Second-sight, a gift of prophetic vision, long supposed in the Scottish Highlands and elsewhere to belong to particular persons. The most common form it took was to see the wraith, fetch, or shadowy second self of some person soon to die, often wrapped in a shroud, or attended with some other of the special circumstances of death or burial. Of course the prophetic character may easily enough have been a mere additional assumption, the time of occurrence of distant events being apt to be confused with the time of hearing of them. In the popular mind everywhere the mystery of death, and the instinctive human longing to believe in a continuity of conscious spiritual life and sympathy, have generated a belief in the probability of an appearance coinciding with, or soon succeeding, the death of an individual; and from this the step is easy to a belief in the possibility of similar appearances before death, in order to foreshadow or forewarn. For, if the appearance be admitted as a probability, it is not difficult to take a further step and attribute to it the function. For what more natural than to suppose that, just as the affection for a dead friend survives the separation of the grave, so the affections of the disembodied spirit or apparitional ghost-soul should continue to cling to the persons loved on earth, and that he should seek by every possible means to give them forewarnings of things soon to happen? And what agents more natural than those gifted souls that stand between the living and the dead, who have attained clearness of spiritual vision by rising above the bondage of sense, through lonely meditation and inner communion with things unseen? Such are the seers to whom the gift of second-sight was once attributed in the Highlands; and we find, as was to be expected, that most often they were reputed men of severe and virtuous life, who would gladly have lost their faculty if they could, and indeed were often sorely troubled in their minds as to whether it was not something that had come from the devil and not from God. In Aubrey's account we read of one who besought the presbytery to pray for him that he should be relieved from this burden, and how after special supplication and confession it was taken from him. Among the Covenanters too the gift of special foresight and prophecy was one vouchsafed to men like Peden, eminent for holiness and spiritual elevation. The gift seems not to have descended by succession, although this is stated to have been the case in Skye before the gospel reached it, and there was long a persistent belief that it belonged to the seventh son of a seventh son; according to some it appears in special cases to have been capable of being communicated from one person to another. Martin in his Description of the Western Isles of Scotland (1703) gives a full account of the second-sight, with a classification of the special visions usually seen, which is conveniently summarised in the seventh chapter of Defoe's well-known Life and Adventures of Duncan Campbell (c. 1680-1730), the deaf and dumb soothsayer, who inherited the faculty from his Lapland mother. With regard to the difficult question of the determination of the time between the sight and the fulfilment, we read here that if an object was seen early in the morning the event would be accomplished a few hours afterwards; if at noon, the same day; and if at night, the accomplishment would take place weeks, months, and sometimes years afterwards, according to the time of night the vision was beheld. The appearance of a shroud was an infallible prognostic of death, and the nearness or remoteness of the event was judged by the amount of the body that was covered by the ghastly sheet; if it was not seen above the middle, a delay of a twelvemonth might be hoped for; but if it ascended high towards the head, the mortal hour was close at hand. The reader will remember the splendid artistic use made of an analogous notion to this by Rossetti in The King's Tragedy. The vision makes such a lively impression upon the seers, continues Martin, that they neither see nor think of anything else except the vision, as long as it continues; the eyelids of the seer are rigidly fixed, and the eyes continue staring until the object vanishes. Sir Walter Scott has put the second-sight to fine use in Waverley, The Legend of Montrose, and elsewhere.
The gradation of symbolical appearances we have mentioned strikes the imagination and gives something like a system to the supernatural phenomena. But if we turn to the cases related we find no such regular order and exactness. The evidence is vague and confused, and the incidents are often of the most trivial character, the revelations, apparently mere subjective hallucinations, commonly made to poor illiterate men, predisposed from their conditions of life to melancholy and superstition. Moreover, one standing weakness is that such predictions may force their own fulfilment, and the indefiniteness of the time provides a convenient loophole of escape for the conscience. As we see in the popular notions about dreams, there is a besetting snare of a tendency unconsciously to antedate the later impression and to read back details into the dream. Even contradictory dreams are forced to the required interpretation on principles of implied symbolism or even of mere conventional and completely irrational explanation; and similarly we find unrecognised apparitions capable of symbolic explanation, as a black dog appearing before a death, phantasmal lights, and the like, as well as weeping, the screech of the banshee, &c., in the region of sounds. Again, coincidences, really due to pure accident, account for much; and still more the invariable leaning of the primitive mind to false analogies and to confound the post hoc with the propter hoc. The savage and the enthusiast alike think in the same vicious circle; what he believes he therefore sees, and what he sees he therefore believes.
Stories of second-sight meet us also in the actual world of history. We find it in the story of Wallace and Bruce; again in the famous vision that Thomas the Rhymer had of the death of Alexander III. at Kinghorn; associated with the tragic fate of James I.; and in the unheeded warning given to the Scottish nobles before going to find their fate at Flodden. A Scottish seer is said to have foretold the unhappy career of Charles I., and another the violent death of Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. In 1652 Sir George Mackenzie, afterwards Lord Tarbat, wrote a minute account of its manifestations, addressed to the celebrated Robert Boyle, which is published in the correspondence of Samuel Pepys. Aubrey throughout life had strong interest in the superstition, and has recorded not a few examples. Next came Martin's copious description, then the Rev. John Fraser's Authentic Instances (1707), and in 1763 the ambitious but poor and credulous Treatise on the Second Sight by Theophilus Insulanus. A fresh revival of interest in the subject took place after the publication of Dr Johnson's memorable Journey to the Hebrides (1775). Johnson was naturally superstitious, and would willingly have believed in the possibility of messages from the other world. But his love of truth was too strong to be satisfied with the evidence, and he confessed that he never could 'advance his curiosity to conviction, but came away at last only willing to believe.' On one occasion Boswell tells us he laid down a sound canon for such questions, incapable to be shaken: 'We could have no certainty of the truth of supernatural appearances unless something was told us which we could not know by ordinary means, or something done which could not be done but by supernatural power; that Pharaoh, in reason and justice, required such evidence from Moses; nay, that our Saviour said: "If I had not done among them the works which none other man did, they had not had sin." As we have seen, spectral sights may be caused by dreams, and every night so many are dreamed that some must come true; morbid conditions of mind or body may account for many more; not to speak of accidental optical illusions, or the workings of an abnormally vivid imagination. And again, from the other side, we may say that it is hardly a compliment to the idea of a divine providence to suppose that special miracles are wrought to announce the marriage or death of a Highland peasant, the wreck of a boat, the winner of a race, or the arrival of a stranger in a remote island of the Hebrides. Nothing wiser on this question generally has been written than Mrs Henry Sidgwick's paper, "On the Evidence for Premonitions," in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research for December 1888. She defines premonitions as predictions, foreshadowings, or warnings of coming events, which afford, if believed, a knowledge of the future greater than that which human beings could obtain by exercising their faculties on the facts before them; and her conclusion is that the evidence at present collected does not seem sufficient to warrant a conclusion in favour of these. The whole of the first-hand cases up till that time before the Psychical Society amounted to 240, about 66 per cent. of these being dreams, thus falling far short both in quantity and quality of the evidence for telepathy. Setting aside the two-thirds dreams, she classifies the remaining third as follows: (1) Visual hallucinations—persons or objects seen when nothing was really there; (2) auditory hallucinations—voices or other sounds heard when, according to the belief of the percipient, there was no real natural sound; (3) verbal predictions, as by fortune-tellers; (4) non-externalised impressions of various kinds—namely, ideas of more or less definiteness, mental visions, mental voices, and motor impulses. See the articles ANIMISM, APPARITIONS, DIVINATION, DREAMS, and MAGIC.