Chapter 13

M. Poupart now gives the explanations of common-sense. The early noises might have had physical causes: master, servants, and neighbours all heard them, but that proves nothing. As to the papers, a wind, or a mouse may have interfered with _them_. The movements of the bed are more serious, as there are several witnesses. But 'suppose the bed was on castors'. The inquirer does not ask whether it really was on castors, or not, he supposes the case. Then suppose S., that melancholy man, wants a lark (a envie de se rejouir), he therefore tosses about in bed, and the bed rushes, consequently, round the room. This experiment may be attempted by any philosopher. Let him lie in a bed with castors, and try how far he can make it run, while he kicks about in it. This explanation, dear to common-sense, is based on a physical impossibility, as any one may ascertain for himself. Then the servants tried in vain to hold back the excited couch, well, these servants may have lied, and, at most, could not examine 'les ressorts secrets qui causaient ce mouvement'. Now, M. Poupart deserts the theory that we can make a bed run about, by lying kicking on it, and he falls back on hidden machinery. The independent witness is said to have said that he was sorry he spoke, but this evidence proves nothing. What happened in the room when the door was bolted, is not evidence, of course, and we may imagine that S. himself made the noises on walls and windows, when his friend and mother were present. Thus M. S. was both melancholy, and anxious se donner un divertissement, by frightening his servants, to which end he supplied his bed with machinery that made it jump, and drew the curtains. What kind of secret springs would perform these feats, M. Poupart does not explain. It would have been wiser in him to say that he did not believe a word of it, than to give such silly reasons for a disbelief that made no exact inquiry into the circumstances. The frivolities of the bed are reported in the case of Home and others, nor can we do much more than remark the conservatism of the phenomena; the knocks, and the animated furniture.

The Amiens case (1746) is reported and attested by Father Charles Louis Richard, Professor in Theology, a Dominican friar. The haunted house was in the Rue de l'Aventure, parish of St. Jacques. The tenant was a M. Leleu, aged thirty-six. The troubles had lasted for fourteen years, and there was evidence for their occurrence earlier, before Leleu occupied the house. The disturbances were of the usual kind, a sound of heavy planks being tossed about, as in the experience of Scott at Abbotsford, raps, the fastening of doors so that they could not be opened for long, and then suddenly gave way (this, also, is frequent in modern tales), a sound of sweeping the floor, as in the Epworth case, in the Wesleys' parsonage, heavy knocks and thumps, the dragging of heavy bodies, steps on the stairs, lights, the dancing of all the furniture in the room of Mlle. Marie de Latre, rattling of crockery, a noise of whirring in the air, a jingling as of coins (familiar at Epworth), and, briefly, all the usually reported tintamarre. Twenty persons, priests, women, girls, men of all sorts, attest those phenomena which are simply the ordinary occurrences still alleged to be prevalent.

The narrator believes in diabolical agency, but he gives the explanations of common-sense. 1. M. Leleu is a visionary. But, as no one says that all the other witnesses are visionaries, this helps us little. 2. M. Leleu makes all the noise himself. That is, he climbs to the roof with a heavy sack of grain on his shoulder, and lets it fall; he runs up and down the chimneys with his heavy sack on his shoulder, he frolics with weighty planks all over the house, thumps the walls, makes furniture dance, and how? What is his motive? His tenants leave him, he is called a fool, a devil, a possessed person: his business is threatened, they talk of putting him in jail, and that is all he has got by his partiality for making a racket. 3. The neighbours make the noises, and again the narrator asks 'how?' and 'why?' 4. Some priests slept in the house once and heard nothing. But nobody pretends that there is always something to hear. The Bishop of Amiens licenses the publication 'with the more confidence, as we have ourselves received the depositions of ten witnesses, a number more than sufficient to attest a fact which nobody has any interest in feigning'.

