A considerable portion of the time of many lunatics, is passed in replies to something supposed to be uttered. As this is an increasing habit, so it may be considered as an unfavourable symptom, and at last the patient becomes so abstracted from surrounding objects, that the greater part of the day is consumed in giving answers to these supposed communications. It sometimes happens that the intelligence conveyed, is of a nature to provoke the mad-man, and on these occasions, he generally exercises his wrath on the nearest bystander; whom he supposes, in the hurry of his anger, to be the offending party. In the soundest state of our faculties, we are more liable to be deceived by the ear, than through the medium of the other senses: a partial obstruction by wax, shall cause the person so affected, to hear the bubbling of water, the ringing of bells, or the sounds of musical instruments; and on some occasions, although the relation seems tinged with superstition, men of undeviating veracity, and of the highest attainments, have asserted, that they have heard themselves _called_. "He [Dr. Johnson] mentioned a thing as not unfrequent, of which I [Mr. Boswell] had never heard before--being _called_, that is, hearing one's name pronounced by the voice of a known person at a great distance, far beyond the possibility of being reached by any sound, uttered by human organs. An acquaintance on whose veracity I can depend, told me, that walking home one evening to Kilmarnock, he heard himself called from a wood, by the voice of a brother who had gone to America; and the next packet brought account of that brother's death. Macbean asserted that this inexplicable _calling_ was a thing very well known. Dr. Johnson said, that one day at Oxford, as he was turning the key of his chamber, he heard his mother distinctly call _Sam_. She was then at Litchfield; but nothing ensued. This phaenomenon is, I think, as wonderful as any other mysterious fact, which many people are very slow to believe, or rather, indeed, reject with an obstinate contempt."--_Boswell's Life of Dr. Johnson, 4to. vol. ii. p. 384._