for reasons opposite but equally powerful, the
countenance of a murdered person is engraved upon the recollection of
his slayer. A thousand additional circumstances, far too obvious to
require recapitulation, render the supposed apparition of the dead the
most ordinary spectral phenomenon which is ever believed to occur among
the living. All that we have formerly said respecting supernatural
appearances in general, applies with peculiar force to the belief of
ghosts; for whether the cause of delusion exists in an excited
imagination or a disordered organic system, it is in this way that it
commonly exhibits itself. Hence Lucretius himself, the most absolute of
sceptics, considers the existence of ghosts, and their frequent
apparition, as facts so undeniable that he endeavours to account for
them at the expense of assenting to a class of phenomena very
irreconcilable to his general system. As he will not allow of the
existence of the human soul, and at the same time cannot venture to
question the phenomena supposed to haunt the repositories of the dead,
he is obliged to adopt the belief that the body consists of several
coats like those of an onion, and that the outmost and thinnest, being
detached by death, continues to wander near the place of sepulture, in
the exact resemblance of the person while alive.

We have said there are many ghost stories which we do not feel at
liberty to challenge as impostures, because we are confident that those
who relate them on their own authority actually believe what they
assert, and may have good reason for doing so, though there is no real
phantom after all. We are far, therefore, from averring that such tales
are necessarily false. It is easy to suppose the visionary has been
imposed upon by a lively dream, a waking reverie, the excitation of a
powerful imagination, or the misrepresentation of a diseased organ of
sight; and in one or other of these causes, to say nothing of a system
of deception which may in many instances be probable, we apprehend a
solution will be found for all cases of what are called real ghost
stories.

In truth, the evidence with respect to such apparitions is very seldom
accurately or distinctly questioned. A supernatural tale is in most
cases received as an agreeable mode of amusing society, and he would be
rather accounted a sturdy moralist than an entertaining companion who
should employ himself in assailing its credibility. It would indeed be a
soleci