In a tale like this, which is only one out of a vast number, exactly analogous, Common-sense is ill-advised in simply alleging imposture, so long maintained, so motiveless, and, on the whole, so very difficult to execute. M. Leleu brought in the Church, with its exorcisms, but our Dominican authority does not say whether or not the noises ceased after the rites had been performed. Dufresnoy, in whose Dissertations {178} these documents are republished, mentions that Bouchel, in his Bibliotheque du Droit Francois, d. v. 'Louage,' treats of the legal aspect of haunted houses. Thus the profession has not wholly disdained the inquiry.

Of all common sensible explanations, the most sporting and good- humoured is that given by the step-daughter of Alexander Dingwall, a tenant in Inverinsh, in 1761. Poor Dingwall in his cornyard 'heard very grievous lamentations, which continued, as he imagined, all the way to the seashore'. These he regarded as a warning of his end, but his stepdaughter sensibly suggested that, as the morning was cold, 'the voice must be that of a fox, to cause dogs run after him to give him heat'. Dingwall took to bed and died, but the suggestion that the fox not only likes being hunted, but provokes it as a form of healthy exercise, is invaluable. The tale is in Theophilus Insulanus, on the second sight.

There is no conclusion to be drawn from this mass of Cock Lane stories. Occasionally an impostor is caught, as at Brightling, in 1659. Mr. Joseph Bennet, a minister in that town, wrote an account of the affair, published in Increase Mather's Remarkable Providences. 'Several things were thrown by an invisible hand,' including crabs! 'Yet there was a seeming blur cast, though not on the whole, yet upon some part of it, for their servant girl was at last found throwing some things.' She averred that an old woman had bidden her do so, saying that 'her master and dame were bewitched, and that they should hear a great fluttering about their house for the space of two days'. This Cock Lane phenomenon, however, is not reported to have occurred. The most credulous will admit that the maid is enough to account for the Brightling manifestations; some of the others are more puzzling and remain in the region of the unexplained.

APPARITIONS, GHOSTS, AND HALLUCINATIONS.

Apparitions appear. Apparitions are not necessarily Ghosts. Superstition, Common-sense, and Science. Hallucinations: their kinds, and causes. Aristotle. Mr. Gurney's definition. Various sources of Hallucination, external and internal. The Organ of Sense. The Sensory Centre. The Higher Tracts of the Brain. Nature of Evidence. Dr. Hibbert. Claverhouse. Lady Lee. Dr. Donne. Dr. Hibbert's complaint of want of evidence. His neglect of contemporary cases. Criticism of his tales. The question of coincidental Hallucinations. The Calculus of Probabilities: M. Richet, MM. Binet et Fere; their Conclusions. A step beyond Hibbert. Examples of empty and unexciting Wraiths. Our ignorance of causes of Solitary Hallucinations. The theory of 'Telepathy'. Savage metaphysics of M. d'Assier. Breakdown of theory of Telepathy, when hallucinatory figure causes changes in physical objects. Animals as Ghost-seers: difficult to explain this by Telepathy. Strange case of a cat. General propriety and lack of superstition in cats. The Beresford Ghost, well-meaning but probably mythical. Mrs. Henry Sidgwick: her severity as regards conscientious Ghosts. Case of Mr. Harry. Case of Miss Morton. A difficult case. Examples in favour of old-fashioned theory of Ghosts. Contradictory cases. Perplexities of the anxious inquirer.

Only one thing is certain about apparitions, namely this, that they do appear. They really are perceived. Now, as popular language confuses apparitions with ghosts, this statement sounds like an expression of the belief that ghosts appear. It has, of course, no such meaning. When Le Loyer, in 1586, boldly set out to found a 'science of spectres,' he carefully distinguished between his method, and the want of method observable in the telling of ghost stories. He began by drawing up long lists of apparitions which are _not_ spectres, or ghosts, but the results of madness, malady, drink, fanaticism, illusions and so forth. It is true that Le Loyer, with all his deductions, left plenty of genuine spectres for the amusement of his readers. Like him we must be careful not to confound 'apparitions,' with 'ghosts'.

When a fist, applied to the eye, makes us 'see stars'; when a liver not in good working order makes us see muscae volitantes, or 'spiders'; when alcohol produces 'the horrors,'--visions of threatening persons or animals,--when a lesion of the brain, or delirium, or a disease of the organs of sense causes visions, or when they occur to starved and enthusiastic ascetics, all these false perceptions are just as much 'apparitions,' as the view of a friend at a distance, beheld at the moment of his death, or as the unrecognised spectre seen in a haunted house.

In popular phrase, however, the two last kinds of apparitions are called 'ghosts,' or 'wraiths,' and the popular tendency is to think of these, and of these alone, when 'apparitions' are mentioned. On the other hand the tendency of common-sense is to rank the two last sorts of apparition, the wraith and ghost, with all the other kinds, which are undeniably caused by accident, by malady, mental or bodily, or by mere confusion and misapprehension, as when one, seeing a post in the moonlight, takes it for a ghost. Science, following a third path, would class all perceptions which 'have not the basis in fact that they seem to have' as 'hallucinations'. The stars seen after a blow on the eye are hallucinations,--there are no real stars in view,--and the friend, whose body seems to fill space before our sight when his body is really on a death-bed far away;-- and again, the appearance of the living friend whom we see in the drawing-room while he is really in the smoking-room or in Timbuctoo,--are hallucinations also. The common-sense of the matter is stated by Aristotle. 'The reason of the hallucinations is that appearances present themselves, not only when the _object of sense_ is itself in motion, but also when the _sense_ is stirred, as it would be by the presence of the object' (De Insomn., ii. 460, b, 23- 26).

The ghost in a haunted house is taken for a figure, say, of a monk, or of a monthly nurse, or what not, but no monthly nurse or monk is in the establishment. The 'percept,' is a 'percept,' for those who perceive it; the apparition is an apparition, for _them_, but the perception is hallucinatory.

So far, everybody is agreed: the differences begin when we ask what causes hallucinations, and what different classes of hallucinations exist? Taking the second question first, we find hallucinations divided into those which the percipient (or percipients) believes, at the moment, and perhaps later, to be real; and those which his judgment pronounces to be _false_. Famous cases of the latter class are the idola which beset Nicolai, who studied them, and wrote an account of them. After a period of trouble and trial, and neglect of blood-letting, Nicolai saw, first a dead man whom he had known, and, later, crowds of people, dead, living, known or unknown. The malady yielded to leeches. {183} Examples of the first sort of apparitions taken by the judgment to be _real_, are common in madness, in the intemperate, and in ghost stories. The maniac believes in his visionary attendant or enemy, the drunkard in his rats and snakes, the ghost-seer often supposes that he has actually seen an acquaintance (where no mistaken identity is possible) and only learns later that the person,--dead, or alive and well,--was at a distance. Thus the writer is acquainted with the story of a gentleman who, when at work in his study at a distance from England, saw a colleague in his profession enter the room. 'Just wait till I finish this business,' he said, but when he had hastily concluded his letter, or whatever he was engaged on, his friend had disappeared. That was the day of his friend's death, in England. Here then the hallucination was taken for a reality; indeed, there was nothing to suggest that it was anything else. Mr. Gurney has defined a hallucination as 'a percept which lacks, but which can only by distinct reflection be recognised as lacking, the objective basis which it suggests'--and by 'objective basis,' he means 'the possibility of being shared by all persons with normal senses'. Nobody but the 'percipient' was present on the occasion just described, so we cannot say whether other people would have seen the visitor, or not. But reflection could not recognise the unreality of this 'percept,' till it was found that, in fact, the visitor had vanished, and had never been in the neighbourhood at all.

Here then, are two classes of hallucinations, those which reflection shows us to be false (as if a sane man were to have the hallucination of a crocodile, or of a dead friend, entering the room), and those which reflection does not, at the moment, show to be false, as if a friend were to enter, who could be proved to have been absent.

