Cock Lane and Common-Sense Part 16

Imposture would imitate the 'spiritual' feats of 'raps,' 'physical movements of objects,' and 'luminous forms'. All this would continue after savagery, after paganism, after 'Popery' among the peasants who were for so long, and in superst.i.tion are even now, a conservative cla.s.s.

All that 'expectancy,' hysterics, 'the dominant idea' and rude hypnotism, 'the sleep of the shadow,' could do, would be done, as witch trials show. All these elements in folklore, magic and belief would endure, in the peasant cla.s.s, under the veneer of civilisation. Now and again these elements of superst.i.tion would break through the veneer, would come to the surface among the educated cla.s.ses, and would 'carry silly women captive,' and silly men. They, too, though born in the educated cla.s.s, would attest impossible occurrences.

In all this, we might only see survival, wonderfully vivacious, and revival astonishingly close to the ancient savage lines.

We are unable to state the case for survival and revival more strenuously, and the hypothesis is most attractive. This hypothesis appears to be Dr. Carpenter's, though he does not, in the limits of popular lectures, unfold it at any length. After stating (p. 1) that a continuous belief in 'occult agencies' has existed, he adds:--

'While this very continuity is maintained by some to be an evidence of the real existence of such [occult] agencies, it will be my purpose to show you that it proves nothing more than the wide-spread diffusion, alike amongst minds of the highest and lowest culture, of certain tendencies to thought, which have either created ideal marvels possessing no foundation whatever in fact, or have, by exaggeration and distortion, invested with a preternatural character occurrences which are perfectly capable of a natural explanation'.

Here Dr. Carpenter does not attempt to show cause why the 'manifestations' are always the same, for example, why spirits rap in the Australian Bush, among blacks not influenced by modern spiritualism: why tables moved, untouched, in Thibet and India, long before 'table-turning' was heard of in modern Europe. We have filled up the lacuna in the doctor's argument, by suggesting that the phenomena (which are not such as a civilised taste would desire) were invented by savages, and handed on in an unbroken catena, a chain of tradition.

But, in following Dr. Carpenter, we are brought up short at one of our old obstacles, we trip on one of our old stumbling-blocks.

Granting that an epileptic patient made strange bounds and springs, we can conceive savages going farther in fancy, and averring that he flew, or was levitated, or miraculously transported through s.p.a.ce.

Let this become matter of traditional belief, as a thing possible in epilepsy, i.e., in 'diabolical,' or 'angelical possession'. Add the honest but hallucinatory persuasion of the patient that he was so levitated, and let him be a person of honour and of sanct.i.ty, say St. Theresa, St. Francis, or St. Joseph of Cupertino. Granting the survival of a savage exaggeration, granting the hallucinated saint, we may, perhaps, explain the innumerable anecdotes about miraculous levitation of which a few are repeated in our paper on 'Comparative Psychical Research.' The witnesses in witch trials, and in ecclesiastical inquiries, and Lord Orrery, and Mr. Greatrakes, and the Cromwellian soldiery in Scotland, the Spanish in Peru, Cotton Mather in New England, saw what they expected to see, what tradition taught them to look for, in the case of a convulsionary, or a saint, or a catechumen. The consensus in illusion was wonderful, but let us grant, for the sake of argument, that it was possible. Let us add another example, from Cochin China.

The witness and narrator is Delacourt, a French missionary. The source is a letter of his of November 25, 1738, to Winslow the anatomist, Membre de l'Academie des Sciences a Paris. It is printed in the Inst.i.tutiones Theologicae of Collet, who attests the probity of the missionary. {324}

In May or June, 1733, Delacourt was asked to view a young native Christian, said by his friends to be 'possessed'.

'Rather incredulous,' as he says, Delacourt went to the lad, who had communicated, as he believed, unworthily, and was therefore a prey to religious excitement, which, as Bishop Callaway found among his Zulu converts, and as Wodrow attests among 'savoury Christians,'

begets precisely such hallucinations as annoyed the early hermits like St. Anthony. Delacourt addressed the youth in Latin: he replied, Ego nescio loqui Latine, a tag which he might easily have picked up, let us say. Delacourt led him into church, where the patient was violently convulsed. Delacourt then (remembering the example set by the Bishop of Tilopolis) ordered the demon _in Latin_, to carry the boy to the ceiling. 'His body became stiff, he was dragged from the middle of the church to a pillar, and there, his feet joined, his back fixed (colle) against the pillar, he was transported in the twinkling of an eye to the ceiling, like a weight rapidly drawn up, without any apparent action on his part. I kept him in the air for half an hour, and then bade him drop without hurting himself,' when he fell 'like a packet of dirty linen'.

