Curiosities & wonders > Letters on demonology and witchcraft

DEMONOLOGY AND WITCHCRAFT. 25
graces the front of Northumberland-house in the
Strand, and having attracted the attention of those
who looked at him by muttering, “ By Heaven, it
wags!—it wags again!” contrived in a few minutes
to blockade the whole street with an immense crowd,
some conceiving that they had absolutely seen the
lion of Percy wag his tail, others expecting to .wit¬
ness the same phenomenon.
On such occasions as we have hitherto mentioned,
we have supposed that the ghost-seer has been in
full possession of his ordinary powers of perception,
unless in the case of dreamers, in whom they may
have been obscured by temporary slumber, and the
possibility of correcting vagaries of the imagination
rendered more difficult by want of the ordinary
appeal to the evidence of the bodily senses. In
other respects, their blood beat temperately, they
possessed the ordinary capacity of ascertaining the
truth, or discerning the falsehood, of external ap¬
pearances, by an appeal to the organ of sight. Un¬
fortunately, however, as is now universally known
and admitted, there certainly exists more than one
disorder known to professional men, of which one
important symptom is a disposition to see appa¬
ritions.
This fiightful disorder is not properly insanity,
although it is somewhat allied to that most horri¬
ble of maladies, and may, in many constitutions,
be the means of bringing it on, and although such
hallucinations are proper to both. The difference
I conceive to be, that, in cases of insanity, the
mind of the patient is principally affected, while
the senses, or organic system, offer in vain to the
lunatic their decided testimony against the fantasy
of a deranged imagination. Perhaps the nature
of fhis collision—between a disturbed imagination
and organs of sense possessed of their usual accu¬
racy—cannot be better described than in the em¬
barrassment expressed by an insane patient con-