Note 140 — Chapter IV · PANTHEISM.

A woman somnambulist was induced to believe that she could not lift her worsted neckerchief off the back of a chair; her shoulders were cold and she wanted it; she put out her hand, and finding herself unable to overcome the subjective obstacle, she translated it into the outer world and declared that the neckerchief was unclean, or of an offensive colour, etc., and ultimately became violently terrified. Another subject, also a woman, was persuaded that she could not pull open a drawer; she touched the button and then let go of it shivering, and exclaiming that it was cold. “No wonder,” she added, as a rational justification of her repulsion, “it is of iron!” She was given an iron compass; she endeavoured to handle it, but soon dropped it. “You see,” she said, “it is as cold as the handle, I cannot hold it.” Thus the objective explanation of a subjective fact, once entertained, tends by force of logic to become general, to include a whole class of similar phenomena, to become a system, and, if need be, a cosmological and metaphysical system.