While he was up aloft, Delacourt preached at him in Latin, and he became, 'perhaps the best Christian in Cochin China'.

Dr. Carpenter's explanation must either be that Delacourt lied; or that a tradition, surviving from savagery, and enforced by the example of the Bishop of Tilopolis, made a missionary, un peu incredule, as he says, believe that he saw, and watched for half an hour, a phenomenon which he never saw at all. But then Dr.

Carpenter also dismisses, with none but the general theory already quoted, the experience of 'a n.o.bleman of high scientific attainments,' who 'seriously a.s.sures us' that he saw Home 'sail in the air, by moonlight, out of one window and in at another, at the height of seventy feet from the ground.' {326}

Here is the stumbling-block. A n.o.bleman of high scientific attainment, in company with another n.o.bleman, and a captain in the army, all vouched for this performance of Home. Now could the savage tradition, which attributes flight to convulsive and entranced persons, exercise such an influence on these three educated modern witnesses; could an old piece of folklore, in company with 'expectancy,' so wildly delude them? Can 'high scientific attainments' leave their possessor with such humble powers of observation? But, to be sure, Dr. Carpenter does not tell his readers that there were _three_ witnesses. Dr. Carpenter says that, if we believe Lord Crawford (and his friends), we can 'have no reason for refusing credit to the historical evidence of the demoniacal elevation of Simon Magus'. Let us point out that we have no contemporary evidence at all about Simon's feat, while for Home's, we have the evidence of three living and honourable men, whom Dr. Carpenter might have cross-examined. The doings of Home and of Simon were parallel, but nothing can be more different than the nature of the evidence for what they are said to have done.

This, perhaps, might have been patent to a man like Dr. Carpenter of 'early scientific training'. But he ill.u.s.trated his own doctrine of 'the dominant idea'; he did not see that he was guilty of a fallacy, because his 'idea' dominated him. Stumbling into as deep a gulf, Dr. Carpenter put Lord Crawford's evidence (he omitted that of his friends) on a level with, or below, the depositions of witnesses as to 'the aerial transport of witches to attend their demoniacal festivities'. But who ever swore that he _saw_ witches so transported? The evidence was not to witnessed facts, but only to a current belief, backed by confessions under torture. No testimony could be less on a par with that of a living 'n.o.bleman of high scientific attainments,' to his own experience.

In three pages Dr. Carpenter has shown that 'early scientific training' in physiology and pathology, does not necessarily enable its possessor to state a case fully. Nor does it prompt him to discriminate between rumours coming, a hundred and fifty years after the date of the alleged occurrences, from a remote, credulous, and unscientific age: and the statements of witnesses all living, all honourable, and, in one case, of 'high scientific attainments.'

{327}

It is this solemn belief in his own infallibility as a judge of evidence combined with his almost incredible ignorance of what evidence is, that makes Dr. Carpenter such an amusing controversialist.

If any piece of fact is to be proved, it is plain that the concurrent testimony of three living and honourable men is worth more than a bit of gossip, which, after filtering through a century or two, is reported by an early Christian Father. In matters wholly marvellous, like Home's flight in the air, the evidence of three living and honourable men need not, of course, convince us of the fact. But this evidence is in itself a fact to be considered--'Why do these gentlemen tell this tale?' we ask; but Dr. Carpenter puts the testimony on the level of patristic tattle many centuries old, written down, on no authority, long after the event. Yet the worthy doctor calmly talks about 'want of scientific culture preventing people from appreciating the force of scientific reasoning,' and that after giving such examples of 'scientific reasoning' as we have examined. {328} It is in this way that Science makes herself disliked. By aid of ordinary intelligence, and of an ordinary cla.s.sical education, every one (however uncultivated in 'science') can satisfy himself that Dr. Carpenter argued at random. Yet we do not a.s.sert that 'early scientific training' _prevents_ people from understanding the nature of evidence. Dr. Carpenter had the training, but he was impetuous, and under a dominant idea, so he blundered along.

