According To Mr. Spencer ('Principles Of Sociology') 'the First Traceable Conception Of A Supernatural Being Is The Conception Of A

Ghost.' Even Fetichism is 'an extension of the ghost theory.' The soul of the Fetich 'in common with

Supernatural agents at large, is originally the double of a dead man.' How do we get this notion - 'the double of a dead man?' Through dreams. In the Old Testament we are told: 'God came to' Abimelech, Laban, Solomon, and others 'in a dream'; also that 'the angel of the Lord' appeared to Joseph 'in a dream.' That is to say, these men dreamed that God came to them. So the savage, who dreams of his dead acquaintance, believes he has been visited by the dead man's spirit. This belief in ghosts is confirmed, Mr. Spencer argues, by other phenomena. The savage who faints from the effect of a wound sustained in fight looks just like the dead man beside him. The spirit of the wounded man returns after a long or short period of absence: why should the spirit of the other not do likewise? If reanimation follows comatose states, why should it not follow death? Insensibility is but an affair of time. All the modes of preserving the dead, in the remotest ages, evince the belief in casual separation of body and soul, and of their possible reunion.

Take another theory. Comte tells us there is a primary tendency in man 'to transfer the sense of his own nature, in the radical explanation of all phenomena whatever.' Writing in the same key, Schopenhauer calls man 'a metaphysical animal.' He is speaking of the need man feels of a theory, in regard to the riddle of existence, which forces itself upon his notice; 'a need arising from the consciousness that behind the physical in the world, there is a metaphysical something permanent as the foundation of constant change.' Though not here alluding to the ghost theory, this bears indirectly on the conception, as I shall proceed to show.

We need not entangle ourselves in the vexed question of innate ideas, nor inquire whether the principle of casuality is, as Kant supposed, like space and time, a form of intuition given A PRIORI. That every change has a cause must necessarily (without being thus formulated) be one of the initial beliefs of conscious beings far lower in the scale than man, whether derived solely from experience or otherwise. The reed that shakes is obviously shaken by the wind. But the riddle of the wind also forces itself into notice; and man explains this by transferring to the wind 'the sense of his own nature.' Thunderstorms, volcanic disturbances, ocean waves, running streams, the motions of the heavenly bodies, had to be accounted for as involving change. And the natural - the primitive - explanation was by reference to life, analogous, if not similar, to our own. Here then, it seems to me, we have the true origin of the belief in ghosts.

Enter page number Go  Previous Next
Page 25 of 208
Words from 12346 to 12851 of 106633