SHAKESPERE'S GHOSTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXVIII, Issue 8538, 11 April 1891, Page 2 (Supplement)

SHAKESPERE'S GHOSTS.

We cannot doubt that Shakespere, like his contemporaries, believed in ghosts, while we do not. How, then, can we say that he is true to nature, when he makes Hamlet or Brutus or Macbeth see ghosts, talk with them, and. thereby in all respects believe in them ? Sceptical arguments against the reality of ghosts were not unknown to Shakcspere's contemporaries. He must have read them himself in Plutarch's "Brutus," but we cannot suppose that those arguments had more effect on him than on Brutus himself. And we cannot escape from the difficulty by saying that the superstition being natural to the poet and to the men of his time, it was natural that he should make the personages of his plays subject to it; for the groundwork of all cur study of Shakespere assumes that he was not merely of an age, but for all time. What wo do say is that the men of Shakespere's age believed in ghosts because they had seen them, and we for the same reason disbelieve in them. We have, like Coleridge, seen too many. Plenty of ghosts have been and still are seen, but the sight has been verified by investigators with habits of mind derived from the practice of the Baconian method of examining facts. Ghosts have been verified, and like many other phenomena once so mysterious as to be supposed to be of supernatural or preternatural origin, they have been found to have their place under known laws of nature. They have been ascertained to be, in metaphysical phrase, subjectively but not objectively real. They come not under the laws of the bodily eyes and of optics, but under those of the imagination ; and it is imagination which can and does give the brain most of the impressions of bodily sight and sound when a ghost is seen. We say most of these, because among the distinctions between a real and a sham—that is, a pretended, dressed-up—ghost is this, that the real ghost does not strike such terror as does the sham, nor does it tell its hearers Vhat they did not know before. It is true that in many well-authenticated ghost stories of our own time even there is an element of unexplained coincidence, which still seems to give them a supernatural appearance ; but these, too, the friends of "Psychical Research" believe that they shall one day bring under ordinary natural law.