You are startled, and well you may be, “at the notion that the
resurrection of Christ has been the mere offspring of the imagination.”
I am quoting your words, but you have not quoted mine. I never said, nor
should I dream of saying, that the resurrection of Christ was “the
offspring of the imagination,” any more than I should say that the law
of gravitation is “the offspring of the imagination,” or that light is
“the offspring of the eye.” But this is just an ordinary specimen of the
way in which people whose minds are blocked and choked with prejudice,
misunderstand what is contrary to their preconceptions. You have made up
your mind that the Imagination is a kind of excrescence on humanity, a
faculty independent of the Creator, and incapable of being made by Him
the medium of revelation; and so you pervert my words to suit your
fancies. But what I said was that Imagination is the basis of all that
is worth calling knowledge, and that, as God reveals the laws of
astronomy through imaginative Reason, so He has revealed the
Resurrection of Christ through imaginative Faith.
Before speaking of the special bearing of the Imagination upon the
manifestation of Christ’s Resurrection, let me say a word or two on the
manner in which our human environment appears to have been adapted to
foster the growth of this faculty. You will be better prepared to expect
great things from the Imagination when you reflect on the great things
that have been wrought by God for its development. You say that you do
not understand the statement in the last paragraph of my last letter,
that the Imagination has been made “the medium of conveying the
revelation of the immortality of the soul,” and still less do you
comprehend how this revelation has been going on “from the creation of
the world,” especially since, during a large portion of this time, there
must have been no men to receive any revelation at all.
I said deliberately “from the creation of the world,” and not “from the
creation of mankind,” because inanimate creation itself appears to me to
bear witness to a purpose, from the first, that this visible world
should help its future tenants to imagine things invisible. Consider but
one instance, the immense influence of Night upon the Imagination, and
you will perhaps come to the conclusion that, but for the provision of
darkness (“these orbs of light and shade”), men would never have been
led to a faith in the light of immortality. In the first place by
revealing to us the wonder-striking order of the infinite stars—which,
but for darkness, would have remained for ever a closed book to
men—Night leads us to dream, or to infer, that there may be other pages
still unturned in the book of Nature’s mysteries, and stimulates us,
however far we may progress in thought, still to press on to something
more beyond; and at the same time, throwing a temporary veil over all
the sights of day, it persuades us to trust that on the morrow the veil
will be removed, and that in the meantime all things will continue in
their order.
Night is aided by sleep and dreams. Slumbering in the darkness, and
bereft of the control of the understanding, Imagination has reproduced
before the mind’s eye the sights of daylight, blended together without
thought of fitness, order, time, or place, so as to form quite new
combinations which scarcely any deliberate daytime effort could have so
vividly depicted: and in the long train of confused visionary images
there have sometimes passed before the mental eye of the mourner or the
murderer the very shapes, and even the voices of the dead, forcing the
slumberer to start up and cry, “They live, they still live; there is a
life beyond the grave.” This trans-sepulchral existence having been once
discerned, the Imagination has set to work to formulate the laws of it,
and to map out and people its regions, thus causing heaven and hell to
become realities and (in course of time) ancestral traditions, and
almost inherited instincts. Sometimes, Imagination has come with a
special and rarely manifested force to the aid of a belief in a future
life. Not in dreams, but in wakeful moments, though for the most part by
night, there have appeared before the mind’s eye such vivid images of
the departed, as have convinced not only the seers of the visions but
also their friends—and so, by a pervasive influence, all but a small
minority of the human race—that something real has been seen, the spirit
of the dead made visible: and to this day, in England, there are not
wanting men of the highest ability, culture, and love of truth, who busy
themselves with serious investigations into the reality of apparitions.
Does this seem to you fanciful? Surely it is the fact that Night and its
phenomena have largely influenced the spiritual, or superstitious, side
of human nature: and if you admit this to be the fact, the only
difference between us is this, that to you this subtle but universal
influence of Darker Nature on Man appears to have been the result of
chance, whereas I think it came from God. To you, one half of Time
appears to have been allowed by God to be spiritually barren, set apart
for the mere repairing of the human material machine: I do not believe
that the spiritual making of Man was foreordained on this “half-time”
principle.
