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M.BRIERRE DE BOISMONT

is well known in England as a physician of large experience among the insane, and as an author of mark on many subjects connected with the physiology and pathology of the mind. He is also favourably distinguished from most of his countrymen by the pains he has taken to make himself acquainted with the labours of his contemporaries on this side the Channel, with some of whom he is on terms of intimacy. The latest production of his pen is now before us in an English dress. The work of translation has been faithfully performed by Mr. Hulme, who has also succeeded in condensing a work of which the chief defect was diffuseness and repetition, without impairing its value as an exponent of a very interesting and important subject.

The intellectual repast provided for us by the author consists of nearly one hundred and fifty cases selected from the best authorities, French, German, and English, arranged in order, and serving as illustrations of the principles laid down in the early chapters of his work. The cases themselves, apart from the running commentary which connects them, and serves to enhance their value, would prove full of interest for the intelligent student; but when taken with the judicious remarks of M. de Boismont, they will be found to combine the charms of authentic fact, lucid arrangement, and sound philosophy.

Before we proceed to place the author's labours under contribution for the edification of our readers, we must indulge ourselves in a brief dissertation on the meaning of the word hallucination. The discussions which took place on the occasion of the trial of Buranelli, respecting the meaning which ought to attach to the cognate words illusion and delusion must serve as

our apology for the slight delay involved in this our verbal criticism.

There are three words in common use among the learned in disorders of the mind-illusion, delusion, and hallucination; and it would greatly conduce to clearness and precision in the treatment of a subject in which these qualities are specially required, if we could arrive at some distinct understanding respecting these terms. Now, there should be no doubt or difficulty about the two words illusion and delusion. Illusion certainly should mean a false sensation, and delusion a false idea. The one (illusion) is an error of the senses, in which the mind, if sound, has no part; the other (delusion) an error of the mind, in which it is not necessary that the senses should participate. But the word hallucination, though perhaps used in France with the requisite precision, has not met with such judicious treatment in England. Among scientific writers it is sometimes used as synonymous with illusion, sometimes with delusion. Our older writers, too, both classical and medical, employed the word in different senses. Addison, for instance, says, of a mere typographical error, This must have been the hallucination of the transcriber, who probably mistook the dash of the i for a t; and Byrom tells us of some poor hallucinating scribe's mistake.' Boyle, too, speaks of a few hallucinations about a subject to which the greatest clerks have been generally such strangers.' In the first two passages the word is used somewhat in the sense of an illusion, but in the third in the sense of a delusion. The two great physicians, Sir Thomas Browne and Harvey, evidently use the word in opposite senses; for Sir Thomas Browne, discoursing upon the sight, says, 'if vision be abolished, it is called cæcitas or blindness; if depraved, and receive its objects erroneously,

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hallucination. But Harvey, speaking of 'a wasting of the flesh without cause,' tells us that it is frequently termed a bewitched disease; but questionless a mere hallucination of the vulgar.' So that Harvey used the word in the sense of an error of the mind, Brown as an error of the sense of sight. As, however, the learned author of Vulgar Errors is defining the word, while Harvey uses it without any special weighing of its meaning-as two out of the three other authorities just quoted employ it in the sense which Sir Thomas Browne attaches to it, and most modern writers give it the same meaning-we will take an hallucination to be a depraved or erroneous action of the senses.

If we are justified in so defining the word hallucination, we are perhaps equally justified in urging our psychologists to abandon the use of the term in favour of the more simple word illusion. But we are afraid that M. Brierre de Boismont would not support us in this attempt at simplification, for he employs the word illusion in contradistinction to the word hallucination, defining a hallucination as the perception of the sensible signs of an idea,' and an illusion as the false appreciation of real sensations.' We, on the contrary, are disposed to make the word illusion do double duty, and to release the word hallucination from all its engagements. Defining an illusion as an error of sense, we

should recognise two kinds of illusion, the one consisting in the falsification of real, the other in the creation of unreal, sensations. Thus a gentleman who, fresh from turtlesoup, punch, venison, and champagne, should contrive to convert a combination of lantern, turnip, broomstick, and sheet into a ghost, would be afflicted with the first form of illusion; while another gentleman who, under similar convivial influences, should succeed in manufac turing a ghost out of the unsubstantial air of a bleak common, with no object visible for miles, would be the subject of the second form of illusion. But the question whether we shall or shall not accept our author's definitions of hallucinations and illusions must not be allowed to divert us any longer from the

more important contents of his work. We shall be turning these to the best account if we attempt, with his assistance, to give our own connected and continuous view of all that part of the large science of psychology which relates to the senses in their healthy and in their disordered conditions.

