All Men are Ghosts

by L. P. Jacks

"Your own!" was the answer.

"Come back, beloved Panhandle!" I called after the retreating figure. "Come back and let me fulfil my part of the compact before you go. I have yet to tell you the story of Billy Burst."

"I shall read it in the next chapter of your book," was the reply, now almost inaudible, so great was the distance from which it came.

I called yet louder, "I have a ghost-story to tell you, dear Panhandle. Very important. About the ghost of a novelist. Far better than yours about the novelist's characters!"

"I shall read about that in the next chapter but one."

Such, I am fain to believe, was the answer. But the voice had now become so faint that this rendering of the words is given with reserve. My first impression was that Panhandle said simply, "Pooh, pooh!"

I was determined not to let him go. Raising my voice to the uttermost, I continued to call him. "Come back," I kept shouting, "and arm me with one more word of wisdom for the battle of life! Without you, Panhandle, I have no protector, and the psychologists will surely devour me."

At the sound of the word "psychologists" Panhandle's flight was suddenly arrested. In one swoop he retraversed the vast space that now lay between us, and returned to his original position.

"Hear, then, my last word," he said. "The chief errors of mankind issue from the notion that thinking is a solitary process and the thinker an isolated being. In writing their works or monologues the thinkers, with few exceptions, have mistaken the form which is proper to philosophy and thereby done violence to the true nature of thought. All thinking is the work of a community; its form is conversational and, in the highest stages, dramatic. For want of this knowledge many philosophers have gone astray. Ignorant of the other minds with which their own are in communion, deaf to the voices which mingle with theirs in the eternal dialogue of thought, they have uttered their message as a weary monologue, and the vivid interplay of mind with mind, the quick debate of reacting spirits, which is the very life of thought, has fallen dead. In the course of your education, which has properly begun to-day, you will become acquainted with a multitude of interlocutors whose existence you have never suspected, though they have been addressing you from the first moment you began to think and contributing much of what you consider most original in your thought. These are the ghosts by whom you will henceforth be haunted, until, finally, they make you one of themselves and carry you to heaven in a whirlwind of fire. Farewell."

Having said this, he instantly vanished, leaving behind him a faint odour of Havana cigars.