This ignorance took effect in the following way - that every piece of evidence to marvellous facts was perforce regarded as presenting one simple alternative: - either the facts happened as alleged; or the witnesses must be practising deliberate fraud. The latter hypothesis was, of course, an easy one enough to make in respect of this or that individual case, and was supported by indisputable examples; but it could not long be applied in any wholesale manner. The previous character of many of the persons involved, the aimlessness of such a fraud, the vast scale of the conspiracy which would have had to be organised in order to impose it on the world, and above all the fact that many of the witnesses brought on themselves nothing but opprobrium and persecution by their statements, made it practically impossible to doubt that the testimony was on the whole honestly given. Fraud, then, being excluded, there remained nothing but to believe the facts genuine. Sane men and women spoke with obvious sincerity of what they had seen with their own eyes; how could such a proof be gainsaid? This is a point which Glanvil and other writers of the witch-epoch are for ever urging; if we reject these facts, they argue, we must reject all beliefs that have their basis in human testimony.

1Lilienthal, Die Hexenprocesse der beiden Stadte Braunsberg (Konigsberg, 1861), p. 152; A Detection of Chelmsford Witches (London, 1679); Malleus Maleficarum (Lyons, 1620), vol. i., p. 242; Muller, Beitrage zur Geschichte des Hexenglaubens (Brunswick, 1854), p. 35, etc.; Ady, Candle in the Dark (London, 1656), p. 135; Hutchinson, Historical Essay Concerning Witchcraft (London, 1720), p. 147.

Happily we have now a totally different means of escaping from the dilemma. We know now that subjective hallucinations may possess the very fullest sensory character, and may be as real to the percipient as any object he ever beheld. I have myself heard an epileptic subject, who was perfectly sane and rational in his general conduct, describe a series of interviews that he had had with the devil, with a precision, and an absolute belief in the evidence of his senses, equal to anything that I ever read in the records of the witches' compacts. And further, we know now that there is a condition, capable often of being induced in uneducated and simple persons with extreme ease, in which any idea that is suggested may at once take sensory form, and be projected as an actual hallucination. To those who have seen robust young men, in an early stage of hypnotic trance, staring with horror at a figure which appears to them to be walking on the ceiling, or giving way to strange convulsions under the impression that they have been changed into birds or snakes, there will be nothing very surprising in the belief of hysterical girls that they were possessed by some alien influence, or that their distant persecutor was actually present to their senses.

It is true that in hypnotic experiments there is commonly some preliminary process by which the peculiar condition is induced, and that the idea which originates the delusion has then to be suggested ab extra. But with sensitive "subjects" who have been much under any particular influence, a mere word will produce the effect; nor is there any feature in the evidence for witchcraft that more constantly recurs than the touching of the victim by the witch.1 Moreover, no hard and fast line exists between the delusions of induced hypnotism and those of spontaneous trance, or of the grave hystero-epileptic crises which mere terror is now known to develop. And association between persons who were possessed with certain exciting ideas would readily account for the generation of a mutually contagious influence; as in cases where magic rites were performed by several persons in company; or where a whole household or community was affected with some particular delusion.2

1Thus, in a case mentioned by De l'Ancre, in the Tableau de l'Inconstance des mauvais Anges et Demons (Paris, 1612), p. 115, all the children who believed themselves to have been taken to a "Sabbath," stated that the witch had passed her hand over their faces, or placed it on their heads.

2A True and Just Record of the Information taken at St. Oseyt in Essex (London, 1582); Potts, Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, etc. (London, 1613); the case of the Flowers in A Collection of Rare and Curious Tracts relating to Witchcraft between the Years 1618 and 1664, pp. 19,21; Glanvil, Sadducismus Triumphatus, p. 581: Hutchinson, Op. cit.t p. 53; Durbin, A Narrative of Some Extraordinary Things (Bristol, 1800), p. 47; Horst, Zauber-Bibliothek, p. 219; Madden, Phantasmata, vol. i., pp. 346-7; T. Hutchinson, History of Massachusetts Bay (Boston, 1692), vol. ii., p. 18; Richet,L'Hommeet l'Intelligence (Paris, 1884),p.392.