Cock Lane and Common-Sense eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 347 pages of information about Cock Lane and Common-Sense.

Cock Lane and Common-Sense eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 347 pages of information about Cock Lane and Common-Sense.
where the horse shied, and found that a farmer had been evicted, and his cottage set on fire.  This unhappy person, it seems, was in debt to all his tradesmen, not to his landlord only.  The fire-raising, however, was an excessively barbaric method of getting him to leave the parish, and the view justified the indignation of the gillie.  The old gillie, much excited, declared that the horse had foreseen this event in the morning, and had, consequently, shied.  In a more sceptical spirit the author reminded Campbell of the sheep which started up.  ‘That sheep was the devil,’ Campbell explained, nor could this rational belief of his be shaken.  The affair led to a conversation on the second sight, and Campbell said, ‘he had it not,’ ‘but his sister (or sister-in-law) had it’.

Campbell was a very agreeable companion, interested in old events, and a sympathiser, as he said, in spite of his name, with the great Montrose.  His remarks led the author to infer that, contrary to what some inquirers wrote in the last, and Graham Dalyell in the present century, the belief in the second sight is still quite common in the Highlands.  As will be shown later, this inference was correct.

We must not, from this survival only, draw the conclusion that the Highlanders are more superstitious than many educated people south of the Highland line.  Second sight is only a Scotch name which covers many cases called telepathy and clairvoyance by psychical students, and casual or morbid hallucinations by other people.  In second sight the percipient beholds events occurring at a distance, sees people whom he never saw with the bodily eye, and who afterwards arrive in his neighbourhood; or foresees events approaching but still remote in time.  The chief peculiarity of second sight is, that the visions often, though not always, are of a symbolical character.  A shroud is observed around the living man who is doomed; boding animals, mostly black dogs, vex the seer; funerals are witnessed before they occur, and ‘corpse-candles’ (some sort of light) are watched flitting above the road whereby a burial procession is to take its way. {228} Though we most frequently hear the term ‘second sight’ applied as a phrase of Scotch superstition, the belief in this kind of ominous illusion is obviously universal.  Theoclymenus, in the Odyssey, a prophet by descent, and of the same clan as the soothsayer Melampus, beholds the bodies and faces of the doomed wooers, ‘shrouded in night’.  The Pythia at Delphi announced a similar symbolic vision of blood-dripping walls to the Athenians, during the Persian War.  Again, symbolic visions, especially of blood-dripping walls, are so common in the Icelandic sagas that the reader need only be referred to the prodigies before the burning of Njal, in the Saga of Burnt Njal.  Second sight was as popular a belief among the Vikings as among the Highlanders who retain a large share of their blood.  It may be argued by students who believe in the borrowing rather than in the independent evolution of ideas, that the Gaelic second sight is a direct inheritance from the Northmen, who have left so many Scandinavian local names in the isles and along the coasts.

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
Cock Lane and Common-Sense from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.