The other world—the inner, or subjective—seems distant, evasive, and unreal, and in contemplating it he is filled with uncertainty, dread, fear, and superstition.
Our friends die and disappear; we miss them, and mourn for them. Where are they? What will become of us when we die? Shall we ever meet them again?
Passing by religion and revelation, as we are dealing with facts and phenomena in the natural life of man, rather than with creeds and dogmas that undertake to cut the “Gordian Knot,” these questions stare everyone in the face, and in every age man has tried to solve them by actual knowledge.
Belief in ghosts, angels and demons is practically universal; and just here comes in the whole range of psychical phenomena, facts and fantasies, illusions, hallucinations and delusions, rational volition, reason dethroned, and the Will in Subjection, already referred to.
As individual experiences, subjective or objective, all are real. The fear incited by illusions and hallucination, or by “seeing a ghost,” regardless of the fact of its actual existence, is as real to the individual as that of meeting a serpent in the grass, or a tiger in the jungle.
Soothsayers, diviners, prophets, mediums, conjurers, and seers consequently have been found in every age and among every people. Ignorance, fear, dread of death, desire to know, have always provided them with patrons, followers, or disciples.
They have often reaped a rich harvest, and not unfrequently dominated a race or a people, as the Papacy does to-day.
Where they have failed to create belief, they have often triumphed through fear and anathema, and often supplemented these weapons by persecution, imprisonment, torture, and death, and so held sway.
Revelation begs the question; dogma forces the conclusion; and both dominate the soul without convincing and without knowledge.