was not even in the house.[7] But instances of the facility with which
phantasms, once admitted, repeat themselves to the senses, are numberless.
Many are recorded by Hibbert and Abercrombie, and every physician in
extensive practice can add largely, from his own experience, to the list.
Intense self-concentration is, in itself, a mighty magician. The
magicians of the East inculcate the necessity of fast, solitude, and
meditation for the due development of their imaginary powers. And I have
no doubt with effect; because fast, solitude, and meditation--in other
words, thought or fancy intensely concentred--will both raise apparitions
and produce the invoker's belief in them. Spinello, striving to conceive
the image of Lucifer for his picture of the Fallen Angels, was at last
actually haunted by the Shadow of the Fiend. Newton himself has been
subjected to a phantom, though to him, Son of Light, the spectre presented
was that of the sun! You remember the account that Newton gives to Locke
of this visionary appearance. He says that 'though he had looked at the
sun with his right eye only, and not with the left, yet his fancy began
to make an impression upon his left eye as well as his right; for if he
shut his right and looked upon the clouds, or a book, or any bright object
with his left eye, he could see the sun almost as plain as with the right,
if he did but intend his fancy a little while on it;' nay, 'for some
months after, as often as he began to meditate on the phenomena, the
spectrum of the sun began to return, even though he lay in bed at
midnight, with his curtains drawn!' Seeing, then, how any vivid
impression once made will recur, what wonder that you should behold in
your prison the Shining Shadow that had first startled you in a wizard's
chamber when poring over the records of a murdered visionary? The more
minutely you analyze your own hallucinations--pardon me the word--the more
they assume the usual characteristics of a dream; contradictory,
illogical, even in the marvels they represent. Can any two persons be
more totally unlike each other, not merely as to form and years, but as to