HALLUCINATORY MANIFESTATIONS. 
67 
the senses. We are accustomed to speak of men of imaginative 
turn as original men. In a sense, this is false and true. It is false, 
if we mean by the expression that a man can originate abso- 
lutely ; it is true, if we mean that a man can originate combi- 
nations of impressions he has received from the outer world. 
The power, or faculty, of forming by the will original com- 
binations of things, events, facts, received and stored up in the 
brain, is as varied in men as is the faculty of forming combina- 
tions or arrangements of things and facts that lie before the 
observer for his use or application. One man makes out of 
his inner hidden properties the most perfect of forms or stories, 
and puts them forward in language or in writing to charm and 
captivate his kindred. Another puts forward mean and com- 
mon-place forms of combination ; a third puts out his treasures 
in such rank confusion, that we are unable to recognise the 
pictures he directs us to ; him we conceive to be estranged, 
for he produces, according to the general judgment, impossible 
combinations ; his crowded or squalid, fantastic, imageries 
appeal to no recognisable realities. Such men, in the wildness 
of their combinations, give to us pictures of new heavens, 
new earths, new shades, which they have mentally surveyed 
until the impression, in all its wantonness, is to them an 
absolute truth, a truth it is a duty straightway to communi- 
cate to mankind. To name only one, from what might be 
a volume of illustrations of this type of hallucination, there is 
that of Benvenuto Cellini, who, visited by an invisible spirit, 
was carried even into the effulgence of the sun itself, dis- 
covering the luminary, when divested of its rays, to be a ball 
of molten gold, and seeing emanate from it divine forms of 
infinite splendour, which he could afterwards describe as faith- 
fully as he could the prison in which he was incarcerated, or the 
couch on which he slept. 
Uneducated sceptics, hearing what they call these stories of the 
marvellous, are wont to say that all narratives of the kind are 
the results of disordered imagination. In this they are often 
greatly wrong. The power of combining received impressions is, 
I admit, easily and frequently exaggerated into the production 
of hallucinations which, recited as realities, constitute a very 
large class of hallucinatory phenomena. But the class is, never- 
theless, distinct, and is only a division of a more extensive series 
i of such phenomena. 
j The last types of hallucination, depending upon disordered 
I function of the receptive brain, to which I shall refer, occur 
I from physical changes in the brain dtself, and which interfere 
with natural physical action. 
These changes of function are due to what may be called 
disturbance of the vascular tension of the brain. In order to 
