GHOSTS AND GHOST-SEERS.

(NORTH BRITISH REVIEW.-No. XVIII.)

In all ages and in every country, mankind, when alike unguided and untrammelled by a definite method of investigation, has exhibited the tendency to believe in the existence of unembodied spirits in general, and in that of disembodied human ones in particular. Nor has this belief or half-belief always been dissociated from the supposition that such spirits occasionally visit or revisit the earth, making themselves sensible to people yet in the flesh. It is upon the records of such apparitions, indeed, that it rests its claims as a part of the popular creed of the world. It appears that both ghosts and ghost-seers are as plentiful and incontrovertible as ever. We are told that the force of public opinion, fashioned by the positive or rationalising spirit of the ignorant present time, renders some of the seers and believers in ghosts afraid, and others of them ashamed, to confess their experiences and convictions; but that there are multitudes of both these sorts of spiritualists in the society, of every grade and kind, of the miserable and sense-beclouded age in which we live. Moreover, not only did Plato, Pliny, Henry More, Donne, Matthew Hale, Samuel Johnson, Addison, and a host of other

worthies believe in such appearances, but there is actually a band of living authors on the subject. Among the Germans, Passavant and Eschenmayer and Ennemoser, to say nothing of Stilling and Kerner and Schubert, have all investigated this shadowy question in the character of believers; and no one, who knows anything of the former three of these men, will deny the great ability and vast erudition they bring to the discussion of their theories, whatever may be said of the weak-eyed mysticism of Schubert, Kerner, and Jung-Stilling. Such is a brief statement of the most important fact of the existence of ghost-seers and ghost-believers, implying that of ghosts to see and believe in. Let us now take a glance at the other side of the subject.

There have always been Sadducees in the world, as well as in Jewry. There have everywhere existed Empirics, or men for experience, and not only in the schools of ancient Greece. It is these men who have ever been the bitterest enemies of the poor ghost. True to the sensuous instinct, which shapes their purely phenomenal science, they have impetuously rejected the conception of unincorporated finite spirits, as at once nonentities and impossibilities. Admitting only phenomena, as observed by the healthy sensation and the healthy consciousness of the race; admitting only such phenomena, together with generalisations drawn from them, into their schemes of the universe, the appearance of incorporeal spirits to the sensibility of the human nervous system has infallibly and necessarily been excluded from their systems. This merely scientific generation of thinkers ignores the very evidence on the other side of the question as corrupted and useless; ghost-seeing being nothing but a disease, ghost-seers are incapable of stating their own case in a trustworthy manner. There is

so much of truth in this way of thinking, that we find the ingenuous authoress of the Night Side of Nature confessing that, after all that has been experienced and written about ghosts and ghost-seeing, there is nothing like scientific evidence of the facts yet forthcoming. Full of faith and enthusiasm in the cause of apparitions though she is, she candidly allows that, so far as a scientific or empirical judgment is concerned, the whole subject still remains in the region of opinion.' Now the Sadduçaic spirit gained the decided and all but supreme ascendency over the mind of Europe in the course of the last century. Even those faithful souls who continued to hold by the mysteries of Christianity, and still more those who only thought they did or pretended to do so, acquired the habit of calling everything to the bar of concrete experience. Rationalism became the spirit of all criticism. Positivism was the exclusive methodology of the age. Wonders ceased, for everything was to be explained on natural principles. Miracles, witchcrafts, philosopher's stones, elixirs of life, powders of attraction, oracles and ghosts had been only dreams of the black night, or mirages of the grey morning; and they were now banished for ever from the horizon of life by the ascending sun of civilisation. This bringing down of every asserted thing to the measure of the sensuous experience of the age was easily put in execution upon ghostly apparitions. They were spectral illusions, they were coincidences, they were peculiar dreams, they were this and they were that. One thing was certain, at least, they were not ghosts. In fine, it became a mark of vulgarity to suppose for a moment that they could be spirits. Accordingly it is true that, to the present hour, very few people can find courage enough even to raise the question.

In the meantime, however, a change has begun to come over the spirit of the time. The positive, experiential philosophy of the eighteenth century has been questioned. Both its methodology and its results have been weighed in the balance, and, in the sincere judgment of the ablest men of the new time, found miserably wanting. Accordingly, all the pristine beliefs and objects of inquiry, which it had rejected with disdain, are now come in for re-examination. All its negative judgments are to be revised-ghost-seeing among the rest. Thoughtful men are no longer content with denial they begin to see that the limited experiences of an individual, or of an individual age, constitute no criterion for those of another individual or another age. The best thinkers of the nineteenth century are becoming sceptics, in the sense of being considerers not deniers. The whole of society is as usual sharing the movement. There is a danger of the immethodical mind, indeed, swinging to the opposite extreme of unreflective credulity. Rash and incapable writers are showing the example of unlearning the lesson of the positive school or epoch, and going right back into the younger age, the more elementary school that preceded it. It is clear that the reconsideration of the ghost question is not now to be settled exactly as our grandfathers did it, and the views of their fathers to be left altogether out of the question, as if they, forsooth, had lived in vain. That were nothing less than a kind of dotage or second childhood of the human mind; a second childhood wanting the beauty, innocence, and boundless promise of the first. Nobody that understands the government of God, or perceives the ongrowing evolution of the destiny of mankind, can fail to perceive that positive science must be at least one of our guides in the renewed investiga

tion of all this difficult and mysterious class of subjects. Not a step must be taken without it. It is because we lament to see this great principle wholly misunderstood among the mesmerists, oneirologists, and pneumatologists of Germany, France, America, and Great Britain, that we propose to devote a few pages to the discussion of the subject of ghosts and ghost-seers. It will furnish the reader with a clue to the method in which alone all such researches must be carried on, if they are to lead to satisfactory results; and it may also forewarn and forearm his mind against the rambling and unprincipled speculations of scientific fanatics.

Since, then, the inquiry is to be inexorably conducted on the inductive principle, let us begin with the facts of the case. Here it is once for all to be premised that the accurate and sufficient observation of the constituent facts of the universe is a most difficult, as it is an allimportant department of science. Few people are aware of the extreme difficulty of the art of simple observation. That art consists not only in the ability to perceive the phenomena of nature through uncoloured eyes, but also of the talent to describe them in unobstructed and transparent words. To observe properly in the very simplest of the physical sciences requires a long and severe training. No one knows this so feelingly as the great discoverer. Faraday once said that he always doubts his own observations. Mitscherlich, on one occasion, remarked to a man of science of our acquaintance that it takes fourteen years to discover and establish a single new fact in chemistry. An enthusiastic student one day betook himself to Baron Cuvier with the exhibition of a new organ, we think it was a muscle, which he supposed himself to have discovered in the body of some living creature or other; but the experienced and saga