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Man Outside Himself

Prevost Battersby

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There remains to be considered what one might describe as the reverse of etheric projection, where the subject sees his own phantasm while preserving full somatic consciousness, known as “autoscopic bilocation", or as vision de soi; and amongst famous cases described in Dr. Sollier's Les Phenomenes d'Autoscopie are those of Goethe, Shelley, Alfred de Musset and Maupassant, the latter of whom, when writing one afternoon at his desk, turned, hearing the door open, to see his own self enter, sit down before him, and, burying his head in his hands, begin to dictate what he was writing. There is, of course, as I think Signor Bozzano puts it, an insuperable abyss between the sensation of seeing one's own double and that of finding oneself consciously out of the body and contemplating the body. Alarm at viewing one's own apparently dead body is soon overcome, whereas the phantom illusion of oneself is generally regarded as a portent, as in a case narrated by Dr. Werner of a jeweller at Ludwigsburg, named Ratzel, who, in perfect health at the time, met his own double one evening, face to face, on turning the corner of a street, a figure which seemed as real and life-like as himself While he gazed at it in terror the figure vanished. He described what had happened to several of his friends, and was painfully impressed by it. Shortly after, passing through a forest, he was asked by some woodcutters to lend them a hand in felling a tree. While hauling on the rope, the tree fell on him and killed him. Another curious story is that of Herr Becker, a professor of mathematics at Rostock. He had gone into his library for a book to settle a disputed point in theology with some friends, and to his amazement saw his own double seated in the chair he was accustomed to occupy. He approached the figure, and, looking over its shoulder,
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