the appearance of a ghost excited no more surprise than to be informed of a storm at sea, or of an extraordinary flash of lightning. In Greece and Rome such narratives furnish the materials of poetry, and for ages after the hold of the marvelous upon ordinary writers was broken the impression of primeval superstitions was so strong that the questions which science now asks—nay, more, the questions which practical men now ask—were not propounded.
To believe merely because antiquity believed is but to tighten the swaddling-clothes of the infant about the grown man and force him once more into the cradle.
The testimony of a single witness to an apparition can be of little value, because whatever he thinks he sees may be a spectral illusion or a hallucination. The state of mind of one who thinks that he sees an apparition is unfavorable to calm observation; and after he has seen it he has nothing but his recollection of what he saw, unsupported by analogies or memoranda taken during the vision. To say that immediately after he witnessed such a thing he made a note of it, is at best to say only that he wrote down what he could remember at that time.
Identification of the dead by a living person must be a matter of great difficulty, particularly as in many of the ghost stories the deceased had not been seen for twenty or twenty-five years, or perhaps was never seen by the individual to whom he is alleged to appear. In view of the mental excitement, not to say trepidation, induced by the belief that he sees a spontaneous and unexpected apparition, one who fancies that he sees the dead can hardly be competent to determine whether it be a subjective vision or an actual object.
It has frequently been laid down as indisputable that if two see a vision at the same time its objective
