Page:In ghostly Japan (IA cu31924014202687).pdf/161

 supernatural. To-day we have ceased to be consciously afraid of the unseen;—knowing that we ourselves are supernatural,—that even the physical man, with all his life of sense, is more ghostly than any ghost of old imagining: but some dim inheritance of the primitive fear still slumbers in our being, and wakens perhaps, like an echo, to the sound of that wail in the night.

Whatever thing invisible to human eyes the senses of a dog may at times perceive, it can be nothing resembling our idea of a ghost. Most probably the mysterious cause of start and whine is not anything seen. There is no anatomical reason for supposing a dog to possess exceptional powers of vision. But a dog’s organs of scent proclaim a faculty immeasurably superior to the sense of smell in man. The old universal belief in the superhuman perceptivities of the creature was a belief justified by fact; but the perceptivities are not visual. Were the howl of a dog really—as once supposed—an outcry of ghostly terror, the meaning might possibly be, “I smell Them!”—but not, “I see them!” No evidence exists to support the fancy that a dog can see any forms of being which a man cannot see.