of the
thing that was there the night before, and of the 'horrible sensation.'
I then mentally concentrated all my effort to charge this 'thing,' if
it was evil to depart, if it was NOT evil, to tell me who or what it
was, and if it could not explain itself, to go, and that I would compel
it {60} to go. It went as on the previous night, and my body quickly
recovered its normal state.

"On two other occasions in my life I have had precisely the same
'horrible sensation.' Once it lasted a full quarter of an hour. In
all three instances the certainty that there in outward space there
stood SOMETHING was indescribably STRONGER than the ordinary certainty
of companionship when we are in the close presence of ordinary living
people. The something seemed close to me, and intensely more real than
any ordinary perception. Although I felt it to be like unto myself so
to speak, or finite, small, and distressful, as it were, I didn't
recognize it as any individual being or person."

Of course such an experience as this does not connect itself with the
religious sphere. Yet it may upon occasion do so; and the same
correspondent informs me that at more than one other conjuncture he had
the sense of presence developed with equal intensity and abruptness,
only then it was filled with a quality of joy.

"There was not a mere consciousness of something there, but fused in
the central happiness of it, a startling awareness of some ineffable
good. Not vague either, not like the emotional effect of some poem, or
scene, or blossom, of music, but the sure knowledge of the close
presence of a sort of mighty person, and after it went, the memory
persisted as the one perception of reality. Everything else might be a
dream, but not that."

My friend, as it oddly happens, does not interpret these latter
experiences theistically, as signifying the presence of God. But it
would clearly not have been unnatural to interpret them as a revelation
of the deity's existence. When we reach the subject of mysticism, we
shall have much more to say upon this head.

Lest the oddity of these phenomena should disconcert you, I will
venture to read you a couple of similar narratives, much shorter,
merely to show that we are dealing with a well-marked natural kind of
fact. In the first case, which I {61} take from the Journal of the
Society for Psychical Research, the sense of presence developed in a
few moments into a distinctly visualized halluc