MR HILARY
All these anecdotes admit of solution on psychological principles.
It is more easy for a soldier, a philosopher, or even a saint, to be
frightened at his own shadow, than for a dead man to come out of his
grave. Medical writers cite a thousand singular examples of the force
of imagination. Persons of feeble, nervous, melancholy temperament,
exhausted by fever, by labour, or by spare diet, will readily conjure
up, in the magic ring of their own phantasy, spectres, gorgons,
chimaeras, and all the objects of their hatred and their love. We
are most of us like Don Quixote, to whom a windmill was a giant, and
Dulcinea a magnificent princess: all more or less the dupes of our own
imagination, though we do not all go so far as to see ghosts, or to
fancy ourselves pipkins and teapots.
MR FLOSKY
I can safely say I have seen too many ghosts myself to believe in
their external existence. I have seen all kinds of ghosts: black
spirits and white, red spirits and grey. Some in the shapes of
venerable old men, who have met me in my rambles at noon; some
of beautiful young women, who have peeped through my curtains at
midnight.
THE HONOURABLE MR LISTLESS
And have proved, I doubt not, 'palpable to feeling as to sight.
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