Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847. Various
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nerves are framed of such materials and in such arrangements, that the chemical changes constantly in progress under the control of life, determine in them currents of thought and feeling.
We must be satisfied with having got thus far by help of the analogy, nor try to push it further; for beyond the fact of both being imponderable forces, electricity and consciousness have nothing in common. They are otherwise violently unlike; or resemble each other as little as a tooth-pick and a headach. Their further relations to the material arrangements through which they may be excited or disturbed, are subjects of separate and dissimilar studies, and resolvable into laws which have no affinity, and admit of no comparison.
But upon the step which we have gained, it stands to reason, that the individual consciousness or mind, habitually energizing in and through a given living brain, may, for any thing we know to the contrary, and very conceivably, be drawn, under circumstances favourable to the event, into direct communication with consciousness, individualised or diffused elsewhere.
Accordingly, there is no intrinsic absurdity in supposing that Zschokke's mind was occasionally thrown into direct relation with that of a chance visitor through favourable influences; that the soul of Arnod Paole, as he lay in his grave alive, in the so-called vampyr-state, may have drawn into communion the minds of other persons, who were thereupon the subjects of sensorial illusions of which he was the theme;—that the mind of Joan of Arc may by possibility have been placed in relation with a higher mind, which foreknew her destiny, and in a parallel manner displayed it to her.
Individual facts may be disputed or attributed to more coincidence, but as soon as their number and singularity and authentication take them out of that category, the explanation offered above cannot be put aside as prima facie absurd. Like other first hypotheses, indeed, it will, if received for a time, have ultimately to make way for a correcter notion. Still it will have helped to lead to truth. I am quite indifferent to its fate. But I am not indifferent to the reception the facts themselves may meet with, which I have adduced it to explain. It is true that nothing can be more trivial and useless than the character in which they present themselves. Disconnected objectless outbreaks, they seem, of some obscure power, they may be compared to the attraction of light bodies by amber after friction, and are as yet as unmeaning and valueless as were the first indications of the electric force. Therefore, doubtless, are they so commonly disregarded.
It is not indeed unlikely that, on looking closer, a number of other incidents, turning up on trifling or important occasions, may be found to depend on the same cause with those we have been considering—things that seem for a moment odd and unaccountable, something more than coincidences, and are then forgotten. The simultaneous suggestions of the same idea to two persons in conversation, the spread of panic-fears, sympathy in general, the attraction or repulsion felt on first acquaintance, the intuitive knowledge of mankind which some possess, the universal fascination exercised by others, may be found, perhaps, in part to hinge on the same principle with Zschokke's seer-gift.
Among the odd incidents which this train of reflection brings to my mind, (which you are at liberty to explain in the way you like best,) I am tempted to select and mention two that were communicated to me by Admiral the Honourable G. Dundas, then a Lord of the Admiralty, and in constant communication with his colleague, Sir Thomas Hardy, from whom he received them. They were mentioned as anecdotes of Lord Nelson, to show his instinctive judgment of men. They both go further.
When Lord Nelson was preparing to follow the French fleet to the West Indies, Captain Hardy was present as he gave directions to the commander of a frigate to make sail with all speed,—to proceed to certain points, where he was likely to see the French,—having seen the French, to go to a certain harbour, and there wait Lord Nelson's coming. After the commander had left the cabin, Nelson said to Hardy, "He will go to the West Indies, he will see the French, he will go to the harbour I have directed, but he will not wait for me. He will return to England." He did so. Shortly before the battle of Trafalgar, an English frigate was in advance of the fleet looking out for the enemy; her place in the offing was hardly discernible. Captain Hardy was with Nelson on the quarter-deck of the Victory. Without any thing to lead to it, Nelson said, "The Celeste" (or whatever the frigate's name may have been)—"the Celeste sees the French." Hardy had nothing to say on the matter. "She sees the French; she'll fire a gun." Within a little, the boom of the gun was heard.
Socrates, it is well known, had singular intimations, which he attributed to a familiar or demon. One day being with the army, he tried to persuade an officer, who was going across the country, to take a different route to that which he intended; "If you take that," he said, "you will be met and slain." The officer, neglecting his advice, was killed, as Socrates had forewarned him.
Timarchus, who was curious on the subject of the demon of Socrates, went to the cave of Trophonius, to learn of the oracle about it. There, having for a short time inhaled the mephitic vapour, he felt as if he had received a sudden blow on the head, and sank down insensible. Then his head appeared to him to open and to give issue to his soul into the other world; and an imaginary being seemed to inform him that, "the part of the soul engaged in the body, entrammelled in its organisation, is the soul is ordinarily understood; but that there is another part or province of the soul, which is the demon. This has a certain control over the bodily soul, and among other offices constitutes conscience. In three months," the vision added, "you will know more of this." At the end of three months Timarchus died.
V.—TRANCE AND SLEEPWALKING
Dear Archy.—The subjects which remain to complete our brief correspondence, are Religious Delusions, the Possessed, and Witchcraft.
In order that I may set these fully and distinctly before you, it is necessary that you should know what is meant by Trance.
You have already had partial glimpses of this comprehensive phenomenon. Arnod Paole was in a trance, in his grave in the church-yard of Meduegua: Timarchus was in a trance in the cave of Trophonius.
But we must go still further back. To conceive properly the nature of trance, it is necessary to form clear ideas of the state of the mind in ordinary sleeping and waking.
During our ordinary waking state, we are conscious of an uninterrupted flow of thought, which we may observe to be modified by three influences—the first, suggestions of our experience and reflections, impulses of our natural and acquired character; the second, present impressions on our senses; the third, voluntary exertion of the attention to detain one class of ideas in preference to others.
Further, we habitually perceive things around us, by or through sensation. But on some, and for the most part trivial occasions, we seem endowed with another sort of perception, which is either direct, or dependent on new modes of sensation.
Again, the balance of the mental machinery may be overthrown. The suggestions of the imagination may become sensorial illusions; the judgment may be the subject of parallel hallucinations; the feelings may be perverted; our ideas may lose connexion and coherence; and intelligence may sink into fatuity.
So much for our waking state.
During sleep, there are no adequate reasons for doubting that the flow of our ideas continues as uninterrupted as in a waking state. It is true, that some persons assert that they never dream; and others that they dream occasionally only. But there is a third class, to which I myself belong, who continually dream, and who always, on waking, distinctly discern the fugitive rearguard of their last sleep thoughts. The simplest view of these diversified instances, is to suppose that all persons in sleep are always dreaming, and that the spaces seemingly vacant of dreams, are only gaps in the memory; that all persons asleep always dream, but that all persons do not always remember their dreams.
The suggestive influences that modify the current of ideas in sleep, are not so numerous as those in operation in our waking state.
The principal, indeed in general the exclusive, impulse to our dreaming thoughts, is our past experience and existing character, from and in obedience to which, imagination moulds our dreams.
Not that sensation is suspended in sleep. On the contrary, it appears to have its usual acuteness; and impressions made upon our senses—the feelings produced