on the first and second, and the picture on the screen will be identical with that which fell on the retina. Shut off the first and turn on the third, and the picture will be identical with the illusion.

Visions, like dreams, are often mere patchworks built up of bits of recollections. The following is one of these : "When passing a shop in Tottenham Court Road, I went in to order a Dutch cheese, and the proprietor (a bullet-headed man whom I had never seen before) rolled a cheese on the marble slab of his counter, asking me if that one would do. I answered 'yes,' left the shop and thought no more of the incident. The following evening, on closing my eyes, I saw a head detached from the body rolling about slightly on a white surface. I recognized the face but could not remember where I had seen it, and it was only after thinking about it for some that I identified it as that of the cheesemonger who had sold me the cheese on the previous day. I may mention that I have often seen the man since, and that I found the vision I saw was exactly like him, although if I had been asked to describe the man before I saw the vision I should have been unable to do so.'

Recollections need not be joined like mosaic-work; they may be blended, on the principle I described two years ago, of making composite portraits. Í

showed that if two lanterns were converged upon the same screen, and the portrait of one person was put into one and that of another person into the other, the portraits being taken under similar aspects and states of light and shade, then on adjusting the two images eye to eye and mouth to mouth, and so superposing them as exactly as the conditions admitted, a new face will spring into existence. It will have a striking appearance of individuality, and will bear a family likeness to each of its constituents. I also showed that these composite portraits admitted of being made photographically* from a large number of components. I suspect that the phantasmagoria may be due to blended memories; the number of possible combinations would be practically endless, and each combination would give a new face. There would thus be no limit to the dies in the coinage of the brain.

I have tried a modification of this process with but small success, which will at least illustrate a cause of the ten

I have latterly much improved the process, and hope shortly to describe it elsewhere.

dency in many cases to visualize grotesque forms. My object was to efface from a portrait that which was common among persons of the same race, and therefore too familiar to attract attention, and to leave whatever was peculiar in it. I proceeded on the following principle: We all know that the photographic negative is the converse (or nearly so) of the photographic positive, the one showing whites where the other shows blacks, and vice versa. Hence the superposition of a negative upon a positive transparency of the same portrait tends to create a uniform smudge. By superposing a negative transparency of a composite portrait on a positive of any one of the individual faces from which it was composed, all that is common to the group ought to be smudged out, and all that is personal and peculiar to that face ought to remain.

I have found that the peculiarities of visualization, such as the tendency to see number-forms, and the still rarer tendency to associate color with sound, is strongly hereditary, and I should infer, what facts seem to confirm, that the tendency to be a seer of visions is equally SO. Under these circumstances we should expect that it would be unequally developed in different races, and that a large natural gift of the visionary faculty might become characteristic not only of certain families, as among the secondsight seers of Scotland, but of certain races, as that of the gipsies.

It happens that the mere acts of fasting, of want of sleep, and of solitary musing, are severally conducive to visions. I have myself been told of cases in which persons accidentally long deprived of food became subject to them. One was of a pleasure-party driven out to sea, and not being able to reach the coast till nightfall, at a place where they got shelter but nothing to eat. They were mentally at ease and conscious of safety, but they were all troubled with visions, half dreams and half hallucinations.

The cases of visions following protracted wakefulness are well known, and I also have collected a few. As regards the effect of solitariness, it may be sufficient to allude to the recognized advantages of social amusements in the treatment of the insane. It follows that the spiritual discipline undergone

"In 1806 General Rapp, on his return from the siege of Dantzic, having occasion to speak to the Emperor, entered his study without being announced. He found him so absorbed that his entry was unperceived. The

General seeing the Emperor continue motionless, thought he might be ill and purposely made a noise. Napoleon immediately roused himself, and without any preamble, seizing Rapp by the arm, said to him, pointing to the sky, 'Look there, up there. The General remained silent, but on being asked a second time, he answered that he perceived nothing. 'What' replied the Emperor, 'you do not see it? It is my star, it is before you, brilliant; then animating by degrees, he cried out, it has never abandoned me, I see it on all great occasions, it commands me to go forward, and it is a constant sign of good fortune to me.'

