"Hallucination" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hastened to explain that Davidson was in a kind of somnambulistic trance. Boyce was interested at once. We both did all we could to rouse the fellow out of his extraordinary state. He answered our questions, and asked us some of his own, but his attention seemed distracted by his hallucination about a beach and a ship. He kept interpolating observations concerning some boat and the davits and sails filling with the wind. It made one feel queer, in the dusky laboratory, to hear him ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... all the reports of the Polish National Government—all its obvious facts, its printed documents, its acts everywhere known and seen, its seizures of papers and documents—and to portray it as a fraud, a myth, a dream of the imagination, a wild hallucination of a disordered brain, it suggests to us the thought that the tardy and present truths here given us of Poland may perhaps have the same origin as that famous description in one of the St. Petersburg papers, of 'the at last truly discovered leader of the Polish insurrection,' ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Townsend is crazy. He is over seventy years of age and may be laboring under a hallucination. His story does appear incredible; there are elements of romance stranger than any I ever read about. Had the money been deposited with him for a few months, or even years, it would have been different, but a deposit to cover twenty ...
— Two Wonderful Detectives - Jack and Gil's Marvelous Skill • Harlan Page Halsey
... this hallucination that you have got hold of?" said Du Meresq. "What did you tell, or fancy ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... was my recollection of that phrase, from a work on sorcery, which now set every nerve tingling. Closely I peered into the masking shadow, telling myself that I was the victim of a subjective hallucination. If this was indeed the case or if what I saw was actual, I must leave each who reads to determine for himself; and the episodes which follow and which I must presently relate ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... 'Stabat Mater;' nor did S. Francis and S. Catherine do more than carry into the vividness of actual hallucination what had been the poetic rapture of many less ecstatic, but not less ardent, souls. They desired to be literally 'crucified with Christ;' they were not satisfied with metaphor or sentiment, and it seemed to them that their Lord had really vouchsafed ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... forgeries; but finding it "Not Proven" that the prisoner knew that they were fictitious, or uttered them with any malicious intention. He was therefore set at liberty, and retired into private life. Whether he was an impostor, or was merely the victim of a hallucination, it is very difficult to say. In any case he failed to prove himself the ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... upon those dark days with the light of what was then the almost immediate future turned full and glaring upon them, we find it difficult to exaggerate the folly of the chief actors in those scenes of crime. Did not the penniless adventurer, whose keen eyesight and wise recklessness were passing for hallucination and foolhardiness in the eyes of his contemporaries, understand the game he was playing better than did that profound thinker, that mysterious but infallible politician, who sat in the Escorial and made ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... wherein it lies, but this joy of Alpine winters is its own reward. Baseless, in a sense, it is more than worth more permanent improvements. The dream of health is perfect while it lasts; and if, in trying to realise it, you speedily wear out the dear hallucination, still every day, and many times a day, you are conscious of a strength you scarce possess, and a delight in living as merry as ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... little Sally Nutter up stairs, roused by the wild chorus of strange voices from the lethargy of her grief, and even spurred into active alarm, locked her door, and then hammered with a chair upon the floor, under a maniacal hallucination that she was calling I know not what or whom to ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... trembled. She felt faint. Awful to hate so! She was quite close, almost touching him. It was necessary he should move, forward or back, to give her room. But he did not move. His hands, outstretched before him on the coats, and sharp against the light, appeared to her to be shaking; but that was the hallucination of this frightful trembling that possessed her. She tried to say, "If you please—," but, dreadfully, had no voice; but made some sound; and he, most slowly, drew back. It was before him that ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... all aghast. This was surely a delusion, a fixed idea, an insane hallucination. "Oh, no, dear," she cried, prying deep into his eyes. "It couldn't be he, it couldn't. You must be mistaken, Michael. I'm sure he's ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen
... "Adepts" would "forbid inquiry," but rather the personal, present limitations of the senses of the average, and even of the scientific man. To undertake the explanation of that which at the outset would be rejected as a physical impossibility, the outcome of hallucination, is unwise and even harmful, because premature. It is in consequence of such difficulties that the psychic production of physical phenomena—save in exceptional ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... room was not real, and yet you saw it; had you wished, you might have touched it, which is certainly all the evidence you have of the existence of the room in which we are now sitting. Hypnotism is not a cause of hallucination, as is commonly supposed, but of fact. Its effects are not illusory, but real. Perhaps it would be more correct to say that they are as real as anything else, and that all the phenomena of nature are mere illusions of the senses, ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... B. will fail, C. will see something, and so on, though these subjects have been duly hypnotised, which Mr. Aide and the rest had not. That an unhypnotised company (or a company wholly unaware that any hypnotic process had been performed on them) should all be subjected by any one to the same hallucination, by an unuttered command, is a thing unknown to science, and most men of science would deny that even one single person could be hallucinated by a special suggestion not indicated by outward word, gesture, or otherwise. ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... usual grave expression on his handsome face, but Jeanne, choking with a sudden emotion, and on the verge of fainting, began to tremble so violently that her teeth chattered. The dream that had haunted her for some time was suddenly beginning, as if in a kind of hallucination, to take the appearance of reality. They had spoken of a wedding, a priest was present, blessing them; men in surplices were singing psalms; was it not she whom they were ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... my eyes. There was no visual hallucination. But in my mind there began to grow the vivid picture of a woman—large, dark-skinned, with white teeth and masculine features, and one eye—the left—so drooping as to appear almost closed. Oh, ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... "His hallucination; he's way off at times. Everything's been done for him. We like the boy and he's havin' the best of care. Why, we couldn't afford to have it get around that we neglect our patients, so you see what he ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... correspondence is somewhat surprising. Read superficially, it must seem extremely monotonous; but when better understood, it indicates the writer's sense of oppression, of hallucination, of being bewitched. From that moment Guynemer had only one object, and from its pursuit he never once desisted. Or, if he did desist for a brief interval, it was only to see his parents, who were part of his life, and ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... about Charles-Norton Sims, the paper, though it did not mention him by name, but variously, according to the temperaments of its correspondents, as a condor, an ichthyosaurus, the moon, an aeroplane, a Japanese fleet, a myth, a cloud, a hallucination, a balloon, and a goose. As she read, she alternately frowned and laughed. Her brows would draw together very seriously, and then suddenly her red lips would part to let through a sparkling rocket of laughter, and then her brows would again knit in concern. The laughter was of triumph ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... first for the likeness of Richard Owen. It was the conformation of the head that gave rise to the mistake, a head domed and massive, white and smooth—it was a head that had always interested me. But as I looked, my mind already searching for the reason of this hallucination, I saw that the lower part of the face was that of an infant. My eyes wandered from the book, and my gaze fluttered along the four persons seated opposite to me, till it rested on the reality of my vision. And even as ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... fantastic. Some ingenious devil must have conceived it by way of pandering to the after-dinner humour of the high gods. As I sat down I rubbed my eyes. Was this brown-whiskered, bald-headed clerical gentleman real? The rubbing of my eyes dispelled no hallucination. He was flesh and blood and still regarded me urbanely. It was horrible. The desertion of the scoundrelly husband, who I thought was lost somewhere in the cesspool of Europe, was the basis, the sanction of the relations between Judith ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... just for once to see some striking vision; and very often in such a case, because the experience does not repeat itself, the seer comes in time to believe that on that occasion he must have been the victim of hallucination. Others begin by becoming intermittently conscious of the brilliant colors and vibrations of the human aura; yet others find themselves with increasing frequency seeing and hearing something to which those ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... garden dreaming there under the moon. She recalled at this moment the details of the day's walk, and all that they had seen in Trirodov's house; she recalled it all so clearly, with almost the vividness of a hallucination. Then a drowsiness crept up, seized her. And Elisaveta could not recall later how she found herself in her bed. It was almost as if an invisible being had carried her, tucked her in, and rocked ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... write their romances, others live them; Honore de Balzac did both. This life so full of romantic fiction mingled with stern reality, where the burden of debt is counter-balanced by dramatic passion, where hallucination can scarcely be distinguished from fact, where the weary traveler is ever seeking gold, rest, or love, ever longing to be famous and to be loved, where the hero, secluded as in a monastery, suddenly emerges ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... dismay Helen thought he must be going mad, for this was the merest trick of his imagination. Certainly he had always dreaded the place, but never a word of that sort had he said to her. Yet there was a shadow of possible comfort in the thought—for, what if the whole thing should prove an hallucination! But whether real or not, she must ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... an hallucination peculiar to the clear atmosphere of these regions. Objects are not only magnified, but frequently distorted in their outlines, and it is only an old hunter that knows a buffalo when he sees one. Brothers a bush is often taken for a wild bull, and with us a brace of carrion crows, ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... for me, as a slight testimonial of his high regard for my sterling worth and symmetrical escutcheon—a testimonial more suggestive of earnest admiration and warm personal friendship than of great intrinsic value, etc., etc., etc., that I hope he will not construct it on the modern plan of mental hallucination and morbid delirium tremens ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... the thing touch her throat, her breast, her arm, and there it closed and seemed to be dragging her toward it. With a super-human effort of will she opened her eyes. In the instant she knew that she was dreaming and that quickly the hallucination of the dream would fade—it had happened to her many times before. But it persisted. In the dim light that filtered into the dark chamber she saw a form beside her, she felt hairy fingers upon her and a hairy breast against which she was being drawn. Jad-ben-Otho! ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... ago, and the criminal, though ruled by an insane appetite, is not known to have been subject to any mental delusion. But there have been a great many similar cases, in which the homicidal or cannibal craving has been accompanied by genuine hallucination. Forms of insanity in which the afflicted persons imagine themselves to be brute animals are not perhaps very common, but they are not unknown. I once knew a poor demented old man who believed himself to be a horse, and would stand by the hour together ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... him down until Napier came and gave him a sedative. The doctor seemed as sick about Hal's inability to remember as I was, though he indicated it was normal enough in concussion cases. "So is the hallucination," he added. ...
