The female thermometer eighteenth centur 173

162 THE FEMALE THERMOMETER V The phantasmagoria was invented, it turns out, at a crucial epoch in the history of Western ghost belief—at precisely that moment when traditional credulity had begun to give way, more or less definitively, to the arguments of scientific rationalism This is not to say that ghost belief simply vanished at the end of the eighteenth century: orthodox religious opinion had always supported the idea of a transcendental spirit world, and popular faith in apparitions weakened only gradually.45 In England, for example, spectacular episodes like the Cock Lane Ghost in the 1760s, Lord Lyttelton's Ghost in 1779, and the Hammersmith Ghost of 1804 testified to the vestigial power of traditional beliefs.46 But the forces of secularization had also been at work for some time Renaissance skepticism had called into question the nature of many supposedly supernatural phenomena, and the successes of Enlightenment science reinforced the rationalist view In 1751 the writers of the Encyclopedie ridiculed "les esprits timides & credules" who mistook everything they saw for apparitions By 1800 similar attitudes had more or less triumphed among the educated classes across Western Europe When Scott, quoting Crabbe, mockingly described the belief in spirits as "'the last lingering fiction of the brain,'" he illustrated how profoundly received opinion had altered since the days of Lavater, Glanvill, Baxter, Beaumont, Mather and other renowned defenders of the "invisible world."47 How had such a remarkable cognitive reorientation come about? Without attempting to speculate here on ultimate causes, we can nonetheless characterize the basic shift in thought The age-old philosophical problem had always been how to account for the many sightings of ghosts reported by reputable witnesses throughout the centuries Rather than resort to the theological notion of a spirit world, the rationalists proposed two new modes of explanation The first line of argument held that apparitions were the result of simple deception Writers since Reginald Scot had argued that many apparitions were in fact the products of legerdemain or trickery—conjurers' illusions (like the Witch of Endor's famous "raising" of Samuel in the Bible, or Cagliostro's fake crystal-ball apparitions) or simple cheats perpetrated by those out to intimidate or manipulate the credulous The spread of popular scientific knowledge in the eighteenth century supported this kind of explanation; recent developments in optics, the new technology of mirrors and lenses, and the refinement of inventions like the magic lantern itself gave would-be skeptics a technical language with which to debunk, retroactively, many reported spectral appearances, including the notorious spirit-raisings performed by ancient pythonesses and necromancers.48 But the second line of argument (not always in perfect accord with the first) ultimately came to dominate modern thinking on the apparition problem According to this hypothesis, spectres carne somehow from within, originating in the disordered brain or sensonum of the ghost-seer himself or herself Earlier writers, again, had propounded a crude version of the idea Those suffering from a surplus