NARRATIVE OF REV. DR. BUSHNELL.
169
Rather do they depend, we should say, on an intromission
from latent spiritual forces, called into action by some abnormal
conditions affecting the relations of the physical to the spiritual
body.
De Boismont, whose work on “ Hallucinations” (Paris, 1852)
has a high reputation in France, admits that some cases of
prevision “ appear to spring from an enlarged faculty of per¬
ception, a supernatural intuition ”
To our instances of clairvoyance in dreams, we add the follow¬
ing perfectly well-authenticated case, related (1S5S) by the Rev.
Dr. Horace Bushnell. “As I sat by the fire,” he says, “one
stormy November night, in a hotel-parlor, in the Napa Valley
of California, there came in a most venerable and benignant-
looking person, with his wife. The stranger was Captain Yount,
a man who came over into California, as a trapper, more than
forty years ago. Here he has lived, apart from the great world
and its questions, acquiring an immense landed estate, and
becoming a kind of acknowledged patriarch in the country.
His tall, manly person, and his gracious, paternal look, as
totally unsophisticated in the expression as if he had never
heard of a philosophic doubt or question in his life, marked him
as the true patriarch.
“The conversation turned, I know not how, on spiritism and
the modern necromancy; and he discovered a degree of incli¬
nation to believe in the reported mysteries. His wife, a much
younger person, and apparently a Christian, intimated that
probably he was predisposed to this kind of faith by a very pe¬
culiar experience of his own, and evidently desired that he might
he drawn out by some intelligent discussion of his queries.
“At my request, he gave me his story. About six or seven
years previous, in a mid-winter’s night, he had a dream, in which
saw what appeared to be a company of emigrants, arrested
by the sno^vs of the mountains, and perishing rapidly by cold
^$nd hunger. He noted the very cast of the scenery, marked by
jh huge perpendicular front of white-rock cliff; he saw the men
Shutting off wkat appeared to be tree-tops rising out of deep