ist. It
arose at an earlier period in India and Persia, but everywhere it was
late in its appearance as a well-defined doctrine. Yet, while positive
evidence is wanting, there can be little doubt that crude and vaguely
formulated ideas of the existence of man after death have been very long
entertained. The traditions of all peoples that have a faith above that
of fetichism contain stories of the apparition of spirits of human
origin, and when we reach civilized peoples and more advanced religions
we find these in abundance. The annals of Christendom are full of them.
They are equally abundant in the centres of other developed forms of
faith. If we could accept these legends of the emergence of spirits
through the thin veil that separates time from eternity as established
facts, the problem would no longer need solution. As it stands, however,
the great mass of such narratives are utterly lacking in evidence of a
character which science can admit. They are bare, unsustained
statements, thousands of which would be far outweighed by a single one
fortified by demonstrated facts. Occasionally, indeed, the story of an
apparition has been closely investigated, and there are a few cases of
this kind handed down from the past which seem reasonably well
established. But any statement coming from prescientific days is open to
doubt; methods of investigation then were not what they are now; the
dogma of the existence of spirit is too important a one to be accepted
on any but incontrovertible evidence, and the vast sum of statements of
apparitions which have come to us from the past, or from the
non-scientific peoples of the present, must be dismissed with the one
verdict, not proven.

There is one important fact, however, connected with the question of
spiritual appearances, which is worthy of some consideration. It is a
fixed rule in the history of opinions that beliefs founded on
imagination or misconception have declined with the advance of
enlightenment, and many conceptions, once strongly entertained, have
faded and vanished in the light of new thought, or where retained have
been so only by the ignorant and unreasoning. It is of interest to find
that this has not been the case with the belief in spiritual
manifestations. This has held its own to the present time, and, while it
is largely sustained by the unintelligent and credulous, it can claim a
considerable body of intelligent adherents to-day, even in the most
enlighten