pictures, which will mutually resemble each other: this does not occur by infection, just as many people may be attacked by the same disease at the same place and in the same atmosphere, without it being caused by infection, as in cholera and the yellow fever. It is, however, certain, that visions may be transferred to others; and this is one of the most remarkable psychological phenomena. It either takes place directly, as among contemplative enthusiasts (the Philadelphian Society of Pordage), and occasionally in magnetic clairvoyants; instances are even known of dreams being transmitted to others; or it takes place directly, as by the laying on of hands, or by the touch in secondsight. To this class belong the remarkable narratives of spiritual appearances when at first one person, then several, saw the same visions, which is even said to have been extended to animals. Whether it is possible or not to consider it as an objective reality, is difficult to say; but such cases are told of every age and of all nations. This remarkable outward appearance of visions of a higher or lower class, does not, however, take place by means of the outward organic senses acting inwardly; for the manifestation in every case acts directly upon the organs of the soul, by means of which the visions are transferred to the organs of the senses. Every mental perception of the ideal, of the divine, and of the higher language of the soul, is certainly always a direct inner spiritual picture; and the divine therefore manifests itself according to the nature of the organ on which it falls,-to the rich poetic imagination as the ruling power of his fancy, to the philosophical understanding as the scheme of a harmonious system,it sinks deeply into the religious mind, and raises the strong, active, working productive will into a sacred power: it is thus that the divine is venerated by every one in a different

manner.

Visions are very various in their nature, as for instance those of the half-waking, even the waking state; the visions which certain persons can call up at will, as in the case of Cardanus; the visions of Nicolai and Bazko, who considered them to be phantasmagorias; the power of self-seeing as well as a double or manifold personality; the second sight of the Scottish isles, and many others. Classed according to their

natures there are religious visions, appearances of saints and gods of old, and according to popular belief, apparitions of ghosts, spirits, and devils.

In the history of magic, visions are almost always of a religious nature. The Israelites, from the time of Abraham, lived in constant communication with the Almighty and the angels, and very often made use of symbolic pictures.

The Indian seers communicate with the sun and moon, who as their divinities raise them up to themselves or descend to them upon the earth. "The senses are collected in the Manas (the Universal Spirit), and the seer sees nothing with the eyes, hears nothing with the ears, feels nothing and tastes nothing; but within the city of Brahma the five Pranas are radiant and watchful, and the seer beholds that which he did and saw when awake, he beholds the seen and the unseen, the known and the unknown, and because the Athma (spirit) is the cause of all actions, therefore he is even active during sleep, and resumes his primitive form of light, and is by nature radiant like Brahma. The inwardly collected spirit clothes itself with the coverings of the heavenly bodies and of the elements, and speaks from the seer as if the voices came from without; the voices which reveal themselves to him from the sun, moon, and stars, from plants and animals, and even from the unbending stone." Extatic states are no where so frequent as among the Hindoos.

Among the Greeks extatic visions were certainly more rare, from their youthfully powerful imagination, and yet among them these visions appeared under the objective forms of their gods. The demon of Socrates, who accompanied him through his whole life as a counselling voice, is well known ; Ulysses was guided by Minerva, and Apollo appeared to the Pythia.

The followers of the New Platonic doctrine had, like the Hindoos, many extatic visions. The ultimate end of their philosophic strivings was to gain an immediate and direct view of the Divinity, who as a pure light was to reveal himself to the inner eye. Purification of the soul from everything earthly, and fasting, were to be the preparations for contemplating this overflowing light. Demons appeared to them, however, in many shapes as intermediate beings between the divinity and man.

In the Christian ages the Israelitish visions were revived-of spirits, of angels, and devils, and the saints, who themselves have in general been the subjects of remarkable visions, maintained almost an uninterrupted spiritual communication with the faithful after their decease. The Jesuit Joh. Carrera lived with a guardian angel almost as with a bosom friend :—" Cum angelo suo tutelari erat tanto et tam familiari conjunctus usu, ut, velut intimo cum amico suo consilia sermonesque conferret, sæpe ad eum de suis rebus dubiis arduisque referret; vicissimque ei angelus ad omnia notis hisce usitatisque vocibus responderet." The angel woke him for his matins, and admonished him when he overslept himself. (Orlandini Historia Societatis Jesu, Colonæ Agripp. 1615 lib. ii. Nobl.)