Dr. Carpenter frequently invoked for the explanation of marvels, a cause which is vera causa, expectancy. 'The expectation of a certain result is often enough to produce it' (p. 12). This he proves by cases of hypnotised patients who did, or suffered, what they expected to be ordered to suffer or do, though no such order was really given to them. Again (p. 40) he urges that imaginative people, who sit for a couple of hours, 'especially if in the dark,'

believing or hoping to see a human body, or a table, rise in the air, probably 'pa.s.s into a state which is neither sleeping nor waking, but between the two, in which they see, hear, or feel by touch, anything they have been led to expect will present itself.'

This is, indeed, highly probable. But we must suppose that _all_ present fall into this ambiguous state, described of old by Porphyry. One waking spectator who sees nothing would make the statements of the others even more worthless than usual. And it is certain that it is not even pretended that all, always, see the same phenomena.

'One saw an arm, and one a hand, and one the waving of a gown,' in that seance at Branxholme, where only William of Deloraine beheld all,

And knew, but how it mattered not, It was the wizard, Michael Scott. {329}

Granting the ambiguous state, granting darkness, and expectancy, anything may seem to happen. But Dr. Carpenter wholly omits such cases as that of Mr. Hamilton Aide, and of M. Alphonse Karr. Both were absolutely sceptical. Both disliked Home very much, and thought him an underbred Yankee quack and charlatan. Both were in the 'expectancy' of seeing no marvels, were under 'the dominant idea' that nothing unusual would occur. Both, in a brilliantly lighted room of a villa near Nice, saw a chair make a rush from the wall into the middle of the room, and saw a very large and heavy table, untouched, rise majestically in the air. M. Karr at once got under the table, and hunted, vainly, for mechanical appliances.

Then he and Mr. Aide went home, disconcerted, and in very bad humour. How do 'expectancy' and the 'dominant idea' explain this experience, which Mr. Aide has published in the Nineteenth Century?

The expectancy and dominant ideas of these gentlemen should have made them see the table and chair sit tight, while believers observed them in active motion. Again, how could Mr. Crookes's lack of 'a special training in the bodily and mental const.i.tution, abnormal as well as normal,' of 'mediums,' affect his power of observing whether a plank of wood did, or did not, move to a certain extent untouched, or slightly touched, and whether the difference of position was, or was not, registered mechanically? (p. 70). It was a pure matter of skilled and trained observation in mechanics. Dr.

Huggins was also present at this experiment in a mode of motion.

Him Dr. Carpenter gracefully discredited as an 'amateur,' without 'a broad basis of _general_ scientific culture'. He had devoted himself 'to a branch of research which tasks the keenest powers of _observation_'. Now it was precisely powers of _observation_ that were required. 'There are _moral_ sources of error,' of which a mere observer like Dr. Huggins would be unaware. And 'one of the most potent of these is a proclivity to believe in the reality of spiritual communications,' particularly dangerous in a case where 'spiritual communications,' were not in question! The question was, did an indicator move, or not, under a certain amount of pressure?

Indiscreetly enough, to be sure, the pressure was attributed to 'psychic force,' and perhaps that was what Dr. Carpenter had in his mind, when he warned Dr. Huggins against 'the proclivity to believe in the reality of spiritual communications'.

About a wilderness of other phenomena, attested by scores of sane people, from Lord Crawford to Mr. S. C. Hall, Dr. Carpenter 'left himself no time to speak' (p. 105). This was convenient, but the lack of time prevented Dr. Carpenter from removing our stumbling- block, the one obstacle which keeps us from adopting, with no shadow of doubt, the theory that explains all the marvels by the survival and revival of savage delusions. Dr. Carpenter's hypothesis of expectancy, of a dominant idea, acting on believers, in an ambiguous state, and in the dark, can do much, but it cannot account for the experience of wide-awake sceptics, under the opposite dominant idea, in a brilliant light.

