ing an appeal into the invisible world. The bereaved parent, whose sleep is startled by tones, hushed in the grave, but coming back upon the ear with living power, wakes to a deeper grief than the sunshine can witness; and while watching the stars out, looks, almost with expectation, for some shadow crossing the grey dawn, or listens for some whisper borne on the morning breeze, some manifestation of a presence which he cannot but believe to exist. The philosopher, who flings aside his book as his lamp expires, and betakes himself to his own speculations for satisfaction which he cannot find elsewhere, is prepared by every inquisition into the secrets of the grave for the perception of an immaterial presence, and longs for nerve to ask where he may have an answer. Every stirring intellect, every spirit which is haunted by remembrances and imaginings is anxious to invest them with a form, to realize them in a sound, and by embodying to perpetuate them. Such an inclination may be called universal, because where there is mind, there is curiosity, more or less, about things pertaining to the world of mind, -things absent, unseen, or future. The inclination may be overpowered by associations of terror, but it is sooner or later experienced by minds of every class.

It is an unquestionable fact that a belief in the immortality of the soul is prevalent in every nation on the face of the earth. It matters little whether the belief arose from a primary revelation spread by tradition, or from the efforts of reason in few reflective minds, or from the natural process of association in all. The belief exists; and with it is connected an idea of the relation of the future life to the present; of the perpetuity of the interests which occupy us here. The union of these notions with the natural curiosity about things unseen occasions the conception of spiritual communion. Nothing seems more natural than

that those disembodied spirits who love should communicate with the survivors who mourn; that the murdered should use their power to appal the murderer; that the wise should return to instruct the ignorant. That such a notion is unsanctioned by true philosophy is, however, clear from the diversity of views which has ever prevailed respecting the appearance of departed spirits.

An immaterial existence cannot be susceptible of the changes which attend the mortal state. It cannot be modified by the influences which give its hues, and shades, and forms to human life. Varieties of age and country cannot extend to spiritual beings; yet the records of their visits to earth present a perfect accordance with the characteristics of the age, the peculiarities of the country, and the superstitions of the individual visited. No glorified saint ever appeared to a North American Indian; nor a Scandinavian warrior to a Trappist or an Italian nun. Nor have ghosts been even divested of external character, or stripped of the non-essentials which they must have left in the grave. They have ever appeared, not only in the costume of their country, and speaking the language of their time, (which might be supposed necessary to their communication with mortals,) but unredeemed from the ignorance and prejudices common to them and their beholders. Their very choice of the sense through which they manifest themselves is in accordance with the predispositions of those with whom they communicate. The savage who is wont to anticipate the storm by the muttering of the heavens and the roar of the forest, who tracks his prey by the cracking of the branches, and detects an ambush by the sound of low breathings lost to unpractised ears, recognises a spirit in the sighings of the breeze or the tumult of the tempest. The mountaineer, who makes the highest neighbouring peak his barometer, sees in the rolling mists the drapery, in the scudding cloud

the chariot of some visitor, who descended on a sunbeam and will fade into invisibility with the rainbow. The ghosts of Greeks were crowned with bays and laurels, of Druids with oak, of savages with feathers, of saints with a glory. The spear, the bow, or the cross were presented, according as the seers were warriors, hunters, or monks. The warnings given were sometimes of an ambush of cannibals, sometimes of the wrath of gods, sometimes of a secret murder. Amidst all this variety of manifestation, no common principle is apparent no one attribute of immateriality no credentials to sanction the mission or dignify the agent. Every thing connected with the appearance was earthly, though the attributes might be strangely conjoined. The form might or might not be gigantic; the substance might or might not be translucent; the voice might be low or powerful, the tread noiseless or heavy. Still familiar attributes were all. There was no evidence of spirituality, which was undoubtedly possible, if the manifestation itself was spiritual. The dreamers, like Nebuchadnezzar, saw an image compounded of a variety of substances never thus conjoined by nature, but all materiał, all furnished to the imaginati on by experience.

Though these manifestations were connected by no common quality which attested their supernatural origin, their universality must be accounted for on some one principle. A belief which has subsisted in all ages and nations must have a common foundation. Such a principle we have already suggested in the fact that every mind, from the grandest which has awed the world, down to the meanest which is at home only among objects of sense, has a reach beyond the present. The eager urchins, who toss halfpence on a tombstone, are as much the watchers of an unseen power as the astrologer at midnight in his high tower. The same emotion kindles them and absorbs

him the same longing to recognise somewhat beyond that which the eye beholds. What they call luck, he calls fate; but all are equally intent on something real, though invisible, inaudible, intangible. By this pervading desire the gypsey thrives, and the wise woman looks through the twilight for, approaching visitors. Through this desire do friends. clasp hands, when they agree that he who first departs shall visit him who survives. Nor is it prevalent in one country or continent more than another. The very modes in which it is gratified bear a strong resemblance all over the world. Games of chance are played with shells and pebbles where there is no coin; and wise women have tents in the deserts of Asia and if gypsies have not yet traversed the globe, their trade is followed wherever the foot of man is planted.

Another cause of the general persuasion into whose origin we are inquiring, is — actual experience of apparitions; not of ghosts or departed spirits, but of apparitions. This fact being fully ascertained furnishes a humbling proof of how all the world may, through its own fault, be wrong in a point in which all the world has an interest in being right. Truly, in this case, the philosopher has had very little the advantage of the clown; and the scornful laugh of the one has been nearly as irrational as the tremors of the other. There has been much folly, as well as cruelty, in the triumphs of the wise over the ignorant; for argument is of no avail against experience, and no ridicule can remove conviction.

Reasoning from the mere belief of the relation of this life to another, prior to all investigations into the nature and properties of spirit and matter, there appears a strong probability that the souls of the departed may have the power of re-appearing on the earth. Researches into the philosophy of the soul destroy this probability. Do ghosts appear as matter or spirit? Not as matter, for agents are

at work, from the moment of death, to effect irremediable changes in the corporeal form. Look into the grave, and see what chemical affinities have done with form and feature, and the substance which composed them. Bone without muscle, or a shapeless mass destitute of either, is all that can be found. A material ghost can only appear by means of a miracle-by an express re-creation of the human form, which would thus be no longer called a ghost, but a man raised from the dead. Such a possibility is not urged by ghost-seers, who rather testify to having seen, heard, or felt, a spirit. But in thus testifying, they show that they know neither what spirit is nor what it is not. Our only notions of spirit are negative. We conceive that it is what matter is not that it has no extension, and therefore cannot be seen; no hardness, and therefore cannot be heard; no solidity, and therefore cannot be smelt, tasted, or felt. There is no reason for believing that spirit cannot act upon matter; but we may safely declare that it cannot, as spirit, act through any of the five senses: and the reason why so many believe that it may, is, that they misconceive the nature of spirit supposing it to be etherealized matter. The philosopher is safe in his conclusion that as the material frame cannot be renovated, and as the spiritual one is not recognisable by the senses, the dead do not appear to the living; but what avails his reasoning, however sound, against the stubborn experience of an objector who declares that he has seen forms invisible to others, so distinctly as to be unable to choose between the apparition and the reality? The philosopher, when he has exhausted his arguments, internally pronounces his opponent a fool or a madman; while the bystanders, who know him to be neither the one nor the other, admit his testimony, and the matter rests where it did before.