It was but the other day that I picked up a weekly paper in which a
gentleman was discussing ghosts--that is, the supposed apparition of the
living and the dead: of the dead though dead, and of the living though
absent.

Nothing has been more keenly discussed since the beginning of human
discussions. Are these phenomena (which undoubtedly happen) what modern
people call subjective, or are they what modern people call objective?
In old-fashioned English, Are the ghosts really there or are they not?
The most elementary use of the human reason persuades us that the matter
is not susceptible of positive proof. The criterion of certitude in any
matter of perception is an inner sense in the perceiver that the thing
he perceives is external to himself. He is the only witness; no one can
corroborate or dispute him. The seer may be right or he may be wrong,
but we have no proof--and only according to our temperament, our fancy,
our experience, our mood, do we decide with one or the other of the two
great schools.

Well, the gentleman of whom I am speaking wrote and had printed in plain
English this phrase (read it carefully):--"Science teaches us that these
phenomena are purely subjective."

Now I am quite sure that of the thousands who read that phrase all but a
handful read it in the spirit in which one hears the oracle of a god.
Some read it with regret, some with pleasure, but all with acquiescence.

That physical science was not competent in the matter one way or the
other each of those readers would probably have discovered, if even so
simple a corrective as the use of the term "physical research" instead
of the sacred term "science" had been applied; the hierarchic title