Doubtless, when at college you first studied
metaphysical speculation, you would have glanced
over Beattie's Essay on Truth as one of the
works written in opposition to your favourite,
David Hume."

"Yes, I read the book, but I have long since
forgotten its arguments."

"Well, in that essay, Beattie* cites the
extraordinary instance of Simon Browne, a learned
and pious clergyman, who seriously disbelieved
the existence of his own soul; and imagined
that, by interposition of Divine power, his soul
was annulled, and nothing left but a principle
of animal life, which he held in common with
the brutes! When years ago, a thoughtful
imaginative student, you came on that story,
probably enough you would have paused,
revolved in your own mind and fancy what kind
of a creature a man might be, if, retaining
human life and merely human understanding, he
was deprived of the powers and properties
which reasoners have ascribed to the existence
of soul. Something in this young man,
unconsciously to yourself, revives that forgotten
train of meditative ideas. His dread of death
as the final cessation of being, his brute-like
want of sympathy with his kind, his incapacity
to comprehend the motives which carry man on
to scheme and to build for a future that extends
beyond his grave, all start up before you at
the very moment your reason is overtasked,
your imagination fevered, in seeking the solution
of problems which, to a philosophy based
upon your system, must always remain insoluble.
The young man's conversation not only
thus excites your fancies, it disturbs your affections.
He speaks not only of drugs that renew
youth, but of charms that secure love. You
tremble for your Lilian while you hear him!
And the brain thus tasked, the imagination thus
inflamed, the heart thus agitated, you are presented
to Sir Philip Derval, whose ghost your
patient had supposed he saw weeks ago.

* Beattie's Essay on Truth, part i. c. ii. 3. The
story of Simon Browne is to be found in The Adventurer.

"This person, a seeker after an occult philosophy,
which had possibly acquainted him with
some secrets in nature beyond the pale of our
conventional experience, though, when analysed,
they might prove to be quite reconcilable with
sober science, startles you with an undefined
mysterious charge against the young man who
had previously seemed to you different from
ordinary mortals. In a room stored with the
dead things of the brute soulless world, your
brain becomes intoxicated with the fumes of
some vapour which produces effects not
uncommon in the superstitious practices of the
East; your brain thus excited, brings distinctly
before you the vague impressions it had before
received. Margrave becomes identified with
the Louis Grayle of whom you had previously
heard an obscure and legendary tale, and all the
anomalies in his character are explained by his
being that which you had contended, in your
physiological work, it was quite possible for man
to be—viz. mind and body without soul! You
were startled by the monster which man would
be were your own theory possible; and in order
to reconcile the contradictions in this very monster,
you account for knowledge and for powers
that mind, without soul, could not have attained,
by ascribing to this prodigy broken memories of
a former existence, demon attributes from former
proficiency in evil magic. My friend, there is nothing
here which your own study of morbid idiosyncrasies
should not suffice to solve."

"So then," said I, "you would reduce all that
have affected my senses as realities into the
deceit of illusions! But," I added, in a whisper,
terrified by my own question, " do not
physiologists agree in this: namely, that though
illusory phantasms may haunt the sane as well as
the insane, the sane know that they are only
illusions, and the insane do not?"

"Such a distinction," answered Faber, " is far
too arbitrary and rigid for more than a very
general and qualified acceptance. Müller, indeed,
who is, perhaps, the highest authority on
such a subject, says, with prudent reserve,
' When a person who is not insane sees spectres
and believes them to be real, his intellect must
be imperfectly exercised.'* He would, indeed,
be a bold physician who maintained that every
man who believed he had really seen a ghost
was of unsound mind. In Dr. Abercrombie's
interesting account of spectral illusions, he tells
us of a servant-girl who believed she saw, at
the foot of her bed, the apparition of Curran,
in a sailor's jacket and an immense pair of whiskers.†
No doubt the spectre was an illusion,
and Dr. Abercrombie very ingeniously suggests
the association of ideas by which the apparition
was conjured up with the grotesque adjuncts of
the jacket and the whiskers; but the servant-girl,
in believing the reality of the apparition,
was certainly not insane. When I read in the
American public journals‡ of 'spirit manifestation,'
in which large numbers of persons of at least
the average degree of education, declare that
they have actually witnessed various phantasms,
much more extraordinary than all which you
have confided to me, and arrive, at once, at the
conclusion that they are thus put into direct
communication with departed souls, I must assume
that they are under an illusion, but I
should be utterly unwarranted in supposing that
because they credited that illusion they were
insane. I should only say with Müller, that in
their reasoning on the phenomena presented to
them, 'their intellect was imperfectly exercised.'
And an impression made on the senses,
being in itself sufficiently rare to excite our
wonder, may be strengthened till it takes the

* Müller's Physiology of the Senses, p. 394.

† Abercrombie on the Intellectual Powers, p. 281.
(15th edition.)

‡ At the date of Faber's conversation with Allen
Fenwick, the (so-called) spirit manifestations had not
spread from America over Europe. But if they had,
Faber's views would, no doubt, have remained the same.