abundantly in circulation. Thus, I have an account by a lady, who ' saw, as it were, the form of some one laid out,' near the time when a brother died at Melbourne, and who mentions another lady known to her, who thought she saw her own father look in at the church window at the moment he was dying in his own house. Another account is sent me by a Shetland lady, who relates that about twenty years ago she and a girl leading her pony recognized the familiar figure of one Peter Sutherland, whom they knew to be at the time in ill-health in Edinburgh; he turned a corner and they saw no more of him, but next week came the news of his sudden death.
That the apparitional human soul bears the likeness of its fleshly body, is the principle implicitly accepted by all who believe it really and objectively present in dreams and visions. My own view is that nothing but dreams and visions could have ever put into men's minds such an idea as that of souls being ethereal images of bodies. It is thus habitually taken for granted in animistic philosophy, savage or civilized, that souls set free from the earthly body are recognized by a likeness to it which they still retain, whether as ghostly wanderers on earth or inhabitants of the world beyond the grave. Man's spirit, says Swedenborg, is his mind, which lives after death in complete human form, and this is the poet's dictum in 'In Memoriam:'
'Eternal form shall still divide The eternal soul from all beside; And I shall know him when we meet.'
This world-wide thought, coming into view here in a multitude of cases from all grades of culture, needs no collection of ordinary instances to illustrate it.[1] But a quaint and special group of beliefs will serve to display the thorough-
- ↑ The conception of the soul as a small human image is found in various districts; see Eyre, 'Australia,' vol. ii. p. 356; St. John, 'Far East,' vol. i. p. 189 (Dayaks); Waitz, vol. iii. p. 194 (N. A. Ind.). The idea of a soul as a sort of 'thumbling' is familiar to the Hindus and to German folklore; compare the representations of tiny souls in mediæval pictures.
