long-lost and
irrelevant things. Real ghosts are such reverberations of the past,
exceeding ordinary imagination and discernment both in vividness and in
fidelity; they may not be explicable without appealing to material
influences subtler than those ordinarily recognised, as they are
obviously not discoverable without some derangement and hypertrophy of
the senses.

[Sidenote: These possibilities affect physical existence only.]

That such subtler influences should exist is entirely consonant with
reason and experience; but only a hankering tenderness for superstition,
a failure to appreciate the function both of religion and of science,
can lead to reverence for such oracular gibberish as these influences
provoke. The world is weary of experimenting with magic. In utter
seriousness and with immense solemnity whole races have given themselves
up to exploiting these shabby mysteries; and while a new survey of the
facts, in the light of natural science and psychology, is certainly not
superfluous, it can be expected to lead to nothing but a more detailed
and conscientious description of natural processes. The thought of
employing such investigations to save at the last moment religious
doctrines founded on moral ideas is a pathetic blunder; the obscene
supernatural has nothing to do with rational religion. If it were
discovered that wretched echoes of a past life could be actually heard
by putting one's ear long enough to a tomb, and if (_per impossibile_)
those echoes could be legitimately attributed to another mind, and to
the very mind, indeed, whose former body was interred there, a
melancholy chapter would indeed be added to man's earthly fortunes,
since it would appear that even after death he retained, under certain
conditions, a fatal attachment to his dead body and to the other
material instruments of his earthly life. Obviously such a discovery
would teach us more about dying than about immortality; the truths
disclosed, since they would be disclosed by experiment and observation,
would be psycho-physical truths, implying nothing about what a truly
disembodied life might be, if one were attainable; for a disembodied
life could by no possibility betray itself in spectres, rumblings, and
spasms. Actual thunders from Sinai and an actual discovery of two stone
tables would have been utterly irrelevant to the moral authority of the
ten commandments or to the existence of a truly supreme being. No less
irrelevant t