Jones had no more to tell.  Poor Mr. Jennings was very gentle, and very kind.  All his people were fond of him.  I could see that the servant was very much moved.

So, dejected and agitated, I passed from that terrible house, and its dark canopy of elms, and I hope I shall never see it more.  While I write to you I feel like a man who has but half waked from a frightful and monotonous dream.  My memory rejects the picture with incredulity and horror.  Yet I know it is true.  It is the story of the process of a poison, a poison which excites the reciprocal action of spirit and nerve, and paralyses the tissue that separates those cognate functions of the senses, the external and the interior.  Thus we find strange bed-fellows, and the mortal and immortal prematurely make acquaintance.

CONCLUSION

A Word for Those Who Suffer

My dear Van L——­, you have suffered from an affection similar to that which I have just described.  You twice complained of a return of it.

Who, under God, cured you?  Your humble servant, Martin Hesselius.  Let me rather adopt the more emphasised piety of a certain good old French surgeon of three hundred years ago:  “I treated, and God cured you.”

Come, my friend, you are not to be hippish.  Let me tell you a fact.

I have met with, and treated, as my book shows, fifty-seven cases of this kind of vision, which I term indifferently “sublimated,” “precocious,” and “interior.”

There is another class of affections which are truly termed—­though commonly confounded with those which I describe—­spectral illusions.  These latter I look upon as being no less simply curable than a cold in the head or a trifling dyspepsia.

It is those which rank in the first category that test our promptitude of thought.  Fifty-seven such cases have I encountered, neither more nor less.  And in how many of these have I failed?  In no one single instance.

There is no one affliction of mortality more easily and certainly reducible, with a little patience, and a rational confidence in the physician.  With these simple conditions, I look upon the cure as absolutely certain.

You are to remember that I had not even commenced to treat Mr. Jennings’ case.  I have not any doubt that I should have cured him perfectly in eighteen months, or possibly it might have extended to two years.  Some cases are very rapidly curable, others extremely tedious.  Every intelligent physician who will give thought and diligence to the task, will effect a cure.

You know my tract on “The Cardinal Functions of the Brain.”  I there, by the evidence of innumerable facts, prove, as I think, the high probability of a circulation arterial and venous in its mechanism, through the nerves.  Of this system, thus considered, the brain is the heart.  The fluid, which is propagated hence through one class of nerves, returns in an altered state through another, and the nature of that fluid is spiritual, though not immaterial, any more than, as I before remarked, light or electricity are so.