This belief appears physiologically to constitute his disorder; and the hope of placing this subject in a distinct point of view may be an apology for the relation of the very remarkable case of Nicolai of Berlin.[25:A] In consequence of a series of calamities which afflicted him with the most poignant grief he had in January and February of the year 1791, the additional misfortune to experience several very unpleasant circumstances which were followed on the 24th of February by a most violent altercation. “My wife and another person came into my apartment in the morning in order to console me, but I was too much agitated by a series of incidents which had most powerfully affected my moral feeling, to be capable of attending to them; on a sudden I perceived, at about the distance of ten steps, a form like that of a deceased person, I pointed at it, asking my wife if she did not see it? It was but natural that she should not see any thing, my question therefore alarmed her very much, and she sent immediately for a physician, the phantasm continued about eight minutes. I grew at length more calm, and being extremely exhausted, fell into a restless sleep, which lasted about half an hour; the physician ascribed the apparition to a violent mental emotion, and hoped there would be no return, but the violent agitation of my mind had in some way disordered my nerves, and produced farther consequences which deserve a more minute description. [25:A] Vide Ferriar on Apparitions, P. 41.—As the Doctor has not cited whence he obtained this curious document, I have been under the necessity of employing perhaps his own translation. “At four in the afternoon, the form which I had seen in the morning reappeared. I was by myself when this happened, and being rather uneasy at the incident, went to my wife’s apartment, but there likewise I was prevented by the apparition, which however, at intervals disappeared, and always presented itself in a standing posture: about six o’clock there appeared also several walking figures, which had no connexion with the first.