oped upon the buddhic
plane, therefore, perfect prevision is possible to him, though he may
not--nay, he certainly will not--be able to bring the whole result of
his sight through fully and in order into this light. Still, a great
deal of clear foresight is obviously within his power whenever he
likes to exercise it; and even when he is not exercising it, frequent
flashes of fore-knowledge come through into his ordinary life, so that
he often has an instantaneous intuition as to how things will turn out
even before their inception.

Short of this perfect prevision we find, as in the previous cases,
that all degrees of this type of clairvoyance exist, from the
occasional vague premonitions which cannot in any true sense be called
sight at all, up to frequent and fairly complete second-sight. The
faculty to which this latter somewhat misleading name has been given
is an extremely interesting one, and would well repay more careful
and systematic study than has ever hitherto been given to it.

It is best known to us as a not infrequent possession of the Scottish
Highlanders, though it is by no means confined to them. Occasional
instances of it have appeared in almost every nation, but it has
always been commonest among mountaineers and men of lonely life. With
us in England it is often spoken of as though it were the exclusive
appanage of the Celtic race, but in reality it has appeared among
similarly situated peoples the world over. It is stated, for example,
to be very common among the Westphalian peasantry.

Sometimes the second-sight consists of a picture clearly foreshowing
some coming event; more frequently, perhaps, the glimpse of the future
is given by some symbolical appearance. It is noteworthy that the
events foreseen are invariably unpleasant ones--death being the
commonest of all; I do not recollect a single instance in which the
second-sight has shown anything which was not of the most gloomy
nature. It has a ghastly symbolism which is all its own--a symbolism
of shrouds and corpse-candles, and other funereal horrors. In some
cases it appears to be to a certain extent dependent on locality, for
it is stated that inhabitants of the Isle of Skye who possess the
faculty often lose it when they leave the island, even though it be
only to cross to the mainland. The gift of such sight is sometimes
hereditary in a family for generations, but this is not an invariable
rule, for it often appears sporadically in one