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It struck me that he was making conversation, saying anything for the sake of gaining time. 'I remember reading a book entitled "Obscure Diseases of the Brain." It contained some interesting data on the subject of hallucinations. 'Possibly. 'Now, candidly, would you recommend me to place myself in the hands of a mental pathologist? 'I don't think that you're insane, if that's what you mean.
It has been argued from the unreality of dreams and hallucinations in which we give a body to our ideas, that we do not in reality perceive external bodies, but simply psychical states and modifications of our souls.
Insanity, degeneration of the normal brain life, may be caused by an upset of the endocrine balance. Among the commonest manifestations of insanity are excitements and depressions, apathies and manias, hallucinations, delusions and obsessions, all of which are reproducible under known conditions of internal secretion excess or failure.
None of this exquisite reasoning as to dreams applies to waking hallucinations, reported before the alleged coincidence, unless we accept a collective hallucination of memory in seer or seers, and also in the persons to whom their story was told. But, it is obvious, memory is apt to become mythopoeic, so far as to exaggerate closeness of coincidence, and to add romantic details.
Miss E. and the working-woman had been in the hall, and there had heard the sound, which they, like Miss C.E., took for that of a key in the lock. Herr Parish, however, inadvertently converts a solitary into a collective hallucination, and then uses the example to explain collective hallucinations in general.
As in these maladies the patient may be subject to hallucinations, it was natural that savages or ignorant men, or polytheists, or ardent Catholics, or excitable Covenanters, should regard these hallucinations as 'lucid' or 'clairvoyant'. A few lucky coincidences would establish this opinion among such observers as we have indicated, while failures of lucidity would not be counted.
The most credulous will admit that the maid is enough to account for the Brightling manifestations; some of the others are more puzzling and remain in the region of the unexplained. Apparitions appear. Apparitions are not necessarily Ghosts. Superstition, Common-sense, and Science. Hallucinations: their kinds, and causes. Aristotle. Mr. Gurney's definition.
These witnesses have too much cerebral activity at the wrong time and place. They start their hallucinations from the external terminus, the unhealthy organ of sense; from the morbid central terminus; or from some dilapidated cerebral station along the line.
In these intervals of partial awakening she never permitted them to lengthen out, as such sensation as she had was of one falling falling through empty space with whirling brain and strange sounds in the ears and strange distorted sights or hallucinations before the eyes falling down down whither? to how great a depth? or was there no bottom, but simply presently a plunging on down into the black of death's bottomless oblivion?
Socrates and Pascal were not exempt from hallucinations. Facts ought to explain themselves by proportionate causes. The weaknesses of the human mind only engender weakness; great things have always great causes in the nature of man, although they are often developed amidst a crowd of littlenesses which, to superficial minds, eclipse their grandeur.
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