communicate any lofty philosophic truths.[14] The phenomena of clairvoyance, in Hegel’s opinion, merely indicate that the ‘material’ is really ‘ideal,’ which, perhaps, is as much as we can ask from them.  ’The somnambulist and clairvoyant see without eyes, and carry their visions directly into regions where the waiting consciousness of orderly intelligence cannot enter’ (Wallace).  Hegel admits, however, that ‘in ordinary self-possessed conscious life’ there are traces of the ‘magic tie,’ ’especially between female friends of delicate nerves,’ to whom he adds husband and wife, and members of the same family.  He gives (without date or source) a case of a girl in Germany who saw her brother lying dead in a hospital at Valladolid.  Her brother was at the time in the hospital, but it was another man in the nest bed who was dead.  ’It is thus impossible to make out whether what the clairvoyants really see preponderates over what they deceive themselves in.’

As long as the facts which Hegel accepted are not officially welcomed by science, it may seem superfluous to dispute as to whether they are attained by the lower or the higher stratum of our consciousness.  But perhaps the question here at issue may be elucidated by some remarks of Dr. Max Dessoir.  Psychology, he says, has proved that in every conception and idea an image or group of images must be present.  These mental images are the recrudescence or recurrence of perceptions.  We see a tree, or a man, or a dog, and whenever we have before our minds the conception or idea of any of these things the original perception of them returns, though of course more faintly.  But in Dr. Dessoir’s opinion these revived mental images would reach the height of actual hallucinations (so that the man, dog, or tree would seem visibly present) if other memories and new sensations did not compete with them and check their development.

Suppose, to use Mlle. Ferrand’s metaphor, a human body, living, but with all its channels of sensation hitherto unopened.  Open the sense of sight to receive a flash of green colour, and close it again.  Apparently, whenever the mind informing this body had the conception of green (and it could have no other) it would also have an hallucination of green, thus

  ’Annihilating all that’s made,
  To a green thought in a green shade.’

Now, in sleep or hypnotic trance the competition of new sensations and other memories is removed or diminished, and therefore the idea of a man, dog, or tree once suggested to the hypnotised patient, does become an actual hallucination.  The hypnotised patient sees the absent object which he is told to see, the sleeper sees things not really present.

Our primitive state, before the enormous competition of other memories and new sensations set in, would thus be a state of hallucination.  Our normal present condition, in which hallucination is checked by competing memories and new sensations, is a suppression of our original, primitive, natural tendencies.  Hallucination represents ’the main trunk of our psychical existence.’[15] In Dr. Dessoir’s theory this condition of hallucination is man’s original and most primitive condition, but it is not a higher, rather a lower state of spiritual activity than the everyday practical unhallucinated consciousness.