“A whole ship’s crew were thrown into consternation by the ghost of the cook, who had died a few days before. He was distinctly seen by all of them walking on the water with a peculiar gait by which he was distinguished, one of his legs being shorter than the other. The cook, so plainly recognized, was only a piece of an old wreck.”

A child endowed with a rich fancy, whose mother has died, may, in the emotion of the pain and the excitement, see her image in heaven or hear her voice. Such phenomena are by no means rare. They depend upon a rich and vivid fancy and a powerful emotion of the heart. This play of fancy, called forth by emotions and moods, has never been better described, in its external resemblance to insanity, than by Shakespeare in the Midsummer Night’s Dream:

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,

Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend

More than cool reason ever comprehends.

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,

Are of imagination all compact:

One sees more devils than vast hell can hold—

That is the madman: the lover, all as frantic.

Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt:

The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling.

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,

And, as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.

Such tricks hath strong imagination;

That, if it would but apprehend some joy.

It comprehends some bringer of that joy;

Or, in the night, imagining some fear.

How easy is a bush supposed a bear.

Deceptions of sense arising in this way have their origin in the most central part of the organ of mind. They are consequences of ideas. Such hallucinations occur, of course, in the insane, and to distinguish them from those of peripheric origin—that is, from those that are independent of the thoughts that immediately preceded them—Kahlbaum terms them centrifugal hallucinations, or phantasms.

As an example of such a phantasm we may instance a well-known hallucination of Goethe, who, when he was once riding to Gesenheim, saw his own counterpart riding toward him. “I saw myself coming along the same path on horseback toward me, dressed, as I had never been, in pike-gray and gold. I shook myself out of the dream, and the figure was gone. But it is singular that eight years later, not at all by choice but only by chance, I found myself riding over the same path in the very direction my visionary self took, and clad in just those clothes, being again on my way to Frederica. Whatever the explanation of these things may be, the wonderful phantom gave me at that moment of separation some alleviation.”