The Kernel and the Husk/The Development of Imagination and its bearing on the Revelation of Christ's Resurrection
XXI
My dear ——,
You are startled, and well you may be, "at the notion that the resurrection of Christ has been the mere offspring of the imagination." I am quoting your words, but you have not quoted mine. I never said, nor should I dream of saying, that the resurrection of Christ was "the offspring of the imagination," any more than I should say that the law of gravitation is "the offspring of the imagination," or that light is "the offspring of the eye." But this is just an ordinary specimen of the way in which people whose minds are blocked and choked with prejudice, misunderstand what is contrary to their preconceptions. You have made up your mind that the Imagination is a kind of excrescence on humanity, a faculty independent of the Creator, and incapable of being made by Him the medium of revelation; and so you pervert my words to suit your fancies. But what I said was that Imagination is the basis of all that is worth calling knowledge, and that, as God reveals the laws of astronomy through imaginative Reason, so He has revealed the Resurrection of Christ through imaginative Faith.
Before speaking of the special bearing of the Imagination upon the manifestation of Christ's Resurrection, let me say a word or two on the manner in which our human environment appears to have been adapted to foster the growth of this faculty. You will be better prepared to expect great things from the Imagination when you reflect on the great things that have been wrought by God for its development. You say that you do not understand the statement in the last paragraph of my last letter, that the Imagination has been made "the medium of conveying the revelation of the immortality of the soul," and still less do you comprehend how this revelation has been going on "from the creation of the world," especially since, during a large portion of this time, there must have been no men to receive any revelation at all.
I said deliberately "from the creation of the world," and not "from the creation of mankind," because inanimate creation itself appears to me to bear witness to a purpose, from the first, that this visible world should help its future tenants to imagine things invisible. Consider but one instance, the immense influence of Night upon the Imagination, and you will perhaps come to the conclusion that, but for the provision of darkness ("these orbs of light and shade"), men would never have been led to a faith in the light of immortality. In the first place by revealing to us the wonder-striking order of the infinite stars—which, but for darkness, would have remained for ever a closed book to men—Night leads us to dream, or to infer, that there may be other pages still unturned in the book of Nature's mysteries, and stimulates us, however far we may progress in thought, still to press on to something more beyond; and at the same time, throwing a temporary veil over all the sights of day, it persuades us to trust that on the morrow the veil will be removed, and that in the meantime all things will continue in their order.
Night is aided by sleep and dreams. Slumbering in the darkness, and bereft of the control of the understanding, Imagination has reproduced before the mind's eye the sights of daylight, blended together without thought of fitness, order, time, or place, so as to form quite new combinations which scarcely any deliberate daytime effort could have so vividly depicted: and in the long train of confused visionary images there have sometimes passed before the mental eye of the mourner or the murderer the very shapes, and even the voices of the dead, forcing the slumberer to start up and cry, "They live, they still live; there is a life beyond the grave." This trans-sepulchral existence having been once discerned, the Imagination has set to work to formulate the laws of it, and to map out and people its regions, thus causing heaven and hell to become realities and (in course of time) ancestral traditions, and almost inherited instincts. Sometimes, Imagination has come with a special and rarely manifested force to the aid of a belief in a future life. Not in dreams, but in wakeful moments, though for the most part by night, there have appeared before the mind's eye such vivid images of the departed, as have convinced not only the seers of the visions but also their friends—and so, by a pervasive influence, all but a small minority of the human race—that something real has been seen, the spirit of the dead made visible: and to this day, in England, there are not wanting men of the highest ability, culture, and love of truth, who busy themselves with serious investigations into the reality of apparitions.
Does this seem to you fanciful? Surely it is the fact that Night and its phenomena have largely influenced the spiritual, or superstitious, side of human nature: and if you admit this to be the fact, the only difference between us is this, that to you this subtle but universal influence of Darker Nature on Man appears to have been the result of chance, whereas I think it came from God. To you, one half of Time appears to have been allowed by God to be spiritually barren, set apart for the mere repairing of the human material machine: I do not believe that the spiritual making of Man was foreordained on this "half-time" principle.
