toms of a state of nervous derangement, called hysteria muscularis, which in his case often manifested itself by acute paroxysms, culminating in cataleptic fits. During these paroxysms, as we have already learned, he retained consciousness, so that when they were over, he could still remember the wild fantasies and strange ravings of his overwrought imagination, which he held to be supernatural communications from a higher world. But it has been ascertained by medical observation that such hysterical subjects frequently develop a tendency to dissimulation and deception, and this they seek to conceal so dexterously from themselves and others, that it requires experienced skill to detect it. Thus the patriotic sentiments and ambitious aims, both of a political and religious character, which for a long time had taken possession of Mohammed's mind and had increasingly become the all-absorbing subject of his day-dreams, also retained their hold on his soul in sleep. They formed the burden of the strange reveries and excited fancies which agitated his mind during his cataleptic fits and mental hallucinations, and were in fact the birth-throes which ushered the unlooked-for 'Arabian Prophet' into the world.

Ibn Ishak, the renowned collector of Mohammedan traditions and the author of the earliest history of Mohammed's life preserved to us, who already has been repeatedly mentioned, lived about a hundred years after Mohammed, and on the ground of his communications we trace, in the following pages, Mohammed's gradual transformation into a prophet. All the later Arab historians follow in his track, only that, as a rule, the later the historian, the more his recital abounds with the marvellous.

Ibn Ishak opens the fourth section of his book by the following statement, based on a tradition derived from the Prophet's favourite wife Aisha: 'When the time had come that God wished to honour Mohammed and to show mercy to mankind, Mohammed's prophetic mission began by his having true dreams, like the bright morning dawn, and by his partiality for solitude.' The biographer, in pointing out the origin of what he regards as the Divine mission of his Prophet, only goes back to his dreams. He might have gone still further back, as we have done, and have traced

those dreams to the ideals and aims which filled his imagination in a waking state. The dreams possessed for him a certain impress of 'truth,' because they were the reflection of his waking thoughts; and in a subject of such supreme excitability of nerves as Mohammed, they assumed a vividness which suggested a comparison with the 'dawn of morning.' As we are not told what the dreams themselves were, we may suppose that they had substantially the same character with which we are all familiar from our own experience in dreamland. A man brooding over such farreaching and momentous plans as Mohammed, will naturally acquire an air of gravity and contract a partiality for solitude in which he may undisturbedly indulge his reveries.

From this first stage in the formation of the Arabian Prophet, that of dreams, Ibn Ishak proceeds in due order to the second, that of visions. He tells us in his narrative, on the authority of another tradition derived from 'some learned man,' that, 'One day, when Mohammed had gone out on some business, he remained away so long that he was missed everywhere, having wandered far in the deep valley of Mecca; and whenever he passed a tree or a stone, they called out, "Peace to thee, thou Apostle of God!" But on turning round and looking in every direction, Mohammed saw nothing but stones and trees. In this state Mohammed remained a long time, seeing and hearing many a thing.' In a later biography, the Rawzet ul Ahbab, we are told that, 'Before the coming down of the Koran, for the space of eleven years, Mohammed was hearing voices, without seeing any person; and for the space of seven years he was seeing a light.' Here, then, we have hallucinations of the ear and the eye and the former beginning before the latter, an order which has also been observed in other individuals of a similar organisation. As in our dreams the involuntary activity of our imaginative soul presents its images to us as objective realities, though on waking we become conscious that these had no existence out of ourselves, but were merely the half-conscious play of our own psychical powers, so also, in a diseased state of the nervous system, the imaginations and cogitations of the soul can reflect themselves in a person's waking consciousness or half-consciousness under