club was but a shadow wielded by an arm of air.
The Slavonians sacrificed a warrior's horse at his tomb.47 Nothing
seemed to the Northman so noble as to enter Valhalla on horseback,
with a numerous retinue, in his richest apparel and finest armor.
It was firmly believed, Mallet says, that Odin himself had
declared that whatsoever was burned or buried with the dead
accompanied them to his palace.48 Before the Mohammedan era, on
the death of an Arab, the finest camel he had owned was tied to a
stake beside his grave, and left to expire of hunger over the body
of his master, in order that, in the region into which death had
introduced him, he should be supplied with his usual bearer.49 The
Chinese who surpass all other people in the offerings and worship
paid at the sepulchres of their ancestors make little paper
houses, fill them with images of furniture, utensils, domestics,
and all the appurtenances of the family economy, and then burn
them, thus passing them into the invisible state for the use of
the deceased whom they mourn and honor.50 It is a touching thought
with the Greenlanders, when a child dies, to bury a dog with him
as a guide to the land of souls; for, they say, the dog is able to
find his way anywhere.51 The shadow of the faithful servant guides
the shadow of the helpless child to heaven. In fancy, not without
a moved heart, one sees this spiritual Bernard dog bearing the
ghost child on his back, over the spectral Gothard of death, safe
into the sheltering hospice of the Greenland paradise.

It is strange to notice the meeting of extremes in the rude
antithetical correspondence between Plato's doctrine of archetypal
ideas, the immaterial patterns of earthly things, and the belief
of savages in the ghosts of clubs, arrows, sandals, and
provisions. The disembodied soul of the philosopher, an eternal
idea, turns from the empty illusions of matter to nourish itself
with the substance of real truth. The spectre of the Mohawk
devours the spectre of the haunch of roast venison hung over his
grave. And why should not the two shades be conceived, if either?

"Pig, bullock, goose, must have their goblins too,
Else ours would have to go without their dinners:
If that starvation doctrine were but true,
How hard the fate of gormandizing sinners!"

The conception of ghosts has been still further introduced also
into the realm of mathematics in an amusing manner. Bishop
Berkeley, bantered on his idealism by Halley,