What is this but clear-seeing, backward and forward, the past and the future? The one faculty is not a whit more surprising and incomprehensible than the other, to those who possess neither; only we see the material product of one, and therefore believe in it. But, as Passavent justly observes, these coruscations belong not to genius exclusively—they are latent in all men. In the highly-gifted this divine spark becomes a flame to light the world withal; but even in the coarsest and least-developed organizations, it may and does momentarily break forth. The germ of the highest spiritual life is in the rudest, according to its degree, as well as in the highest form of man we have yet seen;—he is but a more imperfect type of the race, in whom this spiritual germ has not unfolded itself. Then, with respect to our second source of information, I am quite aware that it is equally difficult to establish its validity; but there are a few arguments in our favor here, too. In the first place, as Dr. Johnson says, though all reason is against us, all tradition is for us; and this conformity of tradition is surely of some weight, since I think it would be difficult to find any parallel instance of a universal tradition that was entirely without a foundation in truth; for with respect to witchcraft, the belief in which is equally universal, we now know that the phenomena were generally facts, although the interpretations put upon them were fables. It may certainly be objected that this universal belief in ghosts only arises from the universal prevalence of spectral illusions; but if so, as I have before observed, these spectral illusions become a subject of very curious inquiry; for, in the first place, they frequently occur under circumstances the least likely to induce them, and to people whom we should least expect to find the victims of them; and, in the second, there is a most remarkable conformity here, too, not only between the individual cases occurring among all classes of persons, who had never exhibited the slightest tendency to nervous derangement or somnambulism, but also between these and the revelations of the somnambules. In short, it seems to me that life is reduced to a mere phantasmagoria, if spectral illusions are so prevalent, so complicated in their nature, and so delusive as they must be if all the instances of ghost-seeing that come before us are to be referred to that theory. How numerous these are, I confess myself not to have had the least idea, till my attention was directed to the inquiry; and that these instances have been equally frequent in all periods and places we can not doubt, from the variety of persons that have given in their adhesion, or at least that have admitted, as Addison did, that he could not refuse the universal testimony in favor of the reappearance of the dead, strengthened by that of many credible persons with whom he was acquainted. Indeed, the testimony in favor of the facts has been at all