Dr. Carpenter exposed and exploded a quant.i.ty of mesmeric spiritualistic myths narrated by Dr. Gregory, by Miss Martineau, and by less respectable if equally gullible authorities. But, speaking merely as perplexed and unconvinced students of argument and evidence, we cannot say that he removed the difficulties which have been ill.u.s.trated and described.

Table-turning, after what is called a 'boom' in 1853-60, is now an abandoned amus.e.m.e.nt. It is deserted, like croquet, and it is even less to be regretted. But its existence enabled disputants to ill.u.s.trate the ordinary processes of reasoning; each making a.s.sertions up to the limit of his personal experience; each attacking, as 'superst.i.tious,' all who had seen, or fancied they had seen, more than himself, and each fighting gallantly for his own explanatory hypothesis, which never did explain any phenomena beyond those attested by his own senses. The others were declared not to exist, or to be the result of imposture and mal-observation,--and perhaps they were.

The truly diverting thing is that Home did not believe in the other 'mediums,' nor in anything in the way of a marvel (such as matter pa.s.sing through matter) which he had not seen with his own eyes.

Whether Home's incredulity should be reckoned as a proof of his belief in his own powers, might be argued either way.

THE GHOST THEORY OF THE ORIGIN OF RELIGION

Evolutionary Theory of the Origin of Religion. Facts misunderstood suggest ghosts, which develop into G.o.ds. This process lies behind history and experience. Difficulties of the Theory. The Theory of Lucretius. Objections Mr. Tyler's Theory. The question of abnormal facts not discussed by Mr. Tylor. Possibility that such 'psychical'

facts are real, and are elements in development of savage religion.

The evidence for psychical phenomena compared with that which, in other matters, satisfies anthropologists. Examples. Conclusion.

Among the many hypotheses as to the origin of religion, that which we may call the evolutionary, or anthropological, is most congenial to modern habits of thought. The old belief in a sudden, miraculous revelation is commonly rejected, though, in one sense, religion was none the less 'revealed,' even if man was obliged to work his way to the conception of deity by degrees. To attain that conception was the necessary result of man's reflection on the sum of his relations to the universe. The attainment, however, of the monotheistic idea is not now generally regarded as immediate and instinctive. A slow advance, a prolonged evolution was required, whether we accept Mr.

Max Muller's theory of 'the sense of the Infinite,' or whether we prefer the anthropological hypothesis. The latter scheme, with various modifications, is the scheme of Epicurus, Lucretius, Hume, Mr. Tylor, and Mr. Herbert Spencer. Man half consciously transferred his implicit sense that he was a living and rational being to nature in general, and recognised that earth, sky, wind, clouds, trees, the lower animals, and so on, were persons like himself, persons perhaps more powerful and awful than himself. This transference of personality can scarcely be called the result of a conscious process of reasoning. Man might recognise personality everywhere, without much more thought or argument than a kitten exerts when it takes a cork or a ball for a living playmate. But consciousness must have reached a more explicit stage, when man began to ask himself what a _person_ is, what life is, and when he arrived at the conclusion that life is a spirit. To advance from that conclusion; to explain all life as the manifestation of indwelling spirits; then to withdraw the conception of life and personality from inanimate things, to select from among spirits One more powerful than the rest, to recognise that One as disembodied, as superior, then as supreme, then as unique, and so to attain the monotheistic conception, has been, according to the evolutionary hypothesis, the tendency of human thought.

Unluckily we cannot study the process in its course of action.

Perhaps there is no savage race so lowly endowed, that it does not possess, in addition to a world of 'spirits,' something that answers to the conception of G.o.d. Whether that is so, or not, is a question of evidence. We have often been told that this or the other people 'has no religious ideas at all'. But later we hear that they do possess a belief in spirits, and very often better information proves that, in one stage or other of advance or degradation, the theistic conception of a Maker and Judge of the world is also present. Meanwhile even civilised and monotheistic peoples also admit the existence of a world of spirits of the dead, of 'demons'

(as in Platonism), of saints (as in Catholicism), of devils, of angels, or of subordinate deities. Thus the elements of religion are universally distributed in all degrees of culture, though one element is more conspicuous in one place or mood, another more conspicuous in another. In one mood the savage, or the civilised man, may be called monotheistic, in another mood atheistic, in a third, practically polytheistic. Only a few men anywhere, and they only when consciously engaged in speculation, a.s.sume a really definite and exclusive mental att.i.tude on the subject. The orthodox monotheistic Mussulman has his afreets, and djinns; the Jew, or the Christian, has his angels, the Catholic has his saints; the Platonist has his demons; Superst.i.tion has its ghosts. The question is whether all these spiritual beings are only ghosts raised to higher powers: or (in the case of deity), to the highest conceivable power, while, even when this last process has been accomplished, we ask whether other ghosts, on lower grades, continue to be recognised. Meanwhile the whole anthropological hypothesis, whether valid or invalid, lies behind history, behind the experience of even the most backward races at present extant. If it be urged, as by Hume, that the conception of a supreme deity is only a reflection of kingship in human society, we must observe that some monarchical races, like the Aztecs, seem to have possessed no recognised monarchical Zeus; while something very like the monotheistic conception is found among races so remote from the monarchical state of society as to have no obvious distinctions of rank, like the Australian blacks. Moreover the evidence, on such difficult points, is obscure, and fluctuating, and capable of various interpretation. Even among the most backward peoples, the traceable shadow of a monotheistic idea often seems to bear marks of degradation and disuse, rather than of nascent development. There is a G.o.d, but He is neglected, and tribal spirits receive prayer and sacrifice. Just as in art there is a point where we find it difficult to decide whether an object is decadent, or archaic, so it is in the study of religious conceptions.

These are a few among the inevitable difficulties and obscurities which haunt the anthropological or evolutionary theory of the origin of religion. Other difficulties meet us at the very beginning. The theory regards G.o.ds as merely ghosts or spirits, raised to a higher, or to the highest power. Mankind, according to the system, was inevitably led, by the action of reason upon apparent facts, to endow all things, from humanity itself to earth, sky, rain, sea, fire, with conscious personality, life, spirit; and these attributes were as gradually withdrawn again, under stress of better knowledge, till only man was left with a soul, and only the universe was left with a G.o.d. The last scientific step, then, it may be inferred, is to deprive the universe of a G.o.d, and mankind of souls.

This step may be naturally taken by those who conceive that the whole process of ghost and G.o.d-making is based on a mere set of natural and inevitable fallacies, and who decline to recognise that these progressive fallacies (if fallacies they are) may be steps on a divinely appointed road towards truth; that He led us by a way that we knew not, and a path we did not understand. Yet, of course, it is plain that a conclusion may be correct, although it was reached by erroneous processes. All scientific verities have been attained in this manner, by a gradual modification and improvement of inadequate working hypotheses, by the slow subst.i.tution of correctness for error. Thus monotheism and the doctrine of the soul may be in no worse case than the Copernican theory, or the theory of the circulation of the blood, or the Darwinian theory; itself the successor of innumerable savage guesses, conjectures of Empedocles, ideas of Cuvier, of the elder Darwin, of Lamarck, and of Chambers.

At present, of course, the theistic hypothesis, and the hypothesis of a soul, do not admit of scientific verification. The difficulty is to demonstrate that 'mind' may exist, and work, apart from 'matter'. But it may conceivably become verifiable that the relations of 'mind' and 'matter' are, at all events, less obviously and immediately interdependent, that will and judgment are less closely and exclusively attached to physical organisms than modern science has believed. Now, according to the anthropological theory of the origin of religion, it was precisely from the opposite of the scientific belief,--it was from the belief that consciousness and will may be exerted apart from, at a distance from, the physical organism,--that the savage fallacies began, which ended, ex hypothesi, in monotheism, and in the doctrine of the soul. The savage, it is said, started from normal facts, which he misinterpreted. But suppose he started, not from normal facts alone, but also from abnormal facts,--from facts which science does not yet recognise at all,--then it is possible that the conclusions of the savage, though far too sweeping, and in parts undeniably erroneous, are yet, to a certain extent, not mistaken. He may have had 'a sane spot in his mind,' and a sane impulse may have led him into the right direction. Man may have faculties which savages recognise, and which physical science does not recognise. Man may be surrounded by agencies which savages exaggerate, and which science disregards altogether, and these faculties and agencies may point to an element of truth which is often cast aside as a survival of superst.i.tion, as the 'after-image' of an illusion.

