Man's first instincts and emotions form his response to the environment in which he found himself. Definite feelings based on pleasure and pain grew up around the phenomena whose causes and effects he understood, whilst around those which he did not understand—and the universe teemed with them in the early days—were naturally woven such personifications, marvelous interpretations, and sensations of awe and fear as would be hit upon by a race having few and simple ideas and limited experience. The unknown, being likewise the unpredictable, became for our primitive forefathers a terrible and omnipotent source of boons and calamities visited upon mankind for cryptic and wholly extra-terrestrial reasons, and thus clearly belonged to a sphere of existence whereof we know nothing and wherein we have no part. The phenomenon of dreaming likewise helped to build up the notion of an unreal or spiritual world; and in general, all the conditions of savage dawn-life so strongly conduced to a feeling of the supernatural, that we need not wonder at the thoroughness with which man's very hereditary essence has become saturated with religion and superstition. That saturation must, as a matter of plain scientific fact, be regarded as virtually permanent so far as the subconscious mind and inner instincts are concerned; for though the area of the unknown has been steadily contracting for thousands of years, an infinite reservoir of mystery still engulfs most of the outer cosmos, whilst a vast residuum of powerful inherited associations clings around all the objects and processes that were once mysterious, however well they may now be explained. And more than this, there is an actual physiological fixation of the old instincts in our nervous tissue, which would make them obscurely operative even were the conscious mind to be purged of all sources of wonder.
(continued next month)
TRUE GHOST STORIES
Edwin C. Hill talks on various subjects every night on the Columbia Broadcasting System. One evening he devoted his program to ghost stories about London that are supposed to be true. They sound very convincing and have many witnesses. We leave it to the reader whether to accept them as truth, or discard them as merely hallucinations. However, they are extremely interesting, nevertheless.
Once, two sailors were roaming around London and came upon an old, but handsome, mansion.
"Funny no one lives here," said one, "This shack seems too good to be left vacant."
But the two sailors didn't intend to leave it vacant that night. They had no money, and thus could not pay for lodging, so they entered the old house, intending to spend the night there.
After climbing to the second floor and finding a fireplace, they built a blazing fire with some wood they had secured. Curling up in some old clothes, they went to sleep beside the roaring fire.
Suddenly, after many hours, one of the sailors awoke, half-conscious of some noise. There it was again! It sounded like a door being closed. Yes—that's what it must have been. A few pieces of wood to bring the dying fire to renewed activity gave him some courage, but he woke the other sailor anyway.
He had hardly time to explain to his friend the reason for his disturbance, when the noise was repeated.