on the part of Grandier's enemies. They would fill more pages than remain at our disposal. The exorcists set at defiance the ritual of their own church. They invented contradictory maxims to ruin the unfortunate curé, and to save their own credit. One of these maxims was, that the devil duly conjured was constrained to speak the truth. Since, therefore, the devil had pronounced Urbain Grandier to be a sorcerer, a sorcerer Urbain Grandier must be. The fact that the devil duly conjured had told a great many demonstrable falsehoods presented no difficulty; for this, as one of the demons (Balaam) explained, was" in order to confirm the incredulous in their doubts." It is evident, further, that the nuns of Loudun were not guiltless of participation in the frauds of the exorcists. Not only the affair of the attempted elevation in the air of the superior, but that of the pretended escape of three of the demons through slight punctures in her side, of which we speak in a note,* and the miraculous appearance on her hand of the names of Joseph, Mary, and Francis de Sales, in characters which gradually wore out, but which were seen before their final disappearance, and stated to be produced by some chemical preparation, prove her to have been a party to a series of prearranged deceptions. We cannot therefore see how it can be, as M. Figuier asserts it is, absolutely impossible to believe that the superior Jeanne de Belfiel, and the honourable young women reared up in the convent, should have consented to accept a part and prepare beforehand for an odious comedy, the dénouement of which was to be the death of an innocent man and a priest." This infer

Grandier himself, in a Mémoire entitled Faits et Conclusions absolutoires, exposed the suspicious circumstances attending this alleged miracle.

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Why think you," he says, "have the demons chosen as signs wounds similar to those inflicted by a cutting instrument (un fer tranchant), though it is the custom of the devils to make wounds similar to those inflicted by burning? Is it not because the superior could more easily conceal an iron instrument, and slightly wound herself with it, than she could conceal fire, and make a wound by burning? Why do you think they chose the left side rather than the forehead or the nose, except that she could not wound herself in the forehead or the nose without the action being visible to the whole assembly? Why did they choose the left side rather than the right, if not because it was easier for the right hand to extend itself over the left side than to bend itself back on the right? Why did she incline on her left arm and left side, if not because this position, in which she remained for a considerable time, made it easier for her to conceal from the eyes of the spectator the instrument with which she wounded herself? Whence think you came the groans which she uttered, if not from the feeling of the pain which she was inflicting on herself, the most courageous not being able to repress a shudder when the surgeon bleeds them? Why did the ends of her fingers appear bloody, if not because they had handled the instrument which made the wounds? Who does not see that this instrument having been very small, it was impossible to prevent the fingers which held it from being reddened by the blood which it made to flow?" The superior's hands were not tied, as it was promised they should be, and her robes were torn, as they ought not to have been, over the wounds.

ence is in direct contradiction to facts which he himself states. On the 3d of July, Sister Claire publicly asserted that all she had said hitherto were "pure calumnies and impostures," and a few days after repeated this declaration. Sister Agnes, who was, from her prepossessing appearance, known as le beau petit diable, "frequently declared that she was not possessed, but that she was compelled to submit to exorcism." Sister Nogeret confessed that she had accused an innocent man, and prayed for pardon from God. In a fit of remorse, the superior made an attempt to take away her own life. All these confessions, however, Laubardemont pronounced to be "a trick of Satan to confirm people in their incredulity;" and they had no effect on the proceedings.

These things considered, what weight can be attached to the alleged instances of penetration on the part of the possessed into the unexpressed thoughts of the exorcists? Here fraud is the easiest to perpetrate and most difficult to detect. M. Figuier receives pretended instances of penetration as facts, and accounts for them by supposing that the possessed were brought into a state of artificial somnambulism and clairvoyance. This is obscurum per obscurius. The evidence of clairvoyance, in spite of the very startling and inexplicable narratives which abound concerning it, is not yet, to say the least, of such a character as to be of scientific validity. It is itself too much of a difficulty to be available in the solution of difficulties.

But though we cannot agree with M. Figuier that there is any sufficient proof that the nuns were clairvoyantes, he has, we think, rendered it probable that they were often thrown into an artificial mesmeric sleep or trance. The description of their condition suggests this explanation of it.

In the Exercitationes of the physician Pidoux, published in 1634, he gives the results of his personal observation of the nuns of Loudun as follows: "Immotæ manent potius rigent, transfixæ non sentiunt, et tanquam turchicho masslascho, aut opio sopita; aliquando nec respirant, sed jacent veluti mortuæ (p. 21). Quædam ex his, talis tantum solo affixe, reflexo ad posteriora corpore, firmiter ad solidum tempus stant (p. 37). Alia humi jacentes, nec articulatim sed erecto quasi trunco et rigido corpore, se ipsis assurgunt." "In their states of sleep," says another observer, "they became as supple and flexible as sheets of lead, so that one could bend their bodies in all directions, before, behind, sideways, till the head touched the earth; and they remained in the posture in which they were left until some one changed their attitudes."

