"Apropos of your argument, I care very little, Hugh," said Julian, "whether you make supernatural appearances objective or subjective. I mean I don't care whether you regard the appearance as a mere deception of the eye, wrought by the disordered workings of the brain, or as the actual presence of a supernatural phenomenon. The result, the effect, the _reality_ of the appearance is just the same in either case. Whether the end is produced by an illusion of the senses, or an appeal to them, the end _is_ produced, and the senses _are_ impressed by something which is not in the ordinary course of human events, just as powerfully as if the ghost had flesh and blood, or the voice were a veritable pulsation of articulated air. The only thing that annoys me is a contemptuous and supercilious denial of the _facts_." "I hold with you, Julian," said Owen. "Take for instance the innumerable recorded instances where intimation has been given of a friend's or relative's death by the simultaneous appearance of his image to some one far absent, and unconscious even of his illness. There are four ways of treating such stories--the first is to deny their truth, which is, to say the least, not only grossly uncharitable, but an absurd and impertinent caprice adopted in order to reject unpleasant evidence; the second is to account for them by an optical delusion, accidentally synchronising with the event, which seems to me a most monstrous ignoring of the law of chances; a third is to account for them by the existence of some exquisite faculty, (existing in different degrees of intensity, and in some people not existing at all), whereby physical impressions are invisibly conveyed by some mysterious sympathy of organisation a faculty of which it seems to me there are the most abundant traces, however much it may be sneered and jeered at by those shallow philosophers who believe nothing but what they can grasp with both hands: and a fourth is to suppose that spirits can, of their own will, or by superior permission, make themselves sometimes visible to human eyes." "Or," said Julian, "so affect the senses _as to produce the impression_ that they are present to human eyes." "And to show you, Lillyston," said Owen, "how little I fear any natural explanations, and how much I think them beside the point, I'll tell you what happened to me only the other night, and which yet does not make me at all inclined to rationalise Hazlet's story. I had just put out the candle in my bedroom, when over my head I saw a handwriting on the wall in characters of light. I started out of bed, and for a moment fancied that I could read the words, and that somebody had been playing me a trick with phosphorus. But the next minute, I saw how it was; the moonlight was shining in through the little muslin folds of the lower blind, and as the folds were very symmetrical, the chequered reflection on the wall looked exactly like a series of words."