Visions were most frequent in Convents, where solitude, ascetic practices, fasting, uncared-for diseases, as spasmodic convulsions, the unoccupied, often dreaming and overflowing imagination, gave numerous opportunities for the formation of these objective pictures. The history of the middle ages, even as far as the sixteenth century, is scarcely more than a history of magnetism and a universal system of socalled witchcraft and magic. Visions were so common that rules were given to distinguish those of divine origin from false delusions and the temptations of the devil. Theologists made this distinction, that the false visions resemble those apparitions which present themselves in convulsions, particularly in epilepsy and in mania, and raving insanity. More explicit directions are given by Cardinal Lambertini, afterwards Pope Benedict XIV., in the third volume of " De servorum Dei beatificatione."

:

SECOND DIVISION.

DREAMS.

DREAMS are often so vivid, that on awaking they outshine surrounding objects, and are long before they vanish. Cardanus (De subtilitate, c. 18) relates that between the ages of four and seven, when he awoke from sleep during the afternoon, all kinds of pictures appeared on the cover of his bed, in the shapes of trees, men, animals, towns, and armies. He was so delighted with them, that his mother often asked what he was looking at; but although very young (parvulus) he considered them to be delusions (non ignorabam hoc esse portentum quoddam), and denied that he saw anything, fearing that they might vanish. Spinoza relates of himself that one morning he awoke from an oppressive dream, when it was already broad daylight, and that the dream was still as vividly before his eyes as if it had been formed of material substances. He was particularly haunted by a dark, miserable-looking Brazilian. This phantom vanished when he fixed his eyes upon a book or any other object; but as soon as he turned his eyes away the Brazilian reappeared with the same distinctness, till at last the phantom vanished over his head (Opera posthuma, epistola 30). Jean Paul (Museum, p. 322) often saw, when awoke suddenly, shadowy forms beside him, once during the night a great reflection as of dawn or a fire: returning from a pedestrian journey, he saw an infantine girl's face looking down from his window, but no child had been in the house. As, therefore, the identity of visions, dreams, and the magnetic somnambulism, arises from an inward property of the human mind, so is it

clear that in the infancy of nations as well as the childhood of man, these visions must arise partly from the want of a power to discriminate between the various pictures of the imagination, and partly from objects in the outer world: and it is also from an entire ignorance of humanity that such appearances and predictions are believed to be something perfectly new,-just as much so as when Plutarch could say of the oracles that the divine power would cease to actuate them.

If the psychological relationship of dreams and visions has been explained by the above-and little doubt remains of their similarity—the physiological explanation cannot be far off; for it is impossible that there can be any one who has not at least observed traces of visions, or at least dreams, in himself. "Dreams, like visions, are phantoms of the inner senses." If all these various forms of visions, ecstasy, spectres, and clairvoyance, have not physiologically similar causes and manifestations, how is it possible that all these phenomena, and those of delirium and fever, the hallucinations of insanity, hypochondriasis, and catalepsy, bear so much mutual resemblance? As, psychologically, a powerful imaginative spiritual influence is at the foundation of all these, and as the mind, by night as well as by day, in sleep as in waking, continues its spiritual activity, and often more freely in sleep than when it is occupied with outward and material objects; so is it physically an instrument of the senses receiving impressions, whether received upon it by the so-called inner senses, by the imagination, or arising from an outward activity: the image of the senses forms itself in both cases according to the nature of the organ: objects, with their outlines and colour, from the eye; voices and sounds through the ear. The organs of the senses may also become active without outward influences or inner psychological impressions; through the sympathies or antagonisms of the juices and powers of the body to the organs of the senses, which in every case only excite the activity of those organic functions which are peculiar to themselves.

The inner senses become gradually active: for instance, the field of vision is impressed in a greater or a less degree, for a longer or a shorter space of time, and the im