It is known that Lord Falkland and Archbishop Williams both warned Charles I. of his fate; but it required no ghost to tell him that. And I have known many deeply interested in the fate of absent friends; and knowing their circumstances and locality, so prophesy, that they seemed to have all the faculty of clairvoyance. The young ladies of Britain, during the Peninsular war, were often dreaming of the apparitions of their lovers, perhaps at the hour of their expiring on the field of battle: coincidences that must make a deep impression on sensitive minds. Were I justified in divulging secrets and confessions, I might relate some curious stories of these inauspicious dreams.
At the moment of the duel between Mr. Pitt and Mr. Tierney, on Wimbledon Common, a lady of fashion in London exclaimed, “This is the important moment!”
Oliver Cromwell had reclined on his couch, and extreme fatigue forbad the coming on of sleep. On a sudden his curtains opened, and a gigantic female form imparted to him, that he should be the greatest man in England. The puritanical faith and ambition of Cromwell might have raised, during the distracted state of the kingdom, something even beyond this; and who may decide, if the spectre had whispered, “Thou shalt be king hereafter,” that the protector would have refused the crown, as, on the feast of Lupercal, it had been refused by Cæsar?
“General Oglethorpe,” writes Boswell, “told us that Prendergast, an officer in the Duke of Marlborough’s army, had mentioned to many of his friends, that he should die on a particular day. Upon that day a battle took place with the French; and after it was over, and Prendergast was still alive, his brother officers, while they were yet in the field, jestingly asked him, where was his prophecy now? Prendergast gravely answered, ‘I shall die, notwithstanding what you see.’ Soon afterwards there came a shot from a French battery, to which the orders for a cessation of arms had not yet reached, and he was killed upon the spot!”
But can these shallow stories be cited as prophecies? The links in the chain of causation are evident, and the veriest sceptic cannot doubt their sequence, where there was so strong a probability. It is merely by reflecting on the past and judging the future by analogy. Natural events of human actions have laws to govern them, and there is seldom foresight without the reflection on these laws. Lord Mansfield, when asked how the French revolution would end, replied, “It is an event without a precedent, and therefore without a prophecy.”
Astr. Then you do not believe, where you cannot develop the causes of events. Like all rational philosophers, you must have demonstrative proof. In which class of sceptics shall I enrol you, Evelyn?—As a proselyte of Aristotle, who will deny not only the existence of spirits, but affirm heaven and hell to be a fable, and that the world is self-existent: or with the Epicureans, who believed the impious doctrine of blind chance,—that the sun and stars were vapours, and the soul perishable; or with the modern lights of reason,—Sir Isaac Newton, who confessed the Paradise Lost to be a fine poem, though it proved nothing; or the Abbé Lauguerne, who, for the self-same reason, despised the brilliancy of Racine and Corneille; or with the Sadducees themselves, who denied both prophecy and spirit?
Ev. Perhaps the Sadducees might have referred visions to the right cause, for phantoms differ little from Locke’s “substance which thinks.” But the mere metaphysician blinks the question (as Lord Bacon does that of experimental chemistry,—“Vix unum experimentum adduci potest quod ad hominum statum levandum et juvandum spectat”); thus wofully depreciating the progress of chemical science, as if the discoveries of Wollaston, of Davy, of Dalton, and of Faraday were fruitless. Remember, modern philosophers are not like Xenophon, who (says Socrates) called all fools who differed from his opinion.
Even Baxter confesses the frequency of imposture in ghost stories, yet leans to the belief of all which he cannot account for.
Now if philosophy had not doubted, science would be stationary. We might still believe, with Heraclitus, that the sun was only a foot in breadth; or, with Copernicus, that it revolved in its orbit, while the earth was at rest. Remember, Astrophel, the way to the temple of Science is through the portals of doubt: it is a mark of weakness, “jurare in verba magistri.” Even the prince philosopher of Denmark doubted the prophetic truth of his father’s ghost on its mere appearance—(“The spirit I have seen may be a devil,”)—until the scene of the play, and the stricken conscience of the king, and then only, he believed that “it was an honest ghost.”
“It is true,” as Lord Chesterfield wrote in 1653, “I know that God can make any such things to appear, but because he can, therefore to conclude that he doth, is ill argued: and though divers books are full of such stories, yet the soberest sort of men in all ages have doubted the truth of them.” I might add to these the visions which have been so strangely warped to interpret a subsequent event. Those of William Rufus, and Innocent the Fourth, and Henry the Second of France, and a thousand others from ancient history, between the assumed prophecy and fulfilment of which, there is about as much truth as when Lady Seymour dreamt of having found a nest of nine finches, and soon after was married to Finch, Earl of Winchelsea, and was blessed with a brood of nine children.