William of Auvergne, Bishop of Paris, in the beginning of the XIIIth century, recognizes the reality of several of the phenomena of spiritualism, and indicates a natural basis. Thus, speaking of the mirrors upon which magicians make their patients look, he says that no images are seen in the glass, but that what takes place is "a bending back of the mind's edge upon itself--of his mind, I say, who looks upon such an instrument; for its brightness forbids the mind's vision exteriorating and directing itself, and flings it back and reflects it in such sort that it cannot but look into itself."[63] Within the mind, he says, all sorts of wonders may be read, for therein abides the light "to which our souls in respect to their noble powers are most closely united; and one of the wisest Christians saith that 'this light is the Creator ever blessed,' meaning by these words that betwixt our minds and the interior light, which is God, there is no intermediary, according to the prophet's word, which, addressing the Creator, saith, 'The light of thy countenance is sealed upon us, O Lord'; that is, thy lightsome countenance, which is naught else but thyself." Whilst acknowledging that this light is "sealed," and that its rays do but break out like lightning flashes in a dark night, and confessing that he has long been cured of that error of his youth, the notion that the purification and abstraction necessary for such inward vision could be profitably achieved without the "grace of the Creator," he yet maintains that this light is, up to a certain point, communicated according to a natural law, analogous, it would seem, to that of the infusion of life. He considers that a melancholy temperament favors this abstraction, and insists that melancholy madmen, in virtue of their abstraction, do receive true irradiations of this divine light, although indefinitely fragmentary (_particulatas et obtruncatas_), "wherefore _naturally_ they begin to discourse like prophets of divine things, yet continue not to talk so, save for a little while, but lapse into words of accustomed folly." He attributes this relapse to their shattered condition and the excess of the melancholy fumes which overpower them. Whatever may be thought of the theory, few can have seen much of mad persons without noticing the noble fragments with which their disjointed talk is not unfrequently interspersed. The present writer has often heard one of the persons concerned relate the following story of a madman's prophecy: