Evolutionary Theory of the Origin of Religion. Facts misunderstood
suggest ghosts, which develop into gods. 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 God. 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, assume a really
definite and exclusive mental attitude 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; Superstition 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 God, 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 gods 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 God. The last scientific step, then, it may be inferred, is
to deprive the universe of a God, and mankind of souls.
This step may be naturally taken by those who conceive that the
whole process of ghost and god-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 substitution 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 superstition, 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 entities. 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 gods. 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 gods of various different origins into a divine
consistory. One of these gods, 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 God 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 gods, 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 identity, 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 entity, 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
circumstances confirmed or illustrated 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 analogues 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
God.
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.
The animistic hypothesis, again, is the result, naturally
fallacious, of savage man's reasonings on life, death, sleep,
dreams, trance, breath, shadow and the other kindred biological
phenomena. Thus clairvoyance (on the animistic hypothesis) is the
flight of the conscious 'spirit' of a living man across space or
time; the 'deathbed wraith' is the visible apparition of the newly-
emancipated 'spirit,' and 'spirits' cause the unexplained
disturbances and movements of objects. In fact it is certain that
the animistic hypothesis (though a mere fallacy) does colligate a
great number of facts very neatly, and has persisted from times of
low savagery to the present age of reason. So here is a case of the
savage origin and persistent 'survival' of a hypothesis,--the most
potent hypothesis in the history of humanity.
From Mr. Tylor's point of view, his concern with the subject ceases
here, it is not his business to ascertain whether the abnormal facts
are facts or fancies. Yet, to other students, this question is very
important. First, if clairvoyance, wraiths, and the other alleged
phenomena, really do occur, or have occurred, then savage man had
much better grounds for the animistic hypothesis than if no such
phenomena ever existed. For instance, if a medicine-man not only
went into trances, but brought back from these expeditions knowledge
otherwise inaccessible, then there were better grounds for believing
in a consciousness exerted apart from the body than if there were no
evidence but that of non-veridical dreams. If merely the dream-
coincidences which the laws of chance permit were observed, the
belief in the soul's dream-flight would win less favourable and
general acceptance than it would if clairvoyance, 'the sleep of the
shadow,' were a real if rare experience. The very name given by the
Eskimos to the hypnotic state, 'the sleep of the shadow,' proves
that savages do make distinctions between normal and abnormal
conditions of slumber.
In the same way a few genuine wraiths, or ghosts, or 'veridical
hallucinations,' would be enough to start the animistic hypothesis,
or to confirm it notably, if it was already started. As to
disturbances and movements of objects unexplained, these, in his own
experience, suggested, even to De Morgan, the hypothesis of a
conscious, active, and purposeful will, _not_ that of any human
being present. Now such a will is hardly to be defined otherwise
than as 'spiritual'. This order of phenomena, like those of
clairvoyance and wraiths, might either give rise to the savage
animistic hypothesis, or, at least, might confirm it greatly. In
fact, if the sets of abnormal phenomena existed, or were held to
exist, savage man scarcely needed the normal phenomena for the basis
of his spiritual belief. The normal phenomena lent him such terms
as 'spirit,' 'shadow,' but much of his theory might have been built
on the foundation of the abnormal phenomena alone. A 'veridical
hallucination,' of the dying would give him a 'wraith'; a recognised
hallucination of the dead would give him a ghost: the often
reported and unexplained movements and disturbances would give him a
vui, 'house spirit,' 'brownie,' 'domovoy,' follet, lar, or lutin.
Or these occurrences might suggest to the thinking savage that some
discontented influence survived from the recently dead.
Four thousand years have passed since houses were haunted in Egypt,
and have left some sane, educated, and methodical men to meet the
same annoyances as the ancient Egyptians did, by the same measures.
We do not pretend to discover, without examination, the causes of
the sounds and sights which baffle trained and not superstitious
investigators. But we do say that similar occurrences, in a kraal
or an Eskimo hut, in a wigwam, in a cave, or under a gunyeh, would
greatly confirm the animistic hypothesis of savages. The theory of
imposture (in some cases) does undeniably break down, for the people
who hold it cannot even suggest a modus operandi within the reach of
the human beings concerned, as in the case of the Wesleys. The
theory of contagious hallucination of all the senses is the property
of Coleridge alone. The hypothesis of a nervous force which sets up
centres of conscious action is confined to Hartmann, and to certain
Highland philosophers, cavalierly dismissed by the Rev. Robert Kirk
as 'men illiterate'. Instead of making these guesses, the savage
thinkers merely applied the animistic hypothesis, which they had
found to work very well already, and, as De Morgan says, to
colligate the phenomena better than any other theory. We cannot
easily conceive men who know neither sleep nor dreams, but if the
normal phenomena of sleep and dreams had not existed, the abnormal
phenomena already described, if they occurred, as they are
universally said to do, could have given rise, when speculated upon,
to the belief in spirits.
But, it may reasonably be urged, 'the natural familiar facts of
life, death, sleep, waking, dreams, breath, and shadows, are all
versae causae, do undeniably exist, and, without the aid of any of
your abnormal facts, afford basis enough for the animistic
hypothesis. Moreover, after countless thousands of years, during
which superstition has muttered about your abnormal facts, official
science still declines to hear a word on the topic of clairvoyance
or telepathy. You don't find the Royal Society investigating second
sight, or attending to legends about tables which rebel against the
law of gravitation.'
