SOME HUMAN INSTINCTS. 169 



But, in spite of psychical research-societies, science has not yet adopted 

 ghosts ; so we can only say that certain ideas of supernatural agency, 

 associated with real circumstances, produce a peculiar kind of horror. 

 This horror is probably explicable as the result of a combination of 

 simpler horrors. To bring the ghostly terror to its maximum, many 

 usual elements of the dreadful must combine, such as loneliness, dark- 

 ness, inexplicable sounds, especially of a dismal character, moving 

 figures half discerned (or, if discerned, of dreadful aspect), and a ver- 

 tiginous baffling of the expectation. This last element, which is intel- 

 lectual, is very important. It produces a strange emotional "curdle" 

 in our blood to see a process, with which we are familiar, deliberately 

 taking an unwonted course. Any one's heart would stop beating if he 

 perceived his chair sliding unassisted across the floor. The lower ani- 

 mals appear to be sensitive to the mysteriously exceptional as well as 

 ourselves. My friend Professor W. K. Brooks, of the Johns Hopkins 

 University, told me of his large and noble dog being frightened into 

 a sort of epileptic fit by a bone being drawn across the floor by a 

 thread which the dog did not see. Darwin and Romanes have given 

 similar experiences.* The idea of the supernatural involves that the 

 usual should be set at naught. In the witch and hobgoblin super- 

 natural, other elements still of fear are brought in caverns, slime and 

 ooze, vermin, corpses, and the like.f A human corpse seems normally 

 to produce an instinctive dread, which is no doubt somewhat due to 

 its mysteriousness, and which familiarity rapidly dispels. But, in 

 view of the fact that cadaveric, reptilian, and underground horrors 

 play so specific and constant a part in many nightmares and forms of 

 delirium, it seems not altogether unwise to ask whether these forms 

 of dreadful circumstance may not at a former period have been more 

 normal objects of the environment than now. The ordinary cock-sure 

 evolutionist ought to have no difficulty in explaining these terrors, 

 and the scenery that provokes them, as relapses into the consciousness 

 of the cave-men, a consciousness usually overlaid in us by experiences 

 of more recent date. 



There are certain other pathological fears, and certain peculiarities 



*"Cf. Romanes, "Mental Evolution," etc., p. 156. 



f In the " Overland Monthly " for this year, a most interesting article on Laura Bridg- 

 man's writings has been published by Mr. E. C. vSandford. Among other reminiscences 

 of her early childhood, while she still knew nothing of the sign-language, the wonderful 

 blind deaf-mute records the following item : " My father [he was a farmer and probably 

 did hi3 own butchering] used to enter his kitchen bringing some killed animals in and 

 deposited them on one of sides of the room many times. As I perceived it it make me 

 shudder with terror because I did not know what the matter was. I hated to approach 

 the dead. One morning I went to take a short walk with my Mother. I went into a snug 

 house for some time. They took me into a room where there was a coffin. I put my 

 hand in the coffin & felt something so queer. It frightened me unpleasantly. I found 

 something dead wrapped in a silk h'd'k'f so carefully. It must have been a body that 

 had had vitality. ... I did not like to venture to examine the body for I was con- 

 founded." 



