"Dr. N. L...heard one day suddenly amongst the voices of his persecutors ('coming from a hollow space in the midst of the wall') a rather loud voice impressively saying to him: 'Change your national allegiance.' Understanding this to mean that his only hope consisted in ceasing to be subject to the Czar of Russia, he reflected a moment what allegiance would be better, and resolved to become an English subject. At the same moment he saw a pseudo-hallucinatory lion of natural size, which appeared and quickly laid its fore-paws on his shoulders. He had a lively feeling of these paws as a tolerably painful local pressure (complete hallucination of touch). Then the same voice from the wall said: 'Now you have a lion--now you will rule,' whereupon the patient recollected that the lion was the national emblem of England. The lion appeared to L. very distinct and vivid, but he nevertheless remained conscious, as he afterwards expressed it, that he saw the animal, not with his bodily but with his mental eyes. (After his recovery he called analogous apparitions by the name of 'expressive-plastic ideas.') Accordingly he felt no terror, even though he felt the contact of the claws...Had the lion been a complete hallucination, the patient, as he himself remarked after recovery, would have felt great fear, and very likely screamed or taken to flight. Had it been a simple image of the fancy he would not have connected it with the voices, of whose objective reality he was at the time quite convinced."[123] From ordinary images of memory and fancy, pseudo-hallucinations differ in being much more vivid, minute, detailed, steady, abrupt, and spontaneous, in the sense that all feeling of our own activity in producing them is lacking. Dr. Kandinsky had a patient who, after taking opium or haschisch, had abundant pseudo-hallucinations and hallucinations. As he also had strong visualizing power and was an educated physician, the three sorts of phenomena could be easily compared. Although projected outwards (usually not farther than the limit of distinctest vision, a foot or so) the pseudo-hallucinations _lacked the character of objective reality_ which the hallucinations possessed, but, unlike the pictures of imagination, it was almost impossible to produce them at will. Most of the 'voices' which people hear (whether they give rise to delusions or not) are pseudo-hallucinations. They are described as '_inner_' voices, although their character is entirely unlike the inner speech of the subject with himself. I know two persons who hear such inner voices making unforeseen remarks whenever they grow quiet and listen for them. They are a very common incident of delusional insanity, and at last grow into vivid hallucinations. The latter are comparatively frequent occurrences in sporadic form; and certain individuals are liable to have them often. From the results of the 'Census of Hallucinations,' which was begun by Edmund Gurney, it would appear that, roughly speaking, one person at least in every ten is likely to have had a vivid hallucination at some time in his life.[124] The following cases from healthy people will give an idea of what these hallucinations are: "When a girl of eighteen, I was one evening engaged in a very painful discussion with an elderly person. My distress was so great that I took up a thick ivory knitting-needle that was lying on the mantelpiece of the parlor and broke it into small pieces as I talked. In the midst of the discussion I was very wishful to know the opinion of a brother with whom I had an unusually close relationship. I turned round and saw him sitting at the further side of a centre-table, with his arms folded (an unusual position with him), but, to my dismay, I perceived from the sarcastic expression of his mouth that he was not in sympathy with me, was not 'taking my side,' as I should then have expressed it. The surprise cooled me, and the discussion was dropped.
"Some minutes after, having occasion to speak to my brother, I turned towards him, but he was gone. I inquired when he left the room, and was told that he had not been in it, which I did not believe, thinking that he had come in for a minute and had gone out without being noticed. About an hour and a half afterwards he appeared, and convinced me, with some trouble, that he had never been near the house that evening. He is still alive and well."
Here is another case: "One night in March 1873 or '74, I cannot recollect which year, I was attending on the sick-bed of my mother. About eight o'clock in the evening I went into the dining-room to fix a cup of tea, and on turning from the sideboard to the table, on the other side of the table before the fire, which was burning brightly, as was also the gas, I saw standing with his hand clasped to his side in true military fashion a soldier of about thirty years of age, with dark, piercing eyes looking directly into mine. He wore a small cap with standing feather; his costume was also of a soldierly style. He did not strike me as being a spirit, ghost, or anything uncanny, only a living man; but after gazing for fully a minute I realized that it was nothing of earth, for he neither moved his eyes nor his body, and in looking closely I could see the fire beyond. I was of course startled, and yet did not run out of the room. I felt stunned. I walked out rapidly, however, and turning to the servant in the hall asked her if she saw anything. She said not. I went into my mother's room and remained talking for about an hour, but never mentioned the above subject for fear of exciting her, and finally forgot it altogether, returning to the dining-room, still in forgetfulness of what had occurred, but repeating, as above, the turning from sideboard to table in act of preparing more tea. I looked casually towards the fire, and there I saw the soldier again. This time I was entirely alarmed, and fled from the room in haste. I called to my father, but when he came he saw nothing."
