be noticed that Shakespeare, when referring to the apparition of the ghost, contributes a far profounder trait of character in explanation of this debated point. Hamlet delays, because he does not right off wholly believe in the ghost. The spirit that I have seen May be a devil: and the devil hath power To assume a pleasing shape; yea and perhaps, Out of my weakness and my melancholy, As he is very potent with such spirits, Abuses me to damn me: I'll have grounds More relative than this: the play's the thing, Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king. In this passage it is obvious that the apparition as such does not leave Hamlet merely devoid of all stability[350], but that he entertains a reasonable doubt, and is determined to make his conviction a certainty by his own experiments before he proceeds to act upon it. (_γ_) As a summary description of these universal powers, which appear not merely in their external independence, but are the vital and moving forces in the human heart and all that is implied in its most intimate life, we may borrow an expression in use among the ancients, that is to say Pathos (_πάθος._) To translate this word adequately is not easy. Passion almost always implies as its concomitant an element of meanness or baseness. We contend in ordinary parlance that a man should not surrender himself to his passions. It must therefore be understood that we use the expression pathos in a nobler and more universal sense than this without the slightest implication of anything blameworthy or egotistic. The devoted love of the sister Antigone is an excellent example of a pathos in the full significance of the Greek use of the term. Pathos in this sense is a power of the emotional life which completely justifies itself, an essential part of the content of rationality and the free will. Orestes, for example, kills his mother not so much on account of any force of his emotional life which we strictly can call passion; rather it is a pathos in itself fully considered upon and essentially sane which carries him on to the awful deed. Thus understood we may add that it is impossible to say that the gods possess pathos. They are merely the universal content of that which is the stimulating energy in the resolves and actions of human individuality. The gods as such continue in their repose and freedom from passion, and however much they may quarrel or contend among themselves, there is nothing really serious in it all, or their strife possessed merely a symbolical significance in the view we may take of it as a universal war of the gods. We must therefore strictly limit pathos to the actions of mankind, and conceive thereunder the essential or rational content, which is present in the human consciousness identical with itself and throughout suffuses the emotional life.