In poets this liability to be possessed by the creations of
their own brains is limited and proportioned by the artistic sense, and
the imagination thus truly becomes the shaping faculty, while in less
regulated or coarser organizations it dwells forever in the _Nifelheim_
of phantasmagoria and dream, a thaumaturge half cheat, half dupe. What
Mr. Tylor has to say on this matter is ingenious and full of valuable
suggestion, and to a certain extent solves our difficulties. Nightmare,
for example, will explain the testimony of witnesses in trials for
witchcraft, that they had been hag-ridden by the accused. But to prove
the possibility, nay, the probability, of this confusion of objective
with subjective is not enough. It accounts very well for such apparitions
as those which appeared to Dion, to Brutus, and to Curtius Rufus. In such
cases the imagination is undoubtedly its own _doppel-gaenger_, and sees
nothing more than the projection of its own deceit. But I am puzzled, I
confess, to explain the appearance of the _first_ ghost, especially among
men who thought death to be the end-all here below. The thing once
conceived of, it is easy, on Mr. Tylor's theory, to account for all after
the first. If it was originally believed that only the spirits of those
who had died violent deaths were permitted to wander,[99] the conscience
of a remorseful murderer may have been haunted by the memory of his
victim, till the imagination, infected in its turn, gave outward reality
to the image on the inward eye.
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