§ 4. So much, then, for gradual development. I proceed to my second main point - the embodiment of the idea which is at the root of the hallucination in a manner that is to some extent original, and implies a creative process carried out by the percipient's own mind.

There is no need to illustrate this process at any length in the purely subjective class. A certain amount of it is, in fact, involved in every sensory hallucination which is anything more than a mere momentary revival of familiar images, due, as I have suggested, to a disturbance at the sensory centre, unprompted by any agitation in the higher tracts of the brain (pp. 314-15). Wherever the higher tracts of the brain are the first in action, and the hallucination represents an object which the senses have never actually encountered, there clearly the mind has more or less created its object; and of the transient hallucinations of the sane the majority seem to belong to this class. A special type that is worth noting is where the hallucination is in part mere reminiscence and in part a new creation. For example, a gentleman tells me that, having been compelled to kill a favourite dog, he very soon afterwards had the subjective vision of a dog running across the lawn, and pursued by a man in a white flannel jacket; and my friend Mrs. Hunter, of 2, Victoria Crescent, St. Helier's, describes how, having just dismissed for the night a young daughter under 15 years of age, heard her lock her door, locked her own, and resumed her own train of thought, she looked up, and there the child "stood smiling, in dressing-gown and hair floating down her back, just as she had left me, but with a baby in her arms " - the apparition lasting for a few seconds.1 A good example of a subjective hallucination whose development from the root-idea is obvious, is a visionary crown, clearly seen by a lady hovering near the head of a preacher to whom she was listening (as she implies) with sympathy and admiration.

As more or less fantastic instances, I may mention the apparition, out of doors, of a tall female figure, which went on in front of the percipient, and whose head then left its body; a man in parti-coloured Oriental garb, about as wide as high, and with a face like a king on a card; and some curious appearances of "flats," human-looking figures without any apparent depth, by which a gentleman tells me that he has been more than once visited. Peculiarities in costume and appurtenances are very common; a woman in grave-clothes, a woman in brocaded silk with a small book in her hand, a black man with a knife in his hand, a sweet-looking creature in a low black dress and mantilla, a tall man with dark curly hair and in antique dress, a woman with a crown and a child, recalling a statuette of the Virgin - such are among the visual hallucinations in my collection which there is no reason to suppose other than purely subjective affections. Of auditory cases, some that have been already given show the construction from a root-idea in the percipient's mind very plainly - e.g., the words, "You can't save him," "Your brother is dead," "Take up that knife and use it " (pp. 329, 303, note). Another good example is that of a clergyman's wife, who tells me that she was once startled by the remark, "Those ladies will borrow money from George to-day," while she was sitting alone, and picturing a call which her husband was paying to some impecunious parishioners whom she mistrusted - unless, indeed, the fact that the loan was actually requested be held to make the case "ambiguous." The hearing of long, original discourses could, of course, not be reckoned as a transient hallucination, and is a type which scarcely occurs at all among hallucinations of the sane; but occasionally a very few words may be quite sufficient to show independence of mental action - as where a lady who was expecting to be called by her sister in the morning, distinctly heard, in fictitious tones, not the expected message, but the much more agreeable one, " Not five; don't get up yet".

1 Cf. Mr. Slacker's case, p. 324.