and endows them with an energy and activity which seems preternatural.

For the reasons now suggested, it seems to us quite unnecessary to suppose the direct operation on the minds and organism of the Ursulines of any other will and personality than their own, -demoniac or human, magical or magnetic, sorcerer's or exorcist's. The highest medical authorities are unanimous in resolving the devils of Loudun into morbid nervous affections on the part of the possessed. The source of their malady was shrewdly guessed at by Giles Menage, in a work published as early as 1674: "In anno 1632," he writes, "accidit ut aliquot virgines Ludonensis cœnobii, uteri suffocationibus, ut verosimile est, laborantes, adeo vexarentur, ut eas a dæmone correptas crederent homines superstitiosi." The subject, even if it were not rather of medical than of general interest, is obviously unfit for discussion in these pages.

M. Figuier's diagnosis represents the sisters of the convent as suffering under hysteria, with various complications, produced by that particular form of derangement technically known as erotomania. The nature of the charges made by the nuns against Grandier, and one feature which pervades the hallucinations of all the possessed respecting his conduct towards them, to which for obvious reasons we have not alluded, puts this explanation of their condition beyond reasonable doubt.

These physiological explanations are satisfactory as far as they go; but they are obviously incomplete. They point out the circumstances which, in this particular case, predisposed the nuns to believe in their own diabolical possession, and to attribute it to the incantations of Grandier; but they throw no light at all on the origin and nature of the general belief in demons and in possession. A few words on both of these subjects will be in place.

The demons of classic belief were, it is well known, originally the disembodied spirits of good men, supposed still to be living on the earth, and exercising tutelary cares over survivors. This is the graceful and touching form which the superstition takes in Hesiod. Soon, however, a similar power over and interest in human affairs was attributed to the departed souls of bad men. In the other world the wicked did not cease from troubling. The course of thought in both the classic nations was the same. To the good and evil demons of the Greeks, the Lares and Dii Manes, and the Lemures and Larva, of the Romans exactly corresponded. Fear is a not less active, and in its effects on the popular imagination is generally a far more potent, principle than the spirit of love and of a sound mind. Mysterious and invisible agencies naturally awaken apprehension and alarm; and it is the tendency of terror to paint

the object towards which it is entertained in the darkest colours, and to become hatred. Hence, while the good demons gradually dropped out of the popular belief, or took another form in which their human origin was lost,. the evil demons remained a leading doctrine of almost every superstition. Christianity found them a prominent part of the Jewish faith, in which they were still held to be the souls of wicked men. Taking up this belief, it has diffused it over the world. The connection between the pious and humane demonism of the pagan poet and the revolting demonism of early Christianity and of the Catholic middle ages seems incredible, when we look only at the two extremes of the development,-the origin of the doctrine and its final form. It is quite clear, however, when the intermediate steps of transition are considered, and the omitted terms of the series introduced.

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The nature of the fact expressed by the word possession remains to be considered. The Roman Catholic church denotes the kinds and degrees of diabolic agency by appropriate terms. "It was possession when the demon was lodged in the interior of the body; obsession when one was the subject of his attacks from without; malefice when one simply suffered from an infirmity inflicted either directly, or through the medium, of a sorcerer. Further, circumsession was distinguished as a sort of obsession, in which the demon laid siege to the body on all sides without actually entering it." Possession was perhaps more than the mere corporeal lodgment of the demon within the organisation of the possessed. The demon dwelt in the mind as well as in the body of his victim, abusing the faculties of thought and emotion and will, not less than those of the physical nature. The demoniac seems to have had, in some confused and confusing way, the feeling of a double personality within the limits of the same consciousness. Besides his true self, he was aware of a second self, an alter ego, distinct from the former and in conflict against it, though yet in some sense blended with it. These demoniacal hallucinations are not by any means phenomena sui generis. They are extreme cases of illusions which, in a less extreme form, are of the very commonest occurrence in the daily experience of almost every one. In reverie, for example, ideas and images seem to float upon the passive mind from some foreign and external source, rather than to rise by any natural law of suggestion from within. For this reason, persons especially inclined to reverie-the mystics of all ages-have invariably been prone to refer the thoughts and impulses which have presented themselves in meditation, not to the natural operation of their own faculties, but to the influence of other beings mys

* Figuier.

teriously communicating with their souls. The thoughts, if low and debasing, are the promptings of Satan; if pure and elevated, they are the inspirations of God. In dreaming, a heightened degree of the same phenomenon is observable. We carry on discussions with imaginary opponents, supplying them with the arguments to which we listen, and grant or refuse our assent. In insanity the same peculiarity is often apparent. Sir Henry Holland, in his Chapters on Mental Physiology, mentions a case of mental derangement in which the patient held frequent and excited conversations with himself; in which he sometimes professed to hear the answers given him; at other times bore both parts himself, but in different tones of voice for each of the persons presumed to be present. Other illustrations may be found to any desired extent in almost any work on medical psychology.

In all these cases, the sense of continuous personal identity, which lies at the root of coherent thought and action, is from some cause or other temporarily disturbed or permanently lost. The power of attention is either voluntarily unexercised or completely gone, and the mind, abandoning all self-direction, is tossed about like a helmless ship. "If," says M. Esquirol, "we notice what passes in the mind of the most sensible of men during a single day, what incoherence shall we notice in his ideas and determinations from the time that he wakes in the morning till he returns to his rest at night! His sensations and ideas have some connection among them only when he arrests his attention, and then only does he reason. The insane no longer enjoy the faculty of fixing their attention, and this is the primitive cause of all their errors."

