out manifesting any sign of pain. After exorcism, the nuns had no recollection whatever of the scenes through which they had passed, and the part they had played. There is no need, however, to refer these phenomena, as M. Figuier seems inclined to do, to the magnetic or quasi-supernatural influence of one human will upon another. The same conditions are conspicuous in hypnotism, as Mr. Braid has denominated the artificial sleep which individuals may produce in themselves, without the intervention of a second party, by prolonged and concentrated attention directed to a single object. The insensibility displayed by the nuns is only an extreme illustration of a fact of every-day experience. It is well known that when attention is withdrawn from outward objects, impressions made on the organism are conveyed only imperfectly, or not at all, to the sentient and percipient mind. In reverie, the events taking place around us are lost upon the mind. Wounds received during an absorbing pursuit are unfelt until the energy of pursuit slackens. Laromiguière was in a certain sense right in representing attention as the condition and primal germ of all mental activity. What we do not attend to we are utterly unconscious of. For instance, in ordinary sleep, though the eye is closed to light, the orifices of the ear are not shut upon the atmospheric waves which circulate round them; yet the ear is as insensible to sound, in proportion to the depth of the sleep, as the eye to vision. And by artificial means particular organs and portions of the nervous system may be thrown into a sleep so profound and complete as to be insensible to the intensest and, what in a waking state would be, the most painful stimuli. At the same time, in artificial as in ordinary sleep particular senses and faculties may be wakeful and active. The constrained and unnatural postures which persons under mesmeric and hypnotic influence assume and maintain, and which were observed in the nuns of Loudun, have their faint foreshadowing and prototype in the odd and uncomfortable attitudes often to be remarked during natural sleep. These facts, imperfectly as they present the subject, indicate, we think, with sufficient clearness that the abnormal states to which we refer are only extreme instances of common and regular phenomena.

The unnatural physical strength developed in the nuns of Loudun, and the extraordinary and almost impossible tours de force by which they displayed it,-exceeding those of any professional mountebank,-are similar in kind to what may be witnessed in every instance of delirium and convulsion. The percipient and nervous organism sleeping, the stream of nerveforce (to use Mr. Bain's language and hypothesis) probably sets with undivided current towards the muscles of voluntary motion,

and endows them with an energy and activity which seems preternatural.

For the reasons now suggested, it seems to us quite unnecessary to suppose the direct operation on the minds and organism of the Ursulines of any other will and personality than their own, -demoniac or human, magical or magnetic, sorcerer's or exorcist's. The highest medical authorities are unanimous in resolving the devils of Loudun into morbid nervous affections on the part of the possessed. The source of their malady was shrewdly guessed at by Giles Menage, in a work published as early as 1674: "In anno 1632," he writes, "accidit ut aliquot virgines Ludonensis cœnobii, uteri suffocationibus, ut verosimile est, laborantes, adeo vexarentur, ut eas a dæmone correptas crederent homines superstitiosi." The subject, even if it were not rather of medical than of general interest, is obviously unfit for discussion in these pages.

M. Figuier's diagnosis represents the sisters of the convent as suffering under hysteria, with various complications, produced by that particular form of derangement technically known as erotomania. The nature of the charges made by the nuns against Grandier, and one feature which pervades the hallucinations of all the possessed respecting his conduct towards them, to which for obvious reasons we have not alluded, puts this explanation of their condition beyond reasonable doubt.

These physiological explanations are satisfactory as far as they go; but they are obviously incomplete. They point out the circumstances which, in this particular case, predisposed the nuns to believe in their own diabolical possession, and to attribute it to the incantations of Grandier; but they throw no light at all on the origin and nature of the general belief in demons and in possession. A few words on both of these subjects will be in place.

The demons of classic belief were, it is well known, originally the disembodied spirits of good men, supposed still to be living on the earth, and exercising tutelary cares over survivors. This is the graceful and touching form which the superstition takes in Hesiod. Soon, however, a similar power over and interest in human affairs was attributed to the departed souls of bad men. In the other world the wicked did not cease from troubling. The course of thought in both the classic nations was the same. To the good and evil demons of the Greeks, the Lares and Dii Manes, and the Lemures and Larva, of the Romans exactly corresponded. Fear is a not less active, and in its effects on the popular imagination is generally a far more potent, principle than the spirit of love and of a sound mind. Mysterious and invisible agencies naturally awaken apprehension and alarm; and it is the tendency of terror to paint

the object towards which it is entertained in the darkest colours, and to become hatred. Hence, while the good demons gradually dropped out of the popular belief, or took another form in which their human origin was lost, the evil demons remained a leading doctrine of almost every superstition. Christianity found them a prominent part of the Jewish faith, in which they were still held to be the souls of wicked men. Taking up this belief, it has diffused it over the world. The connection between the pious and humane demonism of the pagan poet and the revolting demonism of early Christianity and of the Catholic middle ages seems incredible, when we look only at the two extremes of the development,-the origin of the doctrine and its final form. It is quite clear, however, when the intermediate steps of transition are considered, and the omitted terms of the series introduced.