— Let'em Breathe Space • Lester del Rey
... Well it is a strange kind of hallucination which has such physical accompaniments and consequences as those in the story—not wanting confirmation from witnesses—which has come ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... frayed cravat-end out of sight. "Surely, respected sir, you labor under a deplorable hallucination. Why, pardon again, you seem to have not the slightest confidence in boys, I admit, indeed, that boys, some of them at least, are but too prone to one little foolish foible or other. But, what then, respected ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... Yet the hallucination persisted. He could have sworn he heard Sir Richard's voice raised in protest as the crowding natives impeded his progress towards the gangway of the boat; and at last Anstice turned fully round, with half-ashamed curiosity, to see what manner of man this was ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... unbelievers and had in their hands an unanswerable argument in the Witch of Endor, the unbelievers, who dared not contradict the Word of God, were forced to fall back on the theory that the witches suffered from hallucination, hysteria, and, to use the modern word, 'auto-suggestion'. These two classes still persist, the sceptic predominating. Between the believer who believed everything and the unbeliever who disbelieved everything there has been no critical examination of the ...
— The Witch-cult in Western Europe - A Study in Anthropology • Margaret Alice Murray
... lost their wits, "however amusing they may seem at first sight," are "horrible." They could only have been painted by "an imagination such as that of Dickens, excessive, disordered, and capable of hallucination." He seems to be not far from thinking that only our splenetic and melancholy race could have given birth to such literary monsters. To speak like this, as I conceive, shows a singular misconception of the instinct or set purpose that led Dickens ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... Captain Truck, taking the other by a button, as if he pitied his hallucination, "you don't breed such men in London. I came from the river, which never had a subject in it, or any other majesty, than that of the Saybrook Platform. I begin to understand you, at last: you are one of those well-meaning men who fancy the earth but a casing to the island ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... editorial desk of THE ARENA. I confess that I doubted its genuineness. For why should Mr. Clews address the public through the columns of THE ARENA? What has THE ARENA done to merit such distinction? Satisfying myself that the contribution was genuine, that it was not—and is not—a hallucination, I at once divined that it must be a sort of challenge to this magazine. I do the author of "Wall Street, Past, Present, and Future," the honor to believe that he does not suppose THE ARENA to be sufficiently ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... carried only the agonized sounds of a man who had forgotten how to cry and must learn again. There were times after this when he observed incuriously a parade of mind pictures, part memory, part pure hallucination and containing nothing of reason; other times when he thought not at all. The sun appeared to dwindle, retreating and fading far away into a remote place where there were no stars at all. It became a feeble candle, ...
— Far from Home • J.A. Taylor
... all that I do know? It is odd to notice with what perfect lack of reserve the ladies who visit us talk. They chatter away just as if they thought we were human working-machines, without ears, or brains, or memories. This singular hallucination makes it not difficult to become acquainted with certain secrets of fashionable life which one clique would not make known to another clique for ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... from Charlemagne to Napoleon, passed through my mind. All the possible points of view, were, so to speak, piled upon each other, and one caught glimpses of some eccentrically across others. I was enjoying and I was learning. Sight passed into vision without a trace of hallucination, and the landscape was my guide, ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... thus examining with a degree of astonishment that all my reasoning power failed to lessen, obtruded itself on my attention though quite motionless. The persistence and fixity of the phenomenon excluded any idea of hallucination. I am totally exempt from all nervous disorders capable of influencing the sense of sight. The cause of such visual disturbance is, I think, generally due to stomach trouble; and, thank God! I have an excellent stomach. Moreover, visual illusions are ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... pulled about by different alarms, that, while one portion of his mind was still alert and cunning, another trembled on the brink of lunacy. One hallucination in particular took a strong hold on his credulity. The neighbour hearkening with white face beside his window, the passer-by arrested by a horrible surmise on the pavement—these could at worst suspect, they could not know; through the brick ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... did not know his man, however, who was Raoul Yvard; and who had come this way from Bastia, in the hope of escaping any further collision with his formidable foe. He had seen the frigate's lofty sails above the rock as soon as it was light; and, being under no hallucination on the subject of her existence, he knew her at a glance. His first order was to haul everything as flat as possible; and his great desire was to get from under the lee of the mountains of Elba into this very pass, through ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... they were placed, and in that luminous mist which is the half-light of a theatre, details were lost and it was like a hallucination. Of course it was a woman, but was it not a chimera as well? The penetration of her light into their obscurity stupefied them. It was like the appearance of an unknown planet. It came from a world of the happy. Her irradiation ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... modern one, that it was hallucination, is preposterous. Hallucinations that five hundred people at once shared! Hallucinations that lasted all through long talks, spread at intervals over more than a month! Hallucinations that included eating and drinking, speech and answer; the clasp of the hand and the feeling ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... coherent thought was that his speculation concerning the reality of this experience was at last resolved. This could not possibly be an hallucination; at least this particular sequence of events was not. And