Sometimes more than one sense is affected. The following is a case: "In response to your request to write out my experience of Oct. 30, 1886, I will inflict on you a letter.
"On the day above mentioned, Oct. 30, 1886, I was in ----, where I was teaching. I had performed my regular routine work for the day, and was sitting in my room working out trigonometrical formulæ. I was expecting every day to hear of the confinement of my wife, and naturally my thoughts for some time had been more or less with her. She was, by the way, in B----, some fifty miles from me.
"At the time, however, neither she nor the expected event was in my mind; as I said, I was working out trigonometrical formulæ, and I had been working on trigonometry the entire evening. About eleven o'clock, as I sat there buried in sines, cosines, tangents, cotangents, secants, and cosecants, I felt very distinctly upon my left shoulder a touch, and a slight shake, as if somebody had tried to attract my attention by other means and had failed. Without rising I turned my head, and there between me and the door stood my wife, dressed exactly as I last saw her, some five weeks before. As I turned she said: 'It is a little Herman; he has come.' Something more was said, but this is the only sentence I can recall. To make sure that I was not asleep and dreaming, I rose from the chair, pinched myself and walked toward the figure, which disappeared immediately as I rose. I can give no information as to the length of time occupied by this episode, but I know I was awake, in my usual good health. The touch was very distinct, the figure was absolutely perfect, stood about three feet from the door, which was closed, and had not been opened during the evening. The sound of the voice was unmistakable, and I should have recognized it as my wife's voice even if I had not turned and had not seen the figure at all. The tone was conversational, just as if she would have said the same words had she been actually standing there.
"In regard to myself, I would say, as I have already intimated, I was in my usual good health; I had not been sick before, nor was I after the occurrence, not so much as a headache having afflicted me.
"Shortly after the experience above described, I retired for the night and, as I usually do, slept quietly until morning. I did not speculate particularly about the strange appearance of the night before, and though I thought of it some, I did not tell anybody. The following morning I rose, not conscious of having dreamed anything, but I was very firmly impressed with the idea that there was something for me at the telegraph-office. I tried to throw off the impression, for so far as I knew there was no reason for it. Having nothing to do, I went out for a walk; and to help throw off the impression above noted, I walked away from the telegraph-office. As I proceeded, however, the impression became a conviction, and I actually turned about and went to the very place I had resolved not to visit, the telegraph-office. The first person I saw on arriving at said office was the telegraph-operator, who being on terms of intimacy with me, remarked: 'Hello, papa, I've got a telegram for you.' The telegram announced the birth of a boy, weighing nine pounds, and that all were doing well. Now, then, I have no theory at all about the events narrated above; I never had any such experience before nor since; I am no believer in spiritualism, am not in the least superstitious, know very little about 'thought-transference,' 'unconscious cerebration,' etc., etc., but I am absolutely certain about what I have tried to relate.
"In regard to the remark which I heard, 'It is a little Herman,' etc.; I would add that we had previously decided to call the child, if a boy, _Herman_--my own name, by the way."[125] The hallucination sometimes carries a change of the general consciousness with it, so as to appear more like a sudden lapse into a dream. The following case was given me by a man of 43, who had never anything resembling it before: "While sitting at my desk this A. M. reading a circular of the Loyal Legion a very curious thing happened to me, such as I have never experienced. It was perfectly real, so real that it took some minutes to recover from. It seems to me like a direct intromission into some other world. I never had anything approaching it before save when dreaming at night. I was wide awake, of course. But this was the feeling. I had only just sat down and become interested in the circular, when I seemed to lose myself for a minute and then found myself in the top story of a high building very white and shining and clean, with a noble window immediately at the right of where I sat. Through this window I looked out upon a marvellous reach of landscape entirely new. I never had before such a sense of infinity in nature, such superb stretches of light and color and _cleanness_. I know that for the space of three minutes I was entirely lost, for when I began to come to, so to speak,--sitting in that other world, I debated for three or four minutes more as to which was dream and which was reality. Sitting there I got a faint sense of C...[the town in which the writer was], away off and dim at first. Then I remember thinking 'Why, I used to live in C...; perhaps I am going back.' Slowly C...did come back, and I found myself at my desk again. For a few minutes the process of determining where I was was very funny. But the whole experience was perfectly delightful, there was such a sense of brilliancy and clearness and lightness about it. I suppose it lasted in all about seven minutes or ten minutes."
