ESSAY-REVIEWS 333 



Only " restless spirits " appear before us ! Ah ! we fear that in this case every 

 one of us should see one ghost at least every night. Then, why is it that ghosts 

 do not appear to us in broad daylight, and let us examine them thoroughly, and 

 take photographs of them ? And, above all, when they speak why do they not say 

 something great or useful ? Ordinary persons like ourselves cannot answer these 

 questions. Frankly, we do not try to. We find it easier to believe that those who 

 tell us that they have seen ghosts are — well — not telling the truth. That is old 

 Hume's strong position. 



Then there is the whole body of evidence suggesting that mind is only " the 

 secretion of the brain " — evidence which has not been even damaged by the modern 

 pseudo-philosophers, who are out to prove themselves above the order of nature. 

 We witness the development of mind in ourselves and in our children ; we observe 

 its evolution throughout the animal kingdom to mankind, and even throughout 

 mankind from the lowest to the highest types ; and we see it profoundly affected 

 or even destroyed by material agencies. It is depraved almost out of recognition 

 by various diseases and malformations of the brain ; stimulated by good food and 

 health ; weakened by starvation, fatigue, and age ; held in abeyance by opium 

 and other drugs, and by natural sleep ; excited, maddened, or abrogated by 

 alcohol ; improved by education and success ; soured by failure, and even by 

 indigestion ; and finally knocked out altogether, temporarily or permanently, 

 by such a simple process as a knock on the head. And yet our ghost-seers say 

 that it is not of the body at all ; that it is able to live independently, retaining its 

 vast stores of memories, passions, feelings, judgments, and convictions, its muscu- 

 lar powers (to lift tables and chairs at seances), and its powers of utterance, all 

 without food, body, muscles, or tongue ; and that it even possesses additional 

 powers to those which it possessed before, such as the powers of generating light, 

 passing through walls, writing on slates in locked boxes, and communicating with 

 living people through infinite distances of ether ! True, the wily modern 

 spiritualist is trying to abandon visible ghosts altogether (because of the difficulties 

 mentioned above), and contents himself with " communications from the dead " 

 through living " mediums." But the same difficulties remain ; whether visible or 

 not, the pretended ghost is supposed to retain his powers of body, language, 

 memories, loves, and hates, and all without the substances and organs which make 

 these things possible in life. Now, it is a universal experience that a given result 

 is produced by one, and only by one, complex of causes. Take our friend 

 Mr. Jones, for example. He is built up by a great complex of bone, flesh, blood, 

 clothes, and banking account ; his memory is stored with fifty years of experi- 

 ences ; and every action and word of his is based upon and conditioned by those 

 experiences. We have never met another Mr. Jones, and do not believe that he 

 exists. If another person were to claim to be he, the law would put him into gaol. 

 But now we are told that certain particles of ether, without his body, brain, and 

 banking account, can build up another but ghostly Mr. Jones somewhere in 

 supernal space around us ! 



All this is hard to believe in— as hard to believe in, let us say, as the ghost of 

 a candle after it is blown out, or the ghost of a steam-engine continuing to run 

 along the rails on dark nights without coal, after its frame, cylinders, and wheels 

 have been broken up. So strong are our a priori objections that we must have 

 very strong evidence to overcome them. If a fisherman tells us that he has 

 caught a thirty- pound pike, we are quite ready to believe him ; but, as the weight 

 of the pike increases, so does the weight of the evidence required to overcome our 

 incredulity— and in something like an exponential ratio. Thus, when the pike 