he was still hazily considering that when a hand fell on his shoulder, fingers biting into ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... after raising herself into a sitting posture, she cast a haggard look of astonishment at one and another corner of the room, and then fell back upon the pillow, heaving deep sighs. She was, doubtless, a prey to some hallucination. However, she drew Silvere to her bosom, and seemed to some degree to recognise him, though ever and anon she ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... went out or any nonsense of that kind, but from failure of the heart's action owing to excitement. Heritage had no sleep for a fortnight, and he broke down altogether. For months he was really mad, and when his senses came back to him he had that hallucination. Some day it will go, and some day Heritage will take up the dropped threads of his discovery and the world will be all the better for it. And now, will ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... coins from the nippers of a pair of tongs. It was not that Mac Tavish lacked the spirit of charity, but that he wanted every man to know to the full the grand and noble goodness of the Morrisons, and be properly grateful, as he himself was. Dow's complacency in his hallucination ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... of the proofs that the supposed murderess was totally irresponsible, because of hereditary idiocy and insanity. Her father had died of drunkenness in a Cincinnati hospital, and her mother went about under the insane hallucination that she was a prophetess. Nancy's conduct and conversations while employed in the wholesale poisoning business showed that she had no moral comprehension of what she was about. But the plea of insanity had been so often and ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard
... place, and the fellow's dream was somewhat rudely dissipated, the untoward rejection of his preposterous suit was, there is every reason to believe, attributed by both mother and son to the repugnance of Mrs. Armitage alone; and to this idiotic hallucination she has, I fear, fallen a sacrifice. Judging from the emaciated appearance of the body, and other phenomena communicated to me by her ordinary medical attendant—a blundering ignoramus, who ought to have called in assistance long before—she ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... unless to be "agin the Government" is a policy. And lastly, if some of its economic demands are justifiable, and have in several respects been satisfied by modern legislation, its fundamental doctrine, the basis of the entire edifice, is a wild hallucination, sickening to common sense, and completely out of harmony with the progressive economic development of all nations, including ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... you see her conduct; you hear her speech; is it likely—is it possible—that I could have married such a person? You see the absurdity of the thing. No, gentlemen; this person is a lunatic, laboring under some fantastic hallucination, or she is an impostor, conspiring, with others, to blackmail me. I demand, in the name of justice, that she be arrested and sent to prison for her flagrant breach of the peace in her outrageous assault upon me ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... pictures before taking them to Elie Magus. Elie paid him twenty-five francs apiece. At that price of course Fougeres earned nothing; neither did he lose, thanks to his sober living. He made a few excursions to the boulevard to see what became of his pictures, and there he underwent a singular hallucination. His neat, clean paintings, hard as tin and shiny as porcelain, were covered with a sort of mist; they looked like old daubs. Magus was out, and Pierre could obtain no information on this phenomenon. He fancied something was ...
— Pierre Grassou • Honore de Balzac
... muse over the thoughts of sages. What is grocery for one who has ambition? What sweetness hath Muscovada to him who hath tasted of Poesy? The Ideal, lady, I often think, is the true Real, and the Actual, but a visionary hallucination. But pardon me; with ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... we have to explain the origin of the Church's belief in it. The solution which satisfies Strauss, and which seems to us also an adequate interpretation of the problem, is dependent on the two following positions: 1. The appearance of Jesus was literally an appearance, an hallucination, a psychological phenomenon. 2. It was also a sort of practical fallacy of confusion, a ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... something comprehensible, if not altogether believable, and I read with interest of the antiquity of crystal-gazing as a means of inducing hallucination for the purpose of seeking information not to be gained by any normal means. I read of its use in China, in Assyria, in Egypt, in Arabia, in India, in Greece and Rome; of how its practitioners in the Middle Ages were looked upon as heretics and burnt at the stake or ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... Kelsey resumed the conversation by suggesting that, as the matter could not now be helped, they had better say nothing, but go off on the morrow as quietly as possible, leaving J.C. to awake from his hallucination, which she was sure he would do soon, and follow them to the city. This arrangement seemed wholly satisfactory to all parties, and though Nellie declared she'd never again speak to Jed De Vere, she dried her tears, and retiring ...
— Cousin Maude • Mary J. Holmes
... the valley, beyond the beaver marsh and on the farther shore of the lake she saw a little glimmer of light through the rift in the trees. She dared not believe in its reality at first. Perhaps it was a trick of her imagination only, a hallucination born of her starvation, child of her heartfelt prayer. She looked away, then peered again. But, yes—a tiny gleam of yellow light twinkled through the gloom! It was real, it was true! A gleam of hope in the darkness ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... highest prizes of human affairs, it is, I believe, admitted on all hands, that these generally fall to second-rate men. Civilized nations have found it convenient entirely to give up the hallucination that the monarch is the greatest, wisest, and best man in his dominions. Nobody supposes that. And in the case of hereditary dynasties, such an end is not even aimed at. But it is curious to find how with elective sovereignties it is just ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... of a boy who felt that he was continually being followed. This was of course merely a hallucination, but the fright that this boy's state of mind brought on soon caused him to stutter and stammer in ...
