Book: A Strange Story, Volume 5.

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"But you forget the madman said 'that he was led on by the Luminous Shadow
of a beautiful youth,' that the woman said also that she was impelled by
some mysterious agency."

"I do not forget those coincidences; but how your learning would dismiss
them as nugatory were your imagination not disposed to exaggerate them!
When you read the authentic histories of any popular illusion, such as the
spurious inspirations of the Jansenist Convulsionaries, the apparitions
that invaded convents, as deposed in the trial of Urbain Grandier, the
confessions of witches and wizards in places the most remote from each
other, or, at this day, the tales of 'spirit-manifestation' recorded in
half the towns and villages of America,--do not all the superstitious
impressions of a particular time have a common family likeness? What one
sees, another sees, though there has been no communication between the
two. I cannot tell you why these phantasms thus partake of the nature of
an atmospheric epidemic; the fact remains incontestable. And strange as
may be the coincidence between your impressions of a mystic agency and
those of some other brains not cognizant of the chimeras of your own,
still, is it not simpler philosophy to say, 'They are coincidences of the
same nature which made witches in the same epoch all tell much the same
story of the broomsticks they rode and the sabbats at which they danced to
the fiend's piping,' and there leave the matter, as in science we must
leave many of the most elementary and familiar phenomena inexplicable as
to their causes,--is not this, I say, more philosophical than to insist
upon an explanation which accepts the supernatural rather than leave the
extraordinary unaccounted for?"

"As you speak," said I, resting my downcast face upon my hand, "I should
speak to any patient who had confided to me the tale I have told to you."

"And yet the explanation does not wholly satisfy you? Very likely: to
some phenomena there is, as yet, no explanation. Perhaps Newton himself
could not explain quite to his own satisfaction why he was haunted at
midnight by the spectrum of a sun; though I have no doubt that some later
philosopher whose ingenuity has been stimulated by Newton's account, has,
by this time, suggested a rational solution of that enigma.[8] To return
to your own case. I have offered such interpretations of the mysteries
that confound you as appear to me authorized by physiological science.
Should you adduce other facts which physiological science wants the data
to resolve into phenomena always natural, however rare, still hold fast to
that simple saying of Goethe: 'Mysteries are not necessarily miracles.'
And if all which physiological science comprehends in its experience
wholly fails us, I may then hazard certain conjectures in which, by
acknowledging ignorance, one is compelled to recognize the Marvellous (for
as where knowledge enters, the Marvellous recedes, so where knowledge
falters, the Marvellous advances); yet still, even in those conjectures, I
will distinguish the Marvellous from the Supernatural. But, for the
present, I advise you to accept the guess that may best quiet the fevered
imagination which any bolder guess would only more excite."

"You are right," said I, rising proudly to the full height of my stature,
my head erect and my heart defying. "And so let this subject be renewed
no more between us. I will brood over it no more myself. I regain the
unclouded realm of my human intelligence; and, in that intelligence, I
mock the sorcerer and disdain the spectre."

[1] Beattie's "Essay on Truth," part i. c. ii. 3. The story of
Simon Browne is to be found in "The Adventurer."

[2] Miller's Physiology of the Senses, p. 394.

[3] Abercrombie on the Intellectual Powers, p. 281. (15th edition.)

[4] At the date of Faber's conversation with Allen Fenwick, the
(so-called) spirit manifestations had not spread from America over Europe.
But if they had, Faber's views would, no doubt, have remained the same.

[5] Abercrombie on the Intellectual Powers, p. 278. (15th edition.)

This author, not more to be admired for his intelligence than his candour,
and who is entitled to praise for a higher degree of original thought
than that to which he modestly pretends, relates a curious anecdote
illustrating "the analogy between dreaming and spectral illusion, which he
received from the gentleman to which it occurred,--an eminent medical
friend:" "Having sat up late one evening, under considerable anxiety for
one of his children, who was ill, he fell asleep in his chair, and had a
frightful dream, in which the prominent figure was an immense baboon. He
awoke with the fright, got up instantly, and walked to a table which was
in the middle of the room. He was then quite awake, and quite conscious
of the articles around him; but close by the wall in the end of the
apartment he distinctly saw the baboon making the same grimaces which he
had seen in his dreams; and this spectre continued visible for about half
a minute." Now, a man who saw only a baboon would be quite ready to admit
that it was but an optical illusion; but if, instead of a baboon, he had
seen an intimate friend, and that friend, by some coincidence of time, had
died about that date, he would be a very strong-minded man if he admitted
for the mystery of seeing his friend the same natural solution which he
would readily admit for seeing a baboon.

