428 THE BORDERLAND OF SCIENCE. 



rences. It does not seem to me likely that in any 

 large proportion of recorded (and presumably veracious) 

 ghost-stories, there has been an actual phantom of the 

 brain. Such phantoms are sometimes seen, no doubt, 

 and unreal voices are sometimes heard ; but the condi- 

 tion of the brain which leads to such effects must be 

 regarded as altogether exceptional. Certainly it is not 

 common. On the contrary, the play of fancy by which 

 images are formed from objects in no way connected 

 with the picture raised in the mind is a common pheno- 

 menon. Although some minds possess the faculty more 

 than others, few actually want it. I suppose there is 

 not one person in a thousand who cannot see ' faces in 

 the fire,' for instance, though to some the pictures so 

 produced are much more vivid than to others. Dickens 

 tells us that in travelling through a cleared region in 

 America at night, the trees by the roadside seemed to 

 assume the most startling resemblance to different 

 objects now an old man sitting in a chair, now a 

 funeral urn, and so on. Doubtless, not every traveller 

 along the road under the same circumstance would have 

 found so many fanciful tree-pictures formed for him, or 

 perhaps any formed so distinctly, as did Dickens, with 

 his lively imagination and wealth of mind-images. 

 Yet probably very few persons travel along a tree- 

 covered region in the deeper dusk of evening without 

 fancying that the trees shape themselves into strange 

 forms of living or inanimate objects. 



But the important point to be noticed is that when 

 the mind is deeply occupied with particular thoughts, 



