CONCERNING GHOST STORIES

LAST Christmas Day I had the pleasure of dining with a number of charming and accomplished people, who proceeded, after dinner, to tell ghost stories. It is, I believe, a not uncommon way of honouring the festival of Christ's Nativity, and I resigned myself to it, or endeavoured to do so, with a good grace, as to one of the inevitable incidents of the holy season, like waits, Christmas-boxes, and pantomimes. I did not, however, make my contribution to the narratives, and possibly my face, less under control than I had hoped, betrayed that they but moderately interested me. At all events, a brilliant lady, who had just finished a thrilling tale, turned to me with a look of surprise, and observed, 'You don't seem to care about ghost stories?' I replied, 'Well, no; I never tell them, and I would not go out of my way to listen to them; still, I have no wish to mar your innocent—or perhaps not quite innocent-amusement.' The lady rejoined, 'But surely many ghost stories are quite well authenticated-the one I have just told is; and, if so, what can be the harm of telling them?' I thought it best to follow the example of the Chancellor in The Day Dream-the occasion was hardly suitable for a serious discussion- and smiling put the question by,' promising, however, to write something about it when I should have leisure to do so. And now I proceed to redeem my promise.

The question, indeed, which my fair friend put to me divides itself into two. 'Are not many ghost stories true?' and, 'If they are, or may be, true, what can be the harm of telling them to beguile an after-dinner hour or to enliven a tea-table?' Let us consider both these questions a little.

I take the phrase 'Ghost Stories' in a large sense, and include in it not merely tales of apparitions, but generally accounts of phenomena not referable to the action of any natural laws at present known, and therefore presumed to belong to the supernatural sphere. Now, that many of these accounts are true, I do not for one moment doubt. It is, of course, quite easy to deny them upon a priori grounds. The affirmation that there is no order beyond the physical, of course implies that there can be no communication from the supernatural. And this is really the argument-to give a

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classic example of Voltaire in his article Apparitions' in the Philosophical Dictionary. The first sentence strikes the keynote: It is not at all an uncommon thing for a person under a strong emotion to see that which is not.' ('Ce n'est point du tout une chose rare qu'une personne, vivement émue, voit ce qui n'est point.') The proposition is unquestionably true. As unquestionably, it is not conclusive. It would be just as true to say, 'It is not by any means uncommon for a person in a normal state of health and nerves, and not under the influence of any strong emotion, to be conscious of the presence of one who is dead.' The evidence for this second proposition is just as abundant and overwhelming as is the evidence for the first. The a priori argument against apparitions of the departed resolves itself into the ancient Roman dictum that there is nothing beyond death, and that death itself is nothing'- Post mortem nihil est, ipsaque mors nihil.' Of course a man may believe that, if he likes. I use the words 'if he likes' advisedly, for it is, in nine cases out of ten, our inclination which determines our creed. There are those who, to any form of faith in the supersensuous, prefer a crude disbelief in all that lies out of the senses' grasp: but upon such, evidence of the supernatural is thrown away. And just now I am not writing for them.

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But I suppose that thanatists, as it is the fashion to call them, are really not very numerous. At all events, I will take it that most of those who do me the honour to read this paper will be of the opinion expressed by Cardinal Newman in a striking passage of his 'The Invisible World.' The dead, when they depart hence, do not cease to exist, but they retire from this visible scene of things, or, in other words, they cease to act towards us and before us through our senses. . . . They remain; but without the usual means of approach towards us and correspondence with us. . . . We are in a world of spirits as well as in a world of sense.' To Newman, the phenomenal universe was but a veil, hiding from us spiritual realities. The question is, Can any communication reach us from beyond that veil?

