one day with some comrades among rank
grass. The place was noted for adders, and the
youths talked about them. Instantly this lad
felt something enter the leg of his pantaloons
and twist itself with the swiftness of lightning
round his thigh. He stopped terrified, and
careful examination proved that the adder was
a creature of his imagination. The vividness
of the fancy of this youth made his waking
senses and his discerning faculties of no more use
to him for the moment than if they had been
asleep.

This condition of the brain is called by the
savans hallucination. Mueller, the physiologist,
and Goethe, the poet, have both described
hallucinations to which they were subject, and
which they compared in conversation together.
The rarest case, says Mueller, is that of an
individual who, whilst perfectly healthy in body and
mind, has the faculty, on closing his eyes, of
seeing really the objects he wishes to see. History
cites only a very few instances of this
phenomenon. Carden and Goethe were examples
of it.

Goethe says: "When I close my eyes and
stoop my head, I figure to myself and see a
flower in the middle of my visual organ. This
flower preserves only for an instant its first form.
It soon decomposes itself, and out of it issues
other flowers, with coloured and sometimes
green petals. They were not natural but
fantastic flowers, yet regular as the roses of the
sculptor. I could not look fixedly at that creation,
but it remained as long as I liked without
increasing or diminishing. In the same way
when I imagined a disk full of various colours,
I saw continually issue from the centre to the
circumference new forms like those of the
kaleidoscope."

Mueller talked this subject over with Goethe
in 1828. It was interesting to them both.
"Knowing," says Mueller, "that when I was
calmly lying on my bed with my eyes shut,
although not asleep, I often saw figures which
I could observe very well, he was very curious
to learn what I then felt. I told him that my
will had no influence either upon the production
or upon the changes of these figures, and that I
had never seen anything symmetrical or of the
character of vegetation."  Goethe could at will,
on the contrary, choose his theme, which
transformed itself forthwith in a manner apparently
involuntary, but always obeying the laws of
symmetry and harmony. Mueller used to get
rid of the figures which haunted him by
turning his face to the wall. Although he
did not see them change place, they were
still before him. but they soon began to
fade. Jean Paul recommended the observation
of these phantoms as a good plan for falling
asleep.

These are hallucinations of sane minds. The
delusive sensations of flying and falling are
known to many persons. Young girls lying in
bed between sleeping and waking at the epoch
of life when their girlhood is passing into
womanhood, are especially apt, like the religious
ecstatics, to fancy they are flying. And nearly
everybody is familiar with the hallucination of
falling from personal experience. When lying
in bed trying in vain to fall asleep, or to warm
the cold sheets, the patient feels as if sinking
through the floor, and stretches out his arms
suddenly to save himself: yet nothing has
happened except the coincidence of a cold shiver
with a complete expiration.

Physiologists and philosophers of authority
say we are all mad in our dreams; and, if the
absence of the control of reason is a true
definition of insanity, there is no gainsaying the
proposition. But madness means something
more. In dreams the faculties which control
the picturing or imagining powers are simply
inactive; they are neither absent nor incapable.
Far from identifying sleeping dreams with
madness, I feel disposed to contend that voluntary
and momentary hallucinations—seeing by the
blind, hearing by the deaf, sensations of smelling,
touching, tasting, things which do not exist
—are only signs of insanity when the faculties
needful for correcting the errors of sensation are
diseased. Persons unaccustomed to railway
travelling are not insane, although for many minutes
they often believe the train is going backwards,
because they retain the power of correcting the
hallucination by watching the objects they are
passing.

The senses are seeing, hearing, smelling,
touching, and tasting instruments. There are
between these and the seat of intelligence, nerves
performing the functions of carriers. Even
after the instruments have ceased to exist, the
carriers often continue to carry messages—false
messages. When a man has lost an eye, during
the inflammatory period of recovery the carriers
convey horrible images of fiery figures. It is
the carriers who convey the pain of rheumatism
from the lost limb.

A man who was recovering from typhus fever
believed he had two bodies, one of which was
tossing in pain on an uneasy bed, and the other
lying sweetly on a delicious couch. I am not
disposed to ascribe this hallucination to the
duality of the brain, but to a conflict between
the recollection of his sufferings, and the
experience of his recovery. If the patient should
have been permanently unable to overpower
memory by reality he would have been insane,
like the maniacs who believe their legs to be
stalks of straw, or their bodies fragile as glass.

Pictures have produced hallucinations. Leaving
aside the eyes of Madonnas, cases in which
the power of religious ideas come into play, I
may mention other instances of their effects on
minds keenly sensitive to the beauties of the
fine arts. A French physiologist, whilst studying
intensely an English engraving of Landseer's
Horse-shoeing, smelt horn burning, and fixed the
idea in his mind for the moment that the smell
came from the foot of the horse in the engraving.
Another Frenchman records a similar
experience. He had been taking a preparation of
Indian hemp, and was seated at table with a
picture behind him representing a battle of cavalry,