A lucid patient, lying in his bed, announces the arrival of persons to see whom he must possess _transmural vision_, and this faculty is termed by Brierre de Boismont—_hallucination_. In our ignorance, we have hitherto innocently supposed that in order to be rightly termed a _hallucination_, a vision must be subjective. It must have an existence only in the delirious brain of the patient. But if the latter announces the visit of a person, miles away, and this person arrives at the very moment predicted by the _seer_, then his vision was no more subjective, but on the contrary perfectly _objective_, for he saw that person in the act of coming. And how could the patient see, through solid bodies and space, an object shut out from the reach of our mortal sight, if he had not exercised his _spiritual_ eyes on that occasion? Coincidence? Cabanis speaks of certain nervous disorders in which the patients easily distinguished with the naked eye infusoria and other microscopical beings which others could only perceive through powerful lenses. “I have met subjects,” he says, “who saw in Cimmerian darkness as well as in a lighted room; ...” others “who followed persons, tracing them out like dogs, and recognizing by the smell objects belonging to such persons or even such as had been only touched by them, with a sagacity which was hitherto observed only in animals.”[262] Exactly; because reason, which, as Cabanis says, develops only at the expense and loss of natural instinct, is a Chinese wall slowly rising on the soil of sophistry, and which finally shuts out man’s spiritual perceptions of which the instinct is one of the most important examples. Arrived at certain stages of physical prostration, when mind and the reasoning faculties seem paralyzed through weakness and bodily exhaustion, instinct—the spiritual _unity_ of the five senses—sees, hears, feels, tastes, and smells, unimpaired by either time or space. What do we know of the exact limits of mental action? How can a physician take upon himself to distinguish the imaginary from the real senses in a man who may be living a spiritual life, in a body so exhausted of its usual vitality that it actually is unable to prevent the soul from _oozing_ out from its prison? The divine light through which, unimpeded by matter, the soul {146} perceives things past, present, and to come, as though their rays were focused in a mirror; the death-dealing bolt projected in an instant of fierce anger or at the climax of long-festering hate; the blessing wafted from a grateful or benevolent heart; and the curse hurled at an object—offender or victim—all have to pass through that universal agent, which under one impulse is the breath of God, and under another—the venom of the devil. It was _discovered_ (?) by Baron Reichenbach and called OD, whether intentionally or otherwise we cannot say, but it is singular that a name should have been chosen which is mentioned in the most ancient books of the Kabala.