“The very same.”
“Your father has related to me all the particulars of it; I have reflected upon it, and imagine I am capable of explaining it in a natural manner. Your father received, two days before the ghost appeared to him, a letter, by which he was informed that the Count was dangerously ill, and that his life was despaired of on account of his advanced age. This intelligence affected him violently, and the idea of the impending dissolution of his dearest friend, prevailed in his mind from that moment. The melancholy of your father seemed to encrease hourly, reduced him in the day to the state of a dreaming person, and disturbed his rest at night. As often us he awoke in the second night, he fancied he heard somebody groan, yet the groaning person was undoubtedly nobody but himself, and the cause of his groans originated from the pressure of the blood against the breast. This pressure awakened him once more, early in the morning, with some violence; he fell again asleep a few minutes after, and it was very natural that the object of the dream that stole upon him should be no other but Count San*. Your father mistook that dream for a real apparition, and nothing is more pardonable than this self-deceit. The only circumstance that renders this incident remarkable, is, that the Count really expired in that very hour. However, I ask you whether it be so very strange, if our imagination, which deceives us so many thousand times by its delusions, should at length coincide once accidentally with the truth?”
“One rather ought to wonder,” the Duke replied, “that this is so rarely the case.”
“Here you have two instances of apparitions,” I resumed, “which agree in their being delusions, only with that difference, that one of them which happened at the church-yard originated from external causes, and the other from the imagination of your father. We are not always so fortunate as to be able to explain apparitions in so natural a manner; our incapacity and ignorance gives us, however, no right to think that they are supernatural.”
“You think then that the belief in apparitions and the influence of spirits originates merely from ignorance?”
“Certainly; when man was yet in his unpolished state, and ignorant of the laws of nature and of thinking, the uncivilized mortals could not but observe many external phenomena which they could not explain, their stock of experimental knowledge not being equal to that task. Necessitated by the law of reason to search for the cause of every effect, they substituted unknown causes, when unable to find out any that were known to them, and mistook these powers for spirits, because they were invisible to them, though they perceived their effects.”
“I do not deny, my friend, that the original source of the belief in apparitions, and the influence of spirits, has taken its rise from an evidently false conclusion. It has however been frequently the fate of truth, that its discovery was founded on erroneous premises; consequently the manner in which an idea is generated cannot render its internal truth suspected, provided it be supported by other valid arguments.”
“Your remark is very just and true, yet it cannot be applied to the present case, for I have already proved that we possess neither an external nor an internal criterion by which we could discern the influence and apparition of those invisible beings, and that we consequently have no sufficient reason to believe in their existence. This too I will not contest. You have, however, proved only the impossibility of finding out a criterion by which we could discern the real influence of spirits, but not the impossibility of that influence itself. It may yet be supposed that these beings can produce apparitions without, and effects within ourselves, and that we are connected with them in an effectual and secret manner. While this internal impossibility is not proved, it will not be absurd to imagine that men who mortify their sensuality, who are entirely absorbed in meditation, and fix their looks merely on super-terrestial things, may be favoured more frequently with the influence of spiritual beings, and a more intimate connection with them.”
(To be continued.)