COINAGES OF THE BRAIN. 297 



wonderment we suddenly come back to the workaday world, to find 

 " it was but a waking dream." 



Nor can we refuse to consider the influence of repetition and 

 habit as a predominating cause of such abstraction and reveries. 

 Who does not know the " dreamer" of everyday life, or it may 

 be the poet or poetaster, wrapt in a mantle of thought which 

 defies the penetration of mundane things, and within which he 

 sees and hears a universe of his own ? A near gradation, however, 

 brings us within range of the " hallucination " and " illusion," where 

 the creatures and coinages of the brain are projected with more 

 marked effect and in bolder relief than before. Now it is Satan 

 tempting a Luther a very devil in the flesh, with whom the religionist 

 converses and argues, whom he defies loudly and persistently, and at 

 whose head the irate reformer throws his ink-horn a proceeding 

 typical, indeed, of the extinction of many demons by the sweetness 

 and light of pencil and pen. Then it may be a St. Anthony strug- 

 gling with an evil spirit of sensuality, or with actual demons who 

 chastise him cruelly. Or it is Joan of Arc who is admonished by 

 " Our Lady of Bellemont " to succour her country, and to take to 

 arms for its defence : or it is the Hindu, prostrate in pious ecstasy 

 before the shrine of Brahmah, his visions, realities, and his fancied 

 converse with the Almighty One transformed thus into a dread 

 reality. 



Such were the hallucinations of the age of Faith. But they have 

 not ceased in our own day. The religionist before whom the saintly 

 image moves, to whom it speaks, is a reality of the age we live in, no 

 less than is the insane being we seclude in our asylum. In truth, 

 the study of the former is as much a matter of interest as that of the 

 insane ; because, under certain phases of mind, the illusion or halluci- 

 nation of the one may become the mental disease of the other. Thus it 

 is plain that, given abstraction of thought and imaginative play, and 

 we may evolve from our inner consciousness that poetic fervour which 



bodies forth 

 The forms of things unknown , 



or we may revel, by a further development of the same faculty, in 

 the wildest dreams which ever peopled the fancies of an excited 

 visionary, or entranced the tottering intellect of the really insane. 



It is, however, necessary that we should distinguish between an 

 " illusion " and an " hallucination " ; since, although both are stages 

 and gradations in the same series of mental actions, the moral and 

 actual significance of the one may be widely different from that of 

 the other. Under the general name of "hallucination," some au- 

 thorities include every mental phase or act which is founded upon 

 abnormal brain-action, and which tends to land its possessor and 