These are cogent remarks. Normal facts, perhaps, may have suggested
the belief in spirits, the animistic hypothesis. But we do not find
the hypothesis (among the backward races) where abnormal facts are
not alleged to be matters of comparatively frequent experience.
Consequently we do not _know_ that the normal facts, alone,
suggested the existence of spirits to early thinkers, we can only
make the statement on a priori grounds. Like George Eliot's rural
sage we 'think it sounds a deal likelier'. But that, after all,
though a taking, is not a powerful and conclusive syllogism.
Again, we certainly do not expect to see the Royal Society inquiring
into second sight, or clairvoyance, or thought transference. When
the Royal Society was first founded several of its members, Pepys,
F.R.S.; Mr. Robert Boyle, F.R.S.; the Rev. Joseph Glanvill, F.R.S.,
went into these things a good deal. But, in spite of their title,
they were only amateurs. They had no professional dignity to keep
up. They were well aware that they, unlike the late Mr. Faraday,
did not know, by inspiration or by common-sense, the limits of the
possible. They tried all things, it was such a superstitious age.
Now men of science, or the majority of them, for there are some
exceptions, know what is, and what is not possible. They know that
germs of life may possibly come down on meteorites from somewhere
else, and they produced an argument for the existence of a
bathybius. But they also know that a man is not a bird to be in two
places at once, like Pythagoras, and that nobody can see through a
stone wall. These, and similar allegations, they reckon impossible,
and, if the facts happen, so much the worse for the facts. They can
only be due to imposture or mal-observation, and there is an end of
the matter. This is the view of official science. Unluckily, not
many years ago, official science was equally certain that the
ordinary phenomena of hypnotism were based on imposture and on mal-
observation. These phenomena, too, were tabooed. But so many
people could testify to them, and they could be so easily explained
by the suggestive force of suggestion, that they were reluctantly
admitted within the sacred citadel. Many people, sane, not
superstitious, healthy, and even renowned as scientific specialists,
attest the existence of the still rarer phenomena which are said, in
certain cases, to accompany the now more familiar incidents of
hypnotism. But these phenomena have never yet been explained by any
theory which science recognises, as she does recognise that
suggestion is suggestive. Therefore these rarer phenomena
manifestly do not exist, and cannot be the subject of legitimate
inquiry.
These are unanswerable observations, and it is only the antiquarian
who can venture, in his humble way, to reply to them. His answer
has a certain force ad hominem, that is, as addressed to
anthropologists. They, too, have but recently been admitted within
the scientific fold; time was when their facts were regarded as mere
travellers' tales. Mr. Max Muller is now, perhaps, almost alone in
his very low estimate of anthropological evidence, and, possibly,
even that sturdy champion is beginning to yield ground. Defending
the validity of the testimony on which anthropologists reason about
the evolution of religion, custom, manners, mythology, law, Mr.
Tylor writes:--
'It is a matter worthy of consideration that the accounts of similar
phenomena of culture, recurring in different parts of the world,
actually supply incidental proof of their own authenticity. . . .
The test of recurrence comes in. . . . The possibility of
intentional or unintentional mystification is often barred by such a
state of things as that a similar statement is made in two remote
lands by two witnesses, of whom A lived a century before B, and B
appears never to have heard of A.'
If for 'similar phenomena of culture' here, we substitute 'similar
abnormal phenomena' (such as clairvoyance, wraiths, unexplained
disturbances), Mr. Tylor's argument in favour of his evidence for
institutions applies equally well to our evidence for mysterious
'facts'. 'How distant are the countries,' he goes on, 'how wide
apart are the dates, how different the creeds and characters in the
catalogue of the facts of civilisation, needs no further showing'--
to the student of Mr. Tylor's erudite footnotes. In place of 'facts
of civilisation' read 'psychical phenomena,' and Mr. Tylor's
argument applies to the evidence for these rejected and scouted
beliefs.
The countries from which 'ghosts' and 'wraiths' and 'clairvoyance'
are reported are 'distant'; the dates are 'wide apart'; the 'creeds
and characters of the observers' 'are 'different'; yet the evidence
is as uniform, and as recurrent, as it is in the case of
institutions, manners, customs. Indeed the evidence for the
rejected and abnormal phenomena is even more 'recurrent' than the
evidence for customs and institutions. Polyandry, totemism, human
sacrifice, the taboo, are only reported as existing in remote and
semi-civilised countries. Clairvoyance, wraiths, ghosts, mysterious
disturbances and movements of objects are reported as existing, not
only in distant ages, but today; not only among savages or
barbarians, but in London, Paris, Milan. No ages can be more wide
apart, few countries much more distant, than ancient Egypt and
modern England: no characters look more different than that of an
old scribe under Pharaoh, and that of a distinguished soldier under
Queen Victoria. Yet the scribe of Khemi and General Campbell suffer
from the same inexplicable annoyance, attribute it to the same very
abnormal agency, and attempt (not unsuccessfully) to communicate
with that agency, in precisely the same way.
This, though a striking, is an isolated and perhaps a casual example
of recurrence and uniformity in evidence. Mr. Tylor's Primitive
Culture is itself a store-house of other examples, to which more may
easily be added. For example, there is the old and savage belief in
a 'sending'. The medicine-man, or medium, or witch, can despatch a
conscious, visible, and intelligent agent, non-normal, to do his
bidding at a distance. This belief is often illustrated in the
Scandinavian sagas. Rink testifies to it among the Eskimo, Grinnell
among the Pawnees: Porphyry alleges that by some such 'telepathic
impact' Plotinus, from a distance, made a hostile magician named
Alexander 'double up like an empty bag,' and saw and reported this
agreeable circumstance. {352} Hardly any abnormal phenomenon or
faculty sounds less plausible, and the 'spectral evidence' for the
presence of a witch's 'sending,' when the poor woman could establish
an alibi for her visible self, appeared dubious even to Cotton
Mather. But, in their Phantasms of the Living, Messrs. Gurney and
Myers give cases in which a visible 'sending' was intentionally
emitted by Baron Schrenck Notzing, by a stock-broker, by a young
student of engineering, and by a French hospital nurse, to take no
other instances. The person visited frequently by the 'sendings' in
the last cases was a French physician engaged in the hospital, who
reports and attests the facts. All the cases are given at first
hand on the testimony of the senders and of the recipients of the
sendings. Bulwer Lytton was familiar with the belief, and uses the
'shining shadow' in A Strange Story. Now here is uniform recurrent
evidence from widely severed ages, from distant countries, from the
Polar North, the American prairie, Neoplatonic Egypt and Greece,
England and New England of the seventeenth century, and England and
Germany of today. The 'creeds and characters of the observers' are
as 'different' as Neoplatonism, Shamanism, Christianity of divers
sects, and probably Agnosticism or indifference. All these
conditions of unvarying testimony constitute good evidence for
institutions and customs; anthropologists, who eagerly accept such
testimony in their own studies, may decide as to whether they
deserve total neglect when adduced in another field of anthropology.
Turning from 'sendings,' or 'telepathy' voluntarily brought to bear
on one living person by another, we might examine 'death-bed
wraiths,' or the telepathic impact--'if that hypothesis of theirs be
sound'--produced by a dying on a living human being. A savage
example, in which a Fuegian native on board an English ship saw his
father, who was expiring in Tierra del Fuego, has the respectable
authority of Mr. Darwin's Cruise of the Beagle. Instances, on the
other hand, in which Australian blacks, or Fijians, see the
phantasms of dead kinsmen warning them of their decease (which
follows punctually) may be found in Messrs. Fison and Howitt's
Kamilaroi and Kurnai.
From New Zealand Mr. Tylor cites, with his authorities, the
following example: {353} 'A party of Maoris (one of whom told the
story) were seated round a fire in the open air, when there
appeared, seen only by two of them, the figure of a relative left
ill at home. They exclaimed, the figure vanished, and, on the
return of the party, it appeared that the sick man had died about
the time of the vision.' A traveller in New Zealand illustrates the
native belief in the death-wraith by an amusing anecdote. A
Rangatira, or native gentleman, had gone on the war-path. One day
he walked into his wife's house, but after a few moments could not
be found. The military expedition did not return, so the lady,
taking it for granted that her husband, the owner of the wraith, was
dead, married an admirer. The hallucination, however, was _not_
'veridical'; the warrior came home, but he admitted that he had no
remedy and no feud against his successor. The owner of a wraith
which has been seen may be assumed to be dead. Such is Maori
belief. The modern civilised examples of death-wraiths, attested
and recorded in Phantasms of the Living, are numerous; but
statistics prove that a lady who marries again on the strength of a
wraith may commit an error of judgment, and become liable to the
penalty of bigamy. The Maoris, no statisticians, take a more
liberal and tolerant view. These are comparatively scanty examples
from savage life, but then they are corroborated by the wealth of
recurrent and coincident evidence from civilised races, ancient and
modern.
On the point of clairvoyance, it is unnecessary to dwell. The
second-sighted man, the seer of events remote in space or not yet
accomplished in time, is familiar everywhere, from the Hebrides to
the Coppermine River, from the Samoyed and Eskimo to the Zulu, from
the Euphrates to the Hague. The noises heard in 'haunted houses,'
the knocking, routing, dragging of heavy bodies, is recorded, Mr.
Tylor says, by Dayaks, Singhalese, Siamese, and Esths; Dennys, in
his Folklore of China, notes the occurrences in the Celestial
Empire; Grimm, in his German Mythology, gives examples, starting
from the communicative knocks of a spirit near Bingen, in the
chronicle of Rudolf (856), and Suetonius tells a similar tale from
imperial Rome. The physician of Catherine de Medicis, Ambroise
Pare, describes every one of the noises heard by the Wesleys, long
after his day, as familiar, and as caused by devils. Recurrence and
conformity of evidence cannot be found in greater force.
The anthropological test of evidence for faith in the rejected
phenomena is thus amply satisfied. Unless we say that these
phenomena are 'impossible,' whereas totemism, the couvade,
cannibalism, are possible, the testimony to belief in clairvoyance,
and the other peculiar occurrences, is as good in its way as the
evidence for the practice of wild customs and institutions. There
remains a last and notable circumstance. All the abnormal
phenomena, in the modern and mediaeval tales, occur most frequently
in the presence of convulsionaries, like the so-called victims of
witches, like the Hon. Master Sandilands, Lord Torphichen's son
(1720), like the grandson of William Morse in New England (1680),
and like Bovet's case of the demon of Spraiton. {355}
The 'mediums' of modern spiritualism, like Francis Fey, are, or
pretend to be, subject to fits, anaesthesia, jerks, convulsive
movements, and trance. As Mr. Tylor says about his savage
jossakeeds, powwows, Birraarks, peaimen, everywhere 'these people
suffer from hysterical, convulsive, and epileptic affections'. Thus
the physical condition, all the world over, of persons who exhibit
most freely the accepted phenomena, is identical. All the world
over, too, the same persons are credited with the _rejected_
phenomena, clairvoyance, 'discerning of spirits,' powers of
voluntary 'telepathic 'and 'telekinetic' impact. Thus we find that
uniform and recurrent evidence vouches for a mass of phenomena which
science scouts. Science has now accepted a portion of the mass, but
still rejects the stranger occurrences. Our argument is that their
invariably alleged presence, in attendance on the minor occurrences,
is, at least, a point worthy of examination. The undesigned
coincidences of testimony represent a great deal of smoke, and
proverbial wisdom suggests a presumption in favour of a few sparks
of fire. Now, if there are such sparks, the animistic hypothesis
may not, of course, be valid,--'spirits' may not exist,--but the
universal belief in their existence may have had its origin, not in
normal facts only, but in abnormal facts. And these facts, at the
lowest estimate, must suggest that man may have faculties, and be
surrounded by agencies, which physical science does not take into
account in its theory of the universe and of human nature.
We have already argued that the doctrines of theism and of the soul
need not to be false, even if they were arrived at slowly, after a
succession of grosser opinions. But if the doctrines were reached
by a process which started from real facts of human nature, observed
by savages, but not yet recognised by physical science, then there
may have been grains of truth even in the cruder and earlier ideas,
and these grains of gold may have been disengaged, and fashioned,
not without Divine aid, into the sacred things of spiritual
religion.
The stories which we have been considering are often trivial,
sometimes comic; but they are universally diffused, and as well
established as universally coincident testimony can establish
anything. Now, if there be but one spark of real fire to all this
smoke, then the purely materialistic theories of life and of the
world must be reconsidered. They seem very well established, but so
have many other theories seemed, that are long gone the way of all
things human.
Footnotes:
{0a} Fortnightly Review, February 1866, and in a lecture, 1895.
{0b} This diary was edited for private circulation, by a son of Mr.
Proctor's, who remembers the disturbances.
{0c} See essays here on Classical and Savage Spiritualism.
{0d} This was merely a cheerful obiter dictum by the learned
President.
{4} Not the house agent.
{9} Porphyry, Epistola xxi. Iamblichus, De Myst., iii. 2.
{11} The Port Glasgow story is in Report of the Dialectical
Society, p. 200. The flooring was torn up; walls, ceilings,
cellars, were examined by the police, and attempts were made to
imitate the noises, without success. In this case, as at Rerrick in
the end of the seventeenth century, and elsewhere, 'the appearance
of a hand moving up and down' was seen by the family, 'but we could
not catch it: it quietly vanished, and we only felt cold air'. The
house was occupied by a gardener, Hugh McCardle. Names of
witnesses, a sergeant of police, and others, are appended.
{12} Report of Dialectical Society, p. 86.
{17a} For ourselves, we have never seen or heard a table give any
responses whatever, any more than we have seen the ghosts, heard the
raps, or viewed the flights of men in the air which we chronicle in
a later portion of this work.
{17b} Report on Spiritualism, Longmans, London, 1871.
{18} Report, p. 229.
{21} Mr. Wallace may be credited with scoring a point in argument.
Dr. Edmunds had maintained that no amount of evidence would make him
believe in certain obvious absurdities, say the lions in Trafalgar
Square drinking out of the fountains. Mr. Wallace replied: 'The
asserted fact is either possible or not possible. If possible, such
evidence as we have been considering would prove it; if not
possible, such evidence could not exist.' No such evidence exists
for the lions; for the phenomena of so-called spiritualism, we have
consentient testimony in every land, period and stage of culture.
That certainly makes a difference, whatever the weight and value of
the difference may be.
{26a} This illustration is not Mr. Lecky's.
{26b} We have here thrown together a crowd of odd experiences. The
savages' examples are dealt with in the next essay; the Catholic
marvels in the essay on 'Comparative Psychical Research'. For
Pascal, consult L'Amulette de Pascal, by M. Lelut; for Iamblichus,
see essay on 'Ancient Spiritualism'. As to Welsh, the evidence for
the light in which he shone is printed in Dr. Hill Burton's Scot
Abroad (i. 289), from a Wodrow MS. in Glasgow University. Mr. Welsh
was minister of Ayr. He was meditating in his garden late at night.
One of his friends 'chanced to open a window towards the place where
he walked, and saw clearly a strange light surround him, and heard
him speak strange words about his spiritual joy'. Hill Burton
thinks that this verges on the Popish superstition. The truth is
that eminent ministers shared the privileges of Mediums and of some
saints. Examples of miraculous cures by ministers, of clairvoyance
on their part, of spirit-raps attendant on them, and of prophecy,
are current on Presbyterian hagiology. No ministers, to our
knowledge, were 'levitated,' but some _nearly_ flew out of their
pulpits. Patrick Walker, in his Biographia Presbyteriana, vol. ii.
p. 21, mentions a supernatural light which floated round The Sweet
Singers, Meikle John Gibb and his friends, before they burned a
bible. Mr. Gibb afterwards excelled as a pow-wow, or Medicine Man,
among the Red Indians.
{30} Teutonic Mythology, English translation, vol. ii. p. 514. He
cites Pertz, i. 372.
{31} A very early turning table, of 1170, is quoted from Giraldus
Cambrensis by Dean Stanley in his Canterbury Memorials, p. 103. The
table threw off the weapons of Becket's murderers. This was at
South Malling. See the original in Wharton's Anglia Sacra, ii. 425.
{35} See Mr. Tylor's Primitive Culture, chap, xi., for the best
statement of the theory.
{38} Petitot, Traditions Indiennes du Canada Nord-Ouest, p. 434.
{40} Very possibly the whirring roar of the turndun, or [Greek], in
Greek, Zuni, Yoruba, Australian, Maori and South African mysteries
is connected with this belief in a whirring sound caused by spirits.
See Custom and Myth.
{41a} Proc. S. P. R., xix. 180.
{41b} Brough Smyth, i. 475.
{42} Auckland, 1863, ch. x.
{45a} [Greek].--Iamblichus.
{45b} Kohl, Kitchi-Gami, p. 278.
{48} Hind's Explorations in Labrador, ii. 102.
{50a} Rowley, Universities' Mission to Central Africa, p. 217:
cited by Mr. Tylor.
{50b} Quoted in La Table Parlante, a French serial, No. I, p. 6.
{51} Colonel A. B. Ellis, in his work on the Yorubas (1894),
reports singular motions of a large wooden cylinder. It is used in
ordeals.
{52} The Natural and Morall History of the East and West Indies, p.
566, London, 1604.
{53} February 9, 1872. Quoted by Mr. Tylor, in Primitive Culture,
ii. 39, 1873.
{57} Revue des Deux Mondes, 1856, tome i. p. 853.
{60} Hallucinations, English translation, p. 182, London, 1859.
{62} Laws, xi.
{63} Records of the Past, iv. 134-136.
{65a} The references are to Parthey's edition, Berlin, 1857.
{65b} [Greek], 4, 3.
{65c} All are, for Porphyry, 'phantasmogenetic agencies'.
{66a} Jean Brehal, par P.P. Belon et Balme, Paris, s.a., p. 105.
{66b} Proces de Condemnation, i. 75.
{67a} Appended to Beaumont's work on Spirits, 1705.
{67b} See Mr. Lillie's Modern Mystics, and, better, Mr. Myers, in
Proceedings S. P. R., Jan., 1894.
{68a} Origen, or whoever wrote the Philosophoumena, gives a recipe
for producing a luminous figure on a wall. For moving lights, he
suggests attaching lighted tow to a bird, and letting it loose.
Maury translates the passages in La Magie, pp. 58-59.
Spiritualists, of course, will allege that the world-wide theory of
spectral lights is based on fact, and that the hallucinations are
not begotten by subjective conditions, but by a genuine
'phantasmogenetic agency'. Two men of science, Baron Schrenk-
Notzing, and Dr. Gibotteau, vouch for illusions of light
accompanying attempts by _living_ agents to transfer a hallucinatory
vision of themselves to persons at a distance (Journal S. P. R.,
iii. 307; Proceedings, viii. 467). It will be asserted by
spiritualists that disembodied agencies produce the same effect in a
higher degree.
{68b} [Greek].
{69} [Greek].
{70a} Damascius, ap. Photium.
{70b} [Greek].
{71} Life of Hugh Macleod (Noble, Inverness). As an example of the
growth of myth, see the version of these facts in Fraser's Magazine
for 1856. Even in a sermon preached immediately after the event, it
was said that the dreamer _found_ the pack by revelation of his
dream!
{72} iii. 2. [Greek].
{73} Greek Papyri in the British Museum; edited by F. G. Kenyon,
M.A., London, 1893.
{74} See notice in Classical Review, February, 1894.
{75a} See oracles in Eusebius, Praep. Evang., v. 9. The medium was
tied up in some way, he had to be unloosed and raised from the
ground. The inspiring agency, in a hurry to be gone, gave
directions for the unbinding. [Greek]. The binding of the Highland
seer in a bull's hide is described by Scott in the Lady of the Lake.
A modern Highland seer has ensconced himself in a boiler! The
purpose is to concentrate the 'force'.
{75b} Praep. Evang., v. 8.
{75c} Ibid., v. 15, 3.
{78a} Dr. Hodgson, in Proceedings S. P. R., Jan., 1894, makes Mr.
Kellar's evidence as to Indian 'levitation' seem far from
convincing! As a professional conjurer, and exposer of
spiritualistic imposture, Mr. Kellar has made statements about his
own experiences which are not easily to be harmonised.
{78b} Proceedings S. P. R. Jan., 1894.
{86} The Miraculous Conformist. A letter to the Honourable Robert
Boyle, Esq. Oxford: University Press, 1666.
{88a} Fourth edition, London, 1726.
{88b} In Kirk's Secret Commonwealth, 1691. London: Nutt, 1893.
{90a} In the Salem witch mania, a similar case of levitation was
reported by the Rev. Cotton Mather. He produced a cloud of
witnesses, who could not hold the woman down. She would fly up.
Mr. Mather sent the signed depositions to his opponent, Mr. Calef.
But Calef would not believe, for, said he, 'the age of miracles is
past'. Which was just the question at issue! See Beaumont's
Treatise of Spirits, p. 148, London, 1705.
{90b} Miracles and Modern Spiritualism, p. 7. London: Burns,
1875.
{90c} Popular Tales, iv. 340.
{94} The anecdote is published by Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, in a
letter of Lauderdale's, affixed to Sharpe's edition of Law's
Memorialls.
{95} See Ghosts before the Law.
{96} Proceedings S. P. R., xv. 33.
{100a} See many examples in Li Fiorette de Misser Santo Francesco.
{100b} Ch. cxviii.
{101} D. D. Home; his Life and Mission, p. 307, London, 1888.
{102} Sept. 18, vol. v., 1866.
{107a} See Colonel Yule's Marco Polo.
{107b} Quarterly Journal of Science, July, 1871.
{108a} Proceedings S. P. R., xix. 146.
{108b} North American Review, 1893.
{108c} Proceedings S. P. R., x. 45-100; xix. 147.
{109a} Incidents in my Life, i. 170.
{109b} A Paris, chez la Veuve du Carroy, 1621.
{110a} Folklore of China, 1876, p. 79.
{110b} Op. cit., p. 74.
{110c} Paris. Quarto. Black letter. 1528. The original is
extremely rare. We quote from a copy once in the Tellier
collection, reprinted in Recueil de Dissertations Anciennes et
Nouvelles sur les Apparitions. Leloup: Avignon, 1751, vol. ii. pp.
1-87.
{112} Proceedings S. P. R., xix. 186. 'C.' is a Miss Davis,
daughter of a gentleman occupying 'a responsible position as a
telegraphist'. The date was 1888.
{114a} Satan's Invisible World Discovered. Edinburgh: Reid, 1685.
Pp. 67-69.
{114b} Manuscript 7170, A, de la Bibliotheque du Roi.
Dissertations, ut supra, vol. i. pp. 95-129.
{115} Dufresnoy, op. cit., i. 95-129.
{117} Compare Bastian, Mensch., ii. 393, cited by Mr. Tylor.
{118} De Materia Daemon. Isagoge, p. 539. Ap. Corn. Agripp., De
Occult. Philosoph. Lyons, 1600.
{122} Aubrey gives a variant in his Miscellanies, on the authority
of the Vicar of Barnstaple. He calls Fey 'Fry'.
{123a} The Devonshire case, 'Story of a Something,' in Miss
O'Neill's Devonshire Idylls, is attested by a surviving witness.
{123b} Trials of Isobell Young, 1629, and of Jonet Thomson, Feb. 7,
1643. Darker Superstitions of Scotland, p. 593.
{124} Witness Rev. E. T. Vaughan, King's Langley. 1884.
{125a} Segraisiana, p. 213.
{125b} Crookes's Notes of an Enquiry into the Phenomena usually
called Spiritual. 86. London: Burns (second edition).
{126a} Satan's Invisible World Discovered, p. 75.
{126b} A New Confutation of Sadducism, p. 5, writ by Mr. Alexander
Telfair, London, 1696.
{129} Primitive Culture, vol. i. 368; ii. 304.
{130} The reader may also consult Notes on the Spirit Basis of
Belief and Custom, a rough draft printed for the Indian Government.
While rich in curious facts, the draft contains very little about
'manifestations,' except in 'possession'.
{131a} Gregory, Dialogues, iv. 39.
{131b} De Rerum Varietate, xvi. cap. xciii.
{132} De Praestigiis Daemon.
{133} Si fallere possunt, ut quis videre se credat, cum videat
revera extra se nihil: non poterunt fallere, ut credat quis se
audire sonos, quos revera non audit? (p. 81).
{135} Proceedings S. P. R., xv. 42.
{137} There is one possible exception to this rule.
{139} S. P. R., viii. 81.
{140a} Geschichte des Neueren Occultismus, p. 451.
{140b} Opera, 1605.
{142} S. P. R., vi. 149.
{146} Proc. S. P. R., viii. 133.
{147} Proc. S. P. R., Nov., 1889, p. 269.
{149} This is rather overstated; there were knocks, and raps, and
footsteps (Proc. S. P. R., Nov., 1889, p. 310).
{150} Proc. S. P. R., April, 1885, p. 144.
{151} To be frank, in a haunted house the writer did once see an
appearance, which was certainly either the ghost or one of the
maids; 'the Deil or else an outler quey,' as Burns says.
{153} London, 1881, pp. 184-185.
{156} S. P. R., xv. 64.
{158a} Proceedings S. P. R., xvi. 332.
{158b} Sights and Shadows, p. 60.
{165} British Chronicle, January 18, 1762.
{166} Annual Register.
{167} Praep. Evang., v. ix. 4.
{170a} Rudolfi Fuldensis, Annal., 858, in Pertz, i. 372. See
Grimm's Teutonic Mythology, Engl. transl., p. 514.
{170b} Pseudo-Clemens, Homil., ii. 32, 638. In Mr. Myers's
Classical Essays, p. 66.
{178} Avignon, 1751.
{183} Compare the case of John Beaumont, F.R.S., in his Treatise of
Spirits (1705).
{186} Proceedings S. P. R., viii. 151-189.
{189} Mrs. Ricketts was a sister of Lord St. Vincent, who tried, in
vain, to discover the cause of the disturbances. Scott says
(Demonology and Witchcraft, p. 360): 'Who has heard or seen an
authentic account from Lord St. Vincent?' There is a full account
in the Journal of the S. P. R. It appeared much too late for Sir
Walter Scott also complains of lack of details for the Wynyard
story. They are now accessible. People were, in his time, afraid
to make their experiences public.
{190} The story is told by Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, in his
Introduction to Law's Memorialls, p. xci. Sharpe cites no source of
the tradition.
{191} We are not discussing Dreams, which are many, but waking
hallucinations, which are, relatively rare, and are remembered,
unlike Dreams, whether they are coincidental or not.
{192} Gurney, op. cit., p. 187.
{193a} The writer knows a case in which a gentleman, who had gone
to bed about eleven p.m., in Scotland, was roused by hearing his own
name loudly called. He searched his room in vain. His brother died
suddenly, at the hour when he heard the voice, in Canada. But the
difference of time proves that the voice was heard several hours
_before_ the death. Here, then, is a chance coincidence, which
looked very like a case of Telepathy. Another will be found in Mr.
Dale Owen's Debatable Land, p. 364. A gentleman died 'after
breakfast' in Rhenish Prussia, and appeared, before noon, in New
York. Thus he appeared hours after he died.
{193b} Polack, New Zealand, i. 269.
{194a} Proceedings S. P. R., xv. 10.
{194b} The writer has known a case in which a collector of these
statistics, disdained non-coincidental hallucinations as 'of no use'
{195} Proceedings S. P. R., xv. 7.
{196} Animal Magnetism, pp. 61-64, 1887.
{199} The Psychical Society has published the writer's encounter
with Professor Conington, at Oxford, in 1869, when the professor was
lying within one or two days of his death at Boston, a circumstance
wholly unknown to the percipient. But no jury would accept this as
anything but a case of mistaken identity, natural in a short-sighted
man's vague experiences. Mr. Conington was not a man easily to be
mistaken for another, nor were many men likely to be mistaken for
Mr. Conington. Yet this is what must have occurred. There was no
conceivable reason why the professor should 'telepathically'
communicate with the percipient, who had never exchanged a word with
him, except in an examination.
{205} Proceedings of Society for Psychical Research, viii. 111.
{206} Proceedings of Society for Psychical Research, xiv. 442.
{207a} Modern Spirit Manifestations. By Adin Ballou. Liverpool,
1853.
{207b} Proceedings of Society for Psychical Research, xiv. 469.
{209} Edinburgh, 1827, vol. i. p. xxxii.
{214} In the author's case the hypnagogic phantasms seem to be
created out of the floating spots of light which remain when the
eyes are shut. Some crystal-gazers find that similar points de
repere in the glass, are the starting-points of pictures in the
crystal. Others cannot trace any such connection.
{215} Compare Blackwood, August, 1831, in Noctes Ambrosianae.
{216a} Paus., ii. 24, I.
{216b} Bouche Leclercq, i. 339.
{223} The accomplished scryer can see as well in a crystal
ringstone, or in a glass of water, as in a big crystal ball. The
latter may really be dangerous, if left on a cloth in the sun it may
set the cloth on fire.
{224} Animal Magnetism, second edition, p. 135.
{228} Thus an educated gentleman, a Highlander, tells the author
that he once saw a light of this kind 'not a meteor,' passing in air
along a road where a funeral went soon afterwards. His companions
could see nothing, but one of them said: 'It will be a death-
candle'. It seems to have been hallucinatory, otherwise all would
have shared the experience.
{231a} Darker Superstitions of Scotland, p. 481, Edinburgh, 1834.
{231b} Op. cit., p. 473.
{232a} Op. cit., p. 470
{232b} It is, perhaps, needless to add that the unhappy patients
were executed.
{232c} Miscellanies, 1857, p. 184.
{233a} Wodrow, i. 44.
{233b} Aulus Gellius, xv. 18. Dio Cassius, lib. lxvii. Crespet,
De la Hayne de Diable, cited by Dalyell.
{234} Miscellanies, 177.
{235} A copy presented by Scott to Sir Alexander Boswell of
Auchinleck is in the author's possession; it bears Scott's
autograph.
{237} Information from Mr. Mackay, Craigmonie.
{238} 2 Kings, v. 26.
{244} i. 259. Longmans, London, 1811.
{245} Tylor, Primitive Culture, i. 143.
{246} This belief is not confined to the Highlands. Mr. Podmore
quotes Ghost 636 in the Psychical Society's collections: 'The
narrator's mother is said to have seen the figure of a man'. The
father saw nothing till his wife laid her hand on his shoulder, when
he exclaimed, 'I see him now' (S. P. R., Nov., 1889, p. 247).
{250} 'Spectral evidence' was common in witch trials. Wierus (b.
1515) mentions a woman who confessed that she had been at a witch's
covin, or 'sabbath,' when her body was in bed with her husband. If
there was any confirmatory testimony, if any one chose to say that
he saw her at the 'sabbath,' that was 'spectral evidence'. This
kind of testimony made it vain for a witch to take Mr. Weller's
advice, and plead 'a halibi,' but even Cotton Mather admits that
'spectral evidence' is inconclusive.
{253} Papon. Arrets., xx. 5, 9. Charondas, Lib. viii. Resp. 77.
Covarruvias, iv. 6. Mornac, s. v., Habitations, 27 ff., Locat. and
Conduct. Other doctors do not deny hauntings, but allege that a
brave man should disregard them, and that they do not fulfil he
legal condition, Metus cadens in constantem virim. These doctors
may never have seen a ghost, or may have been unusually courageous.
They held that a man might get accustomed to the annoyances of
bogles, s'apprivoiser avec cette frayeur, like the Procter family at
Willington.
{259} Miscellanies, p. 94, London, 1857.
{262} Hibbert, Philosophy of Apparitions, second edition, p. 224.
Hibbert finds Graime guilty, but only because he knew where the body
lay.
{263} Notices Relative to the Bannatyne Club, 1836, p. 191.
Remarkable Trial in Maryland.
{267} Paris, 1708. Reprinted by Lenglet Dufresnoy, in his
Dissertations sur les Apparitions. Avignon, 1751, vol. iii. p. 38.
{269} Second edition, Buon, Paris, 1605. First edition, Angers,
1586.
{273} Dr. Lee, in Sights and Sounds (p. 43), quotes an Irish
lawsuit in 1890. The tenants were anxious not to pay rent, but were
non-suited. No reference to authorities is given. There was also a
case at Dublin in 1885. Waldron's house was disturbed, 'stones were
thrown at the windows and doors,' and Waldron accused his neighbour,
Kiernan, of these assaults. He lost his case (Evening Standard,
February 23, 1885, is cited).
{275} p. 195, London, 1860.
{276} The account followed here is that of the narrator in La Table
Parlante, p. 130, who differs in some points from the Marquis de
Mirville in his Fragment d'un Ouvrage Inedit, Paris, 1852.
{277} For bewitching by touch see Cotton Mather's Wonders of the
Invisible World, p. 150. 'Library of Old Authors,' London, 1862.
{279a} Cotton Mather, op. cit., p. 131.
{279b} Table Parlante, p. 151. A somewhat different version is
given p. 145. The narrator seems to say that Cheval himself deposed
to having witnessed this experiment.
{283a} Gazette des Tribunaux, February 2, 1846, quoted in Table
Parlante, p. 306.
{283b} Table Parlante, p. 174.
{300} Hibbert, Apparitions, p. 211.
{303} Mather's own account of the lost sermon (p. 298) is in his
Life, by Mr. Barrett Wendell, p. 118. It is by no means so romantic
as Wodrow's version.
{307} An account of the method by which the Miss Foxes rapped is
given, by a cousin of theirs, in Dr. Carpenter's Mesmerism (p. 150).
{312} See Dr. Carpenter's brief and lucid statement about 'Latent
Thought' and 'Unconscious Cerebration,' in the Quarterly Review,
vol. cxxxi. pp. 316-319.
{317} A learned priest has kindly looked for the alleged spiritus
percutiens in dedicatory and other ecclesiastical formulae. He only
finds it in benedictions of bridal chambers, and thinks it refers to
the slaying spirit in the Book of Tobit.
{319a} S. P. R., x. 81.
{319b} London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1877.
{320} Quoted by Dr. Carpenter, op. cit., p. vii.
{324} Tom. ii. pp. 312, 435, edition of 1768.
{326} In the Quarterly Review, vol. cxxxi. pp. 336-337, Dr.
Carpenter criticises an account given by Lord Crawford of this
performance. He asks for the evidence of the other witnesses. This
was supplied. He detects a colloquial slovenliness in a phrase.
This was cleared up. He complains that the light was moonlight.
'The moon was shining full into the room.' A minute philosopher has
consulted the almanack and denies that there was any moon!
{327} Lord Crawford's evidence is in the Report of the Dialectical
Society, p. 214
{328} Quarterly Review, vol. cxxxi. p. 303.
{329} Observe the caution of the Mosstrooper, even in that
agitating moment! How good it is, and how wonderfully Sir Walter
forecasts a seance.
{341a} Lucretius, iv. 26-75, Munro's translation.
{341b} Def. Orac., 19.
{341c} Ibid., iv. 193.
{352} Porphyry, Vita Plotini.
{353} Primitive Culture, i. 404.
{355} In the Pandemonium, or Devil's Cloyster, of Richard Bovet,
Gent. (1684).