Tracks of a Rolling Stone. Henry J. Coke
him, paced to and fro with contemptuous indifference, stopping occasionally to spy the enemy with his long ship’s telescope. A number of bluejackets, in reserve, were stationed about half a mile further off at the bottom of the protecting hill. They were completely screened from the fire by some buildings of the suburbs abutting upon the slope. Those in front were watching the cannon-balls which had struck the crest and were rolling as it were by mere force of gravitation down the hillside. Some jokes were made about football, when suddenly a smart and popular young officer—Fox, first lieutenant of one of the brigs—jumped out at one of these spent balls, which looked as though it might have been picked up by the hands, and gave it a kick. It took his foot off just above the ankle. There was no surgeon at hand, and he was bleeding to death before one could be found. Sir Thomas had come down the hill, and seeing the wounded officer on the ground with a group around him, said in passing, ‘Well, Fox, this is a bad job, but it will make up the pair of epaulets, which is something.’
‘Yes sir,’ said the dying man feebly, ‘but without a pair of legs.’ Half an hour later he was dead.
I have spoken lightly of courage, as if, by implication, I myself possessed it. Let me make a confession. From my soul I pity the man who is or has been such a miserable coward as I was in my infancy, and up to this youthful period of my life. No fear of bullets or bayonets could ever equal mine. It was the fear of ghosts. As a child, I think that at times when shut up for punishment, in a dark cellar for instance, I must have nearly gone out of my mind with this appalling terror.
Once when we were lying just below Whampo, the captain took nearly every officer and nearly the whole ship’s crew on a punitive expedition up the Canton river. They were away about a week. I was left behind, dangerously ill with fever and ague. In his absence, Sir Thomas had had me put into his cabin, where I lay quite alone day and night, seeing hardly anyone save the surgeon and the captain’s steward, who was himself a shadow, pretty nigh. Never shall I forget my mental sufferings at night. In vain may one attempt to describe what one then goes through; only the victims know what that is. My ghost—the ghost of the Whampo Reach—the ghost of those sultry and miasmal nights, had no shape, no vaporous form; it was nothing but a presence, a vague amorphous dread. It may have floated with the swollen and putrid corpses which hourly came bobbing down the stream, but it never appeared; for there was nothing to appear. Still it might appear. I expected every instant through the night to see it in some inconceivable form. I expected it to touch me. It neither stalked upon the deck, nor hovered in the dark, nor moved, nor rested anywhere. And yet it was there about me—where, I knew not. On every side I was threatened. I feared it most behind the head of my cot, because I could not see it if it were so.
This, it will be said, is the description of a nightmare. Exactly so. My agony of fright was a nightmare; but a nightmare when every sense was strained with wakefulness, when all the powers of imagination were concentrated to paralyse my shattered reason.
The experience here spoken of is so common in some form or other that we may well pause to consider it. What is the meaning of this fear of ghosts?—how do we come by it? It may be thought that its cradle is our own, that we are purposely frightened in early childhood to keep us calm and quiet. But I do not believe that nurses’ stories would excite dread of the unknown if the unknown were not already known. The susceptibility to this particular terror is there before the terror is created. A little reflection will convince us that we must look far deeper for the solution of a mystery inseparable from another, which is of the last importance to all of us.
CHAPTER VI
The belief in phantoms, ghosts, or spirits, has frequently been discussed in connection with speculations on the origin of religion. According to Mr. Spencer (‘Principles of Sociology’) ‘the first traceable conception of a supernatural being is the conception of a ghost.’ Even Fetichism is ‘an extension of the ghost theory.’ The soul of the Fetich ‘in common with supernatural agents at large, is originally the double of a dead man.’ How do we get this notion—‘the double of a dead man?’ Through dreams. In the Old Testament we are told: ‘God came to’ Abimelech, Laban, Solomon, and others ‘in a dream’; also that ‘the angel of the Lord’ appeared to Joseph ‘in a dream.’ That is to say, these men dreamed that God came to them. So the savage, who dreams of his dead acquaintance, believes he has been visited by the dead man’s spirit. This belief in ghosts is confirmed, Mr. Spencer argues, by other phenomena. The savage who faints from the effect of a wound sustained in fight looks just like the dead man beside him. The spirit of the wounded man returns after a long or short period of absence: why should the spirit of the other not do likewise? If reanimation follows comatose states, why should it not follow death? Insensibility is but an affair of time. All the modes of preserving the dead, in the remotest ages, evince the belief in casual separation of body and soul, and of their possible reunion.
Take another theory. Comte tells us there is a primary tendency in man ‘to transfer the sense of his own nature, in the radical explanation of all phenomena whatever.’ Writing in the same key, Schopenhauer calls man ‘a metaphysical animal.’ He is speaking of the need man feels of a theory, in regard to the riddle of existence, which forces itself upon his notice; ‘a need arising from the consciousness that behind the physical in the world, there is a metaphysical something permanent as the foundation of constant change.’ Though not here alluding to the ghost theory, this bears indirectly on the conception, as I shall proceed to show.
We need not entangle ourselves in the vexed question of innate ideas, nor inquire whether the principle of casuality is, as Kant supposed, like space and time, a form of intuition given a priori. That every change has a cause must necessarily (without being thus formulated) be one of the initial beliefs of conscious beings far lower in the scale than man, whether derived solely from experience or otherwise. The reed that shakes is obviously shaken by the wind. But the riddle of the wind also forces itself into notice; and man explains this by transferring to the wind ‘the sense of his own nature.’ Thunderstorms, volcanic disturbances, ocean waves, running streams, the motions of the heavenly bodies, had to be accounted for as involving change. And the natural—the primitive—explanation was by reference to life, analogous, if not similar, to our own. Here then, it seems to me, we have the true origin of the belief in ghosts.
Take an illustration which supports this view. While sitting in my garden the other day a puff of wind blew a lady’s parasol across the lawn. It rolled away close to a dog lying quietly in the sun. The dog looked at it for a moment, but seeing nothing to account for its movements, barked nervously, put its tail between its legs, and ran away, turning occasionally to watch and again bark, with every sign of fear.
This was animism. The dog must have accounted for the eccentric behaviour of the parasol by endowing it with an uncanny spirit. The horse that shies at inanimate objects by the roadside, and will sometimes dash itself against a tree or a wall, is actuated by a similar superstition. Is there any essential difference between this belief of the dog or horse and the belief of primitive man? I maintain that an intuitive animistic tendency (which Mr. Spencer repudiates), and not dreams, lies at the root of all spiritualism. Would Mr. Spencer have had us believe that the dog’s fear of the rolling parasol was a logical deduction from its canine dreams? This would scarcely elucidate the problem. The dog and the horse share apparently Schopenhauer’s metaphysical propensity with man.
The familiar aphorism of Statius: Primus in orbe Deos fecit timor, points to the relation of animism first to the belief in ghosts, thence to Polytheism, and ultimately to Monotheism. I must apologise to those of the transcendental school who, like Max Müller for instance (Introduction to the ‘Science of Religion’), hold that we have ‘a primitive intuition of God’; which, after all, the professor derives, like many others, from the ‘yearning for something that neither sense nor reason can supply’; and from the assumption that ‘there was in the heart of man from the very first a feeling of incompleteness, of weakness, of dependency, &c.’ All this, I take it, is due to the aspirations of a much later creature than the ‘Pithecanthropus erectus,’ to whom we here refer.