530 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



although they may be really no more than the products of one portion 

 of the brain, which another portion of the same brain is engaged in 

 contemplating, they often, through error, receive a religious sanction. 

 This is notably the case among half-civilized races. 



The number of great men who have been once, twice, or more fre- 

 quently subject to hallucinations is considerable. A list, to w^hich it 

 would be easy to make large additions, is given by Brierre de Bois- 

 mont (''Hallucinations," etc., 1862), from whom I translate the fol- 

 lowing account of the star of the first Napoleon, which he heard, 

 second-hand, from General Rapp : 



In 1806, General Rapp, on his return from the siege of Dantzic, having occa- 

 sion to speak to the Emperor, entered his study without being announced. He 

 found him so absorbed that his entry was unperceived. The General, seeing the 

 Emperor continue motionless, thought he might be ill, and purposely made a 

 noise. Napoleon immediately roused himself, and without any preamble, seizing 

 Rapp by the arm, said to him, pointing to the sky, " Look there, up there." The 

 General remained silent, but, on being asked a second time, he answered that he 

 perceived nothing. "What! " replied the Emperor, "you do not see it? It is 

 my star, it is before you, brilliant " ; then animating by degrees, he cried out, 

 "It has never abandoned me, I see it on all great occasions, it commands me to 

 go forward, and it is a constant sign of good fortune to me." 



It appears that stars of this kind, so frequently spoken of in his- 

 tory, and so well known as a metaphor in language, are a common 

 hallucination of the insane. Brierre de Boismont has a chapter on the 

 stars of great men. I can not doubt that fantasies of this description 

 were in some cases the basis of that firm belief in astrology which not 

 a few persons of eminence formerly entertained. 



The hallucinations of great men may be accounted for in part by 

 their sharing a tendency which we have seen to be not uncommon in 

 the human race, and which, if it happens to be natural to them, is 

 liable to be developed in their overwrought brains by the isolation of 

 their lives. A man in the position of the first Napoleon could have 

 no intimate associates ; a great philosopher who explores ways of 

 thought far ahead of his contemporaries must have an inner world in 

 which he passes long and solitary hours. Great men are also apt to 

 have touches of madness ; the ideas by which they are haunted, and 

 to whose pursuit they devote themselves, and by which they rise to 

 eminence, have much in common with the monomania of insanity. 

 Striking instances of great visionaries may be mentioned, who had 

 almost beyond doubt those very nervous seizures with which the ten- 

 dency to hallucinations is intimately connected. To take a single in- 

 stance, Socrates, whose daimon was an audible not a visual appearance, 

 was subject to what admits of hardly any other interpretation than 

 cataleptic seizure, standing all night through in a rigid attitude. 



It is remarkable how largely the visionary temperament has mani- 

 fested itself in certain periods of history and epochs of national life. 