[6] See Muller's observations on this phenomenon, "Physiology of the
Senses," Baley's translation, p. 1395.

[7] Sir David Brewster's Letters on Natural Magic, p. 39.

[8] Newton's explanation is as follows: "This story I tell you to
let you understand, that in the observation related by Mr. Boyle, the
man's fancy probably concurred with the impression made by the sun's
light to produce that phantasm of the sun which he constantly saw in
bright objects, and so your question about the cause of this phantasm
involves another about the power of the fancy, which I must confess is
too hard a knot for me to untie. To place this effect in a constant
motion is hard, because the sun ought then to appear perpetually. It
seems rather to consist in a disposition of the sensorium to move the
imagination strongly, and to be easily moved both by the imagination and
by the light as often as bright objects are looked upon."--Letter from Sir
I. Newton to Locke, Lord Kinq's Life of Locke, vol. i. pp. 405-408.

Dr. Roget (Animal and Vegetable Physiology considered with reference to
Natural Theology, "Bridgewater Treatise," pp. 524, 525) thus refers to
this phenomenon, which he states "all of us may experience ":--

"When the impressions are very vivid" (Dr. Roget is speaking of visual
impressions), "another phenomenon often takes place,--namely, their
_subsequent recurrence after a certain interval, during which they are not
felt, and quite independently of any renewed application of the cause
which had originally excited them."_ (I mark by italics the words which
more precisely coincide with Julius Faber's explanations.) "If, for
example, we look steadfastly at the sun for a second or two, and then
immediately close our eyes, the image, or spectrum, of the sun remains for
a long time present to the mind, as if the light were still acting on the
retina. It then gradually fades and disappears; but if we continue to
keep the eyes shut, the same impression will, after a certain time, recur,
and again vanish: and this phenomenon will be repeated at intervals, the
sensation becoming fainter at each renewal. It is probable that these
reappearances of the image, after the light which produced the original
impression has been withdrawn, are occasioned by spontaneous affections of
the retina itself which are conveyed to the sensorium. In other cases,
where the impressions are less strong, the physical changes producing
these changes are perhaps confined to the sensorium."

It may be said that there is this difference between the spectrum of the
sun and such a phantom as that which perplexed Allen Fenwick,--namely,
that the sun has been actually beheld before its visionary appearance can
be reproduced, and that Allen Fenwick only imagines he has seen the
apparition which repeats itself to his fancy. "But there are grounds for
the suspicion" (says Dr. Hibbert, "Philosophy of Apparitions," p. 250),
"that when ideas of vision are vivified to the height of sensation, a
corresponding affection of the optic nerve accompanies the illusion."
Muller ("Physiology of the Senses," p. 1392, Baley's translation) states
the same opinion still more strongly; and Sir David Brewster, quoted by
Dr. Hibbert (p. 251) says: "In examining these mental impressions, I
have found that they follow the motions of the eyeball exactly like the
spectral impressions of luminous objects, and that they resemble them also
in their apparent immobility when the eye is displaced by an external
force. If this result (which I state with much diffidence, from having
only my own experience in its favour) shall be found generally true by
others, it will follow that the objects of mental contemplation may be
seen as distinctly as external objects, and will occupy the same local
position in the axis of vision, as if they had been formed by the agency
of light." Hence the impression of an image once conveyed to the senses,
no matter how, whether by actual or illusory vision, is liable to renewal,
"independently of any renewed application of the cause which had
originally excited it," and the image can be seen in that renewal "as
distinctly as external objects," for indeed "the revival of the fantastic
figure really does affect those points of the retina which had been
previously impressed."




CHAPTER XLVI.

