"One night in March 1873 or '74, I cannot recollect which year, I was attending on the sick-bed of my mother. About eight o'clock in the evening I went into the dining-room to fix a cup of tea, and on turning from the sideboard to the table, on the other side of the table before the fire, which was burning brightly, as was also the gas, I saw standing with his hand clasped to his side in true military fashion a soldier of about thirty years of age, with dark, piercing eyes looking directly into mine. He wore a small cap with standing feather; his costume was also of a soldierly style. He did not strike me as being a spirit, ghost, or anything uncanny, only a living man; but after gazing for fully a minute I realized that it was nothing of earth, for he neither moved his eyes nor his body, and in looking closely I could see the fire beyond. I was of course startled, and yet did not run out of the room. I felt stunned. I walked out rapidly, however, and turning to the servant in the hall asked her if she saw anything. She said not. I went into my mother's room and remained talking for about an hour, but never mentioned the above subject for fear of exciting her, and finally forgot it altogether, returning to the dining-room, still in forgetfulness of what had occurred, but repeating, as above, the turning from sideboard to table in act of preparing more tea. I looked casually towards the fire, and there I saw the soldier again. This time I was entirely alarmed, and fled from the room in haste. I called to my father, but when he came he saw nothing."
Sometimes more than one sense is affected. The following is a case:
"In response to your request to write out my experience of Oct. 30, 1886, I will inflict on you a letter.
"On the day above mentioned, Oct. 30, 1886, I was in ——, where I was teaching. I had performed my regular routine work for the day, and was sitting in my room working out trigonometrical formulæ. I was expecting every day to hear of the confinement of my wife, and naturally my thoughts for some time had been more or less with her. She was, by the way, in B——, some fifty miles from me.
"At the time, however, neither she nor the expected event was in my mind; as I said, I was working out trigonometrical formulæ, and I had been working on trigonometry the entire evening. About eleven o'clock, as I sat there buried in sines, cosines, tangents, cotangents, secants, and cosecants, I felt very distinctly upon my left shoulder a touch, and a slight shake, as if somebody had tried to attract my attention by other means and had failed. Without rising I turned my head, and there between me and the door stood my wife, dressed exactly as I last saw her, some five weeks before. As I turned she said: 'It is a little Herman; he has come.' Something more was said, but this is the only sentence I can recall. To make sure that I was not asleep and dreaming, I rose from the chair, pinched myself and walked toward the figure, which disappeared immediately as I rose. I can give no information as to the length of time occupied by this episode, but I know I was awake, in my usual good health. The touch was very distinct, the figure was absolutely perfect, stood about three feet from the door, which was closed, and had not been opened during the evening. The sound of the voice was unmistakable, and I should have recognized it as my wife's voice even if I had not turned and had not seen the figure at all. The tone was conversational, just as if she would have said the same words had she been actually standing there.
"In regard to myself, I would say, as I have already intimated, I was in my usual good health; I had not been sick before, nor was I after the occurrence, not so much as a headache having afflicted me.
"Shortly after the experience above described, I retired for the night and, as I usually do, slept quietly until morning. I did not speculate particularly about the strange appearance of the night before, and though I thought of it some, I did not tell anybody. The following morning I rose, not conscious of having dreamed anything, but I was very firmly impressed with the idea that there was something for me at the telegraph-office. I tried to throw off the impression, for so far as I knew there was no reason for it. Having nothing to do, I went out for a walk; and to help throw off the impression above noted, I walked away from the telegraph-office. As I proceeded, however, the impression became a conviction, and I actually turned about and went to the very place I had resolved not to visit, the telegraph-office. The first person I saw on arriving at said office was the telegraph-operator, who being on terms of intimacy with me, remarked: 'Hello, papa, I've got a telegram for you.' The telegram announced the birth of a boy, weighing nine pounds, and that all were doing well. Now, then, I have no theory at all about the events narrated above; I never had any such experience before nor since; I am no believer in spiritualism, am not in the least superstitious, know very little about 'thought-transference,' 'unconscious cerebration,' etc., etc., but I am absolutely certain about what I have tried to relate.
