Translation from Von Hartmann 125 



carrying out of an action, but is occasionally disconnected 

 from the condition that an action has to be performed 

 immediately, and displays itself simply as an idea in- 

 dependently of conscious will, provided only that the matter 

 concerning which the presentiment is felt is one which in 

 a high degree concerns the will of the person who feels 

 it. In the intervals of an intermittent fever or of other 

 illness, it not unfrequently happens that sick persons can 

 accurately foretell the day of an approaching attack and 

 how long it will last. The same thing occurs almost 

 invariably in the case of spontaneous, and generally in 

 that of artificial, somnambulism ; certainly the Pythia, 

 as is well known, used to announce the date of her next 

 ecstatic state. In like manner the curative instinct dis- 

 plays itself in somnambulists, and they have been known 

 to select remedies that have been no less remarkable for 

 the success attending their employment than for the com- 

 pleteness with which they have run counter to received 

 professional opinion. The indication of medicinal remedies 

 is the only use which respectable electro-biologists will 

 make of the half-sleeping, half-waking condition of those 

 whom they are influencing. " People in perfectly sound 

 health have been known, before childbirth or at the com- 

 mencement of an illness, to predict accurately their own 

 approaching death. The accomplishment of their pre- 

 dictions can hardly be explained as the result of mere 

 chance, for if this were all, the prophecy should fail at 

 least as often as not, whereas the reverse is actually the 

 case. Many of these persons neither desire death nor 

 fear it, so that the result cannot be ascribed to imagina- 

 tion." So writes the celebrated physiologist, Burdach, 

 from whose chapter on presentiment in his work " Blicke 

 in's Leben " a great part of my most striking examples 

 is taken. This presentiment of death, which is the excep- 

 tion among men, is quite common with animals, even 

 though they do not know nor understand what death is. 

 When they become aware that their end is approaching, 



