“What we see is always nothing but the bodily covering; but we must conclude by other marks and circumstances, whether it be inhabited by a spirit. Besides, there is in the whole dominion of our sensible knowledge not one being that answers our idea of a spirit; this idea has been produced merely by reasoning, and therefore a spirit never can become an object of our perception.”
“Very strange!” the Duke replied, shaking his head; “the Irishman has said much the same, and nevertheless, he hit upon an expedient of proving to me the possibility of apparitions.”
“I have read that argument; it is taken from the dialectic. This circumstance alone ought to have made you suspect it. Or are you such a novice in that science that you should not know how pliable it is to accommodate itself to all opinions? Those philosophers who fancy all the beings of the whole creation to be spirits, as well as those who deny the existence of God, draw their arguments from that source. Is there any absurdity that could not be fitted to that baseless philosophy?”
“You are carrying matters too far. The Irishman did indeed propound several positions, which by their evidence enforce their claim to truth.”
“That I do not deny. A great deal of philosophical penetration is however required, if one shall be able to discern the truth and falsehood, which its assertion imply in a strange and m One feels indeed, frequently, the falsehood of sophistical subtilities without being able to refute them.”
“I should be glad to know what you have to object against the doctrine of the Irishman concerning the possibility of apparitions?”
“In order to do this, it will be necessary previously to abstract his doctrine.
“When a spirit, the Irishman says, operates on mine, then he is present to me. If I were a mere rational being, I then should be satisfied with imagining the presence of the spirit, without myself; but since I am a sensible being, by virtue of my nature, my imagination forms a corporeal idea of the object which my understanding thinks; that is, it forms an image of it. The presence of a spirit, therefore, puts my inferior intellectual powers in motion by means of the superior ones; I do not only imagine it merely without myself, but I perceive, at the same time, a shape answerable to it; I not only collect the ideas which he produces in my mind, but, at the same time, shape them in words. In short, I see the spirit and hear him speak.—Do you think, my friend, that I have comprehended the doctrine of the Irishman?”
“Perfectly!”
“The shape in which I see the spirit is, consequently, no real substance, but only the product of my sensitive power of perception, of my imagination.”