A Strange Story — Volume 07Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron
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A Strange Story — Volume 07
Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron
English fiction -- 19th century
"Are there no records on evidence, which most physicians of very extended
practice will perhaps allow that their experience more or less tend to
confirm--no records of the singular coincidences between individual
impressions which are produced by sympathy? Now, whether you or your
Lilian were first haunted by this Shadow I know not. Perhaps before it
appeared to you in the wizard's chamber it had appeared to her by the
Monks' Well. Perhaps, as it came to you in the prison, so it lured her
through the solitudes, associating its illusory guidance with dreams of
you. And again, when she saw it within your threshold, your fantasy, so
abruptly invoked, made you see with the eyes of your Lilian! Does this
doctrine of sympathy, though by that very mystery you two loved each other
at first,--though, without it, love at first sight were in itself an
incredible miracle,--does, I say, this doctrine of sympathy seem to you
inadmissible? Then nothing is left for us but to revolve the conjecture I
before threw out. Have certain organizations like that of Margrave the
power to impress, through space, the imaginations of those over whom they
have forced a control? I know not. But if they have, it is not
supernatural; it is but one of those operations in Nature so rare and
exceptional, and of which testimony and evidence are so imperfect and so
liable to superstitious illusions, that they have not yet been traced--as,
if truthful, no doubt they can be, by the patient genius of science--to
one of those secondary causes by which the Creator ordains that Nature
shall act on Man."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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