— Stammering, Its Cause and Cure • Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue
... you consider him as convalescent, and certainly he does seem rational on every other point; but is this one altogether an hallucination?' ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Lesperon," said he, "the Court may perhaps not be able to discriminate whether this statement of yours is a deliberate attempt to misguide or frustrate the ends of justice, or whether, either in consequence of your wounds or as a visitation of God for your treason, you are the victim of a deplorable hallucination. But the Court wishes you to understand that it is satisfied of your identity. The papers found upon your person at the time of your arrest, besides other evidence in our power, remove all possibility of doubt in that connection. Therefore, ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... of duty and practice and responsibility, and all those galling restraints of life which the noonday light and everyday sounds about brought in with so entire a discord to break up this momentary hallucination. For half a minute only the doctor lingered on the borders of that fairyland where time and duty are not, but only one ineffable moment always passing, never past. Then with a long sigh, the breath of which ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... far from harsh or unreasonable; they are lamb-like compared to what we had reason to fear from Mr. Johnson, if we might judge by his speeches and declarations of a year or two ago. But for the unhappy hallucination which led Mr. Johnson first to fancy himself the people of the United States, and then to quarrel with the party which elected him for not granting that he was so, they would not have found a man in the North to question their ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... rather late to think of all that now, Haswell," said Sir Robert, shrugging his shoulders. "One takes one's line and there's an end. Personally I believe that we are overstrained with the fearful and anxious work of this flotation, and have been the victims of an hallucination and a coincidence. Although I confess that I came to look upon the thing as a kind of mascot, I put no trust in any fetish. How can a bit of gold move, and how can it know the future? Well, I have written to them to ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... next morning, who pronounced me suffering under mental hallucination, for I had told my mother all my strange dream or vision. I had no way to prove that my lover was treacherous, and I alone must suffer. But Laura. What was my duty towards her? was my dominant thought, even while I sat writing, a day or two ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... by colorless economists who were mollycoddelistically making clear that the "stern reality" was the giant hallucination. ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... discourse filled with phrases like "secondary consciousness," "collective hallucinations," "nerve-force," wherein, while admitting that great and good men believed in the phenomena of "spiritism," he concluded that they were overhasty in assigning causes. For his part, the realm of hallucination was boundless. "The mind has the power to create a world of its ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... own husband to every other man, though surely she does not necessarily suppose him to be the most brilliant specimen in existence, so a congregation will generally be found to prefer their own minister, if he is a genuine man, to every other, although surely not always entertaining the hallucination that he is a paragon of ability. Thus to love and to be loved is the secret of ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... utterly unpractised in the world, at sixty years of age,—how could she ever dream of succeeding, when the hard, vulgar, keen, busy, hackneyed New England woman had lost five dollars on her little outlay! Success presented itself as an impossibility, and the hope of it as a wild hallucination. ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... I felt that she was sincere. Still, I wondered what sort of hallucination Craig had to deal with, as Veda Blair repeated the incoherent tale of ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... mask that John wore was as nothing—it was the veriest make- believe. And she could not but doubt now but that the face she had known him so long by was a fictitious face, and as the hallucination strengthened, she saw his large mild eyes grow small, and that vague, dreamy look turn to the dull, liquorish look, the chin came forward, the brows contracted... the large sinewy hands were, oh, so like! Then reason asserted itself; the vision vanished, ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... objective, all are real. The fear incited by illusions and hallucination, or by "seeing a ghost," regardless of the fact of its actual existence, is as real to the individual as that of meeting a serpent in the grass, or a tiger in ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... most extreme caution. The endeavor has been to obtain, first of all, the most elementary psychic phenomena, and to test every step in the investigations by separate experiment, specially devised to prove the good faith of the subject and the reality of his hallucination, to eliminate the possibility of unconscious suggestion, to establish relations with similar phenomena of disease or health in the domain of physiology and psychology, and to note the modifications which can be brought about by altering the conditions ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... thinking that I was the victim of some hallucination, or that the refraction from the intense light produced an optical delusion; and, as I did so, the flaming pillar slowly twisted and thundered off whithersoever it passes to in the bowels of the great earth, leaving Ayesha standing ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... witness of their terrible distress. Furthermore, there were surprises for him in the pages of the great ledgers at the Fort. Surprises of such a nature that he began to wonder if he were still living in the days of miracles, or if he were simply the victim of hallucination. ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... imagines that all his old associates, who still dwell at their homes and enjoy their estates, are tormented by the same feelings which make life a burden to himself. The longer his expatriation, the greater does this hallucination become. The lapse of time, which cools the ardour of the friends whom he has left behind, inflames his. Every month his impatience to revisit his native land increases; and every month his native land remembers and misses him less. This ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... if the occasion presented itself. Some men see their wives even to old age as they saw them when they were young and fair. The first print on the retina of the mental vision was so strong that no later impression can change or efface it. This hallucination is not confined to the marital relationship, and Victor Emmanuel never left off seeing Napoleon in one sole light: as the friend of Solferino. It may be that he perceived what the Italians did not perceive: that the obligation was owed to Napoleon alone, while all France ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... away. Then something seemed to occur which his stepdaughter fancied must really be a hallucination of hers. A murmur apparently came from Henchard's lips in which she detected the words, "You refused to see me!" reproachfully addressed to Lucetta. She could not believe that they had been uttered by her stepfather; unless, indeed, they might have been spoken to one ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... an unaccountable delusion, imagining, in their hallucination, that a Frenchwoman, for instance, or even an Englishwoman nay, some in their madness have been heard to say that a Scotchwoman has been known to walk. Egregious errors all! An Irishwoman of the true Milesian descent can walk a step or two sometimes, but all other women, fair or brown, ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... fish," I remarked after him, "and what is more you have got something up your sleeve. Well, I'll have it down one day. Meanwhile, I wonder whether the whole thing is a lie, no; not a lie, an hallucination. It can't be—because of that orchid. No one can explain away the orchid. A queer people, these Pongo, with their white god and goddess and their Holy Flower. But after all Africa is a land of queer people, and of ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... (through its representative, the provincial press, and the above-named critical puffs,) with shame—the managers are fast going mad with bitter vexation, for having, to use the words of that elegant pleonasm, the introductory preface, "by a sort of ex officio hallucination," rejected this and some twenty other exquisite, though unactable dramas! It is a fact, that since the opening of the English Opera House, Mr. Webster has been confined to his room; Macready has suspended ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 5, 1841 • Various
... a couple of centuries ago, when the Puritan hallucination was still strong, a certain fierce savor of religious intolerance; but now that that has died out, and no material prosperity has come to let them share in the larger life of their century, there is a flatness, a ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... his seat. Straining his bewildered gaze, he sees that the door is shut. He is alone. Everything is as before. It must have been an hallucination, but how dreadfully real the appearance of drowned Alice Webster! Where is Agnes? Soon he hears a ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... bed," he muttered; "I have been upset lately, and these fits of mine may well pass into hallucination. Once think of these ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Under this strange mental hallucination poor Goody Billings, who had five children and a husband of her own, continued to give food and shelter to little Tom for a period of no less than seven years; and though it must be acknowledged that the young gentleman did not in the slightest degree merit the kindnesses shown to him, Goody Billings, ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... in point is an assassination committed through jealousy or hallucination, it is the anthropological factor which is the most important, although nevertheless consideration must also be paid to the physical environment and the social environment. If it is a question, on ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... season he was afforded an "evidence of his salvation from Heaven, with many golden seals thereon hanging in his sight." But, ere long, other temptations assailed him. A strange suggestion haunted him, to sell or part with his Saviour. His own account of this hallucination is too painfully vivid to awaken any other feeling than that ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... De l'hallucination historique, ou etude medico-psychique sur les voix et les revelations de Jeanne d'Arc, 1861, in 8vo. Le Vicomte de Mouchy, Jeanne d'Arc, etude historique et psychologique, Montpellier, 1868, ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... Icelandic telegraph when you are ready, and then, upon return of signal, pop away at my friend. But, since it is not my wish to proceed to such an extremity unnecessarily, if you will admit that I may possibly have been deceived—that there may have been some hallucination about the adventure—that strong tea and nervous excitement may have had something to do with it, then, sir, I am willing to leave the matter open to ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... soul!" he murmured to himself, aloud; "indeed you are absolutely in error. If I have seemed—but I repeat, you are deceived. The idea of 'fitness' is a total hallucination. Supposing you—I do it even in play painfully—entirely out of the way, unthought of. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... laughed loudly here, I took it for granted that my apologist had some personal hallucination relative ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... obliquity of understanding. The more laughable blunders a man shall commit in your company, the more tests he giveth you, that he will not betray or overreach you. I love the safety, which a palpable hallucination warrants; the security, which a word out of season ratifies. And take my word for this, reader, and say a fool told it you, if you please, that he who hath not a dram of folly in his mixture, hath pounds of much ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... purposed to be firm,—to yield to her in nothing, resolving to treat all that she might say as the hallucination of a sickened imagination,—as the effect of absolute want of health, for which some change in her mode of life would be the best cure. She might bid him begone in what language she would. He knew well that such was her intention. But he would not allow a word coming from her in such a ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... to the grief of his friends, showed no signs of mental improvement, though his hallucination took a different form. Instead of being talkative, like he was the day before, he became reserved, saying nothing to any one, not even to answer a simple question when it was put to him. He ensconced himself at the stern in such a position that he was out of the way of the man with the ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis
... your conjuring powers could bring about such a hallucination, Miss Faith.—What a day it has been! Look at that sunlight and think of the city that hath ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... "What an hallucination! Dear lady, do you not see—But what is the use of talking? I cannot convince you of your mistake: but circumstances may; for, of course, sooner or later the unhappy man will be arrested and brought to trial for his share in the robbery ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... the lives of these two men, a generation, or two generations after the struggle had been successfully closed. Amid the quiet hills of Vermont, the minds of both were affected for a time, with at least partial derangement. Dea. Boardman labored temporarily under the hallucination, that he was somehow liable to arrest, and prepared a chamber for his defence. He was obliged, for a time to be watched, though he was never confined. A journey to Connecticut, on horseback, with his son Samuel, when he was perhaps sixty years old, effected an entire ...
