“Not at all. The impression may be deeper and clearer on your mind than any fact of the next morning will make. You will forget the next day altogether, but the impression of the dream will remain through all the following whirl and storm of what you call facts. Now a conviction may be likened to a deep impression on the judgment or the reason, or both. No one can feel it but the person who is convinced. It cannot be conveyed.”
“I fancy that is just what those who believe in spirit-rapping would say.”
“There are the true and false of convictions, as of everything else. I mean that a man may take that for a conviction in his own mind which is not a conviction, but only resembles one. But those to whom you refer profess to appeal to facts. It is on the ground of those facts, and with the more earnestness the more reason they can give for receiving them as facts, that I refuse all their deductions with abhorrence. I mean that, if what they say is true, the thinker must reject with contempt the claim to anything like revelation therein.”
“Then you do not believe in ghosts, after all?” said Kate, in a tone of surprise.
“I did not say so, my dear. Will you be reasonable, or will you not?”
“Dear uncle, do tell us what you really think.”
“I have been telling you what I think ever since I came, Katey; and you won’t take in a word I say.”
“I have been taking in every word, uncle, and trying hard to understand it as well.—Did you ever see a ghost, uncle?”
Cornelius Heywood was silent. He shut his lips and opened his jaws till his cheeks almost met in the vacuum. A strange expression crossed the strange countenance, and the great eyes of his spectacles looked as if, at the very moment, they were seeing something no other spectacles could see. Then his jaws closed with a snap, his countenance brightened, a flash of humour came through the goggle eyes of pebble, and, at length, he actually smiled as he said—“Really, Katey, you must take me for a simpleton!”
“How, uncle?”