The Night-Side of Nature; Or, Ghosts and Ghost-Seers. Catherine Crowe

any one who has been fortunate enough to witness one genuine case of clairvoyance, I think the conception of this universal sense will not be difficult, however the mode of its exercise may remain utterly incomprehensible. As I have said above—to the great Spirit and Fountain of life, all things, in both space and time, must be present. However impossible it is to our finite minds to conceive this, we must believe it. It may, in some slight degree, facilitate the conception to remember that action, once begun, never ceases—an impulse given is transmitted on for ever; a sound breathed reverberates in eternity; and thus the past is always present, although, for the purpose of fitting us for this mortal life, our ordinary senses are so constituted as to be unperceptive of these phenomena. With respect to what we call the future, it is more difficult still for us to conceive it as present; nor, as far as I know, can we borrow from the sciences the same assistance as mechanical discoveries have just furnished me with in regard to the past. How a spirit sees that which has not yet, to our senses, taken place, seems certainly inexplicable. Foreseeing it is not inexplicable: we foresee many things by arguing on given premises, although, from our own finite views, we are always liable to be mistaken. Louis Lambert says: “Such events as are the product of humanity, and the result of its intelligence, have their own causes, in which they lie latent, just as our actions are accomplished in our thoughts previous to any outward demonstration of them; presentiments and prophecies consist in the intuitive perception of these causes.” This explanation, which is quite conformable with that of Cicero, may aid us in some degree as regards a certain small class of phenomena; but there is something involved in the question much more subtle than this. Our dreams can give us the only idea of it; for there we do actually see and hear, not only that which never was, but that which never will be. Actions and events, words and sounds, persons and places, are as clearly and vividly present to us as if they were actually what they seem; and I should think that most people must be somewhat puzzled to decide in regard to certain scenes and circumstances that live in their memory, whether the images are the result of their waking or sleeping experience. Although by no means a dreamer, and without the most remote approximation to any faculty of presentiment, I know this is the case with myself. I remember also a very curious effect being produced upon me, when I was abroad, some years ago, from eating the unwholesome bread to which we were reduced, in consequence of a scarcity. Some five or six times a day I was seized with a sort of vertigo, during which I seemed to pass through certain scenes, and was conscious of certain words, which appeared to me to have a strange connection, with either some former period of my life, or else some previous state of existence. The words and the scenes were on each occasion precisely the same: I was always aware of that, and I always made the strongest efforts to grasp and retain them in my memory, but I could not. I only knew that the thing had been; the words and the scenes were gone. I seemed to pass momentarily into another sphere and back again. This was purely the result of disorder; but, like a dream, it shows how we may be perceptive of that which is not, and which never may be; rendering it, therefore, possible to conceive that a spirit may be equally perceptive of that which shall be. I am very far from meaning to imply that these examples remove the difficulty: they do not explain the thing; they only show somewhat the mode of it. But it must be remembered that when physiologists pretend to settle the whole question of apparitions by the theory of spectral illusions, they are exactly in the same predicament. They can supply examples of similar phenomena; but how a person, perfectly in his senses, should receive the spectral visits of, not only friends, but strangers, when he is thinking of no such matter—or by what process, mental or optical, the figures are conjured up—remains as much a mystery as before a line was written on the subject.

      All people and all ages have believed, more or less, in prophetic dreams, presentiments, and apparitions; and all historians have furnished examples of them. That the truths may be frequently distorted and mingled with fable, is no argument against those traditions; if it were, all history must be rejected on the same plea. Both the Old and New Testaments furnish numerous examples of these phenomena; and although Christ and the apostles reproved all the superstitions of the age, these persuasions are not included in their reprehensions.

      Neither is the comparative rarity of these phenomena any argument against their possibility. There are many strange things which occur still more rarely, but which we do not look upon as supernatural or miraculous. Of nature’s ordinary laws, we yet know but little; of their aberrations and perturbations, still less. How should we, when the world is a miracle and life a dream, of which we know neither the beginning nor the end! We do not even know that we see anything as it is, or rather, we know that we do not. We see things but as our visual organs represent them to us; and were those organs differently constructed, the aspect of the world would to us be changed. How, then, can we pretend to decide upon what is and what is not?

      Nothing could be more perplexing to any one who read them with attention, than the trials for witchcraft of the seventeenth century. Many of the feats of the ancient thaumaturgists and wonder-workers of the temples might have been nearly as much so, but these were got rid of by the easy expedient of pronouncing them fables and impostures; but, during the witch-mania, so many persons proved their faith in their own miraculous powers by the sacrifice of their lives, that it was scarcely possible to doubt their having some foundation for their own persuasion, though what that foundation could be, till the late discoveries in animal magnetism, it was difficult to conceive; but here we have a new page opened to us which concerns both the history of the world and the history of man, as an individual; and we begin to see that that which the ignorant thought supernatural, and the wise impossible, has been both natural and true. While the scientific men of Great Britain, and several of our journalists, have been denying and ridiculing the reports of these phenomena, the most eminent physicians of Germany have been quietly studying and investigating them, and giving to the world, in their works, the results of their experience. Among the rest, Dr. Joseph Ennemoser, of Berlin, has presented to us in his two books on “Magic,” and on “The Connection of Magnetism with Nature and Religion,” the fruits of his thirty years’ study of this subject—during the course of which he has had repeated opportunities of investigating all the phenomena, and of making himself perfectly familiar with even the most rare and perplexing. To any one who has studied these works, the mysteries of the temples and of the witch-trials are mysteries no longer; and he writes with the professed design, not to make science mystical, but to bring the mysterious within the bounds of science. The phenomena, as he justly says, are as old as the human race. Animal magnetism is no new development, no new discovery. Inseparable from life, although, like many other vital phenomena, so subtle in its influences, that only in abnormal cases it attracts attention, it has exhibited itself more or less in all ages and in all countries. But its value as a medical agent is only now beginning to dawn on the civilized world, while its importance in a higher point of view is yet perceived by but few. Every human being who has ever withdrawn himself from the strife, and the turmoil, and the distraction, of the world without, in order to look within, must have found himself perplexed by a thousand questions with regard to his own being, which he would find no one able to solve. In the study of animal magnetism, he will first obtain some gleams of a light which will show him that he is indeed the child of God! and that, though a dweller on the earth, and fallen, some traces of his divine descent, and of his unbroken connection with a higher order of being, still remain to comfort and encourage him. He will find that there exists in his species the germs of faculties that are never fully unfolded here on earth, and which have no reference to this state of being. They exist in all men, but in most cases are so faintly elicited as not to be observable; and when they do shoot up here and there, they are denied, disowned, misinterpreted, and maligned. It is true that their development is often the symptom and effect of disease, which seems to change the relations of our material and immaterial parts; it is true that some of the phenomena resulting from these faculties are stimulated by disease, as in the case of spectral illusions; and it is true that imposture and folly intrude their unhallowed footsteps into this domain of science, as into that of all others; but there is a deep and holy well of truth to be discovered in this neglected by-path of nature, by those who seek it, from which they may draw the purest consolations for the present, the most ennobling hopes for the future, and the most valuable aid in penetrating through the letter into the spirit of the Scriptures.

      I confess it makes me sorrowful when I hear men laughing, scorning, and denying this their birthright; and I can not but grieve to think how closely