"I am persuaded that devotees, lovers, prophets, Illuminati, and Swedenborgians, owe all the wonders of their presentiments, their visions, their prophecies, their conversations with celestial intelligences, their journeys in heaven, and in hell, to the illusions of which this state of being renders us susceptible; in a word, all the extravagance and superstition of their contagious reveries. But I do not hesitate, also, to say that it is probably in this state that men of genius have conceived the most original beauties of their works; that in it the geometrician has solved the problem that had long baffled him; the metaphysician has seen the first glimpse of the most ingenious of his systems; the poet, his most' beautiful verse; the musician, the most expressive and most brilliant of his passages; the statesman, the decisive expedient that all the light of his experience had not discovered with his severest calculations; the general, the expansive and rapid coup d'oeil that fixes the fate of a battle and insures victory."

We may here notice the influence of being on the confines between the true and the fanciful; towards whichever side we lean, reverie is the great source of great actions or rash enterprises.

Carried away by these waking dreams, these castles in the air, so familiar to us, and which substitute such sweet illusions for the sad realities of life, our thoughts are illuminated, our idle fancies become embodied, and we see before us, under sensible forms, all the objects of our wishes. Who, for example, has not a hundred times contemplated the figure of his beloved; or, if he be enamored of glory, has not distinctly heard the sound of clarions, and the cries of the combatants?

All who have lived in the East or written of that glorious country, have spoken of the powerful effect of the climate on the imagination of the inhabitants. It is averred that there exist substances in that part of the world that throw the mind into ecstasies. "For myself," says M. Paul de Molfcnes, "I have always thought that the heaven under which the Arab folds and unfolds his tent is the most effectual source of reverie in which the soul can be steeped. The Orientals do not, like ourselves, know the debasing and loquacious intoxication of wine, of brandy, of beer, and of all those liquors that disfigure the features, disorder the mind, and imprint extravagance on the tongue; but they possess the secret of that noble and silent intoxication of heaven, of solitude, space, and of those divine things which give an august character to the countenance, and illumine thought with the transparencies of vision, and place a sacred seal on the lips, broken at rare intervals by a few solemn words. It is of this intoxication, which those who have once indulged in never renounce, that the recital of Cambi (Sid-el-Adj-Mohammed, member of the tribe of Chambas) is full. Amongst the mysterious facts that I amused myself in gathering from the curious details of this peregrination, is one that appeared to me striking. Chambi relates that, during one of the numerous halts of his journey, a gentle and fraternal exaltation seized him and all his companions. A sort of invisible mirage exhibited to the whole caravan the image of their absent country, and threw into inexpressible tenderness the weary souls of these pilgrims. What heavenly influence spread over all these hearts the same emotion, and animated all these minds with the same thoughts, at the same moment? It is a secret of God, and of the desert. But I love the country, and I love the book in which such secrets are offered to our meditation."*

Such is likewise the opinion of M. Combes the younger: "The Oriental," he remarks, "is indolent and voluptuous. The keff is as essential to his existence as the bread which he eats, or the clothes that cover him. An Arab, be he rich or poor, who cannot indulge during the day in his keff, is a most unhappy man. But, you inquire, what is this keff? The word has no corresponding word in our language; and the Italians, in translating it as 'far niente' (complete idleness), give but a very imperfect idea of its real significance. The keff is a reverie, happiness in repose; it is a kind of beatitude in which the individual is plunged, and from which he would wish never to be aroused. The Orientals rarely think; it is too fatiguing. During the keff, the hours of which are regulated, and of which no motive would induce them voluntarily to deprive themselves, their imagination, capricious and wandering, is without end, and without object; it loves to be lost in a world of fancy, and to feast on vain chimeras. In these ecstatic hours, the Orientals are all poets, but egotists who produce nothing." †

It is to this power of imagination that we owe those wonderful tales which are the charm of the Orientals. It is this which peoples the bowels of the earth with genii, magicians, and palaces filled with treasure, and fancies in every European, who excavates ruins to find the remains of antiquity, a magician invoking the guardian genii of the treasures, in order to possess himself of them.

* Des ouvrages da General Daumas (Article de M. Paul de Molenes, Journal des Debats, du 4 Mars, 1851). † Voyage eu Egypt et en Nubie.

The reverie, then, is eminently favorable to the production of physiological hallucinations; and it is easy to deduce from thence, how, with deep thinkers, it may be the cause of admirable chefs-d'ceuvres.

Hence poets, painters, sculptors, whom genius has touched with his wing, have all perceived before them the form of the ideal of their dreams; their biographies prove that this form was visible to the eyes of their minds (like the ghost of Banquo in Macbeth), and often even to their bodily eyes. Moreover, we do not believe that there are immortal creations without this materialization of the ideal. It is the characteristic sign of the artists of antiquity, and of those of the Middle Ages; and if few can now equal them, it is because that profound belief which elevated the soul to the highest degree of enthusiasm has almost entirely ceased amongst enlightened people, who, on the contrary, profess to believe nothing.

Having reserved hallucinations in relation to psychology for a special chapter, we will not enter on the examination of dreams, of certain states of infancy, of authentic phenomena of magnetism and somnambulism, etc.; our object here is simply to prove that hallucination is consistent with reason. The two classes that we have established are distinguished one from the other, by the excess and the intensity of the phenomenon. In a reasonable state, the image may preserve the vividness of the original, but it is in general recognized as a creation of the imagination, and is of short duration; in the delirious state, on the contrary, the brain paints its pictures with more force than they possess in reality; these are detached from self, take an existence independent of the individual, and disturb the mental faculties.

The psychological study of man, then, proves that hallucination can exist without disordering the mind. We will describe several curious cases in support of this doctrine, and divide them into two sections: 1. Hallucinations corrected by the understanding; 2. Hallucinations not corrected by the understanding: perfect sanity in both cases.

The hallucinations of the first section may continue for a length of time. In certain cases, they are conjured up at will.

Subsection I. - Hallucinations consistent with reasons corrected by the understanding.