Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 2.djvu/216

Rh APPAEITIONS A PPARITIONS, in the ordinary acceptation of the X. word, can scarcely be better denned than in the terms used by Defoe : &quot; They are the invisible inhabitants of the unknown world, affecting human shapes or other shapes, and showing themselves visibly to us.&quot; In this definition no account is taken of &quot; spectral illusions, in voluntarily generated, by means of which figures or forms, not present to the actual sense, are nevertheless depicted with a vividness and intensity sufficient to create a tem porary belief of their reality.&quot; Theories of apparitions generally deal with these hallucinations, and no doubt they are the foundation of many of the stories of superstition, but they scarcely suffice to account for the universality of the belief in the possible appearance of disembodied spirits. These figures, kind or threatening, are probably the first objects that meet the vision of primitive men, when they begin to reflect on the unseen powers around them, and &quot; to explore these coasts which our geographers cannot describe.&quot; Ghosts are almost the first guess of the savage, almost^the last infirmity of the civilised imagination ; on these forms, shadowy and unsubstantial as they are, solid superstructures of ritual and morality have been based, and apparitions, with the consequences of the belief in them, have a literature and a history of their own. In the first place, the belief has had an immense effect on the religious and moral development of our race. Though it is as yet impossible to analyse to its first elements the con fused mass of fear and custom which makes up the faith of savages, there can be little doubt that their religion, with the later and refined heathenism .of Greece and Rome, sprang in part from the propitiation oFthe Spirits of ancestors. Again, it would no longer be true to -say, as Scott did forty years ago, that &quot; the increasing civilisation of all well-con stituted countries has blotted out the belief in apparitions.&quot; The visionaries who found their religion on a pretended intercourse with the dead, and who consider the highest function of their clergy to be &quot;the serving of tables&quot; tables that rap and move may be counted in America by millions. Many causes have combined to bring about this return to what a short time ago seemed a forlorn superstition. First, there was that reaction against the somewhat commonplace scepticism of the last century which took in literature the form of Romanticism and of the Gothic revival, and brought back in a poetical shape the fairies and spectres of mediaeval fancy. Again, the lofty morality and pure life of Swedenborg (1688-1771) won a hearing for his extraordinary visions, and minds influenced by him were ready to welcome further additions to the marvellous. He declared that &quot; the spirit of man is a form ; &quot; and added that it had been &quot; given to him to converse with almost all the dead whom he had known in the life of the body.&quot; Last of all came what is called spiritualism, inspired by an impatient revolt against the supposed tendencies and conclusions of modern science. Inquirers who live in constant fear that science is trying to demonstrate the truth of materialism, and to rob them of their dearest hope, that of a future life in the society of their departed friends, turn eagerly to what they think ocular evidence of another existence. There is scarcely any literature, not even the records of trials for witch craft, that is more&quot; sad and ludicrous than the accounts of &quot; spiritual stances,&quot; with the persistence of the bereaved in seeking a sign. The attempt of the Alex andrian Platonists to substitute the visions of trances for the conclusions of intellect has been .called the despair of reason ; and modern spiritualism, when it is not a drawing-room amusement, is too often a moment in the despair of faith. The belief in apparitions, we have said, has its history, a history contained in ancient laws and literature, in the customs and superstitions of savages, and in the fireside ghost-stories of our own homes. By a comparison of all these we shall try, first, to show how the notion of the existence of spirits and of the possibility of their appear ance arose ; next, to trace several of the shapes in which it is most powerful and general ; lastly, to point out how modern theories and marvels are connected with primitive and savage ideas, and we shall probably arrive at the con elusion that there is either some substratum of imexplained facts, or that the human imagination is subject to laws which have not been sufficiently investigated. It would be rash to say, with Mr Herbert Spencer, that Piimiti the propitiation of the spirits of ancestors is the first germ beliefs, of all religion, and it would be prematxire to deny that there may be races which have no conception of the exist ence of the spirit after death. But it is safe to assert that there are very few savage peoples who do not believe that their dead ancestors appear to them in dreams, and in what they think the clearer vision of trances, and who do not prove their belief by sacrifice of food, by prayers for help, by hymns, and by offerings made to show love or de precate anger. The wide-spread graves of extinct races, with the weapons and vessels buried along with the dead, demonstrate that these nameless and vanished hordes also held that the life of the dead persists, with its old needs and desires. The literature of cultivated peoples shows clearly that the Greeks and Romans held the same opinion, and practised no very different rites. It would be tedious and superfluous to state all the facts so carefully collected by Mr Tylor in his Primitive Culture. Enough to f;ay that when the Athenians condemned the generals who neglected to bury the men who fell at Arginusfe, when Odysseus built a tomb in deference to the threat of the dead Elpenor &quot; lest I become a curse to thee, sent by the gods &quot; they acted from the same motive as the Australian &quot; black fellow ; who holds that his deceased tribesman, if left uninterred, will haunt him as an ingna, or mischievous spirit. If we wanted to state the savage theory of appari tions, we could scarcely do it better than in the words of Apuleius &quot;The human soul, after it has quitted the body, is called Lemur ; that which undertakes the guardianship of the family is called Lar ; those which wander Avithout fixed homes are named Larvae.&quot; The Lemurs then, we may say, are with us still as churchyard ghosts ; the &quot;Lar, after becoming the venerated hero of Grecian religion, has departed with the advance of Christianity. An able account of the Greek worship of the dead will be found in La Cite Antique, by M. Fustel de Coulanges. Taking it for proved that the credence in the apparitions and the power of the dead is a fact as good as universal in the beginning of thought, we must ask, How was the notion arrived at 1 Discarding for the moment the possi bility that it was founded on actual apparitions, we observe several causes which might, indeed which must, have given rise to it. The savage, like the child, is full of question ings, and his reasonings are, so to say, perfectly rational. His hypotheses colligate and explain the facts, as far as he knows them. One of the earliest mysteries to him is the mystery of death how is he to explain the sudden and eternal stillness of the warriors slain in battle 1 ? ISTow the savage philosopher knows of another state, namely, sleep, in which he seems as quiet as the dead, but is really active