of clairvoyance. That it may
also, on those prepared for its reception by strong mental excitement, be
induced by tumultuous music, as by the sound of drums and cymbals, by
odors, and, perhaps, by unguents; and that the same condition also
frequently supervenes on long-continued and intense emotion, as well as on
those hysterical and convulsive movements of the body which sometimes
attend on excessive religious excitation. That, induced by the latter
means, clairvoyance has a tendency to become contagious, and has often
afflicted whole communities with the most dangerous and deplorable
epidemic hallucinations, as in the fancied witch-sabbaths of the
domonomaniacs, and prowling excursions of lycanthropes and vampyres; but
that, although in these demotic frenzies, the prevailing ideas and images
presented to the minds of the sufferers are merely illusory, they possess
the capacity of being put in such a relation with ideas and images derived
from actual existence in the mind of others, as to perceive and
appropriate them. Beyond this it would be difficult to advance our
speculation with any degree of certainty; but if speculation may be at all
indulged in such a question, it might, perhaps, be allowed to a sanguine
speculator to surmise that, possibly, the mind in that state may be put
_en rapport_ with not only the ideas and emotions of another particular
mind, but with the whole of the external world, and with all its minds.
Another step would carry us to that participation in the whole scheme of
nature, pretended to by divinators and seers; but it must be owned that,
in the present state of the evidences, there is no solid ground on which
to rest the foot of conjecture in taking either the one step or the other.

In the mean time, many practitioners are playing with an agency, the
dangerous character of which they little suspect. In ancient exorcisms, it
sometimes happened that the exorcist himself became the involuntary
recipient of the contagious frenzy of the patient. If such an event
happened now, it would not be more wonderful than when it befel the Pere
Surin, at Loudon, in 1635, as he has himself described his disaster in his
letter to the Jesuit Attichi: "For three months and a half I have never
been without a devil in full exercise within me. While I was engaged in
the performance of my ministry, the devil passed out of the body of the
possessed, and coming into mine, assaulted me and cast me down, shook me,
an