A man possessed of a sound mind in a healthy body, endowed with organs of sense of perfect construction, and keeping in all things within the bounds of temperance and moderation, would be absolutely free from illusions and hallucinations. His eye would present to him none but real sights, his ear would convey to him only real sounds. His sleep would not be disturbed by dreams. The only sensations not exactly corresponding to external objects which he would experience would consist in the substitution of the complementary colours for each other if he fatigued the eye by fixing it too long on some bright object. The golden sun would appear to his closed eyes like a violetcoloured wafer, a window-frame would seem to have dark panes and light sashes, and a dark picture with a gilt frame would have its light and dark features transposed.

The perfect physical organization which we have just supposed would also be quite compatible with the hearing of sounds and the seeing of sights which can only be traced to their true source by the light of science or experience. A person thus happily endowed might judge wrongly of an echo or be misled by a mirage. He might be frightened by the Giant of the Brocken or enchanted by the castles of the Fairy Morgana. His sensations would be real, though the cause might be indirect or obscure.

The next onward step in the philosophy of the organs of sense is taken if, for the healthy man, we substitute the ailing child or less vigorous adult, on whose organs of sense sensations linger after the causes of them have been removed. Our author quotes from Abercrombie one case in which the eye was the seat of such a persistent sensation; and he might have drawn from the same source another in which the sense of hearing

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was similarly affected. A friend of the Doctor had been for some time looking intently at a small print of the Virgin and Child. On raising his head, the two figures the size of life appeared at the end of the room, and continued visible for the space of two minutes.

From persistent sensations, or sensations reproduced involuntarily after a short interval, the transition is easy and natural to sensations prolonged or reproduced by an effort of the will. The power of bringing back the pictures of visible objects in the dark, or of restoring sounds in the silence, does not seem to be a very rare one. Many children possess it, and there are artists who are able to turn it to account.

The

painter whom Dr. Wigan represents as executing three hundred portraits in one year possessed this faculty of reproduction in an eminent degree. He placed each of a succession of sitters before him for half an hour, and looked at him attentively, sketching from time to time on the canvas. Having dismissed his last sitter, he began to paint the first of the series after a method described in these words: 'I took the man and sat him in the chair, where I saw him as distinctly as if he had been before me in his own proper person; I may almost say more vividly. I looked from time to time at the imaginary figure, then worked with my pencil, then referred to the countenance, and so on, just as I should have done had the sitter been there. When I looked at the chair I saw the man.' This painter won distinction, and earned and saved money, but he spent thirty years of his life in a madhouse. On his release his right hand was found not to have lost its cunning: but the exercise of his art excited him too much; he gave up his painting, and died soon after.

Another step forward, and we come to the case of the child who covers himself with the bed-clothes, and paints his miniature fancy scenes on his organ of vision; or of the poet who contrives, as Goethe did, to see what he fervently imagines; or of the actor Talma, who asserted of himself that he was in the habit of stripping his brilliant audiences of all covering, artificial

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and natural, till he left only bare skeletons behind, and that under the influence of the emotions excited by this strange spectral assembly he produced some of his most startling effects.

Such then, without making any pretence to minute accuracy, are the most familiar facts relating to the reproduction of sensations or their voluntary creation in the absence of the objects which usually occasion them.

Sensation without the immediate

presence of an object of sense is assuredly a very wonderful phenomenon; but the seeing and hearing, the feeling, smelling, and tasting, of objects which have no existence, as the result of an involuntary operation of the brain, without any co-operation of the senses (for illusions have been shown to occur after the entire destruction of the organs of sense of which they might be supposed the scene), are among the most extraordinary facts of our complicated and marvellous organization. It is to this involuntary work of the brain that we would now invite the attention of the reader.

