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.
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