The hallucinations of fever-delirium are a mixture of pseudo-hallucination, true hallucination, and illusion. Those of opium, hasheesh, and belladonna resemble them in this respect. The following vivid account of a fit of hasheesh-delirium has been given me by a friend: "I was reading a newspaper, and the indication of the approaching delirium was an inability to keep my mind fixed on the narrative. Directly I lay down upon a sofa there appeared before my eyes several rows of human hands, which oscillated for a moment, revolved and then changed to spoons. The same motions were repeated, the objects changing to wheels, tin soldiers, lamp-posts, brooms, and countless other absurdities. This stage lasted about ten minutes, and during that time it is safe to say that I saw at least a thousand different objects. These whirling images did not appear like the realities of life, but had the character of the secondary images seen in the eye after looking at some brightly-illuminated object. A mere suggestion from the person who was with me in the room was sufficient to call up an image of the thing suggested, while without suggestion there appeared all the common objects of life and many unreal monstrosities, which it is absolutely impossible to describe, and which seemed to be creations of the brain.
"The character of the symptoms changed rapidly. A sort of wave seemed to pass over me, and I became aware of the fact that my pulse was beating rapidly. I took out my watch, and by exercising considerable will-power managed to time the heart-beats, 135 to the minute.
"I could feel each pulsation through my whole system, and a curious twitching commenced, which no effort of the mind could stop.
"There were moments of apparent lucidity, when it seemed as if I could see within myself, and watch the pumping of my heart. A strange fear came over me, a certainty that I should never recover from the effects of the opiate, which was as quickly followed by a feeling of great interest in the experiment, a certainty that the experience was the most novel and exciting that I had ever been through.
"My mind was in an exceedingly impressionable state. Any place thought of or suggested appeared with all the distinctness of the reality. I thought of the Giant's Causeway in Staffa, and instantly I stood within the portals of Fingal's Cave. Great basaltic columns rose on all sides, while huge waves rolled through the chasm and broke in silence upon the rocky shore. Suddenly there was a roar and blast of sound, and the word 'Ishmaral' was echoing up the cave. At the enunciation of this remarkable word the great columns of basalt changed into whirling clothes pins and I laughed aloud at the absurdity.
"(I may here state that the word 'Ishmaral' seemed to haunt my other hallucinations, for I remember that I heard it frequently thereafter.) I next enjoyed a sort of metempsychosis. Any animal or thing that I thought of could be made the being which held my mind. I thought of a fox, and instantly I was transformed into that animal. I could distinctly feel myself a fox, could see my long ears and bushy tail, and by a sort of introvision felt that my complete anatomy was that of a fox. Suddenly the point of vision changed. My eyes seemed to be located at the back of my mouth; I looked out between the parted lips, saw the two rows of pointed teeth, and, closing my mouth with a snap, saw--nothing.
"I was next transformed into a bombshell, felt my size, weight, and thickness, and experienced the sensation of being shot up out of a giant mortar, looking down upon the earth, bursting and falling back in a shower of iron fragments.
"Into countless other objects was I transformed, many of them so absurd that I am unable to conceive what suggested them. For example, I was a little china doll, deep down in a bottle of olive oil, next moment a stick of twisted candy, then a skeleton inclosed in a whirling coffin, and so on _ad infinitum_.
"Towards the end of the delirium the whirling images appeared again, and I was haunted by a singular creation of the brain, which reappeared every few moments. It was an image of a double-faced doll, with a cylindrical body running down to a point like a peg-top.
"It was always the same, having a sort of crown on its head, and painted in two colors, green and brown, on a background of blue. The expression of the Janus-like profiles was always the same, as were the adornments of the body. After recovering from the effects of the drug I could not picture to myself exactly how this singular monstrosity appeared, but in subsequent experiences I was always visited by this phantom, and always recognized every detail of its composition. It was like visiting some long-forgotten spot and seeing some sight that had faded from the memory, but which appeared perfectly familiar as soon as looked upon.
"The effects of the drug lasted about an hour and a half, leaving me a trifle tipsy and dizzy; but after a ten-hour sleep I was myself again, save for a slight inability to keep my mind fixed on any piece of work for any length of time, which remained with me during most of the next day."
THE NEURAL PROCESS IN HALLUCINATION.