It appears that stars of this kind, so frequently spoken of in history, and so well known as a metaphor in language, are a common hallucination of the insane. Brierre de Boismont has a chapter on the stars of great men. I cannot doubt that fantasies of this description were in some cases the basis of that firm belief in astrology, which not a few persons of eminence formerly entertained.

The hallucinations of great men may be accounted for in part by their sharing a tendency which we have seen to be not uncommon in the human race, and which, if it happens to be natural to them, is liable to be developed in their over-wrought brains by the isolation of

their lives. A man in the position of the first Napoleon could have no intimate associates; a great philosopher who explores ways of thought far ahead of his contemporaries must have an inner world in which he passes long and solitary hours. Great men are also apt to have touches of madness; the ideas by which they are haunted, and to whose pursuit they devote themselves, and by which they rise to eminence, has much in common with the monomania of insanity. Striking instances of great visionaries may be mentioned, who had almost beyond doubt those very nervous seizures with which the tendency to hallucinations is intimately connected. To take a single instance, Socrates, whose daimon was an audible not a visual appearance, was subject to what admits of hardly any other interpretation than cataleptic seizure, standing all night through in a rigid attitude.

It is remarkable how largely the visionary temperament has manifested itself in certain periods of history and epochs of national life. My interpretation of the matter, to a certain extent, is this-That the visionary tendency is much more common among sane people than is generally suspected. In early life, it seems to be a hard lesson to an imaginative child to distinguish between the real and visionary world. If the fantasies are habitually laughed at the power of distinguishing them becomes at length learnt; any incongruity or nonconformity is noted, the vision is found out and discredited, and is no further attended to. In this way the tendency to see them is blunted by repression. Therefore, when popular opinion is of a matter-of-fact kind, the seers of visions keep quiet; they do not like to be thought fanciful or mad, and they hide their experiences, which only come to light through inquiries such as these that I have been making. But let the tide of opinion change and grow favorable to supernaturalism, then the seers of visions come to the front. It is not that a faculty previously non-existent has been suddenly evoked, but one that had been long smothered is suddenly allowed expression and to develop, without safeguards, under the free exercise of it.-Fortnightly Review.

6.4

THE word "Society" is employed in various senses. We use it in political science to designate the community of men united to a State; in the language of certain aristocratic circles in Paris and London it means a league between a limited number of coteries, whose chief care is to keep their doors closed, in order to follow the important pursuit of amusement among themselves. It is not our purpose here to treat either of Rousseau's or of fashionable society, but of the totality of those classes which everywhere represent national culture, and are, properly speaking, not only its chief producers but chief consumers, which preside over national activity, which take the lead in State and Church, commerce and manufactures, letters and science, in short, of the whole of that stratum of the nation which in Germany, characteristically enough, goes by the name of the educated class" ("Die Gebildeten"). Now, the nature and habitus of this society has, in different nations, at different periods, assumed set forms under the determining influence here of this, there of that particular class, now of this now of that predominating interest. It is clearly not unimportant whether a national society took its definite form during the sixteenth or eighteenth century, whether the decisive part in its formation was played by a community of peaceful burghers or by a nobility of soldiers, whether the principle which prevailed in its constitution was that of art or religion, of science or the State. It may not be uninteresting to trace this progress of development in different nationalities, even should we keep strictly to the high road without tarrying by the way, much less allowing ourselves to be enticed into any of the many by ways lying invitingly on every side.

I.

National Society was a thing unknown to the Middle Ages. The spirit by which they were animated was a spirit of universality; throughout the whole NEW SERIES. VOL XXXIV., No. 2

of Europe there was but one religion, one science, one form of government, and even in literature the substance at least was common to all nationalities. On the other hand, each single nation was divided into strictly severed castes ; the citizens and the clergy, the clergy and the knights, were sharply separated from each other without intermedium. In a similar way all intellectual intercourse between the provinces was impeded by differences of dialect, or could only be carried on by means of Latini.e., of a universal instrument, which hardly permitted the spirit of a nation to find utterance. The development of a national society dates only from the renaissance, for it was not till then that the races of Europe began to form into individual nations, that each of these proceeded to develop a political and linguistic unity of its own, which enabled the cultured classes to approach each other, to indulge in the interchange of thought and feeling, to act and live together, and to feel the healthy glow of common interests.