— Log-book of Timothy Boardman • Samuel W Boardman
... smiles like one who thinks he is going to hear that he will not die, but as the old pain returns when the last portion of the deceptive sentence is spoken, so despair came back to her when remembrance pierced the cloud of hallucination, and told her that all was not a dream—there was something that ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... Princess entertained us as if she had been in her own house. She gave me and my wife a room next her own private apartment. Unfortunately a most trying night was in store for us. Princess Caroline had one of her severe nervous attacks, and in order to preclude the approach of the painful hallucination by which she was tormented at such times, her daughter Marie was obliged to read to her all through the night in a voice deliberately raised a good deal above its natural pitch. I got fearfully excited, especially at what appeared to be an inexplicable disregard for the peace of one's neighbour ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... crowded bits of paper into the keyhole of the door and up and down the crack. Then he closed the one window, turned out the two gas-jets, and opened the stop-cocks again. An odor of gas soon pervaded the room into which came only a faint light from the State House dome. And now a more hideous hallucination came to that hopeless, despairing man, for between the open doors of his tall safe stood the wasted form of his mother! Her gray hair was combed flat on either side of her ashen face, a gray dress covered her attenuated frame, and her arms were folded ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... professor begged. "Leave me one bean only? I promise not to eat it, not to dissect it, not to subject it to experiments of any sort. Let me just have it to look at, to be sure that what you have told me is not an hallucination." ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... to what the voice had said, she was unable to tell, yet averred that the words were perfectly distinct. In a moment the entire family was at the place, but nothing was heard, and the voice was believed to be an hallucination caused by the mother's great anxiety and her disordered nerves. But for months afterward, at irregular intervals of a few days, the voice was heard by the several members of the family, and by others. All declared ...
— Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories • Ambrose Bierce
... musicians from Stanford, travelling through here; something has happened to one of our party; I don't know what's the matter: some hallucination." ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... know, Cathie, how I always see myself nowadays? It is a sort of hallucination. I see a girl at the foot of a precipice. She has had a fall, and she is sitting up, feeling all her limbs. And, to her great astonishment, ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... at the public expense. He would take so much of the hundred dollars as might be necessary, and place it in the hands of the doctor at Bellevue Hospital to defray the expenses of Jacob's funeral. He would say nothing about it, however, till he had actually found the money. It might be a hallucination of Jacob's, ...
— Tom, The Bootblack - or, The Road to Success • Horatio Alger
... nearer still. His heart gave a great throb. Could it be, or was the moon weaving some hallucination in his troubled brain? If it was a phantom, it was that of Lady Clementina: if but modeled of the filmy vapors of the moonlight, and the artist his own brain, the phantom was welcome as joy. His spirit seemed to soar aloft in the yellow ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... hallucination, so perfect her trust in him, that she took no precaution of having any part of her property settled upon herself; and, in marrying this man she gave him an absolute control over her own fortune, and a dangerous, if limited, influence over that of ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... admit Mr. Wilson's incapacity to decipher foreign names or words, even when they stand before him in the clearest print,—an incapacity of which his book affords numerous examples,—and that this incapacity, and not any mental hallucination, has been the cause of the blunder which we have corrected. But we must add that he does evidently labor under an hallucination when he calls this letter of M. St. Hilaire a "flattering notice." He has been misled by his inability to comprehend the employment of courteous language between persons ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... Packard's absence. Some other way must be found to quiet her apprehensions and bring her into harmony again with her surroundings. I knew of only one course. If the influence of the house had brought on this hallucination, then the influence of the house must be destroyed. She must be made to see that, despite its unfortunate reputation, no specter had ever visited it; that some purely natural cause was at the bottom of the various ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... oars which my boatmen plied, the turban worn by the captain, the water-jars and culinary implements, became in themselves so inexpressibly absurd and comical, that I was provoked into a long fit of laughter. The hallucination died away as gradually as it came, leaving me overcome with a soft and pleasant drowsiness, from which I sank into ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... or not one can hardly know. No doubt he has made many of them think so; and, alas, we suffer from a national hallucination that we are liked abroad, when as a matter of fact we are no more liked than others; and in cultured centres we are in addition, laughed at by the careless and sneered at ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... words, which it is not possible for a man to utter," and the throne of God, with all the seraphim and cherubim, archangels and angels, became visible and their conversation intelligible to the enraptured and transported mystic, in a fit of hallucination, when the bewildered imagination sees objectively its own subjective phantasma, and hears from without, in supposed articulate sounds, its own silent thoughts. It requires no great stretch of the imagination to form a correct idea of the mystic eccentricities to which this awful ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... Carlsbad. He looked at her ladylike composure and unconsciousness, and wondered if she could be the same person and the same person as they who lost themselves in the crowd that night and heard and said words palpitant with fate. Perhaps there had been no such words; perhaps it was all a hallucination. He must leave her to recognize that it was reality; till she did so, he felt bitterly that there was nothing for him but submission and patience; if she never did so, there