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'Enough to dispose of any amount of robbers or phantoms either, observed Griff as they went forth by the back door, reinforced by Amos Bell with a lantern in one hand and a poker in the other. My father was fortunately still asleep, and my mother came down to see whether I was frightened.
The gods and the creeds of the past, as shown in the last chapter whatever they may have been, animistic or anthropomorphic or transcendental, whether grossly brutish or serenely ideal and abstract are essentially projections of the human mind; and no doubt those who are anxious to discredit the religious impulse generally will catch at this, saying "Yes, they are mere forms and phantoms of the mind, ephemeral dreams, projected on the background of Nature, and having no real substance or solid value.
She breathes a light breath into it and asks, retaining it and looking into it: 'Now say, what do you see? 'See, Rosa? 'Why, I thought you Egyptian boys could look into a hand and see all sorts of phantoms. Can't you see a happy Future? For certain, neither of them sees a happy Present, as the gate opens and closes, and one goes in, and the other goes away.
During the long evenings of the period when the sun is away from the earth for so great a portion of the day, she would sit on her soft couch of skins and dried moss, listening to the tales he would repeat of the wonderful things he had seen and heard; the dreams of strange and fearful creatures which had troubled his hours of sleep, and the actual appearance to him, when sleep was far from his eyelids, of beings or phantoms not of this world; and the traditions which told of the love, or hatred, or favour, or punishment, of the Great Spirit of his bounties sent to the Cherokees, when famine reared his gaunt form among them, or of wrath provoked, and punishment inflicted, when pride dwelt in their villages, when their thoughts were far from him, when no clay was put on their heads, when the tender and juicy flesh of the deer smoked not in his sacrifice.
How shocking, and yet how wonderful it was to discover that these real things, Sunday luncheons, Sunday walks, country houses, and tablecloths were not entirely real, were indeed half phantoms, and the damnation which visited the disbeliever in them was only a sense of illegitimate freedom. What now takes the place of those things I wonder, those real standard things?
Pleasant as the process might be of announcing the truth and leaving the falsehood to decay of itself, it cannot be carried into practice. Men's minds must be called back from the present of phantoms and encouraged to follow the only path which tends to enduring results. We cannot afford to make the tacit concession that our opinions, though true, are depressing and debasing.
There must be trial. Then, if success be achieved and the illusion becomes real and transcendental, and other things and conditions merely "innutritious phantoms," were it not wise, indeed essential, to tell of it all, so that mayhap the illusions of others may be put to the test? Not that it is good or becoming that many should attempt the part of the Beachcomber. All cannot play it who would.
While his mind had been pursuing its intangible phantoms and turning in irresolution from such pursuit he had heard about him the constant voices of his father and of his masters, urging him to be a gentleman above all things and urging him to be a good catholic above all things. These voices had now come to be hollow-sounding in his ears.
His early ambition, his ill-omened marriage, the causes of his after-rise in the wrong-judging world, the first dawn of his reputation, his rapid and flattering successes, his present elevation, his aspiring hope of far higher office, and more patrician honours, all these phantoms passed before him in checkered shadow and light; but ever with each stalked one disquieting and dark remembrance, the loss of his only son.
Every age that bath passed away bath left a ghost behind it; and the beautiful land seems like that imagined clime beneath the earth in which man, glorious though it be, may not breathe and live but which is populous with holy phantoms and illustrious shades. On, on sped Godolphin. Night broke over him as he traversed the Pontine Marshes.