you would place in the
imagination of the operator, acting on the imagination of those whom it
affects? Here, at least, I can follow you, to a certain extent, for here
we get back into the legitimate realm of physiology."

"And possibly," said Faber, "we may find hints to guide us to useful
examination, if not to complete solution of problems that, once
demonstrated, may lead to discoveries of infinite value,--hints, I say,
in two writers of widely opposite genius, Van Helmont and Bacon.
Van Helmont, of all the mediaeval mystics, is, in spite of his many
extravagant whims, the one whose intellect is the most suggestive to the
disciplined reasoners of our day. He supposed that the faculty which he
calls Fantasy, and which we familiarly call Imagination,--is invested
with the power of creating for itself ideas independent of the senses,
each idea clothed in a form fabricated by the imagination, and
becoming an operative entity. This notion is so far favoured by modern
physiologists, that Lincke reports a case where the eye itself was
extirpated; yet the extirpation was followed by the appearance of
luminous figures before the orbit. And again, a woman, stone-blind,
complained of 'luminous images, with pale colours, before her eyes.'
Abercrombie mentions the case 'of a lady quite blind, her eyes being
also disorganized and sunk, who never walked out without seeing a
little old woman in a red cloak, who seemed to walk before her.'(7)
Your favourite authority, the illustrious Miller, who was himself in
the habit of 'seeing different images in the field of vision when he
lay quietly down to sleep, asserts that these images are not merely
presented to the fancy, but that even the images of dreams are really
seen,' and that 'any one may satisfy himself of this by accustoming
himself regularly to open his eyes when waking after a dream,--the
images seen in the dream are then sometimes visible, and can be observed
to disappear gradually.' He confirms this statement not only by the
result of his own experience, but by the observations made by Spinoza,
and the yet higher authority of Aristotle, who accounts for spectral
appearance as the internal action of the sense of vision.(8) And this
opinion is favoured by Sir David Brewster, whose experience leads him
to suggest 'that the objects of mental contemplation may be seen as
distinctly as external objects, and will occupy the same local position
in the axis of vision as if they had