rcised[79] by his chaplain, who lay in every room one after another,
and by that means dissipated the fears which had so long reigned in the
family.

I should not have been thus particular upon these ridiculous horrors, did
not I find them so very much prevail in all parts of the country. At the
same time I think a person who is thus terrified with the imagination of
ghosts and spectres, much more reasonable than one who, contrary to the
reports of all historians sacred and profane, ancient and modern, and to
the traditions of all nations, thinks the appearance of spirits fabulous
and groundless: could not I give myself up to this general testimony of
mankind, I should to the relations of particular persons who are now
living, and whom I cannot distrust in other matters of fact. I might here
add, that not only the historians, to whom we may join the poets, but
likewise the philosophers of antiquity have favoured this opinion.
Lucretius[80] himself, though by the course of his philosophy he was
obliged to maintain that the soul did not exist separate from the body,
makes no doubt of the reality of apparitions, and that men have often
appeared after their death. This I think very remarkable. He was so
pressed[81] with the matter of fact which he could not have the
confidence to deny, that he was forced to account for it by one of the
most absurd unphilosophical notions that was ever started. He tells us,
that the surfaces of all bodies are perpetually flying off from their
respective bodies, one after another; and that these surfaces or thin
cases, that included each other whilst they were joined in the body like
the coats of an onion, are sometimes seen entire when they are separated
from it; by which means we often behold the shapes and shadows of persons
who are either dead or absent.

I shall dismiss this paper with a story out of Josephus, not so much for
the sake of the story itself as for the moral reflections with which the
author concludes it, and which I shall here set down in his own words.
"Glaphyra the daughter of King Archelaus, after the death of her two
first husbands (being married to a third, who was brother to her first
husband, and so passionately in love with her that he turned off his
former wife to make room for this marriage) had a very odd kind of dream.
She fancied that she saw her first husband coming towards her, and that
she embraced him with great tenderness; when in the midst of the pleasure