No doubt there are examples of error and examples of imposture, so there are in everything where room is to be found for them; and I am quite aware of the propensity of hysterical patients to deceive, but it is for the judicious observers to examine the genuineness of each particular instance; and it is perfectly certain and well established by the German physiologists and psychologists, who have carefully studied the subject, that there are many above all suspicion. Provided, then, that the case be genuine, it remains to be determined how much value is to be attached to the revelations, for they may be quite honestly delivered, and yet be utterly worthless—the mere ravings of a disordered brain; and it is here that conformity becomes important, for I can not admit the objection that the simple circumstance of the patients being diseased invalidates their evidence so entirely as to annul even the value of their unanimity, because, although it is not logically impossible that a certain state of nervous derangement should occasion all somnambules, of the class in question, to make similar answers, when interrogated regarding a subject of which, in their normal condition, they know nothing, and on which they have never reflected, and that these answers should be not only consistent, but disclosing far more elevated views than are evolved by minds of a very superior order which _have_ reflected on it very deeply—I say, although this is not logically impossible, it will assuredly be found, by most persons, an hypothesis of much more difficult acceptance than the one I propose; namely, that whatever be the cause of the effect, these patients are in a state of clear-seeing, wherein they have “more than mortal knowledge;” that is, more knowledge than mortals possess in their normal condition: and it must not be forgotten, that we have some facts confessed by all experienced physicians and physiologists, even in this country, proving that there are states of disease in which preternatural faculties have been developed, such as no theory has yet satisfactorily accounted for. But Dr. Passavent, who has written a very philosophical work on the subject of vital magnetism and clear-seeing, asserts, that it is an error to imagine that the ecstatic condition is merely the product of disease. He says, that it has sometimes exhibited itself in persons of very vigorous constitutions, instancing Joan of Arc, a woman, whom historians have little understood, and whose memory Voltaire’s detestable poem has ridiculed and degraded, but who was, nevertheless, a great psychological phenomenon.