In this point Italy preceded every other European nation; for although, at the close of the fifteenth century, it had not yet formed a national State like the united kingdoms of Spain, England, and France, it had begun since the last German invasion to feel itself an independent nation, like the Greeks of old as opposed to the barbarians. A generation earlier, the written language of Italy had already been recognized as such from the Alps to the Passaro. Above all, the barriers of caste between the educated had well-nigh completely disappeared by the time the revival of classical antiquity gave all of them a common interest. Here, however, it was neither the army nor the clergy, it was the citizen class-i popolani grassi-especially the commercial portion of it, toward which the rest gravitated, which absorbed the others, or at least infused its spirit into them. At the time of the Renaissance Italian society was essentially a town society, nor has it ever ceased to be so. In political as well as

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in intellectual life, the towns stood in the foreground: Milan and Genoa, Venice and Florence, Bologna, Pisa, Siena, Perugia. During the fifteenth, and even until the beginning of the sixteenth century, some of these cities were great European powers of about the same importance as the Netherlands in the seventeenth; and in the greater part of them the citizen-class of wholesale merchants had early overpowered the military nobility of Germanic origin and possessed themselves of the sovereignty. Who does not know, by Dante's example, that a noble was not allowed to take part in the government of Florence until he had renounced his title and had himself inscribed in a corporation? And the armies employed by each of these cities to fight its bloodless battles were no nursery-grounds for a fresh aristocracy. Held as they were in slight esteem, recruited from the lowest orders, of very little influence in the State, they always remained dependants of the lords of the cities. Even in towns, where toward the close of that period, the generals-mostly inen of low extraction-succeeded in seizing the reins of government, as, for instance, the Sforzas in Milan, their officers did not form a military nobility that gave the tone to society. Nor was it otherwise with the clergy. Education having become diffused among the laity, their influence was very small, nor did they in any sense take the lead in society, neither had they any privileged position, nor did they enjoy any special reverence. The clergy intermingled with the rest of that citizen-class from which they mostly sprang, and when a prelate became the object of any special regard, this distinction came to him in virtue of his superior attainments, the weight of his individuality or his connection with powerful citizens, never in virtue of his clerical dignity alone. The men who rose to distinction in the State, in letters, in art, belonged almost exclusively to the citizen-class. Petrarch's father was a notary, Boccaccio's a merchant, Macchiavelli and Guicciardini were of middleclass parentage. Even long after certain families had grown into dynasties and certain groups of families into oligarchies, they still continued to trade as before, not always to the advantage of the

State which they ruled at the same time, while their relations toward those who in reality were their subjects remained in form those of fellow-citizens. The relation of Cosimo de Medici toward Donatello and Brunelleschi resembled far more that of a friend than of a patron, and the intercourse between his grandson Lorenzo and the Pulcis or Angelo Poliziano took place on a footing of familiar equality. The fact is, that these sovereigns were not foreign conquerors, such as ruled in other countries and in Italy also at an earlier period, neither had their ancestors led a separate, unapproachable life from times immemorial. Here rulers and ruled had grown up together, had transacted business with one another, and the fiction that the rulers were only allowed to govern by the consent of the entire community was still retained. Hence the tone of complete equality which prevailed in these circles. Nor was it predominant in Florence only; for even in Ferrara, the only northern State of Italy whose sovereigns belonged to a nobility established by foreign conquest, the same tone reigned, albeit with somewhat less freedom. The examples of the cities exercised in fact a decisive influence. Outwardly at least, this democratic equality has kept its ground in daily intercourse even to the present day. Nowhere are conventional forms less observed than in Italy, they are only brought forward on great State occasions; whereas in ordinary circumstances a familiar laisser aller is the order of the day, which among Italians, chastened as they are by centuries of civilization, seldom degenerates into vulgarity. Still this Italian Society, in spite of its ready wit, its brio, and its inborn gracefulness, had not at that time, nor has it now, the peculiar charm of French and Spanish Society, as it appears in the comedies and novels of the sixteenth century; that charm which consists in the art of moving freely within the limits of conventional forms, of making them bend to the will, of allowing the individuality free play in spite of them, of knowing how to speak of anything and everything without infringing them.

