第52章

Maniacs have hallucinations, especially of voices, but all who have hallucinations are not maniacs. Jeanne d'Arc, so subject to 'airy tongues,' was beyond all doubt a girl of extraordinary physical strength and endurance, of the highest natural lucidity and common- sense, and of health which neither wounds, nor fatigue, nor cruel treatment, could seriously impair. Wounded again and again, she continued to animate the troops by her voice, and was in arms undaunted next day. Her leap of sixty feet from the battlements of Beaurevoir stunned but did not long incapacitate her. Hunger, bonds, and the protracted weariness of months of cross-examination produced an illness but left her intellect as keen, her courage as unabated, her humour as vivacious, her memory as minutely accurate as ever. There never was a more sane and healthy human being. We never hear that, in the moments of her strange experiences, she was 'entranced,' or even dissociated from the actual occurrences of the hour. She heard her voices, though not distinctly, in the uproar of the brawling court which tried her at Rouen; she saw her visions in the imminent deadly breach, when she rallied her men to victory. In this alertness she is a contrast to a modern seeress, subject, like her, to monitions of an hallucinatory kind, but subject during intervals of somnambulisme. To her case, which has been carefully, humorously, and sceptically studied, we shall return.

Meantime let us take voices and visions on the lowest, most prevalent, and least startling level. A large proportion of people, including the writer, are familiar with the momentary visions beheld with shut eyes between waking and sleeping (illusions hypnagogiques). The waking self is alert enough to contemplate these processions of figures and faces, these landscapes too, which (in my own case) it is incapable of purposefully calling up.

Thus, in a form of experience which is almost as common as ordinary dreaming, we see that the semi-somnolent self possesses a faculty not always given to the waking self. Compared with my own waking self, for instance, my half-asleep self is almost a personality of genius. He can create visions that the waking self can remember, but cannot originate, and cannot trace to any memory of waking impressions. These apparently trivial things thus point to the existence of almost wholly submerged potentialities in a mind so everyday, commonplace, and, so to speak, superficial as mine. This fact suggests that people who own such minds, the vast majority of mankind, ought not to make themselves the measure of the potentialities of minds of a rarer class, say that of Jeanne d'Arc.

The secret of natures like hers cannot be discovered, so long as scientific men incapable even of ordinary 'visualising' (as Mr.

Galton found) make themselves the canon or measure of human nature.

Let us, for the sake of argument, suppose that some sane persons are capable of hallucinatory impressions akin to but less transient than illusions hypnagogiques, when, as far as they or others can perceive, they are wide awake. Of such sane persons Goethe and Herschel were examples. In this way we can most easily envisage, or make thinkable by ourselves, the nature of the experiences of Jeanne d'Arc and other seers.

In the other state of semi-somnolence, while still alert enough to watch and reason on the phenomena, we occasionally, though less commonly, hear what may be called 'inner voices.' That is to say, we do not suppose that any one from without is speaking to us, but we hear, as it were, a voice within us making some remark, usually disjointed enough, and not suggested by any traceable train of thought of which we are conscious at the time. This experience partly enables us to understand the cases of sane persons who, when to all appearance wide awake, occasionally hear voices which appear to be objective and caused by actual vibrations of the atmosphere.

I am acquainted with at least four persons, all of them healthy, and normal enough, who have had such experiences. In all four cases, the apparent voice (though the listeners have no superstitious belief on the subject) has communicated intelligence which proved to be correct. But in only one instance, I think, was the information thus communicated beyond the reach of conjecture, based perhaps on some observation unconsciously made or so little attended to when made that it could not be recalled by the ordinary memory.

We are to suppose, then, that in such cases the person concerned being to all appearance fully awake, his or her mind has presented a thought, not as a thought, but in the shape of words that seemed to be externally audible. One hearer, in fact, at the moment wondered that the apparent speaker indicated by the voice and words should be shouting so loud in an hotel. The apparent speaker was actually not in the hotel, but at a considerable distance, well out of earshot, and, though in a nervous crisis, was not shouting at all. We know that, between sleeping and waking, our minds can present to us a thought in the apparent form of articulate words, internally audible. The hearers, when fully awake, of words that seem to be externally audible, probably do but carry the semi-vigilant experience to a higher degree, as do the beholders of visual hallucinations, when wide awake. In this way, at least, we can most nearly attain to understanding their experiences. To a relatively small proportion of people, in wakeful existence, experiences occur with distinctness, which to a large proportion of persons occur but indistinctly, 'On the margin grey 'Twixt the soul's night and day.'