In treating of the case of Auguste Müller, a remarkable somnambule, who possessed the power of appearing elsewhere, while his body lay cold and stiff in his bed, Professor Keiser, who attended him, says, that the phenomenon, as regards the seer, must be looked upon as purely subjective—that is, that there was no outstanding form of Auguste Müller visible to the sensuous organs, but that the magnetic influence of the somnambule, by the force of his will, acted on the imagination of the seer, and called up the image which he believed he saw. But then, allowing this to be possible, as Dr. Werner says, how are we to account for those numerous cases in which there is no somnambule concerned in the matter, and no especial rapport, that we are aware of, established between the parties? And yet these latter cases are much the most frequent; for, although I have met with numerous instances recorded by the German physiologists, of what is called far-working on the part of the somnambules, this power of appearing out of the body seems to be a very rare one. Many persons will be surprised at these allusions to a kind of magnetic phenomena, of which, in this country, so little is known or believed; but the physiologists and psychologists of Germany have been studying this subject for the last fifty years, and the volumes filled with their theoretical views and records of cases, are numerous beyond anything the English public has an idea of.
The only other theory I have met with, which pretends to explain the mode of this double appearance, is that of the spirit leaving the body, as we have supposed it to do in cases of dreams and catalepsy; in which instances the nerve-spirit, which seems to be the archæus or astral spirit of the ancient philosophers, has the power of projecting a visible body out of the imponderable matter of the atmosphere. According to this theory, this nerve-spirit, which seems to be an embodiment of—or rather, a body constructed out of the nervous fluid, or ether—in short, the spiritual body of St. Paul, is the bond of union between the body and the soul, or spirit; and has the plastic force of raising up an aerial form. Being the highest organic power, it can not by any other, physical or chemical, be destroyed; and when the body is cast off, it follows the soul; and as, during life, it is the means by which the soul acts upon the body, and is thus enabled to communicate with the external world, so when the spirit is disembodied, it is through this nerve-spirit that it can make itself visible, and even exercise mechanical powers.
It is certain, that not only somnambules, but sick persons, are occasionally sensible of a feeling that seems to lend some countenance to this latter theory.
The girl at Canton, for example, mentioned in a former chapter, as well as many somnambulic patients, declare, while their bodies are lying stiff and cold, that they see it, as if out of it; and, in some instances, they describe particulars of its appearance, which they could not see in the ordinary way. There are also numerous cases of sick persons seeing themselves double, where no tendency to delirium or spectral illusion has been observed. These are, in this country, always placed under the latter category; but I find various instances recorded by the German physiologists, where this appearance has been seen by others, and even by children, at the same that it was felt by the invalid. In one of these cases, I find the sick person saying, “I can not think how I am lying. It seems to me that I am divided and lying in two places at once.” It is remarkable, that a friend of my own, during an illness in the autumn of 1845, expressed precisely the same feeling; we, however, saw nothing of this second ego; but it must be remembered, that the seeing of these things, as I have said in a former chapter, probably depends on a peculiar faculty or condition of the seer. The servant of Elisha was not blind, but yet he could not see what his master saw, till his eyes were opened—that is, till he was rendered capable of perceiving spiritual objects.
When Peter was released from prison by the angel—and it is not amiss here to remark, that even he “wist not that it was true which was done by the angel, but thought he saw a vision,” that is, he did not believe his senses, but supposed himself the victim of a spectral illusion—but when he was released, and went and knocked at the door of the gate, where many of his friends were assembled, they, not conceiving it possible he could have escaped, said, when the girl who had opened the door insisted that he was there, “It is his angel.” What did they mean by this? The expression is not an angel, but his angel. Now, it is not a little remarkable, that in the East, to this day, a double, or doppelgänger, is called a man’s angel, or messenger. As we can not suppose that this term was used otherwise than seriously by the disciples that were gathered together in Mark’s house, for they were in trouble about Peter, and, when he arrived, were engaged in prayer, we are entitled to believe they alluded to some recognised phenomenon. They knew, either that the likeness of a man—his spiritual self—sometimes appeared where bodily he was not; and that this imago or idolon was capable of exerting a mechanical force, or else that other spirits sometimes assumed a mortal form, or they would not have supposed it to be Peter’s angel that had knocked at the gate.
