Cock Lane and Common-Sense

by Andrew Lang

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 anything else. Mr. Gurney has defined a hallucination as ‘a percept which lacks, but which can only by distinct reflection be recognised as lacking, the objective basis which it suggests’—and by ‘objective basis,’ he means ‘the possibility of being shared by all persons with normal senses’. Nobody but the ‘percipient’ was present on the occasion just described, so we cannot say whether other people would have seen the visitor, or not. But reflection could not recognise the unreality of this ‘percept,’ till it was found that, in fact, the visitor had vanished, and had never been in the neighbourhood at all.

Here then, are two classes of hallucinations, those which reflection shows us to be false (as if a sane man were to have the hallucination of a crocodile, or of a dead friend, entering the room), and those which reflection does not, at the moment, show to be false, as if a friend were to enter, who could be proved to have been absent.

In either case, what causes the hallucination, or are there various possible sorts of causes? Now defects in the eye, or in the optic nerve, to speak roughly, may cause hallucinations from without. An injured external organ conveys a false and distorted message to the brain and to the intelligence. A nascent malady of the ear may produce buzzings, and these may develop into hallucinatory voices. Here be hallucinations from without. But when a patient begins with a hallucination of the intellect, as that inquisitors are plotting to catch him, or witches to enchant him, and when he later comes to see inquisitors and witches, where there are none, we have, apparently, a hallucination from within. Again, some persons, like Blake the painter, voluntarily start a hallucination. ‘Draw me Edward I.,’ a friend would say, Blake would, voluntarily, establish a hallucination of the monarch on a chair, in a good light, and sketch him, if nobody came between his eye and the royal sitter. Here, then, are examples of hallucinations begotten from within, either voluntarily, by a singular exercise of fancy, or involuntarily, as the suggestion of madness, of cerebral disease, or abnormal cerebral activity.

Again a certain amount of intensity of activity, at a ‘sensory centre’ in the brain, will start a ‘percept’. Activity of the necessary force at the right place, may be normally caused by the organ of sense, say the eye, when fixed on a real object, say a candlestick. (1) Or the necessary activity at the sensory centre may be produced, abnormally, by irritation of the eye, or along the line of nerve from the eye to the ‘sensory centre’. (2) Or thirdly, there may be a morbid, but spontaneous activity in the sensory centre itself. (3) In case one, we have a natural sensation converted into a perception of a real object. In case two, we have an abnormal origin of a perception of something unreal, a hallucination, begotten from without, that is by a vice in an external organ, the eye. In case three, we have the origin of an abnormal perception of something unreal, a hallucination, begotten by a vicious activity within, in the sensory centre. But, while all these three sets of stimuli set the machinery in motion, it is the ‘highest parts of the brain’ that, in response to the stimuli, create the full perception, real or hallucinatory.

But there remains a fourth way of setting the machinery in motion. The first way, in normal sensation and perception, was the natural action of the organ of sense, stimulated by a material object. The second way was by the stimulus of a vice in the organ of sense. The third way was a vicious activity in a sensory centre. All three stimuli reach the ‘central terminus’ of the brain, and are there created into perceptions, the first real and normal, the second a hallucination from an organ of sense, from without, the third a hallucination from a sensory centre, from within. The fourth way is illustrated when the machinery is set a-going from the ‘central terminus’ itself, ‘from the higher parts of the brain, from the seats of ideation and memory’. Now, as long as these parts only produce and retain ideas or memories in the usual way, we think, or we remember, but we have no hallucination. But when the activity starting from the central terminus ‘escapes downwards,’ in sufficient force, it reaches the ‘lower centre’ and the organ of sense, and then the idea, or memory, stands visibly before us as a hallucination.

