My Library

saw that a Bible was open before it, and that it was pointing with one of its fingers to the warning conveyed by Isaiah to Hezekiah: "Set thine house in order: for thou shalt die, and not live." He thereupon returned to the company present, relating what he had seen, and, in spite of their arguments, expressing his conviction that he was about to die, which he did on the following day at six o'clock in the evening. A similar case, which had, however, no tragic consequences, is related by Stilling of a government officer at Weimar, called Triplin, who, on going to his office to fetch some document of importance, saw his own double sitting in the chair with the deed in front of him. He retired hastily in considerable alarm, but, later, told his maidservant to go to his room and fetch the paper she would find on the table. But when she went there, seeing her master's double, she concluded that he had not waited for her to perform her errand, but had gone there himself This, as a case for autoscopic bilocation, is somewhat complicated by the evidence of the maid. As the title suggests, it should be only the owner of the phantom who sees it. Goethe furnishes a curious variant of autoscopic vision, tainted as it was with an apparently purposeless percipience. An occurrence, which might have been included in an earlier chapter, may be related as furnishing proof of his psychic aptitude. One rainy summer evening, when returning with a friend from the Belvedere at Weimar, he met what he thought to be an acquaintance, Frederic by name, dressed, to his astonishment, in his own dressing-gown, nightcap, and slippers. The friend who was with him could see nothing, and thought Goethe to be