by the Shadow of the fiend. Newton himself
has been subjected to a phantom, though to
him, Son of Light, the spectre presented was
that of the sun! You remember the account
that Newton gives to Locke of this visionary
appearance. He says that 'though he had
looked at the sun with his right eye only, and
not with the left, yet his fancy began to make
an impression upon his left eye as well as his
right, for if he shut his right and looked
upon the clouds, or a book, or any bright
object with his left eye, he could see the sun
almost as plain as with the right, if he did
but intend his fancy a little while on it;' nay,
'for some months after, as often as he began to
meditate on the phenomena, the spectrum of
the sun began to return, even though he lay in
bed at midnight, with his curtains drawn!'
Seeing, then, how any vivid impression once
made will recur, what wonder that you should
behold in your prison the Shining Shadow that
had first startled you in a wizard's chamber when
poring over the records of a murdered visionary?
The more minutely you analyse your own
hallucinations—  pardon me the word—the more they
assume the usual characteristics of a dream;
contradictory, illogical, even in the marvels
they represent. Can any two persons be more
totally unlike each other, not merely as to
form and years, but as to all the elements of
character, than the Grayle of whom you read,
or believe you read, and the Margrave in whom
vou evidently think that Grayle is existent still?
The one represented, you say, as gloomy, saturnine,
with vehement passions, but with an
original grandeur of thought and will,
consumed by an internal remorse; the other you
paint to me as a joyous and wayward darling of
Nature, acute yet frivolous, free from even the
ordinary passions of youth, taking delight in
innocent amusements, incapable of continuous
study, without a single pang of repentance for
the crimes you so fancifully impute to him. And
now, when your suspicions, so romantically
conceived, are dispelled by positive facts, now,
when it is clear that Margrave neither murdered
Sir Philip Derval nor abstracted the memoir,
you still, unconsciously to yourself, draw
on your imagination in order to excuse the
suspicion your pride of intellect declines to banish,
and suppose that this youthful sorcerer tempted
the madman to the murder, the woman to the
theft——"

"But you forget the madman said 'that he
was led on by the Luminous Shadow of a beautiful
youth,' that the woman said also that she
was impelled by some mysterious agency."

"I do not forget those coincidences; but
how your learning would dismiss them as
nugatory were your imagination not disposed to
exaggerate them! When you read the authentic
histories of any popular illusion, such as the
spurious inspirations of the Jansenist
Convulsionaries, the apparitions that invaded convents,
as deposed to in the trial of Urbain Grandier,
the confessions of witches and wizards in places
the most remote from each other, or, at this day,
the tales of ' spirit-manifestation' recorded in half
the towns and villages of America—do not all
the superstitious impressions of a particular time
have a common family likeness? What one sees
another sees, though there has been no communcation
between the two. I cannot tell you why
these phantasms thus partake of the nature of
an atmospheric epidemic; the fact remains
incontestable. And, strange as may be the
coincidence between your impressions of a mystic
agency and those of some other brains not
cognisant of the chimeras of your own, still, is
it not simpler philosophy to say, ' They are
coincidences of the same nature which made witches
in the same epoch all tell much the same story
of the broomsticks they rode and the sabbats
at which they danced to the fiend's piping,'
and there leave the matter, as in science we
must leave many of the most elementary and
familiar phenomena inexplicable as to their
causes—is not this, I say, more philosophical
than to insist upon an explanation which accepts
the supernatural rather than leave the extraordinary
unaccounted for?"

"As you speak," said I, resting my downcast
face upon my hand, " I should speak to any
patient who had confided to me the tale I have
told to you."

"And yet the explanation does not wholly
satisfy you? Very likely: to some phenomena
there is, as yet, no explanation. Perhaps Newton
himself could not explain quite to his own
satisfaction why he was haunted at midnight by the
spectrum of a sun; though I have no doubt
that some later philosopher, whose ingenuity
has been stimulated by Newton's account, has,
by this time, suggested a rational solution of
that enigma.* To return to your own case.

* Newton's explanation is as follows: " This story
I tell you to let you understand, that in the observation
related by Mr. Boyle, the man's fancy probably
concurred with the impression made by the
sun's light to produce that phantasm of the sun
which he constantly saw in bright objects, and so
your question about the cause of this phantasm involves
another about the power of the fancy, which I
must confess is too hard a knot for me to untie. To
place this effect in a constant motion is hard, because
the sun ought then to appear perpetually. It seems
rather to consist in a disposition of the sensorium to
move the imagination strongly, and to be easily
moved both by the imagination and by the light as
often as bright objects are looked upon." Letter
from Sir I. Newton to Locke, Lord King's Life of
Locke, vol. i. pp. 405-8.

Dr. Roget (Animal and Vegetable Physiology
Considered with reference to Natural Theology,
Bridgewater Treatise, pp. 524, 525), thus refers to
this phenomenon, which he states " all of us may
experience:"

"When the impressions are very vivid" (Dr. Roget
is speaking of visual impressions) " another phenomenon
often takes place, namely,their subsequent recurrence
after a certain interval, during which they are not
felt, and quite independently of any renewed application
of the cause itihich had originally excited them." (I mark
by italics the words which more precisely coincide
with Julius Faber's explanations.) " If, for example,
we look steadfastly at the sun for a second or two,
and then immediately close our eyes, the image or
spectrum of the sun remains for a long time present
to the mind as if the light were still acting on the
retina. It then gradually fades and disappears;
but if we continue to keep the eyes shut, the same
impression will, after a certain time, recur and again
vanish: and this phenomenon will be repeated at
intervals, the sensation becoming fainter at each
renewal. It then gradually fades and disappears;
but if we continue to keep the eyes shut, the same
impression will after a time recur, and then vanish,
and this phenomenon will be repeated at intervals,
the sensation becoming fainter at each renewal. It
is probable that these reappearances of the image,
after the light which produced the original impression
has been withdrawn, are occasioned by spontaneous
affections of the retina itself which are conveyed to
the sensorium. In other cases where the impressions
are less strong, the physical changes producing these
changes are perhaps confined to the sensorium."

It may be said that there is this difference between
the spectrum of the sun and such a phantom
as that which perplexed Allen Fenwick—viz. that
the sun has been actually beheld before its visionary
appearance can be reproduced, and that Allen Fenwick
only imagines he has seen the apparition which
repeats itself to his fancy. " But there are grounds
for the suspicion" (says Dr. Hibbert, Philosophy of
Apparitions, p. 250), "that when ideas of vision are
vivified to the height of sensation, a corresponding affection
of the optic nerve accompanies the illusion." Müller
(Physiology of the Senses, p. 1392, Baley's translation)
states the same opinion still more strongly, and
Sir David Brewster, quoted by Dr. Hibbert (p. 251),
says: " In examining these mental impressions I have
found that they follow the motions of the eyeball
exactly like the spectral impressions of luminous
objects, and that they resemble them also in their
apparent immobility when the eye is displaced by
an external force. If this result (which I state with
much diffidence, from having only my own experience
in its favour) shall be found generally true
by others, it will follow that the objects of mental
contemplation may be seen as distinctly as external
objects, and will occupy the same local position in the
axis of vision, as if they had been formed by the
agency of light." Hence the impression of an image
once conveyed to the senses, no matter how, whether
by actual or illusory vision, is liable to renewal,
"independently of any renewed application of the
cause which had originally excited it," and can be
seen in that renewal "as distinctly as external
objects," for indeed "the revival of the fantastic
figure really does affect those points of the retina
which had been previously impressed,"