Julius Faber and Amy Lloyd stayed in my house three day, I and in their
presence I felt a healthful sense of security and peace. Amy wished to
visit her father's house, and I asked Faber, in taking her there, to seize
the occasion to see Lilian, that he might communicate to me his impression
of a case so peculiar. I prepared Mrs. Ashleigh for this visit by a
previous note. When the old man and the child came back, both brought me
comfort. Amy was charmed with Lilian, who had received her with the
sweetness natural to her real character, and I loved to hear Lilian's
praise from those innocent lips.

Faber's report was still more calculated to console me.

"I have seen, I have conversed with her long and familiarly. You were
quite right,--there is no tendency to consumption in that exquisite, if
delicate, organization; nor do I see cause for the fear to which your
statement had pre-inclined me. That head is too nobly formed for any
constitutional cerebral infirmity. In its organization, ideality, wonder,
veneration, are large, it is true, but they are balanced by other organs,
now perhaps almost dormant, but which will come into play as life passes
from romance into duty. Something at this moment evidently oppresses her
mind. In conversing with her, I observe abstraction, listlessness; but I
am so convinced of her truthfulness, that if she has once told you she
returned your affection, and pledged to you her faith, I should, in your
place, rest perfectly satisfied that whatever be the cloud that now rests
on her imagination, and for the time obscures the idea of yourself, it
will pass away."

Faber was a believer in the main divisions of phrenology, though he did
not accept all the dogmas of Gall and Spurzheim; while, to my mind, the
refutation of phrenology in its fundamental propositions had been
triumphantly established by the lucid arguments of Sir W. Hamilton.[1]
But when Faber rested on phrenological observations assurances in honour
of Lilian, I forgot Sir W. Hamilton, and believed in phrenology. As iron
girders and pillars expand and contract with the mere variations of
temperature, so will the strongest conviction on which the human intellect
rests its judgment vary with the changes of the human heart; and the
building is only safe where these variations are foreseen and allowed for
by a wisdom intent on self-knowledge.[2]

There was much in the affection that had sprung up between Julius Faber
and Amy Lloyd which touched my heart and softened all its emotions. This
man, unblessed, like myself, by conjugal and parental ties, had, in his
solitary age, turned for solace to the love of a child, as I, in the pride
of manhood, had turned to the love of woman. But his love was without
fear, without jealousy, without trouble. My sunshine came to me in a
fitful ray, through clouds that had gathered over my noon; his sunshine
covered all his landscape, hallowed and hallowing by the calm of declining
day.

And Amy was no common child. She had no exuberant imagination; she was
haunted by no whispers from Afar; she was a creature fitted for the
earth,--to accept its duties and to gladden its cares. Her tender
observation, fine and tranquil, was alive to all the important household
trifles by which, at the earliest age, man's allotted soother asserts her
privilege to tend and to comfort. It was pleasant to see her moving so
noiselessly through the rooms I had devoted to her venerable protector,
knowing all his simple wants, and providing for them as if by the
mechanism of a heart exquisitely moulded to the loving uses of life.
Sometimes when I saw her setting his chair by the window (knowing, as I
did, how much he habitually loved to be near the light) and smoothing his
papers (in which he was apt to be unmethodical), placing the mark in his
book when he ceased to read, divining, almost without his glance, some
wish passing through his mind, and then seating herself at his feet, often
with her work--which was always destined for him or for one of her absent
brothers,--now and then with the one small book that she had carried with
her, a selection of Bible stories compiled for children,--sometimes when I
saw her thus, how I wished that Lilian, too, could have seen her, and have
compared her own ideal fantasies with those young developments of the
natural heavenly Woman!

But was there nothing in that sight from which I, proud of my arid reason
even in its perplexities, might have taken lessons for myself?

On the second evening of Faber's visit I brought to him the draft of deeds
for the sale of his property. He had never been a man of business out of
his profession; he was impatient to sell his property, and disposed to
accept an offer at half its value. I insisted on taking on myself the
task of negotiator; perhaps, too, in this office I was egotistically
anxious to prove to the great physician that which he believed to be my
"hallucination" had in no way obscured my common-sense in the daily
affairs of life. So I concluded, and in a few hours, terms for his
property that were only just, but were infinitely more advantageous than
had appeared to himself to be possible. But as I approached him with the
papers, he put his finger to his lips. Amy was standing by him with her
little book in her hand, and his own Bible lay open on the table. He was
reading to her from the Sacred Volume itself, and impressing on her the
force and beauty of one of the Parables, the adaptation of which had
perplexed her; when he had done, she kissed him, bade him goodnight, and
went away to rest. Then said Faber thoughtfully, and as if to himself
more than me,--

"What a lovely bridge between old age and childhood is religion! How
intuitively the child begins with prayer and worship on entering life, and
how intuitively on quitting life the old man turns back to prayer and
worship, putting himself again side by side with the infant!"