This, omitting many technical details, and much that is matter of more dispute than common, is a statement, rough, and as popular as possible, of the ideas expressed in Mr. Gurney’s remarkable essay on hallucinations. [{186}] Here, then, we have a rude working notion of various ways in which hallucinations may be produced. But there are many degrees in being hallucinated, or enphantosmé, as the old French has it. If we are interested in the most popular kind of hallucinations, ghosts and wraiths, we first discard like Le Loyer, the evidence of many kinds of witnesses, diversely but undeniably hallucinated. A man whose eyes are so vicious as habitually to give him false information is not accepted as a witness, nor a man whose brain is drugged with alcohol, nor a man whose ‘central terminus’ is abandoned to religious excitement, to remorse, to grief, to anxiety, to an apprehension of secret enemies, nor even to a habit of being hallucinated, though, like Nicolai, he knows that his visionary friends are unreal. Thus we would not listen credulously to a ghost story out of his own experience from a man whose eyes were untrustworthy, nor from a short-sighted man who had recognised a dead or dying friend on the street, nor from a drunkard. A tale of a vision of a religious character from Pascal, or from a Red Indian boy during his Medicine Fast, or even from a colonel of dragoons who fell at Prestonpans, might be interesting, but would not be evidence for our special purpose. The ghosts beheld by conscience-stricken murderers, by sorrowing widowers, by spiritualists in dark rooms, haunted by humbugs, or those seen by lunatics, or by children, or by timid people in lonely old houses, or by people who, though sane at the time, go mad twenty years later, or by sane people habitually visionary, these and many other ghosts, we must begin, like Le Loyer, by rejecting. 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. But, when we have, in a sane man’s experience, say one hallucination whether that hallucination does, or does not coincide with a crisis in the life, or perhaps with the death of the person who seems to be seen, what are we to think? Or again, when several witnesses simultaneously have the same hallucination,—not to be explained as a common misinterpretation of a real object,—what are we to think? This is the true question of ghosts and wraiths. That apparitions, so named by the world, do appear, is certain, just as it is certain that visionary rats appear to drunkards in delirium tremens. But, as we are only to take the evidence of sane and healthy witnesses, who were neither in anxiety, grief, or other excitement, when they perceived their one hallucination, there seems to be a difference between their hallucinations and those of alcoholism, fanaticism, sorrow, or anxiety. Now the common mistakes in dealing with this topic have been to make too much, or to make too little, of the coincidences between the hallucinatory appearance of an absent person, and his death, or some other grave crisis affecting him. Too little is made of such coincidences by Dr. Hibbert, in his Philosophy of Apparitions (p. 231). He ‘attempts a physical explanation of many ghost stories which may be considered most authentic’. So he says, but he only touches on three, the apparition of Claverhouse, on the night of Killiecrankie, to Lord Balcarres, in an Edinburgh prison; the apparition of her dead mother to Miss Lee, in 1662; and the apparition of his wife, who had born a dead child on that day in England, to Dr. Donne in Paris, early in the seventeenth century.

Dr. Hibbert dedicated his book, in 1825, to Sir Walter Scott, of Abbotsford, Bart., President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Sir Walter, at heart as great a ghost-hunter as ever lived, was conceived to have a scientific interest in the ‘mental principles to which certain popular illusions may be referred’. Thus Dr. Hibbert’s business, if he would satisfy the President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, was to ‘provide a physical explanation of many ghost stories which may be considered most authentic’. In our prosaic age, he would have begun with those most recent, such as the tall man in brown, viewed by Sir Walter on the moor near Ashestiel, and other still remembered contemporary hallucinations. Far from that, Dr. Hibbert deliberately goes back two centuries for all the three stories which represent the ‘many’ of his promise. The Wynyard ghost was near him, Mrs Ricketts’s haunted house was near him, plenty of other cases were lying ready to his hand. [{189}] But he went back two centuries, and then,—complained of lack of evidence about ‘interesting particulars’! Dr. Hibbert represents the science and common-sense of seventy years ago, and his criticism probably represents the contemporary ideas about evidence.

The Balcarres tale, as told by him, is that the Earl was ‘in prison, in Edinburgh Castle, on the suspicion of Jacobitism’. ‘Suspicion’ is good; he was the King’s agent for civil, as Dundee was for military affairs in Scotland. He and Dundee, and Ailesbury, stood by the King in London, to the last. Lord Balcarres himself, in his memoirs, tells James II. how he was confined, ‘in close prison,’ in Edinburgh, till the castle was surrendered to the Prince of Orange. In Dr. Hibbert’s tale, the spectre of Dundee enters Balcarres’s room at night, ‘draws his curtain,’ looks at him for some time, and walks out of the room, Lord Balcarres believing it to be Dundee himself.

Dr. Hibbert never even asks for the authority on which this legend reposes, certainly Balcarres does not tell the tale in his own report, or memoirs, for James II. (Bannatyne Club, 1841). The doctor then grumbles that he does not know ‘a syllable of the state of Lord Balcarres’s health at the time’. The friend of Bayle and of Marlborough, an honourable politician, a man at once loyal and plain-spoken in dealings with his master, Lord Balcarres’s word would go for much, if he gave it. [{190}] But Dr. Hibbert asks for no authority, cites none. He only argues that, ‘agreeably to the well-known doctrine of chances,’ Balcarres might as well have this hallucination at the time of Dundee’s death as at any other (p. 232). Now, that is a question which we cannot settle, without knowing whether Lord Balcarres was subject to hallucinations. If he was, cadit quæstio, if he was not, then the case is different. It is, manifestly, a problem in statistics, and only by statistics of wide scope, can it be solved. [{191}] But Dr. Hibbert was content to produce his easy solution, without working out the problem.