The nature of the fact expressed by the word possession remains to be considered. The Roman Catholic church denotes the kinds and degrees of diabolic agency by appropriate terms. "It was possession when the demon was lodged in the interior of the body; obsession when one was the subject of his attacks from without; malefice when one simply suffered from an infirmity inflicted either directly, or through the medium, of a sorcerer. Further, circumsession was distinguished as a sort of obsession, in which the demon laid siege to the body on all sides without actually entering it."* Possession was perhaps more than the mere corporeal lodgment of the demon within the organisation of the possessed. The demon dwelt in the mind as well as in the body of his victim, abusing the faculties of thought and emotion and will, not less than those of the physical nature. The demoniac seems to have had, in some confused and confusing way, the feeling of a double personality within the limits of the same consciousness. Besides his true self, he was aware of a second self, an alter ego, distinct from the former and in conflict against it, though yet in some sense blended with it. These demoniacal hallucinations are not by any means phenomena sui generis. They are extreme cases of illusions which, in a less extreme form, are of the very commonest occurrence in the daily experience of almost every one. In reverie, for example, ideas and images seem to float upon the passive mind from some foreign and external source, rather than to rise by any natural law of suggestion from within. For this reason, persons especially inclined to reverie-the mystics of all ages-have invariably been prone to refer the thoughts and impulses which have presented themselves in meditation, not to the natural operation of their own faculties, but to the influence of other beings mys

Figuier.

teriously communicating with their souls. The thoughts, if low and debasing, are the promptings of Satan; if pure and elevated, they are the inspirations of God.* In dreaming, a heightened degree of the same phenomenon is observable. We carry on discussions with imaginary opponents, supplying them with the arguments to which we listen, and grant or refuse our assent. In insanity the same peculiarity is often apparent. Sir Henry Holland, in his Chapters on Mental Physiology, mentions a case of mental derangement in which the patient held frequent and excited conversations with himself; in which he sometimes professed to hear the answers given him; at other times bore both parts himself, but in different tones of voice for each of the persons presumed to be present. Other illustrations may be found to any desired extent in almost any work on medical psychology.

In all these cases, the sense of continuous personal identity, which lies at the root of coherent thought and action, is from some cause or other temporarily disturbed or permanently lost. The power of attention is either voluntarily unexercised or completely gone, and the mind, abandoning all self-direction, is tossed about like a helmless ship. "If," says M. Esquirol, "we notice what passes in the mind of the most sensible of men during a single day, what incoherence shall we notice in his ideas and determinations from the time that he wakes in the morning till he returns to his rest at night! His sensations and ideas have some connection among them only when he arrests his attention, and then only does he reason. The insane no longer enjoy the faculty of fixing their attention, and this is the primitive cause of all their errors."

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*In the introduction to his recent translation of Immanuel Hermann Fichte's Contributions to Mental Philosophy, Mr. Morell has ingeniously applied the doctrine of unconscious mental states to the explanation of the phenomena of spiritualistic possession. "This doctrine, that the regions of intelligence and consciousness are precisely coextensive, has of late years," he says, come into deserved discredit. Sir W. Hamilton many years ago pointed out the fact, that there is a process of latent thought always going forward more or less energetically in the Soul. Dr. Carpenter designated the same phenomena under the term unconscious cerebration. Dr. Laycock has brought them under the general category of reflex action, and shown that there is a vast variety of facts both in the man and in the animal which spring distinctly from the reflex action of the brain. Almost all the modern German psychologists, particularly Carus and the Herbartian school, have developed the same doctrine still more at large." Mr. John Mill and Sir Benjamin Brodie, we may add, testify from their own personal experience to the truth of the doctrine of unconscious mental processes, issuing in the development and solution of difficult problems which they had temporarily laid aside. No doubt this phenomenon of unconscious mental processes is not ultimate, and may itself be referred to very different explanations;-and reasons may be shown for assigning different causes in different cases. We do not mean to deny that there are limits within which we are fully competent to determine what is due to our own mind, and what to foreign influences upon us. But a separate examination is clearly needed in each separate case.

The excessive strain of the faculty of mental concentration is, however, often as dangerous as the absence of it, or its too slight exercise. The stages by which a steady and persistent purpose, or object of contemplation, slides into a fixed idea, and then into monomania, are easily appreciated. They have often been illustrated in the career of those who, beginning as reformers, have soon become fanatics, and have ended as madmen. An image or conception absorbing the mind often becomes indistinguishable from a sensible reality. The devil, on the occasion of Luther's throwing the inkstand at him; the saints and angels, and even the holy Trinity, who were revealed to Loyola's ecstatic visions; the Jewish lawgiver, to whom Swedenborg took off his hat in the streets of London,-are so many instances of the subjective becoming objective by being too much dwelt on. We take an example of a different character, but to the same point, from M. de Boismont's work on Hallucinations:

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"A young man (says M. Baudry) occupied himself in planning canals. One day when he had been thinking upon this subject, he marked down on the map the course of the canal which was to pass through his part of the country. All at once he saw a pamphlet in a yellow cover with this title: Plans for cutting a Canal through the Plains of Sologne.' On reading the plans, he found them exactly corresponding with what had been passing through his mind. He read the pamphlet for some minutes, and the opinions it contained confirmed his own; his phantom work then disappeared, and he continued his investigations."

Here we have an example both of that twofold consciousness to which we have referred, and of that tendency to substantiate thoughts into things, which are the most frequent characteristics of insanity in its several forms, and of those passing illusions and delusions which may take place without real mental derangement. To them may be traced back very plausibly the genesis of the devils of Loudun. The nuns were subject to all the conditions which are favourable to hallucination. Their minds were, in all likelihood, little disciplined to active observation, judgment, and comparison, but prone rather to reverie and to those habits of morbid introspection which the life of the religieuse and the practice of confession foster, and which Sir Henry Holland pronounces to be a not unfrequent cause of insanity.* The person and character of Urbain Grandier, and afterwards, through the persistence of the priests, the reality of their possession, had become fixed ideas with them. They were a prey

* 66 It seems probable that certain cases of madness depend on a cause which can scarcely exist, even in a slight degree, without producing some mental disturbance, viz. the too frequent and earnest direction of the mind inwards upon itself the concentration of the consciousness too long continued upon its own functions." Mental Physiology, p. 77.