folds. We are to find some principle or other which could give coherence and unity to all the marvels which have been recorded about double consciousness and farseeing, since it is quite possible that they are really matters of fact after all!

The chief temptation to this somewhat illegitimate enterprise is not, by any means, the still less lawful hope of being ready beforehand for the wildest possibilities of psycho-physiological science, nor yet is it the love of an opportunity for the illus tration of the laws of procedure, according to which a methodical hypothesis or truly scientific guess should be constructed. It is undertaken mainly, if not solely, for the sake of allowing our minds to disport themselves a little while upon the summa capita or topmost tops of solid, though sky-piercing science. The pure, keen air of these neutral regions, equatorial in their place but polar in their temperature, will dissolve away the grosser adhesions of that nether atmosphere in which we are content to toil at the quarry of concrete fact; and it will brace us for another day of work. These figures of speech, however, remind us that, just because this is a summer evening's foray, it must not be too much prolonged; for our great Taskmaster is jealous of the idler, and he cannot tolerate the self-oblivious sportsman in his forests or on his highlands. Let us, then, gird ourselves at once, sally forth with footsteps firm and swift, and return before the twilight has melted around us into night.

It must be remembered on the threshold, of course, that there has already been offered an hypothesis in explanation of the simple or completed trance; a phenomenon which has been accepted as undeniable. That hypothesis brought the trance under the same idea as is numerously exemplified by sun and planet, oxygen and hydrogen, zinc and copper; by the poles of the magnet, the galvanic circle, and the electrical battery; by unity and multiplicity, and so forth. In order to consistency, therefore, it is necessary to carry the same law into the region of those higher phenomena of Mesmerism, which we are now to discuss as if they were natural verities. The hypothesis which we may now invent for their explication and classification, must consist either in a proposition directly deducible from the law of polarity, or in a composition between that law and some other one; else we shall be guilty of the solecism of proclaiming an imperium in imperio, or couple of Senates, in this our imaginary domain. The charitable reader must furthermore understand, once for all, that throughout these few

pages we shall continue to treat of Nature, commonly so called, from that point of view which is occupied by the understanding or judgment according to sense. It is not, indeed, our

custom to contemplate the world of sensations from that position; but the exoteric doctrine concerning these wondrous shows, which is dictated by the spirit of the passing times, is good enough for our present purposes. Gratefully availing ourselves of the language of the sensuous philosophy, as being both a convenient and an admirable formula, we proceed to remind ourselves of a few well-known propositions in natural science; and that by way of premises to a subsequent argu

ment.

I. Every phenomenon, that is to say, every change, that is to say, again, every movement, transpiring in any one part of the sensible universe, is followed by an unending series of phenomena in every other part of that universe, all proceeding from the original mutation. Nature is so full as to be incapable of holding another particle more; and all her hosts of particles are so compacted together that the annihilation of one of them would leave her loose. The removal of a single atom from the world would alter its centre of gravity; and the shock would be felt by every separate part and pendicle, as well as by the whole. All things propagate their permutations to one another. The creaking of my table, the scratching of my pen, the running of my ink, the thrill of my manual nerves and muscles, the vibrations of my brain in thinking this very thought, are all reverberated from the centre of the planet Leverrier beyond Uranus, as well as from the intimate recesses of the bodily organization of Leverrier the calculator at Paris; -if we could only hear the echoes! The vault of heaven is one vast whispering gallery; but only for other ears than ours. Enough for us that we can overhear the secret with the organ of the mind; and that there is no auditory illusion in the case, as there certainly is not. The proposition now under consideration has never been disputed, at least since it was enunciated aright. It has long been one of the catholicons of science. It was a favorite thought with Leibnitz. Babbage, the prince of modern Ishmaelites, has expatiated with friendly eloquence upon this universal relationship and concord of things, in his ninth Bridgewater Treatise, sarcastically so entitled. In fact, this law of universal and unlimited action and reaction is one of the most stupendous, although also one of the simplest of the revelations of physical science; and it is all the more

profoundly interesting that it is the bodily expression and symbol of another law, still more interior and humane, as well as still more penetrative and divine.

II. The same universality of sympathy is repeated within the confines of the cerebro-spinal axis of man; and, in fact, it is then and there alone that it is properly denominated sympathy. The nervous system is a sort of bodily soul underlying, diffused through, and organific of the grosser body of the animal form. The totality of the human person or mask, from the midpoint of the brain to the cuticular periphery, with all its pores and hairs inclusive, was held in reverence by the pious schoolmen of a bygone age as the Microcosm, standing over against as well as within the Macrocosm; a little world within the large; the beauty of the universe in miniature. For it was not long till thoughtful men, once their eyes were effectually opened on the outward world, perceived that man is an epitome and illuminated version of all the powers of nature. The spiritual-minded seers of a far earlier epoch had seen still deeper, and discovered his soul to be the express image of God. It is accordingly easy to understand the doubled insight with which a platonizing divine like Henry More observed, in the twilight of ancient philosophy and modern science, that the composite personality of man is "a medall of the Deitie."