"In regard to the remark which I heard, 'It is a little Herman,' etc.; I would add that we had previously decided to call the child, if a boy, Herman—my own name, by the way."[125]
The hallucination sometimes carries a change of the general consciousness with it, so as to appear more like a sudden lapse into a dream. The following case was given me by a man of 43, who had never anything resembling it before:
"While sitting at my desk this a. m. reading a circular of the Loyal Legion a very curious thing happened to me, such as I have never experienced. It was perfectly real, so real that it took some minutes to recover from. It seems to me like a direct intromission into some other world. I never had anything approaching it before save when dreaming at night. I was wide awake, of course. But this was the feeling. I had only just sat down and become interested in the circular, when I seemed to lose myself for a minute and then found myself in the top story of a high building very white and shining and clean, with a noble window immediately at the right of where I sat. Through this window I looked out upon a marvellous reach of landscape entirely new. I never had before such a sense of infinity in nature, such superb stretches of light and color and cleanness. I know that for the space of three minutes I was entirely lost, for when I began to come to, so to speak,—sitting in that other world, I debated for three or four minutes more as to which was dream and which was reality. Sitting there I got a faint sense of C.... [the town in which the writer was], away off and dim at first. Then I remember thinking 'Why, I used to live in C....; perhaps I am going back.' Slowly C.... did come back, and I found myself at my desk again. For a few minutes the process of determining where I was was very funny. But the whole experience was perfectly delightful, there was such a sense of brilliancy and clearness and lightness about it. I suppose it lasted in all about seven minutes or ten minutes."
The hallucinations of fever-delirium are a mixture of pseudo-hallucination, true hallucination, and illusion. Those of opium, hasheesh, and belladonna resemble them in this respect. The following vivid account of a fit of hasheesh-delirium has been given me by a friend:
"I was reading a newspaper, and the indication of the approaching delirium was an inability to keep my mind fixed on the narrative. Directly I lay down upon a sofa there appeared before my eyes several rows of human hands, which oscillated for a moment, revolved and then changed to spoons. The same motions were repeated, the objects changing to wheels, tin soldiers, lamp-posts, brooms, and countless other absurdities. This stage lasted about ten minutes, and during that time it is safe to say that I saw at least a thousand different objects. These whirling images did not appear like the realities of life, but had the character of the secondary images seen in the eye after looking at some brightly-illuminated object. A mere suggestion from the person who was with me in the room was sufficient to call up an image of the thing suggested, while without suggestion there appeared all the common objects of life and many unreal monstrosities, which it is absolutely impossible to describe, and which seemed to be creations of the brain.
"The character of the symptoms changed rapidly. A sort of wave seemed to pass over me, and I became aware of the fact that my pulse was beating rapidly. I took out my watch, and by exercising considerable will-power managed to time the heart-beats, 135 to the minute.
"I could feel each pulsation through my whole system, and a curious twitching commenced, which no effort of the mind could stop.
"There were moments of apparent lucidity, when it seemed as if I could see within myself, and watch the pumping of my heart. A strange fear came over me, a certainty that I should never recover from the effects of the opiate, which was as quickly followed by a feeling of great interest in the experiment, a certainty that the experience was the most novel and exciting that I had ever been through.
"My mind was in an exceedingly impressionable state. Any place thought of or suggested appeared with all the distinctness of the reality. I thought of the Giant's Causeway in Staffa, and instantly I stood within the portals of Fingal's Cave. Great basaltic columns rose on all sides, while huge waves rolled through the chasm and broke in silence upon the rocky shore. Suddenly there was a roar and blast of sound, and the word 'Ishmaral' was echoing up the cave. At the enunciation of this remarkable word the great columns of basalt changed into whirling clothes pins and I laughed aloud at the absurdity.
"(I may here state that the word 'Ishmaral' seemed to haunt my other hallucinations, for I remember that I heard it frequently thereafter.) I next enjoyed a sort of metempsychosis. Any animal or thing that I thought of could be made the being which held my mind. I thought of a fox, and instantly I was transformed into that animal. I could distinctly feel myself a fox, could see my long ears and bushy tail, and by a sort of introvision felt that my complete anatomy was that of a fox. Suddenly the point of vision changed. My eyes seemed to be located at the back of my mouth; I looked out between the parted lips, saw the two rows of pointed teeth, and, closing my mouth with a snap, saw—nothing.
