realities into the deceit of illusions? But," I added, in a whisper,
terrified by my own question, "do not physiologists agree in this: namely,
that though illusory phantasms may haunt the sane as well as the insane,
the sane know that they are only illusions, and the insane do not."

"Such a distinction," answered Faber, "is far too arbitrary and rigid for
more than a very general and qualified acceptance. Muller, indeed, who is
perhaps the highest authority on such a subject, says, with prudent
reserve, 'When a person who is not insane sees spectres and believes, them
to be real, his intellect must be imperfectly exercised.'[2] He would,
indeed, be a 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