If we again assume as possible a perfectly healthy and perfectly temperate man, we can imagine such a man to be absolutely free from hallucinations, for we can imagine him free from dreams; but the vast majority of men have large experience of hallucinations as they occur in that imperfect sleep which favours the free play of the fancy. In this state we know that every sense may become in its turn the theatre of impressions that are not distinguishable from those which external objects occasion in the waking man; and these illusions of the senses are blended with delusions of the mind that rival them in vividness and reality.

Here let us pause a moment while we contemplate this wonderful phenomenon of dreams-this strange compound of illusions and delusions-this harmless analogue of madness-this most instructive and most humanizing plea for dealing cautiously and tenderly with the sorest trial and affliction of humanity. Fatigued by bodily labour, wearied by mental applica

tion, or tired of doing nothing, we escape from the discomfort of clothes, place ourselves in a position of rest, do our best to banish thought, shut out, if we can, both light and sound, and so fall asleep. There we lie, given up to the chemical changes and automatic movements of nutrition, circulation, and respiration, the pulse and breathing reduced to their lowest number, and every function of the frame to its lowest point of activity. Of the proximate cause of this state we know nothing, and the best guess we can make at it is that the balance of the circulation through the brain has been altered, and that whereas in our waking state the vessels conveying red blood to the head were kept filled by the more vigorous action of the heart, and the vessels conveying black blood from the head were comparatively empty, in our sleeping state the order of things is reversed, and the black blood predominates over the red.

Be this as

it may, a perfectly healthy change in the functions of the brain, and one not involving any permanent alteration in its structure, is found by universal experience to be accompanied by illusions of all the senses, and strange delusions of the mind, the illusions and delusions being mixed up into scenes as apparently real as the mixture of sensations, thoughts, and actions, which make up the transactions of our waking hours.

When these curious compounds of illusion and delusion are brought about by very slight departures from ideal perfect health, or when they occur during the short transition from sound sleep to perfect wakefulness, and are not attended by any painful sensation of oppression, suffocation, sinking, or struggling, we call them dreams; but if that single strawberry, or that modicum of pie-crust which we were so imprudent as to blend with that otherwise moderate and wholesome supper, should happen to disagree with us, and the indigestion which reveals itself to our waking man by too familiar symptoms in stomach and brain, in mind and temper, plants a cat, a dog, or a demon upon our chests, raises us

to giddy heights, plunges us to awful depths, sends us spinning like a top, or, more merciful, lends us wings to fly, or seven-league boots to clear oceans at a leap, then our dreams become nightmares, and we have opened out for contemplation the myriads of hallucinations which grow out of uneasy bodily sensations misinterpreted by a mind robbed by sleep of all its usual standards of comparison.

Of the varieties of nightmare, we have not space to speak at any length. Suffice it to state, that the sleeper sometimes betrays his trouble to the looker-on by restless tossings about, while at other times he appears to be in a sound sleep; that generally he wakes up in a paroxysm of terror struggling hopelessly for breath, for power of speech, or movement; and that, in some few instances, the unreal sensations are for a short space of time believed to be real, to the imminent danger of sleeping neighbours. For some interesting cases of nightmare repeated night after night (in some instances at the same hour), and of nightmare attacking a number of persons at the same time, and with the self-same hallucination, the reader is referred to M. Brierre de Boismont. Also for much curious information on dreams, somnambulism, ecstasy, and animal magnetism.

We have marked some of the cases cited under the head of dreams as misplaced, but the cases are so interesting in themselves that our criticism is disarmed as we read them.

From dreams, nightmares, somnambulism, and other analogous conditions fruitful in hallucinations, we pass on to abstinence, voluntary or enforced, to solitude and imprisonment, and to the complicated fatigues and privations of shipwreck. Judging by the examples cited by the author, these causes generally, but not invariably, produce hallucinations of an agreeable kind; in which respect they resemble the sensations described by those who have been rescued from drowning and hanging. The shipwrecked crew on the raft of the Medusa, deserted and starving, saw not only the vessels which they hoped for, but beautiful plantations