AND BODILY STATES UPON THE IMAGINATION. 217 



judge truly and correctly.* As long as the mind remains perfectly 

 sound, and its three great powers bear a strict and healthy relation 

 to each other, the actions of the senses will be correct, and the 

 ideas they furnish consonant to the order and perfection of nature. 

 But when the faculties of the mind become unduly exalted, or the 

 reciprocity of these actions destroyed — whether, as we have before 

 seen, from disease of body or disorder affecting the mind in the 

 abstract — a false action will be given to one or more of the senses, 

 and hallucination will take place. From this view it will at once 

 be seen that hallucinations will be most common in persons whose 

 minds are totally deranged, in those labouring under the various 

 forms of melancholy or mania ; and this is actually the case, 

 scarcely any form of insanity being totally devoid of hallucination 

 of one or more of the senses. Hallucination may be confined to 

 one sense, as monomania is limited to one series of ideas ; the eye 

 may be false whilst the ear remains true, the taste may be decep- 

 tive whilst the touch accurately informs of all the properties its 

 functions permit it to ascertain. It is commonly the case that hal- 

 lucination, as affecting one or more senses, bears a correspondent 

 relation to that state of mind which produces the affection in the 

 first instance ; thus, the maniac will be deceived by the actions of 

 every sense, while the hallucinations of the monomaniac will be 

 confined to one. A very remarkable instance of this is related in a 

 recent publication, and though probably well known, it illustrates 

 so clearly this point, and throws so much light on the theory I have 

 just promulgated, that I do not think it necessary to resort to works 

 less known for an example, since I know not where I could find 

 one so suitable and so authentic. It was not originally related to 

 illustrate a point of similar character to that to which I am about to 



* Hallucinations, according to Esquirol, are images produced by memory, 

 and associated by imagination. Foville, with more truth, considers them 

 entirely as the product of a morbid imagination, which gives reality to the 

 ideas existing in the mind ; L e., the mind presents its ideas to the senses in 

 a form which calls into action the functions of that sense to which the hallu- 

 cination is addressed. Thus, the mind calls up the idea of a form which the 

 eye beholds, it conceives of sounds which the ear detects, yet which have no 

 existence. A priest, a man of strong mind and good education, was subject 

 to hallucinations of the ear ; he heard voices which continually threatened 

 him. Being reasoned with upon his affection, and the nature of depraved 

 sensation and false perception being explained to him, he constantly replied 

 — " I ought then to doubt what you say to me and what I see ; for the 

 sounds which appear to you to have no existence, appear to me as certainly 

 to be real as anything else which I see or hear around me." 



VOL. V. NO. XVIII. 2e 



