7 io THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



I cannot, of course, enumerate all the bodily conditions in which 

 hallucinations appear, but there is one more which I shall mention par- 

 ticularly, because it has been the foundation of a prophetic or apostolic 

 mission. It is not at all uncommon for a vivid hallucination of one or 

 other of the senses, of hearing, of sight, of smell, of touch, of muscular 

 sensibility, to precede immediately the unconsciousness of an epileptic 

 fit. It may be a command or threat uttered in a distinct voice, or the 

 figure of a person clearly seen, or a feeling of sinking into the ground 

 or of rising into the air ; and a common visual hallucination on such 

 occasions is a flash, a halo, or a flood of bright or colored light, which 

 makes a strong impression before the person falls unconscious. When 

 he comes to himself he remembers it vividly, and believes, perhaps, that 

 it was a vision of an angel of light or of the Holy Ghost. There can 

 be no doubt that angelic apparitions and heavenly visions have some- 

 times had this origin. Proceeding from the sensory centre, not from 

 the higher centres of thought, they are calculated to produce the strong- 

 er impression of their miraculous nature ; for, if the person knows that 

 he was not thinking of anything of the kind when the vision occurred, 

 he will naturally be the more startled and affected by it. I might give 

 many striking examples in proof of what I say, but I will content 

 myself with an ordinary and comparatively recent one. Two or three 

 years ago a laborer in the Chatham dock-yard, who was epileptic, and 

 had once been in an asylum for insanity, suddenly split the skull of a 

 fellow-laborer near him with an adze. There was no apparent motive 

 for the deed, for the men were not on bad terms. He was, of course, 

 tried for murder, but was acquitted by the jury on the ground of insan- 

 ity, in accordance with the medical evidence, but directly in the teeth 

 of a strong charge of the judge, and much to the disappointment of 

 certain newspapers, w 7 hose editorial feelings are sadly harrowed when- 

 ever an insane person escapes from the gallows. He is now in the 

 criminal asylum at Broadmoor, and he has told the medical officers there 

 what was not known at the trial that some years before the mur- 

 der he had received the Holy Ghost ; that it came to him like a flash 

 of light, and that his own eyes had been taken out, and other eyes, like 

 balls of fire, substituted for them. A characteristic epileptic halluci- 

 nation ! Let us suppose that this man had undertaken some prophetic 

 mission, as epileptics have done, and had put into it all the energy of 

 his epileptic temperament, he would have declared with perfect sin- 

 cerity, so far as he was concerned, that the Holy Ghost appeared to 

 him in a vision as an exceeding bright light, and, behold ! his own eyes 

 were taken out and balls of fire were in their places. 



Some persons maintain that the earliest visions of Mohammed, who, 

 like Caesar, was epileptic, were of this kind, and that his change of 

 character and the assumption of his prophetic mission followed an epi- 

 leptic vision. Tradition tells us that he was walking in solitude in the 

 lonely defiles and valleys near Mecca, when every stone and tree greeted 