"I was next transformed into a bombshell, felt my size, weight, and thickness, and experienced the sensation of being shot up out of a giant mortar, looking down upon the earth, bursting and falling back in a shower of iron fragments.
"Into countless other objects was I transformed, many of them so absurd that I am unable to conceive what suggested them. For example, I was a little china doll, deep down in a bottle of olive oil, next moment a stick of twisted candy, then a skeleton inclosed in a whirling coffin, and so on ad infinitum.
"Towards the end of the delirium the whirling images appeared again, and I was haunted by a singular creation of the brain, which reappeared every few moments. It was an image of a double-faced doll, with a cylindrical body running down to a point like a peg-top.
"It was always the same, having a sort of crown on its head, and painted in two colors, green and brown, on a background of blue. The expression of the Janus-like profiles was always the same, as were the adornments of the body. After recovering from the effects of the drug I could not picture to myself exactly how this singular monstrosity appeared, but in subsequent experiences I was always visited by this phantom, and always recognized every detail of its composition. It was like visiting some long-forgotten spot and seeing some sight that had faded from the memory, but which appeared perfectly familiar as soon as looked upon.
"The effects of the drug lasted about an hour and a half, leaving me a trifle tipsy and dizzy; but after a ten-hour sleep I was myself again, save for a slight inability to keep my mind fixed on any piece of work for any length of time, which remained with me during most of the next day."
THE NEURAL PROCESS IN HALLUCINATION.
Examples of these singular perversions of perception might be multiplied indefinitely, but I have no more space. Let us turn to the question of what the physiological process may be to which they are due. It must, of course, consist of an excitement from within of those centres which are active in normal perception, identical in kind and degree with that which real external objects are usually needed to induce. The particular process which currents from the sense-organs arouse would seem under normal circumstances to be arousable in no other way. On [p. 72] ff. above, we saw that the centres aroused by incoming peripheral currents are probably identical with the centres used in mere imagination; and that the vividness of the sensational kind of consciousness is probably correlated with a discrete degree of intensity in the process therein aroused. Referring the reader back to that passage and to what was more lately said on [p. 103] ff., I now proceed to complete my theory of the perceptive process by an analysis of what may most probably be believed to take place in hallucination strictly so called.
We have seen ([p. 75]) that the free discharge of cells into each other through associative paths is a likely reason why the maximum intensity of function is not reached when the cells are excited by their neighbors in the cortex. At the end of [Chapter XXV] we shall return to this conception, and whilst making it still more precise, use it for explaining certain phenomena connected with the will. The idea is that the leakage forward along these paths is too rapid for the inner tension in any centre to accumulate to the maximal explosion-point, unless the exciting currents are greater than those which the various portions of the cortex supply to each other. Currents from the periphery are (as it seems) the only currents whose energy can vanquish the supra-ideational resistance (so to call it) of the cells, and cause the peculiarly intense sort of disintegration with which the sensational quality is linked. If, however, the leakage forward were to stop, the tension inside certain cells might reach the explosion-point, even though the influence which excited them came only from neighboring cortical parts. Let an empty pail with a leak in its bottom, tipped up against a support so that if it ever became full of water it would upset, represent the resting condition of the centre for a certain sort of feeling. Let water poured into it stand for the currents which are its natural stimulus; then the hole in its bottom will, of course, represent the 'paths' by which it transmits its excitement to other associated cells. Now let two other vessels have the function of supplying it with water. One of these vessels stands for the neighboring cortical cells, and can pour in hardly any more water than goes out by the leak. The pail consequently never upsets in consequence of the supply from this source. A current of water passes through it and does work elsewhere, but in the pail itself nothing but what stands for ideational activity is aroused. The other vessel, however, stands for the peripheral sense-organs, and supplies a stream of water so copious that the pail promptly fills up in spite of the leak, and presently upsets; in other words, sensational activity is aroused. But it is obvious that if the leak were plugged, the slower stream of supply would also end by upsetting the pail.