oment than if they had been asleep.
This condition of the brain is
called by the savans hallucination. Mueller, the physiologist, and Goethe, the
poet, have both described hallucinations to which they were subject, and which
they compared in conversation together. The rarest case, says Mueller, is that
of an individual who, while perfectly healthy in body and mind, has the faculty,
on closing his eyes, of seeing really the objects he wishes to see. History
cites only a very few instances of this phenomenon. Carden and Goethe were
examples of it.
Goethe says: "When I close my
eyes and stoop my head, I figure to myself and see a flower in the middle of my
visual organ. This flower preserves only for an instant its first form. It soon
decomposes itself, and out of it issues other flowers, with colored and
sometimes green petals. They were not natural but fantastic flowers, yet regular
as the roses of the sculptor. I could not look fixedly at that creation, but it
remained as long as I liked without increasing or diminishing. In the same way
when I imagined a disk full of various colors, I saw continually issue from the
centre to the circumference new forms like those of the kaleidoscope."
Mueller talked this subject over
with Goethe in 1828. It was interesting to them both. "Knowing," says Mueller,
"that when I was calmly lying on my bed with my eyes shut, although not asleep,
I often saw figures which I could observe very well, he was very curious to
learn what I then felt. I told him that my will had no influence either upon the
production or upon the changes of these figures, and that I had never seen any
thing symmetrical or of the character of vegetation." Goethe could at will, on
the contrary, choose his theme, which transformed itself forthwith in a manner
apparently involuntary, but always obeying the laws of symmetry and harmony.
Mueller used to get rid of the figures which haunted him by turning his face to
the wall. Although he did not see them change place, they were still before him,
but they soon began to fade. Jean Paul recommended the observation of these
phantoms as a good plan for falling asleep.
These are hallucinations of sane
minds. The delusive sensations of flying and falling are known to many persons.
Young girls lying in bed between sleeping and waking, at the epoch of life when
their girlhood is passing into womanhood, are especially apt, like the religious
ecstatics, to fancy they are flying. And nearly every body is familiar with the
hallucinations of falling from personal experience. When lying in bed trying in
vain to fall asleep, or to warm the cold sheets, the patient feels as if sinking
through the floor, and stretches out his arms suddenly to save himself: yet
nothing has happened except the coincidence of a cold shiver with a complete
Physiologists and philosophers of
authority say we are all mad in our dreams; and, if the absence of the control
of reason is a true definition of insanity, there is no gainsaying the
proposition. But madness means something more. In dreams the faculties which
control the picturing or imagining powers are simply inactive; they are neither
absent nor incapable. Far from identifying sleeping dreams with madness, I feel
disposed to contend that voluntary and momentary hallucinations—seeing by the
blind, hearing by the deaf, sensations of smelling, touching, tasting things
which do not exist—are only signs of insanity when the faculties needful for
correcting the errors of sensation are diseased. Persons unaccustomed to railway
traveling are not insane, although for many minutes they often believe the train
is going backward, because they retain the power of correcting the hallucination
by watching the objects they are passing.
The senses are seeing, bearing,
smelling, touching, and tasting instruments. There are between these and the
seat of intelligence nerves performing the functions of carriers. Even after the
instruments have ceased to exist the carriers often continue to carry
messages—false messages. When a man has lost an eye, during the inflammatory
peri