nary dissertation on mental malformities, tracing each leading variety back to its origin, and following the steps of its growth; so might they throw light on the ways by which the various modes of defective observation and reasoning that spring from the biasing passions and tempers of human nature shut it out from thorough and veracious converse with facts, and grow from generation to generation into the structural outcomes of positive mental malformity. The brain is, as it were, essentially a consolidation of memories, and these consolidate embodiments of fallacies of thought and feeling might be described justly as the various spirits of error made flesh. And if that be their true origin and organic meaning, their functions will naturally furnish the most striking displays of these errors, the organ giving out the kind of function which inspired its construction. A man could not think or do deceit habitually and naturally if his ancestors for generations before him had not thought or done deceit, and in the end incorporated its spirit into the structure of his brain. If they have lived in mean spheres and comparatively simple social relations, where there was not much call for self-restraint or need of delicacy of feeling, and he is launched into a larger human sphere and into more complex and refined social relations, where self-restraint and

respect for others are required, then the fundamental faults of his nature are brought into obtrusive exercise and conspicuous display.*

The intermediate region or border-land of thought and feeling between soundness and unsoundness of mind is a penumbral region which has been very fruitful of supernatural products. It is less fruitful now than once it was, because, like other enchanted. regions, it has been surveyed in part, and taken possession of by positive knowledge, but it is yet not barren of wonders. Ghost-seers and ghost-seekers are still to be met with, and in such numbers and of such zeal at the present time as to have organized in England a society for the systematic prosecution of their researches; and they stand in no need of

* One might follow the principle, through a variety of exemplifications, into the explanations of the fundamental traits of individual characters. No conscious ingenuity applied diligently to doing the wrong thing, or the right thing at the wrong time, ever equals, or can equal, the unconscious ingenuity with which certain natures, incarnating the discordant feelings and doings of their forefathers, succeed almost invariably in doing, with the most apt inaptness, the wrong thing, or the right thing at the wrong time. Again, there are some persons who are uniformly unfortunate through life, who, failing in everything they put their hands to, might really seem to have been born under an unlucky star, just as there are persons who almost uniformly succeed; the fate which is thus inexorable against them, is the fate made for them by the absence of some good or the presence of some bad quality in their organization. Therefore it is invincible and always intervening to wreck their ventures. The circumstances of life become everrecurring occasions of calling it into unfortunate exercise, or of revealing its unfortunate absence.

compassion who look compassionately down from their superior spiritual altitude on the inferior mental endowments of those destitute of their fine spiritual sense. Great, indeed, will be their reward if it be that which they joyfully anticipate-namely, the proof of the reality of the spiritual world by the incontestable evidence of facts, the demonstration of the supernatural by natural means, the vision of the soul by the eye of the body.

Without endorsing the observations of enthusiasts who are sometimes signally disqualified by natural temperament from observing accurately at all, and signally qualified to embrace eagerly that which suits its strain of quality, this much reason may fairly be allowed to the inquiries of those who seek for sensible evidence of supersensible things: first, that matter does undoubtedly exist in so fine, subtile, and, so to speak, spiritualized a state as to be imperceptible to human sense, and in that condition is amazingly active; second, that, though we cannot then perceive it by sense, it is possible we may nevertheless be affected powerfully by it. To leap, however, from this admission to the creation of a world of spiritual beings of human kind and form is to go backwards to the dark days of knowledge for the material and forms of more enlightened thought; for it is certain there has not been any discovery of new laws and

properties of matter in these latter days to warrant in the least the belief of its taking the visible form and substance of a ghost.

The case is really one of reversion to the old belief of savages, amongst whom everywhere spirits and ghosts have abounded; an example of the active revival or recrudescence of a surviving superstition, not a new acquisition of scientific thought; and the method of thought pursued is none other than the old method which filled nature with spirits in the past, making the counterfeit of knowledge where no knowledge was. It may seem to savour of science to think of spirit as a name for the most subtile manifestations of material substance, seeing that, however much men may subtilize and refine matter, they who owe all the material and forms of their ideas to sensory perception cannot immaterialize it entirely, cannot really conceive spiritual existence or agency save as endowed with some of its properties; but it is signal inconsistency thereupon to make grossly sensible to eye, or palpable to touch, or audible to ear, a material agency the essential character of which is a tenuity too fine for the appreciation of sense.

M

CHAPTER II.

HALLUCINATIONS AND ILLUSIONS.

THAT many theories concerning the supernatural have had their origin and sustenance in the operations of disordered mind cannot be disputed by any one who has bestowed the attention entitling him to have and to express an opinion on the subject. Of these disordered operations of mind the most striking outcomes notably are Hallucinations and Illusions, and Mania and Delusions. It is their nature, origin, and significance that I go on now to consider briefly and summarize compendiously.

By hallucination is meant such a false perception of sense as a person has when he sees, hears, touches, or otherwise apprehends as external, that which has no existence at all outside his consciousness, no objective basis-sees a person where there is no person, hears a voice where there is no voice. It is the creation of a fitting object of sense as cause of a special sensation where no such object