Such social intercourse was in fact a game of skill, which, though not without its dangers as well as its fascinations, differs as widely

from vulgar familiarity as a sonnet does from doggerel. To be sure, doggerel, like the versification of Faust" and of the "Wandering Jew," may be worth all Petrarch's sonnets put together; still even a Goethe hardly ventures to indulge in it always and everywhere, and readily returns to the sonnet, where circumstances require it, because he feels that it is precisely" when the spirit begins to move most powerfully, that we learn the value of restraint; and may this not be applied in the main to every branch of culture?

This social equality which acknowledged no superior, even while it submitted in fact to rulers, in the Italy of the fifteenth century was coupled with a rare unity of culture. Each specialty having developed on the soil of a common culture, mankind here were 10 longer divided into merchants, statesmen, men of learning, and artists. Who among us can say whether it was his wool trade, State affairs (at that time still in the hands of a circle of families nearly allied to him), his friend Donatello's works, or the new university he had undertaken to found at his own expense, which most absorbed the interest and attention of a Niccolo da Uzzano? Even the fair sex took a large part in this education and in this society. Convent education was still the exception. Patricians' daughters were taught Greek, Latin, and mathematics at home with their brothers. Thus the gulf which now yawns between the sexes was at that time nowhere perceptible, nor was there any opportunity for the modern blue-stocking to arise, since she is a product of the unnatural state of things by which women are debarred from the educational advantages of men, so that those who contrive to obtain them find themselves isolated among their own sex, and are in danger of appearing and indeed of becoming unwomanly. "In the hands of the women of the Renaissance," as a contemporary writer finely expresses it, "the education of their time only became an instrument with which to develop their feminine characteristics more brilliantly; not the result of an exterior, conventional education, but an interior harmony, arising from the co-operation of all the forces of

woman's nature.' Well might Ariosto proudly sing:

"Ben mi par di veder ch'al secol nostro Tanta virtu fra belle donne emerga, Che quò dar opra a carte ed ad inchiostro Perchè nei futuri anni si disperga." For, indeed, they were not a few, those highly-educated women of the fifteenth century, who shared largely the conversation, the intellectual pursuits, nay, even the business of the men; yet not one of them ceased to be a true woman. Let us but remember Lucrezia Tornabuoni, herself a poetess and a friend of poets, the mother of Lorenzo de' Medici, who superintended the studies of her gifted son, who presided wisely and cleverly over a large establishment, the master of which, Piero, was almost constantly ill, and let us call to mind that charming letter, in which she describes the beauty of her future daughter-inlaw, Clarice Orsini, with the eye of a female connoisseur. The way in which Sandro Botticcelli has placed together the juvenile daughter of the Albizzis with Pico della Mirandola in his glorious frescoes at the Villa Lemmi near Florence, leaves no doubt, though this young lady is not mentioned in the chronicles and correspondences of the time which abound in allusions to so many of her contemporaries, that the handsome prodigy of his age, who knew everything that could be known," must have been an intimate and playfellow of the graceful girl. And, setting aside Florence, did not Caterina Cornaro, who facilitated the first steps of a Bembo in his eventful career, continue to patronize art and science long after she had doffed her Cyprian crown and retired once more into private life at Venice. Did not Elisabetta da Urbino number a Castiglione, a Bernardo Accolti-an author whose " Virginia" is too little knownamong her intimate friends? Were not Bojardo and Guarini, the humanist, guests at the table of the elder Leonora of Ferrara, just as, two generations afterwards, Tasso and Guarini, the poet, found favor and protection with the younger Leonora? And how learned was that graceful housewife Portia, the mother of Torquato! Who does not recollect Vittoria Colonna, Michael Angelo's beautiful muse? Above all, where can

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