a monstrous brood of its own begetting, and making even good men ferocious in imagined self-defence. Imagination has always been, and still is, in a narrower sense, the great mythologizer; but both its mode of manifestation and the force with which it reacts on the mind are one thing in its crude form of childlike wonder, and another thing after it has been more or less consciously manipulated by the poetic faculty. A mythology that broods over us in our cradles, that mingles with the lullaby of the nurse and the winter-evening legends of the chimney-corner, that brightens day with the possibility of divine encounters, and darkens night with intimations of demonic ambushes, is of other substance than one which we take down from our bookcase, sapless as the shelf it stood on, and remote from all present sympathy with man or nature as a town history. It is something like the difference between live metaphor and dead personification. Primarily, the action of the imagination is the same in the mythologizer and the poet, that is, it forces its own consciousness on the objects of the senses, and compels them to sympathize with its own momentary impressions. When Shakespeare in his "Lucrece " makes "The threshold grate the door to have him heard,”. his mind is acting under the same impulse that first endowed with human feeling and then with human shape all the invisible forces of nature, and called into being those "Fair humanities of old religion," whose loss the poets mourn. So also Shakespeare no doubt projected himself in his own creations; but those creations never became so perfectly disengaged from him, so objective, or, as they used to say, extrinsical, to him, as to react upon him like real and even alien existences. I mean permanently, for momentarily they may and must have done so. But before man's consciousness had wholly disentangled itself from outward objects, all nature was but a manysided mirror which gave back to him a thousand images of himself, more or less beautified or distorted, magnified or diminished, till his imagination grew to look upon its own incorporations as having an independent being. Thus, by degrees, it became at last passive to its own creations. You may see imaginative children. every day anthropomorphizing in this way, and the dupes of that superabundant vitality in themselves, which bestows qualities proper to itself on everything about them. There is a period of development in which grown men are childlike. In such a period the fables which endow beasts with human attributes first grew up; and we luckily read them so early as never to become suspicious of any absurdity in them. The Finnic epos of "Kalewala" is a curious illustration of the same fact. In it everything has the affections, passions, and consciousness of men. When the mother of Lemminkäinen is seeking her lost son, Sought she many days the lost one, Roadways, ye whom God hath shapen, By the wheel-tire to be wounded, And by heavy heels down-trampled." " It is in this tendency of the mind under certain conditions to confound the objective with the subjective, or rather to mistake the one for the other, that Mr. Tylor, in his "Early History of Mankind," is fain to seek the origin of the supernatural, as we somewhat vaguely call whatever transcends our ordinary experience. And this, no doubt, will in many cases account for the particular shapes assumed by certain phantasmal appearances, though I am inclined to doubt whether it be a sufficient explanation of the abstract phenomenon. It is easy for the arithmetician to make a key to the problems that he has devised to suit himself. An immediate and habitual confusion of the kind spoken of is insanity; and the hypochondriac is tracked by the black dog of his own mind. Disease itself is, of course, in one sense natural, as being the result of natural causes; but if we assume health as the mean representing the normal poise of all the mental faculties, we must be content to call hypochondria subternatural, because the tone of the instrument is lowered, and to designate as supernatural only those ecstasies in which the mind, under intense but not unhealthy excitement, is snatched sometimes above itself, as in poets and other persons of imaginative temperament. In poets this liability to be possessed by the creations of their own brains is limited and proportioned by the artistic sense, and the imagination thus truly becomes the shaping faculty, while in less regulated or coarser organizations it dwells forever in the Nifelheim of phantasmagoria and dream, a thaumaturge half cheat, half dupe. What Mr. Tylor has to say on this matter is ingenious and full of valuable suggestion, and to a certain extent solves our difficulties. Nightmare, for example, will explain the testimony of witnesses in trials for witchcraft, that they had been hag-ridden by the accused. But to prove the possibility, nay, the probability, of this confusion of objective with subjective is not enough. It accounts very well for such apparitions as those which. appeared to Dion, to Brutus, and to Curtius Rufus. In such cases the imagination is undoubtedly its own doppelgänger, and sees nothing more than the projection of its own deceit. But I am puzzled, I confess, to explain the appearance of the first ghost, especially among men who thought death to be the end-all here below. The thing once conceived of, it is easy, on Mr. Tylor's theory, to account for all after the first. If it was originally believed that only the spirits of those who had died violent deaths were permitted to wander,' the conscience of a 1 Lucian, in his Liars, puts this opinion into the mouth of Arignotus. The theory by which Lucretius seeks to explain apparitions, though materialistic, seems to allow some influence also to the working of imagination. It is hard otherwise to explain how his simulacra (which are not unlike the astral spirits of later times) should appear in dreams. ea quae rerum simulacra vocamus, nobis vigilantibus obvia mentes terrificant atque in somnis, cum saepe figuras contuimur miras simulacraque luce carentum (De Rer. Nat. iv. 33–37, ed. Munro.) E |