HALLUCINATIONS OF THE SENSES. 699 



really appeared to this enraptured maiden, and as few, if any, will 

 doubt that she herself sincerely believed that he did, one must needs 

 suppose that her visions were hallucinations generated by the enthusi- 

 asm of a mind which was in a singularly exalted strain of religious and 

 patriotic feeling. 



The special medical interest of the subject lies in this that there 

 are a great many persons in the world who, suffering under some form 

 or other of nervous disorder, habitually see figures or faces, hear threat- 

 ening or insulting voices, even feel blows and taste poisons, which 

 have no existence outside their own minds ; and neither argument 

 nor demonstration of the impossibility of what they allege they per- 

 ceive will shake their convictions in the least. " You assure me," 

 they will say, " that I am mistaken ; that there are no such persons as 

 I see, no such voices as I hear ; but I protest to you that I see and 

 hear them as distinctly as I see and hear you at this moment, and that 

 they are just as real to me." What are we to reply ? I have replied 

 sometimes, that " as you are alone on one side in your opinion, and all 

 the world is on the other side, I must needs think, either that you are 

 an extraordinary genius, far in advance of the rest of the world, or that 

 you are a madman a long way behind it ; and, as I don't think you to 

 be a genius, I am bound to conclude that your senses are disordered." 

 But the argument does not produce the least effect. 



Let me give an example or two of the character of these hallucina- 

 tions, and of their persistence in minds that might be thought sane 

 enough to correct them. The first shall be that of an old gentleman 

 who was much distressed because of an extremely offensive smell which 

 he imagined to proceed from all parts of his body : there was not the 

 least ground, in fact, for this imagination. He was scrupulously clean 

 in person, extremely courteous in manner, thoroughly rational in his 

 conversation on every other subject, a shrewd and clever man of busi- 

 ness ; no one talking with him would for a moment have suspected him 

 of entertaining such extraordinary fancies. Nevertheless, his life was 

 made miserable by them ; he would not go into society, but took soli- 

 tary rambles in the country, where he might meet as few persons as 

 possible ; in his own house he slept for the first part of the night on 

 the ground- floor, mounting up higher at a later period of the night ; 

 and this he did to prevent the bad odors from becoming too concen- 

 trated in one room. He believed that the people in the next house 

 were irritated and offended by the emanations, for he often heard them 

 moving about and coughing ; and, when he passed a cab-stand in the 

 street, he noticed that even the horses became restless and fidgeted. 

 He used to hang his clothes out of the window at night that they might 

 get pure, until his housekeeper put a stop to the practice by telling 

 him that the exhibition of them would excite the notice and comment 

 of his neighbors. All the while he was conducting his business with 

 propriety and success ; his own partners had no suspicion of his concli. 



