Sketches of the Philosophy of Apparitions;

£2,750 · Offered by Shapero Rare Books

an early and influential materialist explanation of ghost sightings First edition of a key work attributing ghost sightings to the human mind, an early examination of the unconscious. Rare in commerce, with no copies in recent auction records. 'Two of the most influential studies upon the nature and origin of hallucinations in the early nineteenth century centred their examination upon the supposed sighting of apparitions and phantoms of the dead. In these works, John Ferriar and Samuel Hibbert — both medical physicians — outlined the theory of spectral illusions — the argument that apparitions were to be traced to disorders and diseases of the bodily apparatus, rather than to insanity, revelation, or post-mortem haunting... Hibbert enlarged upon Ferriar's writings and outlined the similar thesis that "apparitions are nothing more than ideas, or the recollected images of the mind, which have been rendered as vivid as actual impressions". Agreeing with Ferrier that ghosts could be understood as waking dreams, Hibbert used analogies with the chemical world to illustrate the changeable nature of the individual's mental state such as the intoxications of dangerous miasmas and the "visonary world" induced by exposure to nitrous oxide. A recurring reference-point in Hibbert's text was that the "renovation of past feelings" through association to a certain level of intensity could produce apparitions in the mind... Though stressing the optical sense in their theories of spectral ill

• Binding: Hardcover

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