Genre:

Essay

Subjects:

Psychology, Mental Illness, Spiritualism

    Notes Samuel Hibbert's claim in his Philosophy of Apparitions, that apparitions are 'nothing more than ideas, or the recollected images of the mind' and links 'spectral illusions' to such mental conditions as 'inflammation of the brain'. Denies that the 'appearance of the spirit upon the earth' is impossible and 'infinitely' prefers Harriet E Stowe's 'theory' of the 'thousand living fibres [which] connect us with the unknown and unseen state'. (180) Cites evidence of a spirit form and concludes that 'it is not an impossible thing for the spirits of the dead to walk again' (181).