into which he runs who
delivers himself unconditionally to the custody of solitude, and does not
arm himself against its faithless hospitality. Shut up in a barren and
monotonous leisure, without studies to occupy curiosity, without objects
to amuse the senses, or to interest and to attract the affections to any
thing human, fancy will escape into the worlds of chimerical existence,
there to seek amusement and exercise. How fondly does it then embrace and
cherish angelical visions, or infernal phantoms, prodigies, or miracles!
or should its reveries take another direction, with what increasing
eagerness and confidence do its hopes hunt after the delusions of alchemy,
the fictions of philosophy, and the delirium of metaphysics! In cases
where the mind is less capacious, and its stores less copious, it will
attach itself to some absurd notion, the child of its languid and
exhausted powers; and bestowing its fondest confidence on this darling of
its dotage, will abandon reason and outrage common sense."(82)

I have given this lengthened extract from Zimmerman, because I think it
satisfactorily explains those mystic _visions_ as well as _infernal
phantoms_, with which the mediaeval legends and chronicles, generally
composed by monks, abound, and which are often unjustly ascribed to fraud
and wilful deception. Medical science, as well as all the branches of
natural philosophy, being then in a very imperfect condition, such
phenomena as those of nuns mewing like cats or biting like dogs, which are
mentioned by Zimmerman, were not explained as nervous diseases, but
ascribed to the possession of evil spirits; and I frankly confess that I
am by no means sure, that if cases like those mentioned above were to
happen in our enlightened age, there would not be found many good folks
ascribing them to a similar agency. It must be also remembered that, if
notwithstanding the extreme rapidity and regularity of communications in
our own time, reports of various events are often exaggerated and even
completely altered in passing from one place to another; how much more
must it have been the case during the time of such defective communication
as existed previous to the invention of printing and the introduction of
the post! It was therefore no wonder if occurrences of such an
extraordinary nature as those alluded to were immensely magnified by
report, and if it had, at least in many places, converted the mewing and
biting nuns into as man