8i2 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



desire to see the color and size of his eyes, that I might tell of 

 them afterward, but this favor I never won. All my efforts 

 only caused the vision to disappear/' " As the clouds draw to 

 themselves the vapors of earth, so does he draw our souls to him- 

 self, ravishes them out of themselves, brings them upon the 

 clouds of his majesty to heaven with him, and begins to reveal to 

 them the mysteries of the kingdom which he has prepared for 

 them. ... In these ecstasies the soul seems to leave the body. 

 Hence the natural warmth diminishes, the limbs slowly grow 

 cold, although one feels the while most comfortable. In the 

 prayer of union, in which we find ourselves already in our native 

 country, we can almost always resist the divine attraction, though 

 it be with difficulty and with great effort, but not in ecstasy ; all 

 resistance is then usually impossible. Before one thinks there 

 comes a shock so sudden and mighty that one sees and feels as if 

 that cloud from heaven, or that divine eagle, had swept one away 

 and borne one off in flight." ''This condition is a sleep of the 

 mental powers, in which they, without being wholly merged iu 

 God, yet can not tell how they work. The pleasure, the bliss, is 

 incomparably greater than in the preceding state of prayer. The 

 soul is overflowed with the water of God's grace, which flows full 

 to the banks. She can not and will not go either forward or 

 backward, and only glows with the desire to enjoy such tran- 

 scendent majesty. . . . My state then seems to me an absolute 

 death to all worldly things and a ravishment in God. I know no 

 fit simile for what the soul then feels. She no longer knows 

 what she does, whether she talks, is silent, laughs, or weeps. It is 

 like a blissful delirium, a heavenly madness, in which one learns 

 true wisdom ; in short, it is a sort of most exquisite bliss." 



With these few illustrations I must turn from the forms of 

 trance which appear to result from the hypertrophy of some 

 mental state to a very different type. From the theoretical point 

 of view we would expect to find the lines of cleavage so to speak 

 in disordination taking different directions in different people. 

 In the cases of which I have been speaking the mental co-ordina- 

 tion would seem to be pretty much dissolved or displaced. In 

 other cases, to which I shall return later those of so-called sec- 

 ondary personality we shall find the lines of cleavage relatively 

 few, and constant in their direction and location. But to the 

 trance states proper belong those forms of disordination in which 

 the inner life of thought is left intact while dissociated from 

 movement, from sensation, or from both. The chronic cases in 

 which some movements or some sensations only are lost are 

 grouped under hysteria rather than under trance ; the more com- 

 plete and transitory forms properly belong to trance. 



Of the second of these three conceivable cases, in which all 



