Second sight, or, Deuteroscopia / by W.A.F. Browne.

  • Browne, W. A. F. (William Alexander Francis), 1806-1885.
Date:
[1876]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Second sight, or, Deuteroscopia / by W.A.F. Browne. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    to Catholicism and to Protestantism, to Christianity without its twin civilisation, and are by constitution gloomy, dreamy, and uneducated, are prone to superstition, to create and to credit imaginary communications and warnings from the world of spirits. Another fallacy, flattering it may he to the spirit or the vanity of the age, has obtained circulation, that the influ- ence of their belief is dead—has died under the doubts and preaching of the priesthood—has been laid by the blaze of enlightenment: yet in Skye, certainly, the focus where the rays of weird illumination from the cluster of islets around were concentrated—where this “local habitation and name” were illus- trated by a literature, and by the collection of the largest number of examples extant—it would appear that this belief still survives ; and this although the pulses of the steamboat and the scream of the locomotive mingle with the roar of ocean, and the tide of Cook’s tourists bring as various and as curious novelties to the shore as the Gulf Stream, and the doubts and difficulties of Protestantism have supplanted the credulity and sanction of Catholicism as to communion with the unseen and the unknown. If any diminution has taken place in the dominion of such convictions in these remote and ungenial lands, it must he by the migration of such convictions south- ward. The most copious and authoritative record of such revelations in the region to which they are supposed to be indigenous is to he found in Martin’s Treatise on the subject, incorporating Tracts by Theophilus Insulanus and Aubrey. These narratives were written at different times in the eighteenth century, hut are contained in a work called “Miscellanea Scotica,” published in 1820. The frequency of this credence may he estimated from the assurance made in the first edition of the Statistical Account of Scotland by the minister of Applecross—still, notwithstanding continued emigration, numbering 1,129 inhabitants—that the belief is general among his parishioners, although they reject that in witchcraft. Martin’s Collection embraces 178 distinct histories, in many in- stances related to the authors by the seers themselves ; in others derived directly from, or traced to, trustworthy sources. An analysis of these facts appears to show that the gift or power of perceiving such marvels was sometimes hereditary, sometimes communicable by touch ; that it was never acquired ; that theie was no college or school of seers or prophets ; that it was exeicised independently of the will in a trance-coma condition, and often only once in the life of the individual. The senses of hearing, touch, even smell, as well as that of vision, seem to have been channels through which the phantom impressions reached the- m.ind; and the objects or pictures thus conveyed were of the