The lowest known stage, and, according to the evolutionary hypothesis, the earliest stage in religion, is the belief in the ghosts of the dead, and in no other spiritual ent.i.ties. Whether this belief anywhere exists alone, and untempered by higher creeds, is another question. These ghosts are fed, propitiated, receive worship, and, to put it briefly, the fittest ghosts survive, and become G.o.ds. Meanwhile the conception of ghosts of the dead is more or less consciously extended, so that spirits who never were incarnate as men become credible beings. They may inform inanimate objects, trees, rivers, fire, clouds, earth, sky, the great natural departments, and thence polytheism results. There are political processes, the consolidation of a state, for example, which help to blend these G.o.ds of various different origins into a divine consistory. One of these G.o.ds, it may be of sky, or air becomes king, and reflection may gradually come to recognise him not only as supreme, but as, theoretically, unique, and thus Zeus, from a very limited monarchy, may rise to solitary all-fatherhood. Yet Zeus may, originally, have been only the ghost of a dead medicine-man who was called 'Sky,' or he may have been the departmental spirit who presided over the sky, or he may have been sky conceived of as a personality, or these different elements may have been mingled in Zeus. But the whole conception of spirit, in any case, was derived, it is argued, from the conception of ghosts, and that conception may be traced to erroneous savage interpretations of natural and normal facts.

If all this be valid, the idea of G.o.d is derived from a savage fallacy, though, of course, it does not follow that an idea is erroneous, _because_ it was attained by mistaken processes and from false premises. That, however, is the inference which many minds are inclined to draw from the evolutionary hypothesis. But if the facts on which the savage reasoned are, some of them, rare, abnormal, and not scientifically accepted; if, in short, they are facts demonstrative of unrecognised human faculties, if these faculties raise a presumption that will, mind, and organism are less closely interdependent than science supposes, then the savage reasoning may contain an important element of rejected truth. It may even seem, at least, conceivable that certain factors in the conception of 'spirit' were not necessarily evolved as the anthropological hypothesis conceives them to have been.

Science had scarcely begun her secular conflict with religion, when she discovered that the battle must be fought on haunted ground, on the field of the ghosts of the dead. 'There are no G.o.ds, or only dei otiosi, careless, indolent deities. There is nothing conscious that survives death, no soul that can exist apart from the fleshly body.' Such were the doctrines of Epicurus and Lucretius, but to these human nature opposed 'facts'; we see, people said, men long dead in our dreams, or even when awake: the Homeric Achilles, beholding Patroclus in a dream, instantly infers that there verily _is_ a shadow, an eidolon, a shadowy consciousness, shadowy presence, which outlasts the death of the body. To this Epicurus and Lucretius reply, that the belief is caused by fallacious inferences from facts, these facts, appearances beheld in sleep or vision, these spectral faces of the long dead, are caused by 'films peeled off from the surface of objects, which fly to and fro through the air, and do likewise frighten our minds when they present themselves to us _awake as well as in sleep_, what time we behold strange shapes, and "idols" of the light-bereaved,' Lucretius expressly advances this doctrine of 'films' (an application of the Democritean theory of perception), 'that we may not believe that souls break loose from Acheron, or that shades fly about among the living, or that any part of us is left behind after death'. {341a} Believers in ghosts must have replied that they do _not_ see, in sleep or awake, 'films' representing a mouldering corpse, as they ought to do on the Lucretian hypothesis, but the image, or idolon of a living face. Plutarch says that if philosophers may laugh, these long enduring 'films,' from a body perhaps many ages deep in dust, are laughable. {341b} However Lucretius is so wedded to his 'films'

that he explains a purely fanciful being, like a centaur, by a fortuitous combination of the film of a man with the film of a horse. A 'ghost' then, is, to the mind of Lucretius, merely a casual persistent film of a dead man, composed of atoms very light which can fly at inconceivable speed, and are not arrested by material obstacles. By parity of reasoning no doubt, if Pythagoras is seen at the same moment in Thurii and Metapontum, only a film of him is beheld at one of these two places. The Democritean theory of ordinary perception thus becomes the Lucretian theory of dreams and ghosts. Not that Lucretius denies the existence of a rational soul, in living men, {341c} a portion of it may even leave the body during sleep, and only a spark may be left in the embers of the physical organism. If even that spark withdraws, death follows, and the soul, no longer warmly housed in the body, ceases to exist. For the 'film' (ghost) is not the soul, and the soul is not the film, whereas savage philosophy identifies the soul with the ghost. Even Lucretius retains the savage conception of the soul as a thing of rarer matter, a thing partly separable from the body, but that thing is resolved for ever into its elements on the death of the body.

