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Phantasmagoria 165 moral or physical point is reached; thought revived, colored, and represented, suddenly appears in a material form, and is transformed into an hallucination (HD, 287) What such statements articulated, at bottom, was a new conception of the daemonic or irrational nature of thought There was now a potential danger in the act of reflection—a danger in paying too much attention to mental images or in "thinking too hard." One's inmost thoughts might at any moment assume the strangely externalized shape of phantoms The antiapparition writers often attacked the activity they referred to as reverie—the habit of indulging in erotic or poetic fancies, dwelling too long on things one had read, or brooding over obscure intellectual problems Like a supernatural impulsion, reverie had the power to lead one out of oneself into madness Given the spectral nature of thought, anyone theoretically could become like that "monomaniac of a cultivated and ardent mind," mentioned by Brierre de Boismont, who, through too great a delight in the creations of his imagination, saw waking dreams as realities: One day we found him with eyes fixed, a smiling mouth, and in the act of clapping his hands in sign of applause He did not hear us open the door of his room To our question: "What does this mean? What are you doing?" "I am," he replied, "like the fool that Horace speaks of: I am seeing an imaginary play I was wearied by my fireside; I am fond of the beauties of the opera, and have been playing to myself the ballet of The Sylphide; and when you touched me on the shoulder, I was applauding Taglioni, with whose graceful and noble dancing I had never before been so much charmed." (HD, 369) We can see how the metaphor of the phantasmagoria mediated perfectly between the two contradictory perceptions inherent in the rationalist position Ghosts were unreal, according to the skeptics, in the sense that they were artificial—the product of certain internal mechanistic processes The magic lantern was the obvious mechanical analogue of the human brain, in that it "made" illusionary forms and projected them outward But in another highly paradoxical sense, ghosts now seemed more real than ever before—in that they now occupied (indeed preoccupied) the intimate space of the mind itself The paradox was exactly like that achieved at the real phantasmagoria: ghosts did not exist, but one saw them anyway Indeed, one could hardly escape them, for they were one's own thoughts bizarrely externalized The reader may object here that I have been hedging, wildly, on an obscure yet crucial issue—namely, whether the phantasmagoria figure was merely a rhetorical device, a way of speaking, or if real people, beginning in the nineteenth century, actually came to experience the so-called ghosts inside their heads as such When Carlyle spoke of the "boundless Phantasmagoria" of everyday life, or Rimbaud described himself as a "maitre en fantasmagories," did these writers mean to imply that they indeed "saw" things in the manner of the ghost-seers of old? The question is perhaps imponderable Still, it seems conceivable that if one holds to
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