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Those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings!
Blank misgivings of a creature
Moving about in worlds not realised,
High instincts before which our mortal nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised.

If Moses came to London he would be very disgusted with Mr. Stead and the correspondents of “Borderland” who collect “facts” for him. For that supremely sane and sage legislator made one clean sweep of all the festering superstitions that fascinate the silly and the sentimental to-day as much as they did three thousand years ago. Mr. Stead is a Puritan, and the Old Testament should be his impregnable rock. Yet Deuteronomy is most definite about “Julia.” “There shall not be found with thee … a consulter with a familiar spirit. For whosoever doeth these things is an abomination unto the Lord.” His organisation of research is a delusion; science is not to be thus syndicated. The ordinary observer has no idea of scientific sifting, and in ten minutes I exposed a gentleman who impressed a large London club as “the most wonderful thought-reader in Europe.”

“Nature has many methods of producing the same effect,” says Henry James’s greater brother. “She may make our ears ring by the sound of a bell, or by a dose of quinine; make us see yellow by spreading a field of buttercups before our eyes, or by mixing a little Santonine powder with our food.” Probably not ten per cent. of the correspondents of “orderland” are aware of the existence of such “subjective sensations,” or realize, despite their nightly experience of dreams, that it does not take an actual external object to give you the sensation of something outside yourself. And passing optical illusions may have all the substantiality of ghosts. When Benvenuto Cellini went to consult a wizard, as he relates in his “Memoirs,” countless spirits were raised for his behoof, dancing amid the voluminous smoke of a kindled fire. He actually saw them: it was a splendid case for “Borderland.” Yet the probabilities are that the cunning magician merely projected magic-lantern pictures on the background of the vapour. My brother woke up one morning, and accidentally directing his eyes to the ceiling, beheld there a couple of monsters–uncouth, amorphous creatures with ramifying conformations and deep purple veins. After a few moments they passed away; but the next morning, lo! they were there again, and the next, and the next, till at last, in alarm, off he goes to a specialist in eyes and unfolds his tale of woe. Is he, perhaps, going blind? “So you’ve discovered them at last!” laughs the eminent oculist. “These things are Purkinje’s Figures–the shadows of the network of blood-vessels of the retina microscopically magnified on the ceiling: everybody ought to see them–it’s a sign the eye is a good working lens. But they don’t notice them except by accident, when the light slants sideways, and when there’s a specially good background for them to be projected and magnified upon.” And, taking him into his mystic chamber, and reconstituting the conditions, “Look!” says he, “there are your old friends again!” And there they were, sure enough, in all their amorphous horror. It is, in fact, not so much the actual external object that determines our perception, as attention or inattention; and with wise unconsciousness we ignore all that it is not necessary for us to see at the moment. If our organism were always in perfect health, if our senses were not deceivers ever, if we did not dream as solid a world as that which we inhabit by day, then, indeed, a single appearance of a ghost would settle the question; but as things are, our own eyes are just what we mustn’t believe.

As Helmholtz pointed out, we ought to see everything double, except the few objects in the centre of vision; and as a matter of fact we do get double images, but the prejudiced intelligence perceives them as one. The drunken man is thus your only true seer. Genius, which has always been suspected of affinity with drunkenness, is really a faculty for seeing abnormally–that is to say, veraciously. Andrew Lang, who thinks that all children have genius, is thus partially justified; for till they have been taught to see conventionally, they see with fresh insight. Hence the awkwardness of their questions. Mr. Bernard Shaw recently wrote an article on “How to Become a Genius,” but he omitted to supply the recipe. It is simply this: see what you do see, and not what everybody tells you you see. To think what everybody says is to be a Philistine, and to say what everybody thinks is to be a genius. Every healthy eye sees Purkinje’s Figures when the conditions are present; but only a rare eye perceives them consciously. That is the eye of genius, but the Philistines cry, “Disease! Degeneration!”