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, darkness, inexplicable sounds, especially of a dismal character, moving figures half discerned (or, if discerned, of dreadful aspect), and a vertiginous baffling of the expectation. This last element, which is intellectual, 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 animals 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.[1] The idea of the supernatural involves that the usual should be set at naught. In the witch and hobgoblin supernatural, other elements still of fear are brought in—caverns, slime and ooze, vermin, corpses, and the like.[2] 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.
- ↑ In the "Overland Monthly" for this year, a most interesting article on Laura Bridgman's writings has been published by Mr. E. C. Sandford. 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 his 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 confounded."