Madame Sagille, one of the religieuses, suffered a pin to be thrust into her arm, when the demon had sent her to sleep, with

out manifesting any sign of pain. After exorcism, the nuns had no recollection whatever of the scenes through which they had passed, and the part they had played. There is no need, however, to refer these phenomena, as M. Figuier seems inclined to do, to the magnetic or quasi-supernatural influence of one human will upon another. The same conditions are conspicuous in hypnotism, as Mr. Braid has denominated the artificial sleep which individuals may produce in themselves, without the intervention of a second party, by prolonged and concentrated attention directed to a single object. The insensibility displayed by the nuns is only an extreme illustration of a fact of every-day experience. It is well known that when attention is withdrawn from outward objects, impressions made on the organism are conveyed only imperfectly, or not at all, to the sentient and percipient mind. In reverie, the events taking place around us are lost upon the mind. Wounds received during an absorbing pursuit are unfelt until the energy of pursuit slackens. Laromiguière was in a certain sense right in representing attention as the condition and primal germ of all mental activity. What we do not attend to we are utterly unconscious of. For instance, in ordinary sleep, though the eye is closed to light, the orifices of the ear are not shut upon the atmospheric waves which circulate round them; yet the ear is as insensible to sound, in proportion to the depth of the sleep, as the eye to vision. And by artificial means particular organs and portions of the nervous system may be thrown into a sleep so profound and complete as to be insensible to the intensest and, what in a waking state would be, the most painful stimuli. At the same time, in artificial as in ordinary sleep particular senses and faculties may be wakeful and active. The constrained and unnatural postures which persons under mesmeric and hypnotic influence assume and maintain, and which were observed in the nuns of Loudun, have their faint foreshadowing and prototype in the odd and uncomfortable attitudes often to be remarked during natural sleep. These facts, imperfectly as they present the subject, indicate, we think, with sufficient clearness that the abnormal states to which we refer are only extreme instances of common and regular phenomena.

The unnatural physical strength developed in the nuns of Loudun, and the extraordinary and almost impossible tours de force by which they displayed it,-exceeding those of any professional mountebank,-are similar in kind to what may be witnessed in every instance of delirium and convulsion. The percipient and nervous organism sleeping, the stream of nerveforce (to use Mr. Bain's language and hypothesis) probably sets with undivided current towards the muscles of voluntary motion,

and endows them with an energy and activity which seems preternatural.

For the reasons now suggested, it seems to us quite unnecessary to suppose the direct operation on the minds and organism of the Ursulines of any other will and personality than their own, -demoniac or human, magical or magnetic, sorcerer's or exorcist's. The highest medical authorities are unanimous in resolving the devils of Loudun into morbid nervous affections on the part of the possessed. The source of their malady was shrewdly guessed at by Giles Menage, in a work published as early as 1674: "In anno 1632," he writes, "accidit ut aliquot virgines Ludonensis cœnobii, uteri suffocationibus, ut verosimile est, laborantes, adeo vexarentur, ut eas a dæmone correptas crederent homines superstitiosi." The subject, even if it were not rather of medical than of general interest, is obviously unfit for discussion in these pages.

M. Figuier's diagnosis represents the sisters of the convent as suffering under hysteria, with various complications, produced by that particular form of derangement technically known as erotomania. The nature of the charges made by the nuns against Grandier, and one feature which pervades the hallucinations of all the possessed respecting his conduct_towards them, to which for obvious reasons we have not alluded, puts this explanation of their condition beyond reasonable doubt.

These physiological explanations are satisfactory as far as they go; but they are obviously incomplete. They point out the circumstances which, in this particular case, predisposed the nuns to believe in their own diabolical possession, and to attribute it to the incantations of Grandier; but they throw no light at all on the origin and nature of the general belief in demons and in possession. A few words on both of these subjects will be in place.

The demons of classic belief were, it is well known, originally the disembodied spirits of good men, supposed still to be living on the earth, and exercising tutelary cares over survivors. This is the graceful and touching form which the superstition takes in Hesiod. Soon, however, a similar power over and interest in human affairs was attributed to the departed souls of bad men. In the other world the wicked did not cease from troubling. The course of thought in both the classic nations was the same. To the good and evil demons of the Greeks, the Lares and Dii Manes, and the Lemures and Larvæ, of the Romans exactly corresponded. Fear is a not less active, and in its effects on the popular imagination is generally a far more potent, principle than the spirit of love and of a sound mind. Mysterious and invisible agencies naturally awaken apprehension and alarm; and it is the tendency of terror to paint

the object towards which it is entertained in the darkest colours, and to become hatred. Hence, while the good demons gradually dropped out of the popular belief, or took another form in which their human origin was lost, the evil demons remained a leading doctrine of almost every superstition. Christianity found them a prominent part of the Jewish faith, in which they were still held to be the souls of wicked men. Taking up this belief, it has diffused it over the world. The connection between the pious and humane demonism of the pagan poet and the revolting demonism of early Christianity and of the Catholic middle ages seems incredible, when we look only at the two extremes of the development,-the origin of the doctrine and its final form. It is quite clear, however, when the intermediate steps of transition are considered, and the omitted terms of the series introduced.

The nature of the fact expressed by the word possession remains to be considered. The Roman Catholic church denotes the kinds and degrees of diabolic agency by appropriate terms. "It was possession when the demon was lodged in the interior of the body; obsession when one was the subject of his attacks from without; malefice when one simply suffered from an infirmity inflicted either directly, or through the medium, of a sorcerer. Further, circumsession was distinguished as a sort of obsession, in which the demon laid siege to the body on all sides without actually entering it."* Possession was perhaps more than the mere corporeal lodgment of the demon within the organisation of the possessed. The demon dwelt in the mind as well as in the body of his victim, abusing the faculties of thought and emotion and will, not less than those of the physical nature. The demoniac seems to have had, in some confused and confusing way, the feeling of a double personality within the limits of the same consciousness. Besides his true self, he was aware of a second self, an alter ego, distinct from the former and in conflict against it, though yet in some sense blended with it. These demoniacal hallucinations are not by any means phenomena sui generis. They are extreme cases of illusions which, in a less extreme form, are of the very commonest occurrence in the daily experience of almost every one. In reverie, for example, ideas and images seem to float upon the passive mind from some foreign and external source, rather than to rise by any natural law of suggestion from within. For this reason, persons especially inclined to reverie-the mystics of all ages-have invariably been prone to refer the thoughts and impulses which have presented themselves in meditation, not to the natural operation of their own faculties, but to the influence of other beings mys• Figuier.

*