From a letter of Feuerbach of September 20, 1828, we learn that
Kaspar, '_without being an albino_,' can see as well in utter darkness
as in daylight. Perhaps the man who taught Kaspar to write, in the
dark, _was_ an albino: Kaspar never saw his face. Kaspar's powers of
vision abated, as he took to beef, but he remained hyperæsthetic, and
could see better in a bad light than Daumer or Feuerbach. Some
'dowsers,' we know, can detect subterranean water, by the sensations
of their hands, without using a twig, or divining rod, and others can
'spot' gold hidden under the carpet, with the twig. Kaspar, merely
with the bare hand, detected (without touching it?) a needle under a
table cloth. He gradually lost these gifts, and the theory seems to
have been that they were the result of his imprisonment in the dark,
and a proof of it. The one thing certain is that Kaspar had the
sensitive or 'mediumistic' temperament, which usually--though not
always--is accompanied by hysteria, while hysteria means cunning and
fraud, whether conscious or not so conscious. Meanwhile the boy was in
the hands of men credulous, curious, and, in the case of Daumer,
capable of odd sensations induced by suggestion. From such a boy, in
such company, the truth could not be expected, above all if, like some
other persons of his class, he was subject to 'dissociation' and
obliviousness as to his own past.

Rather curiously we find in Feuerbach's own published collection of
Trials the case of a boy, Sörgel, who had 'paroxysms of second
consciousness ... of which he was ignorant upon returning to his
ordinary state of consciousness.' We have also the famous case of the
atheistic carpenter, Ansel Bourne, who was struck deaf, dumb, and
blind, and miraculously healed, in a dissenting chapel, to the great
comfort of 'a large and warm congregation.' Mr. Bourne then became a