was nothing for him ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... with many comments and exclamations, to the story of the unseen lady, the legend of the fair witch, the dagger that was a paper-knife by day and the severed tresses. She did not hear of the singular nightmare or hallucination that had been my second visitor. My reason had accounted for the experience and dismissed it. Some other part of myself avoided the memory with that deep, unreasoning sense of horror sometimes ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... boat as proposed. His be-whiskered friend did not put in an appearance and Kirtley congratulated himself on the riddance. The more he reflected, the less he made any sense out of it. Coincidence, practical joke, spy system at white heat, hallucination—all suggestions ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... up at the round and brilliant globe of light floating in the sky above his head, and wondered whether it were, indeed, possible that all that had befallen him was a reality and not some tremendous hallucination. Then suddenly arousing himself to a renewed realization of that which had occurred, he turned and ran like one possessed, up along the wharf, and so into the ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... lady, with a slight smile, and that indefinite, quickly smothered change of eye which signifies, "I don't believe a word of it!" "Are you sure that there is not a mistake somewhere, or a little mental hallucination? The story is very entertaining, but—I beg your pardon—I should be interested to ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... and Gutenberg were as much inspired by the Evil One as they have been fabled to be, when they carved out of a mountain of ore the instrument yclept type, to completely exhaust the possibilities of which is of late announced as the sum of human destiny. They lived under the hallucination of dawning literature, when printed books implied sacred and classical perfection; and they could by no means have foreseen the royal folios of the "New York Herald" and "Tribune," or the marvellous inanities about the past, present, and future, which figure in an indescribable ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... carried away the head of his companion. Accosted by another soldier, he was asked why he was carrying a man whose head had been shot away. He stoutly denied the allegation and, at length, dropped the headless body to prove the other's hallucination. Seeing that the man's head was, in truth, gone, he exclaimed, "Why, the durn fool told me ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... Halbrane neared that curious island of Tristan d'Acunha, which may be described as the big boiler of the African seas. By that time I had come to realize that the "hallucination" of Captain Len Guy was a truth, and that he and the captain of the Jane (also a reality) were connected with each other by this ocean waif from the authentic expedition of Arthur Pym. My last doubts were buried ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... is reported to be busy sawing trees. Some declare that his energy is due to an hallucination that they are German generals. Others say the whole story is a clumsy attempt to discredit him with ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various
... the case never made its appeal to her. She was too much of a romantic, living, as many women do, in a cloudland of hallucination, until a lightning circumstance tears its rent in the vaporous fabric and experience thunders in their ears. Had she consented to the reasoning that she had but left the plying of one trade in exchange for another; had she admitted the fact that she had but abandoned ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... of the college classical club, and visions of life as a professor of languages seemed to me far from unhappy. A compulsory course in philosophy convinced me that there was still much to learn; and I had a delicious hallucination in which I saw myself compiling a volume of commentaries on the various systems of this queen of sciences. "The Grammar of Agnostics," I think it was to be called: it would be written in a neat and comely hand on thousands of pages of pure white foolscap: ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... examines an ethical note from the popular point of view. Like Hoffmann, Chamisso takes his reader into the midst of current life, but, unlike Hoffmann, his moods are not the dissolving views which leave the reader in doubt as to whether the whole is a phantasmagoria and a hallucination. Schlemihl is genuinely and consistently realistic. It is a story in the first person and has a rigidly logical arrangement of episodes leading up to its climax. It does not make ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... nor indeed any but the most scanty covering. It has been surmised that the soldier who made this report may indistinctly and from a distance have descried a flock of tall white cranes, otherwise he was either the victim of an hallucination or an inventor of strange tales to astonish his fellows. Humboldt (Histoire de la Geographie du nouveau Continent) quotes an instance of the colonists of Angostora once mistaking a flock of cranes for ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... always had more or less interest in the study of physiology, and during my college course conducted a series of experiments in hypnotism, and made some interesting discoveries regarding the exaltation of the senses, and especially in relation to illusion and hallucination by ...
— Montezuma's Castle and Other Weird Tales • Charles B. Cory
... a very uncommon result of masturbation and its various resultant morbid conditions, as the records of the many institutions for the unfortunate class of sufferers from this disease bear abundant witness. Sometimes it manifests itself in the milder forms of hallucination, or monomania, but in the majority of cases, the patient sinks into a despondent hypochondria, which is many times followed, sooner or ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... whole it appears most probable that Shelley on this night was the subject of a powerful hallucination. The theory of his enemies at Tanyrallt, that the story had been invented to facilitate his escape from the neighbourhood without paying his bills, may be dismissed. But no investigation on the spot could ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... life had been merged in this struggle which had only conquered her overwrought heart and brain when she had felt that the Madonna had deserted her and delivered her to the wrath of Venice, so now, in her hallucination,—since the Madonna had brought her to Rome,—her faith and power of speech suddenly returned, and she rallied all her strength to ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull |