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It is a question of fact, and, as I have before observed, the evidence for an affirmative answer to it, seems to me overwhelming. I am well aware that this evidence can seldom be tested as evidence is tested in an English court of law. The narrator does not speak, as a rule, under the sanction of an oath or a solemn affirmation. Nor is he, as a rule, subjected to the sifting process of cross-examination. Still, I do not hesitate to say that the testimony upon which many histories of apparitions rest is so clear, so concrete, and so cogent, as to leave no room for doubt in a candid mind-a mind, as the phrase is, open to conviction. If,' Lord Chief Baron Pollock told the jury in the trial of the Mannings-' if the conclusion to which you are led be that there is that degree of certainty in the case that

you would act upon it in your own grave and important concerns, that is the degree of certainty which the law requires, and which will justify you in returning a verdict of guilty.' Such was the degree of certainty which this very learned judge, expounding, I need not say correctly, the doctrine of English jurisprudence, held sufficient for the hanging of the Manning couple. But the degree of certainty produced by the evidence in support of many well-known apparitions-for example, the Wynyard-Sherbrooke, the Brougham, and the Weld-appears to me to go far beyond that, and to leave no room for incredulity, except in a mind dominated by a first principle which blocks belief. I may say the same of the account of St. Ambrose falling into a trance during Liturgy, and being seen at the funeral of St. Martin of Tours, and of the apparitions of St. Philip Neri, both during his lifetime and after his decease, to Cardinal Baronius, his disciple and friend.

I have been writing without special reference to the Christian religion. But it must be perfectly clear to any student of its Sacred Books that if communications from the unseen world, such as those which we are considering, are impossible, and do not take place, these venerable documents lose all claim to credibility, so closely are stories of visions and revelations interwoven with their very texture. We must say the same of the Lives of the Saints.' And, as regards the more recent Saints, we are often in a position to criticise closely the evidence upon which the alleged supernatural facts rest. In many cases that evidence seems amply sufficient for certitude, unless we discredit it on the a priori ground which I mentioned before: as, for example, in the following incident in the life of St. Alphonsus Liguori:

On the morning of the 21st of September, 1774, after Alphonsus [he was then Bishop of St. Agatha] had ended Mass, contrary to custom, he threw himself into his armchair; he was cast down and silent, he made no movement of any sort, never articulated a word, and said nothing to any one. He remained in this state all that day and all the following night, and during all this time he took no nourishment and did not attempt to undress. The servants on seeing the state he was in did not know what was going to happen, and remained up and at his door, but no one dared to enter it. On the morning of the 22nd he had not changed his position, and no one knew what to think of it. The fact was that he was in a prolonged ecstasy. However, when the day became further advanced, he rang the bell to announce that he intended to celebrate Mass. The signal was not only answered to by Brother Francis Anthony, according to custom, but all the people in the house hurried to him with eagerness. On seeing so many people, his Lordship asked what was the matter, with an air of surprise. 'What is the matter!' they replied; 'you have neither spoken nor eaten anything for two days, and you ceased to give any signs of life.' That is true,' replied Alphonsus; but do you not know I have been with the Pope, who has just died?' . . . It was looked upon as a mere dream. . . . However, before very long the tidings of the death of Pope Clement the Fourteenth were received. He passed to a better life on the 22nd of September at seven o'clock in the morning, at the very moment when Alphonsus came to himself.

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I should here observe, as in fairness I am bound to do, that wellauthenticated stories of this sort are by no means confined to Christian hagiology. Thus, in Eflāki's well-known work, Menagibus 'L'Arifin, the Acts of certain Islamite saints of the Mevlevi order of Dervishes, many similar instances of supernatural facts are vouched for by the historian-a man of undoubted intelligence and probity-as seen by himself; while others are related upon the authority of witnesses whose names are generally given, and whose piety and veracity were known to him.

But the reader must not suppose that narrations of this kind find credence only among the professors of Christianity or Islam. They are received with equal readiness by exponents of the newest schools of philosophy, to whom Christianity, or any of its rival religions, would appear 'a creed outworn.' Thus, Schopenhauer, who, however we may feel towards his speculations, certainly ranks amongst the keenest and subtlest intellects of these latter days, profoundly believed in them, and would not reject even the wildest stories of supernatural manifestations as unworthy of examination. Whether the dead ever actually appear he does not indeed undertake to determine; but he will not deny that they may have the capacity of manifesting themselves to, or communicating with, the living. Death, as he judged, though extinguishing the intellect, which, according to him, is merely a function of the brain, has, he considers, no dominion over the will, whereof the brain is only a manifestation. And the fact of apparitions of the living he believed to be established beyond all reasonable doubt. He gives many instances in support of his belief. I have before me, as I write, his most fascinating paper, 'An Enquiry concerning Ghost-seeing, and what is connected therewith' ( Versuch über das Geistersehn und was damit zusammenhängt'). He observes that belief in ghosts is born with man, that it is found in all ages and in all countries, and that probably no one is altogether free from it. The great multitude of men, he continues, in all times and in all lands, draw a distinction between natural and supernatural, as two essentially different orders of things, ascribing to the supernatural order, miracles, divinations, ghosts, and enchantments, but yet apprehending that nature itself rests upon the supernatural. And this popular differentiation (Unterscheidung), he goes on to say, essentially agrees with the Kantian distinction between phenomenon and the thing-in-itself; although Kant regards nature and the supernatural not as two different and separate kinds of being, but as one, which, taken in itself, may be called supernatural, but when manifested in the world of sense, and apprehended by the intellect, and assuming the forms prescribed thereby, is termed nature. What Kant calls phenomenon (Erscheinung) Schopenhauer denominates intellectual representation (Vovstellung); and Kant's thing-in-itself is named by him Will.

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ordinary circumstances, Schopenhauer teaches, we know this Will only as manifested under the forms of space, time, and causality. But there are states of the brain in which we penetrate beyond those forms and come into direct contact with the ultimate, the one reality, Will, transcending the intellectual illusions which are the realm of physical science, and reaching the sphere of absolute truth. To this sphere of absolute truth, curious as it may seem, he refers animal magnetism, sympathetic cures, magic, second sight, presentiments, apparitions, and visions of all kinds.

But I must not linger further upon these fascinating and farreaching speculations. That they are Schopenhauer's, is enough to entitle them to a respectful hearing. What I have said may suffice as to the first question which I have proposed: the truth, actual or possible, of ghost stories. I shall now proceed to consider the further question-whether, allowing that they may be, and often are, more or less true, the telling them is a harmless amusement. I put the inquiry in this way purposely. I shall answer it in the negative, and shall give my reasons for so doing. I am, of course, very far from saying that all tales of the supernatural, save such as are well authenticated, or vouched for by religion, are necessarily to be reprehended. They may be harmless; nay, more, as a recent reverend writer claims, they may even be 'edifying, ministering to faith and fostering piety.' Nor, again, would I venture to affirm that all scientific inquiry regarding supernatural phenomena, is in itself reprehensible. I use the word 'scientific' in the proper signification. It is generally taken in a too narrow and exclusive sense. In common parlance it is restricted to physics, and to ways of investigation most congruously followed in the domain of physics, but ill-adapted, as a rule, for employment elsewhere. I understand by 'science,' systematised and co-ordinated knowledge, a knowledge of facts as underlain by principles -in other words, causal knowledge. And by the scientific method I understand that which the modern mind now so emphatically recognises and so fruitfully follows as its chosen instrument of research in all departments of intellectual activity-the method which starts, not from a priori speculations, but from established facts, and which finds in the comparison of those facts and in the deduction of their results the guarantee of reality. I am far from saying that we may not pursue this method in investigating the supernatural. But I do say that to a science of the supernatural, in the true sense of the word 'science,' we shall never attain by human industry. However numerous the supernatural phenomena which we collect by observation and verify by experience, we cannot advance to the idea of a law as the explanation of them. The subject is too obscure; the instances are too conflicting and too contradictory; the causal nexus is beyond us. Consider the results obtained by the Society for Promoting Psychical Research, for which two valued friends of