Literary Notices. ' xxxi 



correctness of the language. This cultured lady had never had a mas- 

 tery of the spoken tongue but suddenly, without apparent cause, lost 

 the speech of her birth and entire life and seemed to have miraculously 

 acquired a new faculty. My friend, as a sensible man, did not seek to 

 exorcise a demon or even send for a doctor, but employed the expect- 

 ant method until the curious nervous kink straightened out of itself, 

 never, so far as known, to reappear. If this circumstance, which is 

 known to very few, had taken place in an ignorant community, the be- 

 lief in possession would have been absolute and the sufferer, if not of 

 unusually well balanced mind, would have been tormented into perma- 

 nent delusions or worse. Again, in the case of the writer it has hap- 

 pened while studying language and in a stage where ordinarily the act 

 of composition was painfully tedious, that, say during an early morn- 

 ing doze, he seemed suddenly endowed with a gift of tongues and 

 rolled off sentence after sentence with the greatest ease and apparent 

 accuracy. The neurological explanation of such phenomena is not 

 difficult and, if it were, the appeal to demoniac possession would add 

 but another and more insoluble problem. In one case cited by 

 the author the subject seemed to be able to describe a distant country 

 and her power was accounted miraculous, but the more than usually 

 accurate reporter adds that her descriptions were only correct in the 

 general outlines and not in detail and that she might have picked up 

 the facts used from other sources. 



If the author had lived in this country during the last twenty years 

 it is unlikely that he would have considered the resemblance of the 

 oriental table-tipping performances to those which ran their course here 

 as evidence in favor of their spiritual nature. 



One point requires further notice. The morbid personality is 

 usually worse than the normal. Does this seem remarkable ? We think 

 it is only what should be expected. In the life of every person not ut- 

 terly depraved there is a constant struggle against what are to him temp- 

 tations. The even trajectory of normal life is the resultant of conflict- 

 ing forces of which some are (to the subject) bad or malign. This is 

 (luite apart from any absolute moral system. In neurotics these anti- 

 monies are doubly strong. When, then, the one set of mental forces 

 are switched out of circuit the other is Ukely to be immanent. The 

 ruling or dominant forces are just the ones to be unhorsed for the rea- 

 son that they are so largely inhibitory while the other set is chiefly in- 

 trenched in the elementary physical nature. 



Before passing to the evidence collected by the author let us note 

 something of the setting of the facts. 



