John Netten Radcliffe

“ I told him that my will had not any influence either upon the production or the metamorphoses of these figures, and that I never distinguished anything symmetrical, anything that had the character of vegetation. Göethe, on the contrary, was able to appoint at will a theme, which afterwards transformed itself, after a fashion apparently involuntary, but always in obedience to the laws of harmony and symmetry: a difference between two men, of which one possessed the poetical imagination in the highest degree of development, whilst the other devoted his life to the study of reality and of nature. ”

“ The human understanding, when any proposition has been once laid down (either from general admission and belief, or from the pleasure it affords) forces everything else to add fresh support and confirmation, and although most cogent and abundant instances may exist to the contrary, yet either does not observe, or despises them, or gets rid of and rejects them by some distinction, with violent and injurious prejudice, rather than sacrifice the authority of its first conclusions. ”

“ Loki is the personification of evil; Frigga is the goddess of the earth; and night, day, the moon, time, the present, the past, and the future, healing, chastity, abundance, love, courtesy, wisdom, and every form and passion and power of nature which the Scandinavians had separated and distinguished, each had its special and worshipped god. ”

“ At the commencement of the Christian era, certain men, inspired by the Holy Ghost, were enabled to cast aside all those thoughts and feelings derived from habit, education, and authority, and to receive at once, in all its purity and fulness, the light of the gospel—perhaps the most wonderful of all the miracles of Holy Writ. ”

“ After the creation of man, God revealed himself. The perfect knowledge of the Deity thus obtained, was perpetuated by a fragment of the human race, notwithstanding the baneful effects of the fall; and at the epoch of the deluge, the solitary family which escaped that mighty cataclysm, formed a centre from which anew the attributes and powers of the Godhead were made known in all their truth and purity. But again sin prevailed, and with the exception of one race, who alone treasured the true knowledge of the Deity, mankind lost by degrees the pure faith of their fathers ”

“ The yielding of wood-work, the scouring of vermin, the sighing of the wind in chinks and crannies, have been transformed by excited and superstitious imaginations into the sighing, or whispering, or knocking of wandering ghosts, and there is, perhaps, not a town or village in England which has not at one time or other had one or more houses reputed to be haunted by incorporeal visitants who have thus announced their presence. ”

“ The adventures of Jack the Giant-Killer, the most celebrated of all celebrated nursery heroes, are for the most part derived from the fabulous era of our own country, and from Scandinavian mythology; and the whole tale is a degraded and vitiated tradition in which the deeds of Corineus, a celebrated personage in the mythical history of Britain, and Prince Arthur; the adventures of Thor, the god of thunder, and other Scandinavian deities, are jumbled together in strange confusion. ”

“ As the developed faculty of presentiment is a capability of experiencing the arrangements which are made in the world of spirits, and executed in the visible world, second-sight certainly belongs also under this head. And as those who possess this capability are generally simple people, it again follows from hence, that a developed faculty of presentiment is by no means a quality which belongs solely to devout and pious people, or that it should be regarded as a divine gift; I take it, on the contrary, for a disease of the soul, which we ought rather to endeavour to heal than promote. ”

“ This gentleman has for many years been free from any spectral apparition; but hard study, mental emotion, a disordered state of the health, or pressure with the finger on the eyeball, is apt to occasion a brilliant evolution of coloured light in the field of vision.
The spontaneous appearance of light in the visual field, in this case, formed the substratum upon which the mind moulded the spectres; and it is interesting to remark the influence which the perusal of a volume of legends and ghost-stories, and subsequent classical studies, had in determining the form of the phantasma. ”

“ The Pueblo Indians of New Mexico still perpetuate the holy fire "by the side of which the Aztecan kept a continual watch for the return to earth of Quetzalcoatl, the god of air." In a solitary cave of the mountains is preserved the undying fire, and its dim light is seen by the hunter if, by chance, led by the chase, he passes near to this lonely temple. ”

“ The substratum of superstition which is found to prevail more or less in most persons, is a never-failing source of delusion; and it is the groundwork upon which the impostor acts. Readily excited and brought into play by phenomena of which the origin is not palpably evident, it seizes with avidity upon doctrines which pander to its taste for mystery and wonder ”

“ Sometimes a ghost will haunt a certain house, or a plot of ground, and become so obstreperous, that the occupier of the house is obliged to desert it, and the proprietor of the land to allow it to become waste. But it has happened that if the spirit was that of an old proprietor, a deed executed in its name has appeased it, and it has no more troubled the place. ”

“ If a finger be pressed constantly into the corner of a window-frame for ten minutes or more, and then, continuing the pressure, the mind be directed to judge whether the force at a given moment is all horizontal or all downwards, or how much is in one direction and how much in the other, it will find great difficulty in deciding, and will, at last, become altogether uncertain,—at least such is my case. ”

“ We are now in a position to comprehend more fully that, by the action of the imagination and emotions alone, the changes going on in the nervous centres may be so far disturbed that the whole of those sensations which are generally excited by agents external to the body may be called into play, and the mental idea assume, in light, colour and shade, sound, taste and touch, all the distinctness and definitiveness which appertains to an actual object within the sphere of the respective senses, and be considered as such. ”

“ One of the most formidable objections to the majority of ghost-stories of this nature is the insufficiency of the authority upon which they are given. In many instances we cannot trace them satisfactorily to their origin; in others, we have received them after they have passed through the hands of several persons; and in still more (as in the tales we have just analysed) there is intrinsic evidence that no endeavour has been made to obviate or elicit the sources of fallacy to which the ghost-seer has been exposed, and diminish as much as possible the chances of error. ”

“ It is unnecessary to dwell upon the goggle eyes burning with flames which he imagined Satan to possess; suffice it that he remained before the supposed devil some time, overcome with terror, when a blink of the rising moon showed that he was laid at the foot of the stump of a tree. ”

“ If we reflect for a moment upon the difficulty which most persons experience in detecting the direction and position of sounds, particularly when the mind is under the dominion of certain ideas, we may readily imagine how at the first the delusion of spirit-rapping obtained credence among the credulous and ignorant. It was, however, soon ascertained that an imposition was being practised; and very shortly after the development of the mania, a "medium" came forward and confessed the deception practised, and the mode in which she had carried it out. ”

“ Even when glimpses of the spirit-world are vouchsafed to those who still firmly believe in occasional visitations from its inhabitants, it would seem that the fashion of their appearance has become more in accordance with the quiet well-regulated ideas of the age. The major part of those terrible attributes of the nether world, that of old were delighted in, are no longer exhibited, and they are numbered with the things that have been. ”

“ That proclivity to the belief in supernatural interpositions, that vague notion of spiritual beings, that so-called innate consciousness of the existence of the supernatural, which most persons possess more or less of, and which is totally inconsistent with the clear and perfect doctrine of the invisible taught in the Gospel, is, we believe, derived solely from the infant mind and earlier periods of youth being poisoned by the supernatural events and phenomena detailed in fabulous, legendary, and ghost-lore. ”