If however you ask me what amount of truth or reality there has been in these dreams and visions, I should reply, as about poetry and prophecy, that some of these imaginations have represented realities, some unrealities; but that the total result to which they have led men, the belief in the immortality of the soul, is a reality. But when I speak of a "real vision" of a spirit or ghost, I hope you will not misunderstand me so far as to suppose that I could mean a material, gas-like (though intangible) form, occupying so many cubical inches of space. A spirit, so far as I conceive it, does not occupy space; nor is it the object of sight, any more than of smell or touch; it is, to me, of the nature of a thought, only a thought personified, i.e. a thought capable of loving and being loved, of hating and being hated. But though it may not be the object of the senses in the same way in which external things are, it may be manifested to the Imagination, i.e. the mind's eye, in such a way as to produce the same effect as though it were an external object seen by the body's eye.
Every one who loves truth will tread with cautious steps in this mysterious province of phantasmal existence, and carefully measure his language, knowing that we are in a region of illusion, exaggeration, and (sometimes) of imposture. But there does seem evidence to shew that people (mostly perhaps twins), at a distance from one another, have in some at present inexplicable manner influenced one another so that the disease or death or calamity of one has been simultaneously made known to the other; and you have probably read of cases, fairly supported, which would shew that a passionate longing on the part of a dying man to see some distant friend may create a responsive emotion, if not an actual vision, in the mind of that friend. We are so completely in the dark as to the originating causes (for physiology tells us nothing but the instrumental causes) which produce our thoughts, that I see nothing at all absurd in the notion that every truthful and vivid conception of one human being in the mind of another upon earth, arises from some communion in the spirit-world between the spirits of the two.
So much for conjectures as to the possible reality or possible causes of some classes of apparitions. I do not often myself set much store on them, except so far as they are of use in reminding us how wide is the province of possibility, or how narrow the province of certainty, in the region of ultimate causation. I lay stress, not upon any conjectural explanation of ghost phenomena, but upon the following general considerations, most of which are of the nature, not of conjectures, but of facts: 1st, man is what he is, largely in virtue of the Imagination; 2nd, one half of man's time and one half of the phenomena of Nature seem to have no other purpose (so far as man is concerned) than to stimulate the Imagination; 3rd, if we suppose that this wonderful world is under the government of a good God, although opposed by an inferior Evil, we are led to infer that He has implanted in us this faculty of Imagination and that the noble aspirations and beliefs which have been developed by it have not been unmixed delusions; 4th, among the noblest of the beliefs thus developed, has been the belief in the immortality of the soul, which, after being tested by the faith of many centuries, is at this day cherished by the majority of civilized mankind; 5th, this belief has proved its truth, so far as imaginations can prove themselves true, by working well, i.e. it has raised and ennobled those who have entertained it, and has made them (on the whole) morally the better for it; 6th, a part of the training of the Imagination, intimately connected with the production of the belief in the immortality of the soul, has been the development of a power to see mental visions, with all the vividness of material visions; 7th, among these visions, some of the most common have been apparitions of the forms of the dead, and some of the best authenticated of these have occurred where a strong unfulfilled desire has possessed the departed in the moment of dying and where the seer of the apparition has been bound by close ties to the dead.
These are the considerations, mostly facts—you may dispute some of them, but not all I think—in the light of which I should endeavour to illustrate the manifestation of Christ to His disciples after death. To these facts I merely added the conjecture that possibly there may be something besides the mere movement of our brains that produces these images of the departed, something—I will not say external, for a spirit, if independent of place, can be neither external to us nor internal—but some act in the invisible world of spirits corresponding to every apparition upon the visible world. But I did not pledge myself to such a theory. I only insisted that the whole revelation of poetry and religion through the Imagination has been of such inestimable importance to man that we cannot put it all aside as false because imaginative; we must regard it with reverence and be prepared to find that in the central event of the purest religion of all, the Imagination has been made the medium of the culminating revelation of spirit and truth. Indeed, if the spiritual world is real and near, it is difficult to conceive how God—without breaking the Laws of Nature and without unfitting us for life in a world of sense—could better give us glimpses of an invisible environment, than by causing it to press in, as it were, upon the Imagination, so that the mind's eye, thus stimulated by real invisibilities, may, for the time, supplant the bodily faculty of sight, and afterwards leave behind in us a permanent suggestion that, as there is a material world corresponding to the bodily eye, so there is a mind's world corresponding to the mind's eye. With this pre-conception I will ask you to approach the narrative of Christ's Resurrection as I shall endeavour to set it forth in my next letter from the natural point of view.