Examples of these singular perversions of perception might be multiplied indefinitely, but I have no more space. Let us turn to the question of what the physiological process may be to which they are due. It must, of course, consist of an excitement from within of those centres which are active in normal perception, identical in kind and degree with that which real external objects are usually needed to induce. The particular process which currents from the sense-organs arouse would seem under normal circumstances to be arousable in no other way. On p. 72 ff. above, we saw that the centres aroused by incoming peripheral currents are probably identical with the centres used in mere imagination; and that the vividness of the sensational kind of consciousness is probably correlated with a discrete degree of _intensity_ in the process therein aroused. Referring the reader back to that passage and to what was more lately said on p. 103 ff., I now proceed to complete my theory of the perceptive process by an analysis of what may most probably be believed to take place in hallucination strictly so called.
We have seen (p. 75) that the free discharge of cells into each other through associative paths is a likely reason why the maximum intensity of function is not reached when the cells are excited by their neighbors in the cortex. At the end of Chapter XXV we shall return to this conception, and whilst making it still more precise, use it for explaining certain phenomena connected with the will. The idea is that the leakage forward along these paths is too rapid for the inner tension in any centre to accumulate to the maximal explosion-point, unless the exciting currents are greater than those which the various portions of the cortex supply to each other. Currents from the periphery are (as it seems) the only currents whose energy can vanquish the supra-ideational resistance (so to call it) of the cells, and cause the peculiarly intense sort of disintegration with which the sensational quality is linked. _If, however, the leakage forward were to stop,_ the tension inside certain cells might reach the explosion-point, even though the influence which excited them came only from neighboring cortical parts. Let an empty pail with a leak in its bottom, tipped up against a support so that if it ever became full of water it would upset, represent the resting condition of the centre for a certain sort of feeling. Let water poured into it stand for the currents which are its natural stimulus; then the hole in its bottom will, of course, represent the 'paths' by which it transmits its excitement to other associated cells. Now let two other vessels have the function of supplying it with water. One of these vessels stands for the neighboring cortical cells, and can pour in hardly any more water than goes out by the leak. The pail consequently never upsets in consequence of the supply from this source. A current of water passes through it and does work elsewhere, but in the pail itself nothing but what stands for _ideational_ activity is aroused. The other vessel, however, stands for the peripheral sense-organs, and supplies a stream of water so copious that the pail promptly fills up in spite of the leak, and presently _upsets_; in other words, _sensational_ activity is aroused. But it is obvious that if the leak were plugged, the slower stream of supply would also end by upsetting the pail.
To apply this to the brain and to thought, if we take a series of processes A B C D E, associated together in that order, and suppose that the current through them is very fluent, there will be little intensity anywhere until, perhaps, a pause occurs at E. But the moment the current is blocked anywhere, say between C and D, the process in C must grow more intense, and might even be conceived to explode so as to produce a sensation in the mind instead of an idea.
It would seem that some hallucinations are best to be explained in this way. We have in fact a regular series of facts which can all be formulated under the single law that _the substantive strength of a state of consciousness bears an inverse proportion to its suggestiveness_. It is the halting-places of our thought which are occupied with distinct imagery. Most of the words we utter have no time to awaken images at all; they simply awaken the following words. But when the sentence _stops_, an image dwells for awhile before the mental eye (see Vol. I. p. 243). Again, whenever the associative processes are reduced and impeded by the approach of unconsciousness, as in falling asleep, or growing faint, or becoming narcotized, we find a concomitant increase in the intensity of whatever partial consciousness may survive. In some people what M. Maury has called 'hypnagogic' hallucinations[126] are the regular concomitant of the process of falling asleep. Trains of faces, landscapes, etc., pass before the mental eye, first as fancies, then as pseudo-hallucinations, finally as full-fledged hallucinations forming dreams. If we regard association-paths as paths of drainage, then the shutting off of one after another of them as the encroaching cerebral paralysis advances ought to act like the plugging of the hole in the bottom of the pail, and make the activity more intense in those systems of cells that retain any activity at all. The level rises because the currents are not drained away, until at last the full sensational explosion may occur.
The usual explanation of hypnagogic hallucinations is that they are ideas deprived of their ordinary _reductives_. In somnolescence, sensations being extinct, the mind, it is said, then having no stronger things to compare its ideas with, ascribes to these the fulness of reality. At ordinary times the objects of our imagination are reduced to the _status_ of subjective facts by the ever-present contrast of our sensations with them. Eliminate the sensations, however, this view supposes, and the 'images' are forthwith 'projected' into the outer world and appear as realities. Thus is the illusion of dreams also explained. This, indeed, after a fashion gives an account of the facts.[127] And yet it certainly fails to explain the extraordinary vivacity and completeness of so many of our dream-fantasms. The process of 'imagining' must (in these cases at least[128]) be not merely relatively, but absolutely and in itself more intense than at other times. The fact is, it is not a process of imagining, but a genuine sensational process; and the theory in question is therefore false as far as that point is concerned.