I made no answer, but, after a pause, spoke of fines and freeholds,
title-deeds and money; and when the business on hand was concluded, asked
my learned guest if, before he departed, he would deign to look over the
pages of my ambitious Physiological Work. There were parts of it on which
I much desired his opinion, touching on subjects in which his special
studies made him an authority as high as our land possessed.

He made me bring him the manuscript, and devoted much of that night and
the next day to its perusal.

When he gave it me back, which was not till the morning of his departure,
he commenced with eulogies on the scope of its design, and the manner of
its execution, which flattered my vanity so much that I could not help
exclaiming, "Then, at least, there is no trace of 'hallucination' here!"

"Alas, my poor Allen! here, perhaps, hallucination, or self-deception, is
more apparent than in all the strange tales you confided to me. For here
is the hallucination of the man seated on the shores of Nature, and who
would say to its measureless sea, 'So far shalt thou go and no farther;'
here is the hallucination of the creature, who, not content with exploring
the laws of the Creator, ends with submitting to his interpretation of
some three or four laws, in the midst of a code of which all the rest are
in a language unknown to him, the powers and free-will of the Lawgiver
Himself; here is the hallucination by which Nature is left Godless,
because Man is left soulless. What would matter all our speculations on a
Deity who would cease to exist for us when we are in the grave? Why mete
out, like Archytas, the earth and the sea, and number the sands on the
shore that divides them, if the end of this wisdom be a handful of dust
sprinkled over a skull!

"'Nec quidquam tibi prodest
Aerias tentasse dornos, animoque rotundum
Percurrisse polum naorituro.'

"Your book is a proof of the soul that you fail to discover. Without a
soul, no man would work for a Future that begins for his fame when the
breath is gone from his body. Do you remember how you saw that little
child praying at the grave of her father? Shall I tell you that in her
simple orisons she prayed for the benefactor,--who had cared for the
orphan; who had reared over dust that tomb which, in a Christian
burial-ground, is a mute but perceptible memorial of Christian hopes; that
the child prayed, haughty man, for you? And you sat by, knowing nought of
this; sat by, amongst the graves, troubled and tortured with ghastly
doubts, vain of a reason that was sceptical of eternity, and yet shaken
like a reed by a moment's marvel. Shall I tell the child to pray for you
no more; that you disbelieve in a soul? If you do so, what is the
efficacy of prayer? Speak, shall I tell her this? Shall the infant pray
for you never more?"

I was silent; I was thrilled.

