The Night-Side of Nature; Or, Ghosts and Ghost-Seers

by Catherine Crowe

CHAPTER X.

THE FUTURE THAT AWAITS US.

In all ages of the world, and in all parts of it, mankind have earnestly desired to learn the fate that awaited them when they had “shuffled off this mortal coil;” and those pretending to be their instructors have built up different systems which have stood in the stead of knowledge, and more or less satisfied the bulk of the people. The interest on this subject is, at the present period, in the most highly civilized portions of the globe, less than it has been at any preceding one. The great proportion of us live for this world alone, and think very little of the next: we are in too great a hurry of pleasure or business to bestow any time on a subject of which we have such vague notions—notions so vague, that, in short, we can scarcely by any effort of the imagination bring the idea home to ourselves; and when we are about to die, we are seldom in a situation to do more than resign ourselves to what is inevitable, and blindly meet our fate; while, on the other hand, what is generally called the religious world is so engrossed by its struggles for power and money, or by its sectarian disputes and enmities, and so narrowed and circumscribed by dogmatic orthodoxies, that it has neither inclination nor liberty to turn back or look around, and endeavor to gather up from past records and present observation such hints as are now and again dropped in our path, to give us an intimation of what the truth may be. The rationalistic age, too, out of which we are only just emerging, and which succeeded one of gross superstition, having settled, beyond appeal, that there never was such a thing as a ghost—that the dead never do come back to tell us the secrets of their prison-house, and that nobody believes such idle tales but children and old women—seemed to have shut the door against the only channel through which any information could be sought. Revelation tells us very little on this subject—reason can tell us nothing; and if Nature is equally silent, or if we are to be deterred from questioning her from the fear of ridicule, there is certainly no resource left us but to rest contented in our ignorance, and each wait till the awful secret is disclosed to ourselves.

A great many things have been pronounced untrue and absurd, and even impossible, by the highest authorities of the age in which they lived, which have afterward, and indeed within a very short period, been found to be both possible and true. I confess myself, for one, to have no respect whatever for these dogmatic denials and affirmations, and I am quite of opinion that vulgar incredulity is a much more contemptible thing than vulgar credulity. We know very little of what is, and still less of what may be; and till a thing has been proved, by induction, logically impossible, we have no right whatever to pronounce that it is so. As I have said before, a priori conclusions are perfectly worthless; and the sort of investigation that is bestowed upon subjects of the class of which I am treating, something worse—inasmuch as they deceive the timid and the ignorant, and that very numerous class which pins its faith on authority and never ventures to think for itself, by an assumption of wisdom and knowledge, which, if examined and analyzed, would very frequently prove to be nothing more respectable than obstinate prejudice and rash assertion.

For my own part, I repeat, I insist upon nothing. The opinions I have formed, from the evidence collected, may be quite erroneous; if so, as I seek only the truth, I shall be glad to be undeceived, and shall be quite ready to accept a better explanation of these facts, whenever it is offered to me: but it is in vain to tell me that this explanation is to be found in what is called imagination, or in a morbid state of the nerves, or an unusual excitement of the organs of color and form, or in imposture; or in all these together. The existence of all such sources of error and delusion I am far from denying, but I find instances that it is quite impossible to reduce under any one of those categories, as we at present understand them. The multiplicity of these instances, too—for, not to mention the large number that are never made known or carefully concealed, if I were to avail myself liberally of cases already recorded in various works, many of which I know, and many others I hear of as existing, but which I can not conveniently get access to, I might fill volumes (German literature abounds in them)—the number of the examples, I repeat, even on the supposition that they are not facts, would of itself form the subject of a very curious physiological or psychological inquiry. If so many people in respectable situations of life, and in apparently a normal state of health, are capable of either such gross impostures, or the subjects of such extraordinary spectral illusions, it would certainly be extremely satisfactory to learn something of the conditions that induce these phenomena in such abundance; and all I expect from my book at present is, to induce a suspicion that we are not quite so wise as we think ourselves; and that it might be worth while to inquire a little seriously into reports, which may perchance turn out to have a deeper interest for us than all those various questions, public and private, put together, with which we are daily agitating ourselves.

I have alluded, in an earlier part of this work, to the belief entertained by the ancients that the souls of men, on being disengaged from the bodies, passed into a middle state, called Hades, in which their portions seemed to be neither that of complete happiness nor of insupportable misery. They retained their personality, their human form, their memory of the past, and their interest in those that had been dear to them on earth. Communications were occasionally made by the dead to the living: they mourned over their duties neglected and their errors committed; many of their mortal feelings, passions, and propensities, seemed to survive; and they sometimes sought to repair, through the instrumentality of the living, the injuries they had formerly inflicted. In short, death was merely a transition from one condition of life to another; but in this latter state, although we do not see them condemned to undergo any torments, we perceive that they are not happy. There are, indeed, compartments in this dark region: there is Tartarus for the wicked, and the Elysian fields for the good, but they are comparatively thinly peopled. It is in the mid-region that these pale shades abound, consistently with the fact that here on earth, moral as well as intellectual mediocrity is the rule, and extremes of good or evil the exceptions.

With regard to the opinion entertained of a future state by the Hebrews, the Old Testament gives us very little information; but what glimpses we do obtain of it appear to exhibit notions analogous to those of the heathen nations, inasmuch as that the personality and the form seem to be retained, and the possibility of these departed spirits revisiting the earth and holding commune with the living is admitted. The request of the rich man, also, that Lazarus might be sent to warn his brethren, yet alive, of his own miserable condition, testifies to the existence of these opinions; and it is worthy of remark that the favor is denied, not because its performance is impossible, but because the mission would be unavailing—a prediction which, it appears to me, time has singularly justified.

Altogether, the notion that in the state entered upon after we leave this world, the personality and form are retained, that these shades sometimes revisit the earth, and that the memory of the past still survives, seems to be universal; for it is found to exist among all people, savage and civilized: and if not founded on observation and experience, it becomes difficult to account for such unanimity on a subject which I think, speculatively considered, would not have been productive of such results; and one proof of this is, that those who reject such testimony and tradition as we have in regard to it, and rely only on their own understandings, appear to be pretty uniformly led to form opposite conclusions. They can not discern the mode of such a phenomenon; it is open to all sorts of scientific objections, and the cui bono sticks in their teeth.

This position being admitted, as I think it must be, we have but one resource left, whereby to account for the universality of this persuasion—which is, that in all periods and places, both mankind and womankind, as well in health as in sickness, have been liable to a series of spectral illusions of a most extraordinary and complicated nature, and bearing such a remarkable similarity to each other in regard to the objects supposed to be seen or heard, that they have been universally led to the same erroneous interpretation of the phenomenon. It is manifestly not impossible that this may be the case; and if it be so, it becomes the business of physiologists to inquire into the matter, and give us some account of it. In the meantime, we may be permitted to take the other view of the question, and examine what probabilities seem to be in its favor.

When the body is about to die, that which can not die, and which, to spare words, I will call the soul, departs from it—whither? We do not know: but, in the first place, we have no reason to believe that the space destined for its habitation is far removed from the earth, since, knowing nothing about it, we are equally entitled to suppose the contrary; and, in the next, that which we call distance is a condition that merely regards material objects, and of which a spirit is quite independent, just as our thoughts are, which can travel from here to China, and back again, in a second of time.