A vast span, a period of ten or more, probably of
twenty centuries, during which great things occurred and great
tragedies were enacted, which seem all the darker and more
tremendous to the mind because unwritten and unknown. But
with the mighty dead of these blank ages I could not commune.
Doubtless they loved and hated and rose and fell, and there
were broken hearts and broken lives; but as beings of flesh
and blood we cannot visualize them, and are in doubt even as
to their race. And of their minds, or their philosophy of
life, we know absolutely nothing. We are able, as Clifford
has said in his Cosmic Emotion, to shake hands with the
ancient Greeks across the great desert of centuries which
divides our day from theirs; but there is no shaking hands
with these ancients of Britain--or Albion, seeing that we are
on the chalk. To our souls they are as strange as the
builders of Tiuhuanaco, or Mitla and Itzana, and the cyclopean
ruins of Zimbabwe and the Carolines.
It is thought by some of our modern investigators of psychic
phenomena that apparitions result from the coming out of
impressions left in the surrounding matter, or perhaps in the
ether pervading it, especially in moments of supreme agitation
or agony. The apparition is but a restored picture, and
pictures of this sort are about us in millions; but for our
peace they are rarely visible, as the ability to see them is
the faculty of but a few persons in certain moods and certain
circumstances.
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