HALLUCINATOEY MANIFESTATIONS. 
61 
experience that whatever is recognisable is ; and if this were 
not the common and universal belief, the world would wander 
on in vain doubting and fear. Sometimes by accident we 
meet with persons who are actually possessed with unbelief in 
what is the common experience of the majority ; to those who 
constitute the majority these persons are insane. 
Every allowance must therefore be made for the fixed belief 
on the reality of obscure manifestations, and indeed the allow- 
ance will be enforced until the major part of mankind is edu- 
cated to see that there is a method of accounting for the 
manifestations which destroys the supernatural reality, and 
assigns the wonderful to the natural. To this latter explanation 
of the phenomena most men of science have now come : they 
claim the perfectible principle as the standard under which 
they reason. 
Considered by the method thus noticed, the obscure manifes- 
tations we have admitted are not derived from objects in the 
outside universe at all, but belong entirely to the individual. 
They are simply due to aberration of function in one or other 
of the organic parts concerned in the processes of common human 
observation : they are, in a word, not receipts by the man, but 
interruptions within him, or reflects from him. 
What I have called, after Salverte, the perfectible principle 
of opinion, is not deemed by its supporters to be a principle 
perfected, but one leading towards perfected discovery. It is 
devoid of dogma, and proclaims only what seems to be the 
nearest approach towards what is true. In this sense the fol- 
lowing is in brief outline the exposition of the nature of 
the occult phenomena now under consideration — hallucinatory 
manifestations. 
A whole series of mysterious manifestations, and these of the 
simplest kind, are connected purely with the physical conditions 
which modify the natural mode of conveyance of an object or 
act to the senses : the mirage, the double sun, the monster in 
the fog, the reflected sound (echo), even the reflected image in 
the clear stream ; these — the mysterious manifestations of the 
earliest history of man, when the fixed principle of his thought 
had no rival — are now acknowledged, all but universally, to 
admit of a physical exposition that strips them of their mystery. 
Such obscure manifestations as remain, and aie not traceable to 
external influences, are discoverable in the processes for obser- 
vation possessed by the observer, in his senses, and the parts to 
which they minister. 
For the full action of every part accomplished by and 
through the senses there are many factors. There is a collec- 
tive organ for condensing the external fact that is brought to the 
man, a seeing organ, a hearing organ, touch, taste, and smelling 
