But wherever the hallucination can be gradually traced in its development from more rudimentary sensations, these last seem to be very distinct and exceptional things, unknown in ordinary experience. Moreover, the vision itself is commonly of a changing kind - the features developing rapidly out of one another; often also of a swarming kind - detailed landscapes, elaborate kaleidoscopic patterns, showers of flowers, lines of writing on a luminous ground, and so on.1 Now, compare such experiences with ordinary cases of "ghost-seeing" in the dark. A man wakes in the night, and sees a luminous figure at the foot of his bed. Here the hallucination comes suddenly, single and complete, to a person whose eyes are open and unfatigued; it is not preceded by any peculiar affection of vision, is not developed out of anything, and does not move, or swarm, or develop fresh features; nor does it fulfil the test of hallucinations due to the state of the external organ, by moving as the eye.

1Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty, pp. 159-63; Maury, Le Sommeil et lee Reves, p. 331. Probably the first clear description of these phenomena is that given by Vair, Bishop of Pozzuolo, De Fascino Libri ires (Venice, 1589), p. 112. The following cases - the first from Mrs. Willert, of Headington Hill, Oxford, the second sent to mo by the Rev. J. A. Macdonald, of Manchester, in the words of his wife - are as good specimens as could be found. Mrs. Willert wrote on Dee. 20, 1883: -

"The pictures I see generally appear at night before going to sleep, always in complete darkness, and I believe usually when I am rather tired. I can see them with my eyes open, but the colours are much less brilliant than when my eyes arc shut. I am quite conscious at the time of the unreality of the scenes - indeed, they seem to be very much like the constantly changing slides of a magic lantern, and I should say of the same size; when they disappear everything is black again. I sec all kinds of things, generally in quick succession; never, however, blending into one another. I can never recall the same picture however much I try. I see landscapes, interiors and exteriors of houses, etc., and single objects, such as flowers, books, boots, feathers, pots, etc., etc., and sometimes figures - of which, however, I can never distinguish the faces. Once or twice I have seen a little scene enacted. I remember one distinctly. I saw a man in the dress of the last century riding down a lane. As he came forward, two men, also on horseback, rushed out on him from behind some trees and knocked him down. I longed to know the end of this little story, but it disappeared.

I am never conscious that the things I see have any connection with what I have been thinking of, nor do I ever remember to have recognised a place I know amongst the many landscapes I see".

Mr. Willert tells me that his wife can always narrate these visions as they pass, and is certainly wide awake at the time.

Mrs. Macdonald says: -

"For many years I have been accustomed to see multitudes of faces as I lie awake in bed, generally before falling to sleep at night, after waking up in the morning, or if I should wake up in the middle of the night. They seem to come up out of the darkness as a mist, and rapidly develop into sharp delineation, assuming roundness, vividness, and living reality. Then they fade off only to give place to others, which succeed with surprising rapidity and in enormous multitudes. Formerly the faces were wonderfully ugly. They were human, but resembling animals, yet such animals as have no fellows in the creation, diabolical-looking things. So curiously and monstrously frightful were they that I cannot conceive whence they could have come if not from the infernal world. I could not, certainly, at other times, by any voluntary effort of imagination, conjure up anything even remotely approaching their frightfulness. Latterly the faces have become exquisitely beautiful. Forms and features of faultless perfection now succeed each other in infinite variety and number".

I will add one more experience, which would, I think, be specially hard to refer to the Licht-staub of the eye, inasmuch as it had an obvious cause of another sort. A friend wrote to me on Sept. 29, 1885: moves.1 Such visions are commonly explained - and often, no doubt, with justice - as due to nervousness or expectancy. But nervousness and expectancy act by exciting the mind, not by congesting the retina; they work on the imagination, and their physical seat is not in the eye, but in the brain. We should conclude, then, that the brain initiates the hallucination; and that nocturnal visions, which vary so greatly both in themselves and in the general conditions of their appearance, vary also in their seat of origin.

"Between sleeping and waking this morning, I perceived a dog running about in a field (an ideal white-and-tan sporting dog, * bred out of the Spartan kind,' etc.), and the next moment I heard a dog barking outside the window. Keeping my closed eyes on the vision, I found that it came and went with the barking of the dog outside; getting fainter, however, each time".

1M. Binet treats all "ghost-seers" as so paralysed with terror that they do not move their eyes from the figure - which leaves it open to him to guess that the figure would move if their eyes moved. Brewster (Natural Magic, p. 130) had the same idea. To Wundt, also, stationary hallucinations that can be looked away from seem unknown as a distinct and fairly common type, and he inclines to regard them as mere illusions. Brewster's own case of Mrs. A., and the well-known cases given by Paterson (Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, Jan., 1843) would alone suffice, I think, to refute this view. See also Kandinsky's and Schroder van der Kolk's experiences (Archiv fur Psychiatrie, 1881, p. 461, and De Pathologic en Therapie Krank-zinnigheid, p. 27). I have in my possession a good many examples where the imaginary figure has been looked away from and back to again. (See, for instance, Mr. Turner's case, quoted below, p. 461.) The Rev. P. H. Newnham tells us of three occasions, during the autumn of 1883, on which he saw and recognised in church the figures of persons who proved not to have been there.