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POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
without, by the brain and fixed in it. We exercise this faculty, 
naturally, when at will we re-picture to ourselves, or project 
what we have seen, heard, felt, or otherwise received by the 
senses. We recall a landscape we have surveyed, a tune we have 
heard, and the like ; and if the impression be correctly fixed in 
us, and we will it to return, it comes back correctly. In the act 
we project from us that which we recall, and look at it, or listen 
to it, as if it were again external to us. This faculty, exalted to 
unnatural degree, is a fruitful source of illusion. Wigan supplies 
a striking illustration of the kind in the case of an eminent 
portrait painter who followed Sir Joshua Eeynolds. The 
painter in question once produced three hundred portraits from 
his own hand in one year. When asked on what this peculiar 
power of rapid work depended, he answered that when a sitter 
came to him, he looked at him attentively for half an hour, 
sketching from time to time on the canvas ; then he put away 
the canvas and took another sitter. When he wished to re- 
sume the first portrait, he said, “ I took the man and put him 
in the chair, where I saw him as distinctly as if he had been 
before me in his own proper person. When I looked at the 
chair I saw the man.” After a while the painter began to fail 
to discover the difference between the real and the imaginary 
sitters, so that he became actually insane and remained in an 
asylum for thirty years. Then his mind was restored to him, 
and he resumed the use of the pencil ; but the old evil threat- 
ened to return, and he once more forsook his art, soon afterwards 
to die. 
Talma, the actor, had a faculty of mental projection equally 
singular with that possessed by the artist whose history Wigan 
has related. Talma could project before himself the form of a 
human skeleton with such perfection of detail that to him the 
form was a reality, and when he stood before the footlights he 
had in his presence, in the theatre, an audience of skeletons. 
Gfoethe, who conceived that if Shakespeare was the greatest of 
men who had lived he himself was the second, once projected 
his own figure and viewed it as if it had been another person. 
I might prolong the record of these hallucinations, but to 
prove that they exist is all sufficient for the purpose I have 
in view. They are, the reader will see, nothing more than the 
results of an exaggeration of a natural faculty, which faculty, 
well possessed is a marvellous accomplishment, but over posses- 
sed is a disaster to the possessor. 
There is another form of hallucination, having its seat in the 
brain, and which springs from what has been called the effect of 
the imagination. Imagination, brought to its true meaning, 
is the art of the will to combine into various groups the pictures 
or impressions that have been condensed in the brain through 