"Has it never occurred to you, who, in denying all innate perceptions as
well as ideas, have passed on to deductions from which poor Locke, humble
Christian that he was, would have shrunk in dismay,--has it never
occurred to you as a wonderful fact, that the easiest thing in the world
to teach a child is that which seems to metaphysical schoolmen the
abstrusest of all problems? Read all those philosophers wrangling about a
First Cause, deciding on what are miracles, and then again deciding that
such miracles cannot be; and when one has answered another, and left in
the crucible of wisdom a caput mortuum of ignorance, then turn your eyes,
and look at the infant praying to the invisible God at his mother's knees.
This idea, so miraculously abstract, of a Power the infant has never seen,
that cannot be symbolled forth and explained to him by the most erudite
sage,--a Power, nevertheless, that watches over him, that hears him, that
sees him, that will carry him across the grave, that will enable him to
live on forever,--this double mystery of a Divinity and of a Soul, the
infant learns with the most facile readiness, at the first glimpse of his
reasoning faculty. Before you can teach him a rule in addition, before
you can venture to drill him into his horn-book, he leaps, with one
intuitive spring of all his ideas, to the comprehension of the truths
which are only incomprehensible to blundering sages! And you, as you
stand before me, dare not say, 'Let the child pray for me no more!' But
will the Creator accept the child's prayer for the man who refuses prayer
for himself? Take my advice, pray! And in this counsel I do not overstep
my province. I speak not as a preacher, but as a physician. For health
is a word that comprehends our whole organization, and a just equilibrium
of all faculties and functions is the condition of health. As in your
Lilian the equilibrium is deranged by the over-indulgence of a spiritual
mysticism which withdraws from the nutriment of duty the essential pabulum
of sober sense, so in you the resolute negation of disciplined spiritual
communion between Thought and Divinity robs imagination of its noblest
and safest vent. Thus, from opposite extremes, you and your Lilian meet
in the same region of mist and cloud, losing sight of each other and of
the true ends of life, as her eyes only gaze on the stars and yours only
bend to the earth. Were I advising her, I should say: 'Your Creator has
placed the scene of your trial below, and not in the stars.' Advising
you, I say: 'But in the trial below, man should recognize education for
heaven.' In a word, I would draw somewhat more downward her fancy, raise
somewhat more upward your reason. Take my advice then,--Pray. Your
mental system needs the support of prayer in order to preserve its
balance. In the embarrassment and confusion of your senses, clearness of
perception will come with habitual and tranquil confidence in Him who
alike rules the universe and reads the heart. I only say here what has
been said much better before by a reasoner in whom all Students of Nature
recognize a guide. I see on your table the very volume of Bacon which
contains the passage I commend to your reflection. Here it is. Listen:
'Take an example of a dog, and mark what a generosity and courage he will
put on when he finds himself maintained by a man who, to him, is instead
of a God, or melior natura, which courage is manifestly such as that
creature, without that confidence of a better nature than his own, could
never attain. So man, when he resteth and assureth himself upon Divine
protection and favour, gathereth a force and faith which human nature
could not obtain.'[3] You are silent, but your gesture tells me your
doubt,--a doubt which your heart, so femininely tender, will not speak
aloud lest you should rob the old man of a hope with which your strength
of manhood dispenses,--you doubt the efficacy of prayer! Pause and
reflect, bold but candid inquirer into the laws of that guide you call
Nature. If there were no efficacy in prayer; if prayer were as mere an
illusion of superstitious fantasy as aught against which your reason now
struggles, do you think that Nature herself would have made it amongst the
most common and facile of all her dictates? Do you believe that if there
really did not exist that tie between Man and his Maker--that link
between life here and life hereafter which is found in what we call Soul
alone--that wherever you look through the universe, you would behold a
child at Prayer? Nature inculcates nothing that is superfluous. Nature
does not impel the leviathan or the lion, the eagle or the moth, to pray;
she impels only man. Why? Because man only has soul, and Soul seeks to
commune with the Everlasting, as a fountain struggles up to its source.
Burn your book. It would found you a reputation for learning and
intellect and courage, I allow; but learning and intellect and courage
wasted against a truth, like spray against a rock! A truth valuable to
the world, the world will never part with. You will not injure the truth,
but you will mislead and may destroy many, whose best security is in the
truth which you so eruditely insinuate to be a fable. Soul and Hereafter
are the heritage of all men; the humblest, journeyman in those streets,
the pettiest trader behind those counters, have in those beliefs their
prerogatives of royalty. You would dethrone and embrute the lords of the
earth by your theories. For my part, having given the greater part of my
life to the study and analysis of facts, I would rather be the author of
the tritest homily, or the baldest poem, that inculcated that imperishable
essence of the soul to which I have neither scalpel nor probe, than be the
founder of the subtlest school, or the framer of the loftiest verse, that
robbed my fellow-men of their faith in a spirit that eludes the
dissecting-knife,--in a being that escapes the grave-digger. Burn your
book! Accept This Book instead; Read and Pray."

He placed his Bible in my hand, embraced me, and, an hour afterwards, the
old man and the child left my hearth solitary once more.

[1] The summary of this distinguished lecturer's objections to phrenology
is to be found in the Appendix to vol i. of "Lectures on Metaphysics," p.
404, et seq. Edition 1859.

[2] The change of length of iron girders caused by variation of
temperature has not unfrequently brought down the whole edifice into which
they were admitted. Good engineers and architects allow for such changes
produced by temperature. In the tubular bridge across the Menai Straits,
a self-acting record of the daily amount of its contraction and expansion
is ingeniously Contrived.

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