n. This
impression of presence is impossible to describe. It varies in
intensity and clearness according to the personality from whom the
writing professes to come. If it is some one whom I love, I feel it
immediately, before any writing has come. My heart seems to recognize
it."

In an earlier book of mine I have cited at full length a curious case
of presence felt by a blind man. The presence was that of the figure
of a gray-bearded man dressed in a pepper and salt suit, squeezing
himself under the crack of the door and moving across the floor of the
room towards a sofa. The blind subject of this quasi-hallucination is
an exceptionally intelligent reporter. He is entirely without internal
visual imagery and cannot represent light or colors to himself, and is
positive that his other senses, hearing, etc., were not involved in
this false perception. It seems to have been an abstract conception
rather, with the feelings of reality and spatial outwardness directly
attached to it--in other words, a fully objectified and exteriorized
IDEA.

Such cases, taken along with others which would be too tedious for
quotation, seem sufficiently to prove the existence in our mental
machinery of a sense of present reality more diffused and general than
that which our special senses yield. For the psychologists the tracing
of the organic seat of such a feeling would form a pretty
problem--nothing could be more natural than to connect it with the
muscular sense, with the feeling that our muscles were innervating
themselves for action. Whatsoever thus innervated our activity, or
"made our flesh creep"--our senses are what do so oftenest--might then
appear real and present, even though it were but an abstract idea. But
with such vague conjectures we have no concern at present, for our
interest lies with the faculty rather than with its organic seat.

Like all positive affections of consciousness, the sense of reality has
its negative counterpart in the shape of a feeling of unreality by
which persons may be haunted, and of which one sometimes hears
complaint:--

"When I reflect on the fact that I have made my appearance by accident
upon a globe itself whirled through space as the sport of the
catastrophes of the heavens," says Madame Ackermann; "when I see myself
surrounded by beings as ephemeral and incomprehensible as I am myself,
and all excitedly pursuing pure chimeras, I experience a strange
feeling of being in a drea