To say that all the visible inhabitants of the mundane spirit-world are creatures of the disordered human liver, is perhaps a needless harshness of statement. The question of a future life is not involved in this subject, nor raised by the best writers who are studying it; but, religious belief quite apart, it remains to be proved that spirits of a supernatural world have any share in the affairs of a world governed by natural law. A goblin which manifests itself to the human eye, it seems to me, becomes natural, by bowing before the natural laws which rule in optics. Yet believers in ghosts find no difficulty in this direction; the word ‘supernatural’ covers a multitude of sins. ‘What is the supernatural?’ asks Disraeli, in ‘Lothair.’ ‘Can there be anything more miraculous than the existence of man and the world? anything more literally supernatural than the origin of things?’
Surely, in this life, nothing! The student who endeavours to govern his faith by the methods of science asks no more of any ghost that ever walked the earth, than that it will prove itself a reality. Man loves the marvellous. The marvels of science, however, do not melt away into thin air on close examination. They thrive under the severest tests, and grow more and more extraordinary the more they are tried. The spectroscope and the radiometer are more wonderful than any ‘supernatural’ thing yet heard of. Transportation through the air in the arms of a spirit is a clear impossibility; but it is less wonderful than the every-day feats of electricity in our time, the bare conception of which would have filled Plato and Aristotle with awe.
The actual origin of the phantoms of the spirit-world is to be found in the lawless and luxuriant fancy of primeval man. The creatures of this fancy have been perpetuated throughout all time, unto our own day, by that passionate yearning in men for continued life and love, which is ineradicable in our nature. Men will not, they can not, accept the doubt which plunges an eternal future into eternal darkness, and separates them for ever from the creatures of their love. Hence, when the remorseless fact of Death removes those creatures, they look, with a longing which is indescribably pathetic, into the Unknown where their beloved have gone, and strive to see them in their spirit-life.
On this verge the finite mind must pause; to question that life is to add a terrible burden to all human woe; it need not be questioned. But to question the power of anything in that life to manifest itself to man through natural law, is to do what science has a right to do. ‘The living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing ... neither have they any more a portion for ever in any thing that is done under the sun.’[112]
FOOTNOTE:
[112] ‘Eccles.’ ix., 5, 6.