In either case, what causes the hallucination, or are there various possible sorts of causes? Now defects in the eye, or in the optic nerve, to speak roughly, may cause hallucinations _from without_. An injured external organ conveys a false and distorted message to the brain and to the intelligence. A nascent malady of the ear may produce buzzings, and these may develop into hallucinatory voices. Here be hallucinations _from without_. But when a patient begins with a hallucination of the intellect, as that inquisitors are plotting to catch him, or witches to enchant him, and when he later comes to _see_ inquisitors and witches, where there are none, we have, apparently, a hallucination _from within_. Again, some persons, like Blake the painter, _voluntarily_ start a hallucination. 'Draw me Edward I.,' a friend would say, Blake would, _voluntarily_, establish a hallucination of the monarch on a chair, in a good light, and sketch him, if nobody came between his eye and the royal sitter. Here, then, are examples of hallucinations begotten _from within_, either voluntarily, by a singular exercise of fancy, or involuntarily, as the suggestion of madness, of cerebral disease, or abnormal cerebral activity.

Again a certain amount of intensity of activity, at a 'sensory centre' in the brain, will start a 'percept'. Activity of the necessary force at the right place, may be _normally_ caused by the organ of sense, say the eye, when fixed on a real object, say a candlestick. (1) Or the necessary activity at the sensory centre may be produced, _abnormally_, by irritation of the eye, or along the line of nerve from the eye to the 'sensory centre'. (2) Or thirdly, there may be a morbid, but spontaneous activity in the sensory centre itself. (3) In case one, we have a natural sensation converted into a perception of a real object. In case two, we have an abnormal origin of a perception of something unreal, a hallucination, begotten _from without_, that is by a vice in an external organ, the eye. In case three, we have the origin of an abnormal perception of something _unreal_, a hallucination, begotten by a vicious activity _within_, in the sensory centre. But, while all these three sets of stimuli set the machinery in motion, it is the 'highest parts of the brain' that, in response to the stimuli, create the full perception, real or hallucinatory.

But there remains a fourth way of setting the machinery in motion. The first way, in normal sensation and perception, was the natural action of the organ of sense, stimulated by a material object. The second way was by the stimulus of a vice in the organ of sense. The third way was a vicious activity in a sensory centre. All three stimuli reach the 'central terminus' of the brain, and are there created into perceptions, the first real and normal, the second a hallucination from an organ of sense, _from without_, the third a hallucination from a sensory centre, _from within_. The fourth way is illustrated when the machinery is set a-going from the 'central terminus' itself, 'from the higher parts of the brain, from the seats of ideation and memory'. Now, as long as these parts only produce and retain ideas or memories in the usual way, we think, or we remember, but we have no hallucination. But when the activity starting from the central terminus 'escapes downwards,' in sufficient force, it reaches the 'lower centre' and the organ of sense, and then the idea, or memory, stands visibly before us as a hallucination.

This, omitting many technical details, and much that is matter of more dispute than common, is a statement, rough, and as popular as possible, of the ideas expressed in Mr. Gurney's remarkable essay on hallucinations. {186} Here, then, we have a rude working notion of various ways in which hallucinations may be produced. But there are many degrees in being hallucinated, or enphantosme, as the old French has it. If we are interested in the most popular kind of hallucinations, ghosts and wraiths, we first discard like Le Loyer, the evidence of many kinds of witnesses, diversely but undeniably hallucinated. A man whose eyes are so vicious as habitually to give him false information is not accepted as a witness, nor a man whose brain is drugged with alcohol, nor a man whose 'central terminus' is abandoned to religious excitement, to remorse, to grief, to anxiety, to an apprehension of secret enemies, nor even to a habit of being hallucinated, though, like Nicolai, he knows that his visionary friends are unreal. Thus we would not listen credulously to a ghost story out of his own experience from a man whose eyes were untrustworthy, nor from a short-sighted man who had recognised a dead or dying friend on the street, nor from a drunkard. A tale of a vision of a religious character from Pascal, or from a Red Indian boy during his Medicine Fast, or even from a colonel of dragoons who fell at Prestonpans, might be interesting, but would not be evidence for our special purpose. The ghosts beheld by conscience-stricken murderers, by sorrowing widowers, by spiritualists in dark rooms, haunted by humbugs, or those seen by lunatics, or by children, or by timid people in lonely old houses, or by people who, though sane at the time, go mad twenty years later, or by sane people habitually visionary, these and many other ghosts, we must begin, like Le Loyer, by rejecting. These witnesses have too much cerebral activity at the wrong time and place. They start their hallucinations from the external terminus, the unhealthy organ of sense; from the morbid central terminus; or from some dilapidated cerebral station along the line. But, when we have, in a sane man's experience, say one hallucination whether that hallucination does, or does not coincide with a crisis in the life, or perhaps with the death of the person who seems to be seen, what are we to think? Or again, when several witnesses simultaneously have the same hallucination,--not to be explained as a common misinterpretation of a real object,--what are we to think? This is the true question of ghosts and wraiths. That apparitions, so named by the world, do appear, is certain, just as it is certain that visionary rats appear to drunkards in delirium tremens. But, as we are only to take the evidence of sane and healthy witnesses, who were neither in anxiety, grief, or other excitement, when they perceived their one hallucination, there seems to be a difference between their hallucinations and those of alcoholism, fanaticism, sorrow, or anxiety. Now the common mistakes in dealing with this topic have been to make too much, or to make too little, of the coincidences between the hallucinatory appearance of an absent person, and his death, or some other grave crisis affecting him. Too little is made of such coincidences by Dr. Hibbert, in his Philosophy of Apparitions (p. 231). He 'attempts a physical explanation of many ghost stories which may be considered most authentic'. So he says, but he only touches on three, the apparition of Claverhouse, on the night of Killiecrankie, to Lord Balcarres, in an Edinburgh prison; the apparition of her dead mother to Miss Lee, in 1662; and the apparition of his wife, who had born a dead child on that day in England, to Dr. Donne in Paris, early in the seventeenth century.

Dr. Hibbert dedicated his book, in 1825, to Sir Walter Scott, of Abbotsford, Bart., President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Sir Walter, at heart as great a ghost-hunter as ever lived, was conceived to have a scientific interest in the 'mental principles to which certain popular illusions may be referred'. Thus Dr. Hibbert's business, if he would satisfy the President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, was to 'provide a physical explanation of many ghost stories which may be considered most authentic'. In our prosaic age, he would have begun with those most recent, such as the tall man in brown, viewed by Sir Walter on the moor near Ashestiel, and other still remembered contemporary hallucinations. Far from that, Dr. Hibbert deliberately goes back two centuries for all the three stories which represent the 'many' of his promise. The Wynyard ghost was near him, Mrs Ricketts's haunted house was near him, plenty of other cases were lying ready to his hand. {189} But he went back two centuries, and then,--complained of lack of evidence about 'interesting particulars'! Dr. Hibbert represents the science and common-sense of seventy years ago, and his criticism probably represents the contemporary ideas about evidence.

The Balcarres tale, as told by him, is that the Earl was 'in prison, in Edinburgh Castle, on the suspicion of Jacobitism'. 'Suspicion' is good; he was the King's agent for civil, as Dundee was for military affairs in Scotland. He and Dundee, and Ailesbury, stood by the King in London, to the last. Lord Balcarres himself, in his memoirs, tells James II. how he was confined, 'in close prison,' in Edinburgh, till the castle was surrendered to the Prince of Orange. In Dr. Hibbert's tale, the spectre of Dundee enters Balcarres's room at night, 'draws his curtain,' looks at him for some time, and walks out of the room, Lord Balcarres believing it to be Dundee himself.