[Decoration]
I
WHAT _is_ the fear of ghosts among those who believe in ghosts?
All fear is the result of experience,--experience of the individual or
of the race,--experience either of the present life or of lives
forgotten. Even the fear of the unknown can have no other origin. And
the fear of ghosts must be a product of past pain.
Probably the fear of ghosts, as well as the belief in them, had its
beginning in dreams. It is a peculiar fear. No other fear is so
intense; yet none is so vague. Feelings thus voluminous and dim are
super-individual mostly,--feelings inherited,--feelings made within us
by the experience of the dead.
What experience?
Nowhere do I remember reading a plain statement of the reason why ghosts
are feared. Ask any ten intelligent persons of your acquaintance, who
remember having once been afraid of ghosts, to tell you exactly why they
were afraid,--to define the fancy behind the fear;--and I doubt whether
even one will be able to answer the question. The literature of
folk-lore--oral and written--throws no clear light upon the subject. We
find, indeed, various legends of men torn asunder by phantoms; but such
gross imaginings could not explain the peculiar quality of ghostly fear.
It is not a fear of bodily violence. It is not even a reasoning
fear,--not a fear that can readily explain itself,--which would not be
the case if it were founded upon definite ideas of physical danger.
Furthermore, although primitive ghosts may have been imagined as capable
of tearing and devouring, the common idea of a ghost is certainly that
of a being intangible and imponderable.[118]
[118] I may remark here that in many old Japanese legends and
ballads, ghosts are represented as having power to _pull
off_ people's heads. But so far as the origin of the fear
of ghosts is concerned, such stories explain nothing,--since
the experiences that evolved the fear must have been real,
not imaginary, experiences.
Now I venture to state boldly that the common fear of ghosts is _the
fear of being touched by ghosts_,--or, in other words, that the imagined
Supernatural is dreaded mainly because of its imagined power to touch.
Only to _touch_, remember!--not to wound or to kill.
But this dread of the touch would itself be the result of
experience,--chiefly, I think, of prenatal experience stored up in the
individual by inheritance, like the child's fear of darkness. And who
can ever have had the sensation of being touched by ghosts? The answer
is simple:--_Everybody who has been seized by phantoms in a dream._
Elements of primeval fears--fears older than humanity--doubtless enter
into the child-terror of darkness. But the more definite fear of
ghosts may very possibly be composed with inherited results of
dream-pain,--ancestral experience of nightmare. And the intuitive terror
of supernatural touch can thus be evolutionally explained.
Let me now try to illustrate my theory by relating some typical
experiences.