His imaginary 'film,' on the other hand, may apparently endure for ages.

The Lucretian theory had, for Lucretius, the advantages of being physical, and of dealing a blow at the hated doctrine of a future life. For the public it had the disadvantages of being incapable of proof, of not explaining the facts, as conceived to exist, and of being highly ridiculous, as Plutarch observed. Much later philosophers explained all apparitions as impressions of sense, recorded on the brain, and so actively revived that they seemed to have an objective existence. One or two stock cases (Nicolai's, and Mrs. A.'s), in which people _in a morbid condition_, saw hallucinations which they knew to be hallucinations, did, and do, a great deal of duty. Mr. Sully has them, as Hibbert and Brewster have them, engaged as protagonists. Collective hallucinations, and the hallucinations of the sane which coincide with the death, or other crisis in the experience of the person who seemed to be seen, were set down to imagination, 'expectant attention,' imposture, mistaken ident.i.ty, and so forth.

Without dwelling on the causes, physical or psychological, which have been said by Frazer of Tiree (1707), Ferrier, Hibbert, Scott, and others, to account for the hallucinations of the sane, for 'ghosts,' Mr. Tylor has ably erected his theory of animism, or the belief in spirits. Thinking savages, he says, 'were deeply impressed by two groups of biological phenomena,' by the facts of living, dying, sleep, trance, waking and disease. They asked: 'What is the difference between a living body and a dead one?' They wanted to know the causes of sleep, trance and death. They were also concerned to explain the appearances of dead or absent human beings in dreams and waking visions. Now it was plain that 'life'

could go away, as it does in death, or seems to do in dreamless sleep. Again, a phantasm of a living man can go away and appear to waking or sleeping people at a distance. The conclusion was reached by savages that the phantasm which thus appears is identical with the life which 'goes away' in sleep or trance. Sometimes it returns, when the man wakes, or escapes from his trance. Sometimes it stays away, he dies, his body corrupts, but the phantasm endures, and is occasionally seen in sleeping or waking vision. The general result of savage thought is that man's life must be conceived as a personal and rational ent.i.ty, called his 'soul,' while it remains in his body, his 'wraith,' when it is beheld at a distance during his life, his 'ghost,' when it is observed after his death. Many circ.u.mstances confirmed or ill.u.s.trated this savage hypothesis Breath remains with the body during life, deserts it at death. Hence the words spiritus, 'spirit,' [Greek], anima, and, when the separable nature of the shadow is noticed, hence come 'shade,' 'umbra,'

[Greek], with a.n.a.logues in many languages. The hypothesis was also strengthened, by the great difficulty which savages feel in discriminating between what occurs in dreams, and what occurs to men awake. Many civilised persons feel the same difficulty with regard to hallucinations beheld by them when in bed, asleep or awake they know not, on the dim border of existence. Reflection on all these experiences ended in the belief in spirits, in souls of the living, in wraiths of the living, in ghosts of the dead, and, finally, in G.o.d.

This theory is most cogently presented by Mr. Tylor, and is confirmed by examples chosen from his wide range of reading. But, among these normal and natural facts, as of sleep, dream, breath, life, dying, Mr. Tylor includes (not as facts, but as examples of applied animistic theory) cases of 'clairvoyance,' apparitions of the dying seen by the living at a distance, second sight, ghostly disturbances of knocking and rapping, movements of objects, and so forth. It is not a question for Mr. Tylor whether clairvoyance ever occurs: whether 'death-bed wraiths' have been seen to an extent not explicable by the laws of chance, whether disturbances and movements of objects not to be accounted for by human agency are matters of universal and often well-attested report. Into the question of fact, Mr. Tylor explicitly declines to enter; these things only concern him because they have been commonly explained by the 'animistic hypothesis,' that is, by the fancied action of spirits.