It is highly probable that the seeing of those visionary armies and similar prodigies is a sort of second-sight; but having admitted this, we are very little nearer an explanation. Granting that, as in the above experiments, the essence of things may retain the forms of the substance, this does not explain the seeing that which has not yet taken place, or which is taking place at so great a distance, that neither Oetinger’s essence nor the superficial films of Lucretius can remove the difficulty.
It is the fashion to say that second-sight was a mere superstition of the highlanders, and that no such thing is ever heard of now; but those who talk in this way know very little of the matter. No doubt, if they set out to look for seers, they may not find them; such phenomena, though known in all countries and in all ages, are comparatively rare, as well as uncertain and capricious, and not to be exercised at will: but I know of too many instances of the existence of this faculty in families, as well as of isolated cases occurring to individuals above all suspicion, to entertain the smallest doubt of its reality. But the difficulty of furnishing evidence is considerable: because, when the seers are of the humbler classes, they are called impostors and not believed; and when they are of the higher, they do not make the subject a matter of conversation, nor choose to expose themselves to the ridicule of the foolish; and consequently the thing is not known beyond their own immediate friends. When the young duke of Orleans was killed, a lady, residing here, saw the accident, and described it to her husband at the time it was occurring in France. She had frequently seen the duke, when on the continent.
Captain N—— went to stay two days at the house of Lady T——. After dinner, however, he announced that he was under the necessity of going away that night, nor could he be induced to remain. On being much pressed for an explanation, he confided to some of the party that, during the dinner, he had seen a female figure with her throat cut, standing behind Lady T——’s chair. Of course, it was thought an illusion, but Lady T—— was not told of it, lest she should be alarmed. That night the household was called up for the purpose of summoning a surgeon—Lady T—— had cut her own throat!
Mr. C——, who, though a Scotchman, was an entire skeptic with regard to the second-sight, was told by a seer whom he had been jeering on the subject, that, within a month, he (Mr. C——) would be a pall-bearer at a funeral; that he would go by a certain road, but that, before they had crossed the brook, a man in a drab coat would come down the hill and take the pall from him. The funeral occurred, Mr. C—— was a bearer, and they went by the road described; but he firmly resolved that he would disappoint the seer by keeping the pall while they crossed the brook; but shortly before they reached it, the postman overtook them, with letters, which in that part of the country arrived but twice a week, and Mr. C——, who was engaged in some speculations of importance, turned to received them—at which moment the pall was taken from him, and on looking round, he saw it was by a man in a drab coat!
A medical friend of mine, who practised some time at Deptford, was once sent for to a girl who had been taken suddenly ill. He found her with inflammation of the brain, and the only account the mother could give of it was, that shortly before, she had run into the room, crying, “Oh, mother, I have seen Uncle John drowned in his boat under the fifth arch of Rochester bridge!” The girl died a few hours afterward; and, on the following night, the uncle’s boat ran foul of the bridge, and he was drowned, exactly as she had foretold.
Mrs. A——, an English lady, and the wife of a clergyman, relates that, previous to her marriage, she with her father and mother being at the seaside, had arranged to make a few days’ excursion to some races that were about to take place; and that the night before they started, the father having been left alone, while the ladies were engaged in their preparations, they found him, on descending to the drawing-room, in a state of considerable agitation—which, he said, had arisen from his having seen a dreadful face at one corner of the room. He described it as a bruised, battered, crushed, discolored face, with the two eyes protruding frightfully from their sockets; but the features were too disfigured to ascertain if it were the face of any one he knew. On the following day, on their way to the races, an accident occurred; and he was brought home with his own face exactly in the condition he had described. He had never exhibited any other instance of this extraordinary faculty, and the impression made by the circumstance lasted the remainder of his life, which was unhappily shortened by the injuries he had received.
The late Mrs. V——, a lady of fortune and family, who resides near Loch Lomond, possessed this faculty in an extraordinary degree, and displayed it on many remarkable occasions. When her brother was shipwrecked in the channel, she was heard to exclaim, “Thank God, he is saved!” and described the scene with all its circumstances.
Colonel David Steward, a determined believer in what he calls the supernatural, in his book on the highlanders, relates the following fact as one so remarkable, that “credulous minds” may be excused for believing it to have been prophetic. He says that, late in an autumnal evening of the year 1773, the son of a neighbor came to his father’s house, and soon after his arrival inquired for a little boy of the family, then about three years old. He was shown up to the nursery, and found the nurse putting a pair of new shoes on the child, which she complained did not fit. “Never mind,” said the young man, “they will fit him before he wants them”—a prediction which not only offended the nurse, but seemed at the moment absurd, since the child was apparently in perfect health. When he joined the party in the drawing-room, he being much jeered upon this new gift of second-sight, explained that the impression he had received originated in his having just seen a funeral passing the wooden bridge which crossed a stream at a short distance from the house. He first observed a crowd of people, and on coming nearer he saw a person carrying a small coffin, followed by about twenty gentlemen, all of his acquaintance, his own father and a Mr. Stewart being among the number. He did not attempt to join the procession, which he saw turn off into the churchyard: but knowing his own father could not be actually there, and that Mr. and Mrs. Stewart were then at Blair, he felt a conviction that the phenomenon portended the death of the child: a persuasion which was verified by its suddenly expiring on the following night;—and Colonel Stewart adds that the circumstances and attendants at the funeral were precisely such as the young man had described. He mentions, also, that this gentleman was not a seer; that he was a man of education and general knowledge; and that this was the first and only vision of the sort he ever had.
I know of a young lady who has three times seen funerals in this way.
The old persuasion that fasting was a means of developing the spirit of prophecy, is undoubtedly well founded, and the annals of medicine furnish numerous facts which establish it. A man condemned to death at Viterbo, having abstained from food in the hope of escaping execution, became so clairvoyant, that he could tell what was doing in any part of the prison; the expression used in the report is that he “saw through the walls:” this, however, could not be with his natural organs of sight.