her, " Betty, you may set down the candle
and go to bed. I don't want anything more to-
night." Absorbed in writing, Dr. L. conceiving
Betty to be gone, did not look up for some time
after this. But when he again raised his eyes,
there stood Betty with the candle in her hand
as before. The command to set it down and to
go to bed was repeated; but Betty never stirred.
At length, when this had happened more than
two or three times, the doctor, surprised at
Betty's supposed perversity, and thinking she
must be afflicted with sudden deafness, put out
his hand to push her gently towards the door,
thereby more energetically to demonstrate that
she was, on this occasion, "Madame de Trop."
Then, said Dr. L., I received an unpleasant
shock in discovering that Betty was but thin