Dr. Hughlings Jackson's explanation of the epileptic seizure is acknowledged to be masterly. It involves principles exactly like those which I am bringing forward here. The 'loss of consciousness' in epilepsy is due to the most highly organized brain-processes being exhausted and thrown out of gear. The less organized (more instinctive) processes, ordinarily inhibited by the others, are then exalted, so that we get as a mere consequence of relief from the inhibition, the meaningless or maniacal action which so often follows the attack.[129] Similarly the _subsultus tendinorum_ or jerking of the muscles which so often startles us when we are on the point of falling asleep, may be interpreted as due to the rise (in certain lower motor centres) of the ordinary 'tonic' tension to the explosion-point, when the inhibition commonly exerted by the higher centres falls too suddenly away.
* * * * * * * * * * One possible condition of hallucination then stands revealed, whatever other conditions there may be. _When the normal paths of association between a centre and other centres are thrown out of gear, any activity which may exist in the first centre tends to increase in intensity until finally the point may be reached at which the last inward resistance is overcome, and the full sensational process explodes._[130] Thus it will happen that causes of an amount of activity in brain-cells which would ordinarily result in a weak consciousness may produce a very strong consciousness when the overflow of these cells is stopped by the torpor of the rest of the brain. A slight peripheral irritation, then, if it reaches the centres of consciousness at all during sleep, will give rise to the dream of a violent sensation. All the books about dreaming are full of anecdotes which illustrate this. For example, M. Maury's nose and lips are tickled with a feather while he sleeps. He dreams he is being tortured by having a pitch-plaster applied to his face, torn off, lacerating the skin of nose and lips. Descartes, on being bitten by a flea, dreams of being run through by a sword. A friend tells me, as I write this, of his hair changing its position in his forehead just as he 'dozed off' in his chair a few days since. Instantly he dreamed that some one had struck him a blow. Examples can be quoted _ad libitum_, but these are enough.[131] We seem herewith to have an explanation for a certain number of hallucinations. _Whenever the normal forward irradiation of intra-cortical excitement through association-paths is checked, any accidental spontaneous activity or any peripheral stimulation (however inadequate at other times) by which a brain-centre may be visited, sets up a process of full sensational intensity therein._ * * * * * In the hallucinations artificially produced in hypnotic subjects, some degree of peripheral excitement seems usually to be required. The brain is asleep as far as its own spontaneous thinking goes, and the words of the 'magnetizer' then awaken a cortical process which drafts off into itself any currents of a related sort which may come in from the periphery, resulting in a vivid objective perception of the suggested thing. Thus, point to a dot on a sheet of paper, and call it 'General Grant's photograph,' and your subject will see a photograph of the General there instead of the dot. The dot gives objectivity to the appearance, and the suggested notion of the General gives it form. Then magnify the dot by a lens; double it by a prism or by nudging the eyeball; reflect it in a mirror; turn it upside down; or wipe it out; and the subject will tell you that the 'photograph' has been enlarged, doubled, reflected, turned about, or made to disappear. In M. Binet's language,[132] the dot is the outward _point de repère_ which is needed to give objectivity to your suggestion, and without which the latter will only produce a _conception_ in the subject's mind.[133] M. Binet has shown that such a peripheral _point de repère_ is used in an enormous number, not only of hypnotic hallucinations, but of hallucinations of the insane. These latter are often _unilateral_; that is, the patient hears the voices always on one side of him, or sees the figure only when a certain one of his eyes is open. In many of these cases it has been distinctly proved that a morbid irritation in the internal ear, or an opacity in the humors of the eye, was the starting point of the current which the patient's diseased acoustic or optical centres clothed with their peculiar products in the way of ideas. _Hallucinations produced in this way are_ 'ILLUSIONS' _and M. Binet's theory, that all hallucinations must start in the periphery, may be called an attempt to reduce hallucination and illusion to one physiological type,_ the type, namely, to which normal perception belongs. In every case, according to M. Binet, whether of perception, of hallucination, or of illusion, we get the sensational vividness by means of a current from the peripheral nerves. It may be a mere trace of a current. But that trace is enough to kindle the maximal or supra-ideational process so that the object perceived will have the character of _externality_. What the _nature_ of the object shall be will depend wholly on the particular system of paths in which the process is kindled. Part of the thing in all cases comes from the sense-organ, the rest is furnished by the mind. But we cannot by