Volume 1

An essay on the history and reality of apparitions. Being an account of what they are, and what they are not; whence they come, and whence they come not. As also how we may distinguish between the apparitions of good and evil spirits and how we ought to behave to them. With a great variety of surprizing and diverting examples, never publish'd before / [Anon].

  • Defoe, Daniel, 1661?-1731.
Date:
M DCC XXVII
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An essay on the history and reality of apparitions. Being an account of what they are, and what they are not; whence they come, and whence they come not. As also how we may distinguish between the apparitions of good and evil spirits and how we ought to behave to them. With a great variety of surprizing and diverting examples, never publish'd before / [Anon]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    48/430 (page 28)
    N ow if God mutt not be fuppofed to have crea- ted fo many habitable Bodies without peopling them, and that it would reflect upon his Wifdom to lay fo much of his Creation wafte; that all the Planets fhould feem to be made for nothing but to range about the Watte as a kind of dark Inhabitants ; of no ufe but to fhine a little, and that with but bor- row’d Beams too, upon this little Point called Earth, where only a Set of Rationals can exift ; I fay, if this muft not be fuppofed, but on the con- trary there are certainly People of one Kind or — another in all thofe Bodies, let the Trouble of ma- king them be what it will; if this be the Cafe, and that this muft be believed in fpight of fo ma- ny Difficulties and Inconfiftencies; then allow me to argue a little upon the following Enquiry. W uy may I not as well fuggett, and that with every jot as much Probability, that there are, or at leaft may be, a certain Number of appointed Inha- bitants in the vaftly-extended Aby{fs of Space, a kind of Spirits (other than the Angels good or bad, and other than the unembodied or uncafed Souls of Men) who dwell in the invifible World, and in the Vatt No-where of unbounded Space, of which we can neither fay what it is, what it contains, or how determined: ‘That Great Wafte, of whofe Extent ’tis hardly poffible even the Soul itfelf can conceive, and of which all the Accounts we give, and Guefles we make, are fo remote, look fo Enthufiattic, fo improbable, and fo like impoffible, that inftead of informing the ignorant Part of the World by it, we only arm them with Jeft and Ridicule, and re- folve them into incurable Unbelief; depending that what it is not poflible to Conceive of, is not pofli- ble to Be. | N ow is this immenfe Space indeed a Void? is it all a Wafte? is it utterly defolate? or is it inhabited and peopled by the Omnipotent Maker, in a manner {uited