Ev. Nay, I presume not to so potent a faculty. Many of the slight imperfections of vision are, as I have confessed, merely exaggerations of romantic ideas floating in the memory; and this is not a novel notion, for Plato and other philosophers held it long before our time.
Muscæ volitantes are usually, though not always, substantial: i.e. depending on points or fibres in the axis of vision, on congestions, or varicose states of the vessels of the choroïd or retina, or of atoms floating in the humours. These specks, which do not appear alike in the eyes of all, and the brilliant beams in the suffusio scintillans, so varied and so whimsical, might be readily moulded into human form, by the imagination of an enthusiast, or the feelings of the ghost-seer, who is usually morose and melancholy, in a state of longing for a ghost or a mystery.
But when many of the more confirmed illusions are depending on structural disease in the membranes and humours of the eye, I am confident in the resources of our science to relieve, if not to remove. Coleridge indeed has expressed his belief, that by some convulsion of the eye, it may see projected before it part of its own body, easily magnified into the whole by slight imagination. If this be true, the whole mystery of the Death-fetch is unravelled.
The nerves and their ganglia are often diseased, when we least suspect: and calcareous and scrofulous tumours, pressing on the optic axis, in the brain, or on the pneumogastric nerve above its recurrent branch, and disease in the bronchial glands around the cardiac plexus, may exist, with the very slightest sensations of pain. Even in extreme disorganization of the brain, there may be remissions of painless repose; and in other cases, where pain is synchronous with illusion, the illusion may subside although the pain remains; an indication, or proof, indeed, of structural cause for the phantasy. And this discrimination, Astrophel, of the line of distinction between sanity and derangement, is often of a hair’s breadth; and the law confesses here the high value of pathology, seeing that, in cases of suicide or of idiocy, and other states which involve the rites of sepulture, the conveyance of entailed estates, or personal responsibility, the judgment of the physician is held to be oracular.
MYSTERIOUS FORMS AND SIGNS.
“Fierce fiery warriors fight upon the clouds,
In ranks, and squadrons, and right form of war,
Which drizzled blood upon the capitol:
The noise of battle hurtled in the air.”
Julius Cæsar.