magic,
and not of clairvoyance. Both the drugs and the ceremonies are methods
emphatically to be avoided by any one who wishes to approach
clairvoyance from the higher side, and use it for his own progress and
for the helping of others. The Central African medicine-man or
witch-doctor and some of the Tartar Shamans are good examples of the
type.

Those to whom a certain amount of clairvoyant power has come
occasionally only, and without any reference to their own wish, have
often been hysterical or highly nervous persons, with whom the faculty
was to a large extent one of the symptoms of a disease. Its appearance
showed that the physical vehicle was weakened to such a degree that it
no longer presented any obstacle in the way of a certain modicum of
etheric or astral vision. An extreme example of this class is the man
who drinks himself into delirium tremens, and in the condition of
absolute physical ruin and impure psychic excitation brought about by
the ravages of that fell disease, is able to see for the time some of
the loathsome elemental and other entities which he has drawn round
himself by his long course of degraded and bestial indulgence. There
are, however, other cases where the power of sight has appeared and
disappeared without apparent reference to the state of the physical
health; but it seems probable that even in those, if they could have
been observed closely enough, some alteration in the condition of the
etheric double would have been noticed.

Those who have only one instance of clairvoyance to report in the
whole of their lives are a difficult band to classify at all
exhaustively, because of the great variety of the contributory
circumstances. There are many among them to whom the experience has
come at some supreme moment of their lives, when it is comprehensible
that there might have been a temporary exaltation of faculty which
would be sufficient to account for it.

In the case of another subdivision of them the solitary case has been
the seeing of an apparition, most commonly of some friend or relative
at the point of death. Two possibilities are then offered for our
choice, and in each of them the strong wish of the dying man is the
impelling force. That force may have enabled him to materialize
himself for a moment, in which case of course no clairvoyance was
needed or more probably it may have acted mesmerically upon the
percipient, and momentarily dulled his physical and stimulated his