*In the introduction to his recent translation of Immanuel Hermann Fichte's Contributions to Mental Philosophy, Mr. Morell has ingeniously applied the doctrine of unconscious mental states to the explanation of the phenomena of spiritualistic possession. "This doctrine, that the regions of intelligence and consciousness are precisely coextensive, has of late years," he says, "come into deserved discredit. Sir W. Hamilton many years ago pointed out the fact, that there is a process of latent thought always going forward more or less energetically in the soul. Dr. Carpenter designated the same phenomena under the term unconscious cerebration. Dr. Laycock has brought them under the general category of reflex action, and shown that there is a vast variety of facts both in the man and in the animal which spring distinctly from the reflex action of the brain. Almost all the modern German psychologists, particularly Carus and the Herbartian school, have developed the same doctrine still more at large." Mr. John Mill and Sir Benjamin Brodie, we may add, testify from their own personal experience to the truth of the doctrine of unconscious mental processes, issuing in the development and solution of difficult problems which they had temporarily laid aside. No doubt this phenomenon of unconscious mental processes is not ultimate, and may itself be referred to very different explanations;-and reasons may be shown for assigning different causes in different cases. We do not mean to deny that there are limits within which we are fully competent to determine what is due to our own mind, and what to foreign influences upon us. But a separate examination is clearly needed in each separate case.

The excessive strain of the faculty of mental concentration is, however, often as dangerous as the absence of it, or its too slight exercise. The stages by which a steady and persistent purpose, or object of contemplation, slides into a fixed idea, and then into monomania, are easily appreciated. They have often been illustrated in the career of those who, beginning as reformers, have soon become fanatics, and have ended as madmen. An image or conception absorbing the mind often becomes indistinguishable from a sensible reality. The devil, on the occasion of Luther's throwing the inkstand at him; the saints and angels, and even the holy Trinity, who were revealed to Loyola's ecstatic visions; the Jewish lawgiver, to whom Swedenborg took off his hat in the streets of London, are so many instances of the subjective becoming objective by being too much dwelt on. We take an example of a different character, but to the same point, from M. de Boismont's work on Hallucinations:

"A young man (says M. Baudry) occupied himself in planning canals. One day when he had been thinking upon this subject, he marked down on the map the course of the canal which was to pass through his part of the country. All at once he saw a pamphlet in a yellow cover with this title: 'Plans for cutting a Canal through the Plains of Sologne.' On reading the plans, he found them exactly corresponding with what had been passing through his mind. He read the pamphlet for some minutes, and the opinions it contained confirmed. his own; his phantom work then disappeared, and he continued his investigations."

Here we have an example both of that twofold consciousness to which we have referred, and of that tendency to substantiate thoughts into things, which are the most frequent characteristics of insanity in its several forms, and of those passing illusions and delusions which may take place without real mental derangement. To them may be traced back very plausibly the genesis of the devils of Loudun. The nuns were subject to all the conditions which are favourable to hallucination. Their minds were, in all likelihood, little disciplined to active observation, judgment, and comparison, but prone rather to reverie and to those habits of morbid introspection which the life of the religieuse and the practice of confession foster, and which Sir Henry Holland pronounces to be a not unfrequent cause of insanity.* The person and character of Urbain Grandier, and afterwards, through the persistence of the priests, the reality of their possession, had become fixed ideas with them. They were a prey

"It seems probable that certain cases of madness depend on a cause which can scarcely exist, even in a slight degree, without producing some mental disturbance, viz. the too frequent and earnest direction of the mind inwards upon itself the concentration of the consciousness too long continued upon its own functions." Mental Physiology, p. 77.

to hysteria and nervous derangement. Taking these things into account, there is nothing preternatural in their state either of mind or of body.

The resemblance between the so-called spiritualism of our own day, and the demonism to which we have been adverting, is a point which no doubt has struck our readers, but on which we must only very briefly touch. In their origin both superstitions are the same: they both begin as a worship of, or at least a mysterious intercourse with, the dead. The media correspond to the possessed of the earlier delusion. When the superior of the Ursulines states, "My name is Astaroth, and I entered into the body of this maiden through the pact of water," the state of mind indicated in this speech does not essentially differ from that displayed when an American lady sitting in her own drawing-room announces, "My name is Samuel Havens; the Pacific, on board of which I was an engineer, is lost; but I am here." In both cases there is that duplicity of consciousness, that sense of a twofold personality, which is common in partial and complete insanity. The only difference is, that the demons of the modern spiritualism have not yet become the devils of the mediæval superstition. They are not exclusively powers of evil, ready to enter into compact with bad men for the torture and ruin of the living. Sorcery and exorcism are not yet parts of the modern doctrine of spirits. The temper of the age will probably prevent their ever becoming so; but there is nothing else, nothing in the belief itself, as now professed, to prevent its repeating the history of its prototype. Again, the signs of diabolic possession recognised in the ritual of the Roman Catholic church describe accurately the alleged phenomena of modern possession. They are the reading of the thoughts of bystanders; knowledge of languages, and power of speaking them (generally ungrammatically); familiarity with the future, and with events of the present time occurring beyond the range of sensible cognition; preternatural physical strength, and the power of suspension in the air for considerable periods of heavy persons and things. The resemblance extends even to the evasions by which palpable falsehoods and failures are explained away. The desire to confirm the sceptical in their unbelief, or the wanton trickery of untruthful spirits, is the unanswerable, if not conclusive, defence in every case of detection,

The limitation of our space compels us to refrain from pursuing this subject any further, and from entering upon the other topics discussed by M. Figuier. We regret this the less because the most interesting of them, namely, the cases of the Jansenist Convulsionnaires, and of the Protestants of the Cevennes, are, however different in detail, yet in the essential

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