Dr. Ennemoser, who always leans to the physical rather than the psychical explanation of a phenomenon, says, that the faculty of self-seeing, which is analogous to seeing another person’s double, is to be considered an illusion; but that this imago of another seen at a distance, at the moment of death, must be supposed to have an objective reality. But if we are capable of thus perceiving the imago of another person, I can not comprehend why we may not see our own; unless, indeed, the former was never perceived but when the body of the person seen was in a state of insensibility; but this does not always seem to be a necessary condition, as will appear by some examples I am about to detail. The faculty of perceiving the object, Dr. Ennemoser considers analogous to that of second sight, and thinks it may be evolved by local, as well as idiosyncratical conditions. The difficulty arising from the fact that some persons are in the habit of seeing the wraiths of their friends and relations, must be explained by his hypothesis. The spirit, as soon as liberated from the body, is adapted for communion with all spirits, embodied or otherwise; but all embodied spirits are not prepared for communion with it.
A Mr. R——, a gentleman who has attracted public attention by some scientific discoveries, had had a fit of illness at Rotterdam. He was in a state of convalescence, but was still so far taking care of himself as to spend part of the day in bed, when, as he was lying there one morning, the door opened, and there entered in tears, a lady with whom he was intimately acquainted, but whom he believed to be in England. She walked hastily to the side of his bed, wrung her hands, evincing by her gestures extreme anguish of mind, and before he could sufficiently recover his surprise to inquire the cause of her distress and sudden appearance, she was gone. She did not disappear, but walked out of the room again, and Mr. R—— immediately summoned the servants of the hotel, for the purpose of making inquiries about the English lady—when she came, what had happened to her, and where she had gone to, on quitting his room? The people declared there was no such person there; he insisted there was, but they at length convinced him that they, at least, knew nothing about her. When his physician visited him, he naturally expressed the great perplexity into which he had been thrown by this circumstance; and, as the doctor could find no symptoms about his patient that could warrant a suspicion of spectral illusion, they made a note of the date and hour of the occurrence, and Mr. R—— took the earliest opportunity of ascertaining if anything had happened to the lady in question. Nothing had happened to herself, but at that precise period her son had expired, and she was actually in the state of distress in which Mr. R—— beheld her. It would be extremely interesting to know whether her thoughts had been intensely directed to Mr. R—— at the moment; but that is a point which I have not been able to ascertain. At all events the impelling cause of the form projected, be the mode of it what it may, appears to have been violent emotion. The following circumstance, which is forwarded to me by the gentleman to whom it occurred, appears to have the same origin:—
“On the evening of the 12th of March, 1792,” says Mr. H——, an artist, and a man of science, “I had been reading in the ‘Philosophical Transactions,’ and retired to my room somewhat fatigued, but not inclined to sleep. It was a bright moonlight night and I had extinguished my candle and was sitting on the side of the bed, deliberately taking off my clothes, when I was amazed to behold the visible appearance of my half-uncle, Mr. R. Robertson, standing before me; and, at the same instant, I heard the words, ‘Twice will be sufficient!’ The face was so distinct that I actually saw the pock-pits. His dress seemed to be made of a strong twilled sort of sackcloth, and of the same dingy color. It was more like a woman’s dress than a man’s—resembling a petticoat, the neck-band close to the chin, and the garment covering the whole person, so that I saw neither hands nor feet. While the figure stood there, I twisted my fingers till they cracked, that I might be sure I was awake.
“On the following morning, I inquired if anybody had heard lately of Mr. R., and was well laughed at when I confessed the origin of my inquiry. I confess I thought he was dead; but when my grandfather heard the story, he said that the dress I described, resembled the strait-jacket Mr. R. had been put in formerly, under an attack of insanity. Subsequently, we learned that on the night, and at the very hour I had seen him, he had attempted suicide, and been actually put into a strait-jacket.
“He afterward recovered, and went to Egypt with Sir Ralph Abercrombie. Some people laugh at this story, and maintain that it was a delusion of the imagination; but surely this is blinking the question! Why should my imagination create such an image, while my mind was entirely engrossed with a mathematical problem?”