bold physician who maintained that
every man who believed he had really seen a ghost was of unsound mind.
In Dr. Abercrombie's interesting account of spectral illusions, he tells
us of a servant-girl who believed she saw, at the foot of her bed,
the apparition of Curran, in a sailor's jacket and an immense pair of
whiskers.(3) No doubt the spectre was an illusion, and Dr. Abercrombie
very ingeniously suggests the association of ideas by which the
apparition was conjured up with the grotesque adjuncts of the jacket
and the whiskers; but the servant-girl, in believing the reality of the
apparition, was certainly not insane. When I read in the American
public journals(4) of 'spirit manifestations,' in which large numbers of
persons, of at least the average degree of education, declare that they
have actually witnessed various phantasms, much more extraordinary
than all which you have confided to me, and arrive, at once, at the
conclusion that they are thus put into direct communication with
departed souls, I must assume that they are under an illusion; but I
should be utterly unwarranted in supposing that, because they credited
that illusion, they were insane. I should only say with Muller, that in
their reasoning on the phenomena presented to them, 'their intellect was
imperfectly exercised.' And an impression made on the senses, being in
itself sufficiently rare to excite our wonder, may be strengthened till
it takes the form of a positive fact, by various coincidences which
are accepted as corroborative testimony, yet which are, nevertheless,
nothing more than coincidences found in every day matters of business,
but only emphatically noticed when we can exclaim, 'How astonishing!'
In your case such coincidences have been, indeed, very signal, and might
well aggravate the perplexities into which your reason was thrown. Sir
Philip Derval's murder, the missing casket, the exciting nature of the
manuscript, in which a superstitious interest is already enlisted by
your expectation to find in it the key to the narrator's boasted powers,
and his reasons for the astounding denunciation of the man whom you
suspect to be his murderer,--in all this there is much to confirm, nay,
to cause, an illusion; and for that very reason, when examined by strict
laws of evidence, in all this there is but additional proof that the
illusion was--only illusion. Your affections contribute to strengthen
your fancy in its war on your reason. The girl