Visions: a Personal Narrative of Morbid Phenomena

Extract

[The following communication was sent for publication by a journalist of experience. The mental aberrations described were preliminary to an attack of acute mania, from which the author happily recovered some three years ago.—Ed.]

Experiences in the mystical borderland of science have generally so little to commend them to the consideration of practical intellects, and are so often narrated in terms calculated to offend common sense, that I have for some years refrained from giving publicity to this account of the strange impressions on the visual sense which marked a period of some months of physical weakness and nervous tension. and if I now write of these visions it is in the hope that a faithful narrative of the circumstances may lead to sounder views than are now obtaining, and being widely promulgated by certain would-be leaders of thought who, in the Press and on the platform, are confounding this age of materialism by reviving teaching which would disgrace a heathen priesthood, and which outrages our fondest hopes and beliefs.