when any one from curiosity desired to see, for instance, a rose in
these phials, he took that in which the ashes of the rose-bush were
preserved, and placing it over a lighted candle, as soon as it felt a
little warmth, they saw the ashes stir and rise like a little dark
cloud, and, after some movements, they represented a rose as beautiful
and fresh as if newly gathered from the rose-tree.

Gaffard assures us that M. de Cleves, a celebrated chemist, showed
every day plants drawn from their own ashes. David Vanderbroch affirms
that the blood of animals contains the idea of their species as well
as their seed; he relates on this subject the experiment of M.
Borelli, who asserts that the human blood, when warm, is still full of
its spirits or sulphurs, acid and volatile, and that, being excited in
cemeteries and in places where great battles are fought by some heat
in the ground, the phantoms or ideas of the persons who are there
interred are seen to rise; that we should see them as well by day as
by night, were it not for the excess of light which prevents us even
from seeing the stars. He adds that by this means we might behold the
idea, and represent by a lawful and natural necromancy the figure or
phantom of all the great men of antiquity, our friends and our
ancestors, provided we possess their ashes.

These are the most plausible objections intended to destroy or obviate
all that is said of the apparitions of spirits. Whence some conclude
that these are either very natural phenomena and exhalations produced
by the heat of the earth imbued with blood and the volatile spirit of
the dead, above all, those dead by violence; or that they are the
consequences of a stricken and prepossessed fancy, or simply illusions
of the mind, or sports of persons who like to divert themselves by the
panics into which they terrify others; or, lastly, movements produced
naturally by men, rats, monkeys, and other animals; for it is true
that the oftener we examine into what have been taken for apparitions,
nothing is found that is real, extraordinary, or supernatural; but to
conclude from thence that all the apparitions and operations
attributed to angels, spirits or souls, and demons are chimerical, is
carrying things to excess; it is to conclude that we mistake always,
because we mistake often.

Footnotes:

[438] M. de S. Andre, Lett. iii. sur les Malefices.

CHAPTER L.

CONCLUSION OF THE TREATISE ON APPARITIONS.

A