The law of inevitable reciprocity of movement is as cogent among the parts of the microcosmical universe of the human frame, then, as it is among the members of the macrocosm, that hundred-handed Briareus, that ocular Argus of antique fable. A sensation, or any atomico-physiological movement ordinarily followed by a perceptible sensation, in or at one nerve, is unavoidably shed through every part of the system. It is a curious and beautiful, although also a deducible circumstance of this sympathy, that each nerve receives the shock, originating in another one, in its own intimate nature, and reproduces or reëchoes or propagates it through its own proper function. A sudden pang of agony in the tongue is seen by the eye, heard by the ear; and so forth. The things which limit and obscure the perception of such transmitted sensations in actual life, will be considered under another head. In the meantime it is to be particularly noticed that, apart from those circumstances of limitation in the concrete animal frame, every single portion of the nervous-system must suffer the influence, or rather the effluence, circumambient from an original movement in any

other portion, to pass on in the endless journey through the pathway of its least contingent and most individual property. It is the same throughout the whole of Nature. A phenomenon originated anywhere is carried round the universe by a mineral through its cohesion, by a plant through its irritability, by an animal through its sensibility, by a muscle through its specific contractivity, by a common nerve through its sensitive or voluntative quality, by an optic nerve through its capacity for sight; and so forth. An optic nerve, indeed, when subjected to the action of fire or caustic, is chemically decomposed; but it is by no means as an optic nerve that it is so affected; it is simply as a given chemical compound of such and such elements that it is burned. So long as it is an optic nerve, properly so called, and to the extent in which it is an optic nerve and no other tertium quid in existence, it only sees fire, or else flashes fire, in such circumstances. It follows therefore, from all these considerations, that if there were two mouths, for example, in one organism, every taste perceived at one of them would be handed over as such to the other; always supposing for the present that there were nothing to set bounds to the practical working of the law of sympathetic sensation. There is a very significant thing connected with this phantastical conception of a man with two mouths, deserving to be indicated and remembered with more than ordinary care. The half-written page is before my eye; pulses of white light rush from all its surface, except where the black ink has fallen, to the outside of my retina; an image of the manuscript is painted on that expanded sheet of nerve; and the writing is seen, we know not how. All that can be said in the matter, according to the methodology of after thought, is this; that such an image on the retina of a healthy eye is invariably followed by the perception of the thing that is imaged. But since the optic nerve and thalamus, since the brain are essential to a healthy eye, it is perhaps not easy to resist the supposition that the image of the retina is propagated inwards to somewhere that it meets the mind! Hence the Hartleian theory of sensation, so long cherished, with some modifications, by the Scotch psycholo gists; and hence also the Helvetian and other forms of materialism, which the doctrine of Hartley degenerated into as soon as the scientific public would suffer the play of Hamlet to be performed before them without the Prince! For our own part, we are clearly of opinion that, if the matter is to be considered from this external point of view at all, the Hartleian formula

is very good so long as it is confined to sensations and remembered sensations, including of course whatever sensational manifestations may accompany pure emotions and ideas. The word Vibration, however, must always be understood to be no more than an algebraic sign. Upon these conditions and from this point of view, it is not only allowable but correct to assert that the perception of any object over against the eye is produced, in so far as the physical mechanism of the process is concerned, by a neurological movement begun at the external surface of the retina and propagated from without inwards. When on the other hand I remember, or conceive of the paper I have scribbled over with my pen, the neurological movement essential to the conception of the writing is not begun at the outside of the retina but somewhere else, no matter where; and it is propagated from within outwards. The written page of memory is the reverse of that of perception; that is, in this physiological respect. It is more faint, sensuously speaking, than that which is under the very eye. In fever and præternatural activity or insanity of the organ, the feeble image propagated from within outwards in the act of memory becomes so forcible as to simulate the nature of an immediate image; and there is developed the phenomenon of sensuous illusion. With these subjects, however, we have nothing to do at present, except in so far as the following queer consideration is concerned. If the indulgent reader will bring our two-headed monster before his mind's eye again, he will at once observe that the atomico-physiological movement (corresponding with the taste of anything) begun at one of its mouths, and propagated from without inwards, will be carried from within outwards to the other. It will reach the secondary palate like the memory of a taste, shadowy and ghost-like; always supposing that palate not to be so morbidly sensitive as to convert the remembrance of a sensation into a palatal illusion.

III. The individuality of man, as an animal shape, is produced and sustained by those overflowing currents of sensation of which he is the subject. He is isolated from and within that world of external appearances, of which he is the centre according to the truth of appearance if not according to the truth of reality, by sensation. But it is not by the sensations produced in him by stars, or sea and land, or heat and cold, or flowers and fragrance, or the persons of friends and lovers. Were there no other sensations than these, he could not discriminate them from his animal self. They would all be parts