The female thermometer eighteenth centur 174

Phantasmagoria 163 of melancholy humours, wrote Robert Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy, were especially likely to see spectres.49 Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan (1651), argued that it was not God's doing, but the "distemper of some of the inward parts of the Body" that brought on dreams and apparitions.500 At the end of the eighteenth century, however, thanks to the emergence of the new scientific theory of mind, the projective argument took on a conceptual sophistication and an ideological urgency unmatched in previous epochs A host of polemical treatises on apparitions appeared in England, France, and Germany beginning around 1800.51 The authors were usually medical men, concerned to eradicate superstition and place all seemingly supernatural phenomena on a solid psychological footing Their arguments were resolutely Lockean and mechanistic in nature Thus, in one of the first and most influential of such works, An Essay Towards a Theory of Apparitions (1813), the Manchester physician John Ferriar invoked the new mentalist concept of the hallucination to explain spectral occurrences.52 Poor digestion, a diseased state of the nerves, irregular circulation, or some other "peculiar condition of the sensorium," he argued, all served to enflame the brain and "renew" visual or auditory impressions imprinted in the past A "renewed" impression then manifested itself upon the brain as if it were an external object—to the surprise or terror of the perceiver The images most likely to be revived in this delusional way, Ferriar deduced, were precisely those originally accompanied by a strong sense of fear or horror: thus the prevalence of corpses and bloody sights and other grotesque images in popular ghost visions Religious mania, poetic frenzy, or an overburdening sense of guilt, he added, might intensify the power of the spectral illusion.53 Something of Ferriar's influence can be felt in a comic essay in Blackwood's Magazine from 1818 (significantly entitled "Phantasmagoriana"), which celebrated the "decisive victory of the genius of physiology over the Prince of Dark' ness." Thanks to "ferriarism," its author averred, one no longer had to cross a dark churchyard with "any worse apprehension than that of mere mortal rheumatism or asthma"—all phantom-fear having been annihilated by the new "principle of hallucination "54 But other important debunking texts quickly followed: Joseph Taylor's Apparitions; or, The Mystery of Ghosts, Hobgoblins, and Haunted Houses, Developed (1815), Samuel Hibbert's Philosophy of Apparitions (1825), John Abercrombie's Inquiries Concerning the Intellectual Powers (1830), William Newnham's Essay on Superstition (1830), Brewster's Letters on Natural Magic (1833), Walter Cooper Dendy's The Philosophy of Mysteryy (1841), and Charles Ollier's The Fallacy of Ghosts, Dreams, and Omens (1848) In France the most significant book on the subject (and indeed one of the most influential works of nineteenth-century psychology before Freud) was undoubtedly Alexandre Brierre de Boismont's Des Hallucinations: ou, Histoire raisonnee des apparitions, des visions, des songes, de I'extase, des reves, du magnetisme et du somnambulisme (1845), translated into English in 1850 Allowing for certain variations in emphasis, the basic argument in each of