If however you ask me what amount of truth or reality there has been in
these dreams and visions, I should reply, as about poetry and prophecy,
that some of these imaginations have represented realities, some
unrealities; but that the total result to which they have led men, the
belief in the immortality of the soul, is a reality. But when I speak of
a “real vision” of a spirit or ghost, I hope you will not misunderstand
me so far as to suppose that I could mean a material, gas-like (though
intangible) form, occupying so many cubical inches of space. A spirit,
so far as I conceive it, does not occupy space; nor is it the object of
sight, any more than of smell or touch; it is, to me, of the nature of a
thought, only a thought personified, _i.e._ a thought capable of loving
and being loved, of hating and being hated. But though it may not be the
object of the senses in the same way in which external things are, it
may be manifested to the Imagination, _i.e._ the mind’s eye, in such a
way as to produce the same effect as though it were an external object
seen by the body’s eye.
Every one who loves truth will tread with cautious steps in this
mysterious province of phantasmal existence, and carefully measure his
language, knowing that we are in a region of illusion, exaggeration, and
(sometimes) of imposture. But there does seem evidence to show that
people (mostly perhaps twins), at a distance from one another, have in
some at present inexplicable manner influenced one another so that the
disease or death or calamity of one has been simultaneously made known
to the other; and you have probably read of cases, fairly supported,
which would show that a passionate longing on the part of a dying man to
see some distant friend may create a responsive emotion, if not an
actual vision, in the mind of that friend. We are so completely in the
dark as to the originating causes (for physiology tells us nothing but
the instrumental causes) which produce our thoughts, that I see nothing
at all absurd in the notion that every truthful and vivid conception of
one human being in the mind of another upon earth, arises from some
communion in the spirit-world between the spirits of the two.
So much for conjectures as to the possible reality or possible causes of
some classes of apparitions. I do not often myself set much store on
them, except so far as they are of use in reminding us how wide is the
province of possibility, or how narrow the province of certainty, in the
region of ultimate causation. I lay stress, not upon any conjectural
explanation of ghost phenomena, but upon the following general
considerations, most of which are of the nature, not of conjectures, but
of facts: 1st, man is what he is, largely in virtue of the Imagination;
2nd, one half of man’s time and one half of the phenomena of Nature seem
to have no other purpose (so far as man is concerned) than to stimulate
the Imagination; 3rd, if we suppose that this wonderful world is under
the government of a good God, although opposed by an inferior Evil, we
are led to infer that He has implanted in us this faculty of Imagination
and that the noble aspirations and beliefs which have been developed by
it have not been unmixed delusions; 4th, among the noblest of the
beliefs thus developed, has been the belief in the immortality of the
soul, which, after being tested by the faith of many centuries, is at
this day cherished by the majority of civilized mankind; 5th, this
belief has proved its truth, so far as imaginations can prove themselves
true, by working well, _i.e._ it has raised and ennobled those who have
entertained it, and has made them (on the whole) morally the better for
it; 6th, a part of the training of the Imagination, intimately connected
with the production of the belief in the immortality of the soul, has
been the development of a power to see mental visions, with all the
vividness of material visions; 7th, among these visions, some of the
most common have been apparitions of the forms of the dead, and some of
the best authenticated of these have occurred where a strong unfulfilled
desire has possessed the departed in the moment of dying and where the
seer of the apparition has been bound by close ties to the dead.
These are the considerations, mostly facts—you may dispute some of them,
but not all I think—in the light of which I should endeavour to
illustrate the manifestation of Christ to His disciples after death. To
these facts I merely added the conjecture that possibly there may be
something besides the mere movement of our brains that produces these
images of the departed, something—I will not say external, for a spirit,
if independent of place, can be neither external to us nor internal—but
some act in the invisible world of spirits corresponding to every
apparition upon the visible world. But I did not pledge myself to such a
theory. I only insisted that the whole revelation of poetry and religion
through the Imagination has been of such inestimable importance to man
that we cannot put it all aside as false because imaginative; we must
regard it with reverence and be prepared to find that in the central
event of the purest religion of all, the Imagination has been made the
medium of the culminating revelation of spirit and truth. Indeed, if the
spiritual world is real and near, it is difficult to conceive how
God—without breaking the Laws of Nature and without unfitting us for
life in a world of sense—could better give us glimpses of an invisible
environment, than by causing it to press in, as it were, upon the
Imagination, so that the mind’s eye, thus stimulated by real
invisibilities, may, for the time, supplant the bodily faculty of sight,
and afterwards leave behind in us a permanent suggestion that, as there
is a material world corresponding to the bodily eye, so there is a
mind’s world corresponding to the mind’s eye. With this pre-conception I
will ask you to approach the narrative of Christ’s Resurrection as I
shall endeavour to set it forth in my next letter from the natural point
of view.
XXII
THE RESURRECTION