’Velut aegri somnia vanae
  Finguntur species’

is his motto.

Kant’s real position about all these matters is, I venture to say, almost identical with that of Sir Walter Scott.  A Scot himself, by descent, Kant may have heard tales of second-sight and bogles.  Like Scott, he dearly loved a ghost-story; like Scott he was canny enough to laugh, publicly, at them and at himself for his interest in them.  Yet both would take trouble to inquire.  As Kant vainly wrote to Swedenborg and others—­as he vainly spent 7L. on ‘Arcana Coelestia,’ so Sir Walter was anxious to go to Egypt to examine the facts of ink-gazing clairvoyance.  Kant confesses that each individual ghost-story found him sceptical, whereas the cumulative mass made a considerable impression.[13]

The first seventy pages of the ‘Tribune’ are devoted to a perfectly serious discussion of the metaphysics of ‘Spirits.’  On page 73 he pleasantly remarks, ’Now we shall understand that all said hitherto is superfluous,’ and he will not reproach the reader who regards seers not as citizens of two worlds (Plotinus), but as candidates for Bedlam.

Kant’s irony is peculiarly Scottish.  He does not himself know how far he is in earnest, and, to save his self-respect and character for canniness, he ‘jocks wi’ deeficulty.’  He amuses himself with trying how far he can carry speculations on metaphysics (not yet reformed by himself) into the realm of the ghostly.  He makes admissions about his own tendency to think that he has an immaterial soul, and that these points are, or may be, or some day will be, scientifically solved.  These admissions are eagerly welcomed by Du Prel in his ‘Philosophy of Mysticism;’ but they are only part of Kant’s joke, and how far they are serious, Kant himself does not know.  If spiritualists knew their own business, they would translate and publish Kant’s first seventy pages of ‘Traeume.’  Something like telepathy, action of spirit, even discarnate, on spirit, is alluded to, but the idea is as old as Lavaterus at least (p. 52).  Kant has a good deal to say, like Scott in his ‘Demonology,’ on the physics of Hallucination, but it is antiquated matter.  He thinks the whole topic of spiritual being only important as bearing on hopes of a future life.  As speculation, all is ’in the air,’ and as in such matters the learned and unlearned are on a level of ignorance, science will not discuss them.  He then repeats the Swedenborg stories, and thinks it would be useful to posterity if some one would investigate them while witnesses are alive and memories are fresh.

In fact, Kant asks for psychical research.

As for Swedenborg’s so costly book, Kant laughs at it.  There is in it no evidence, only assertion.  Kant ends, having pleased nobody, he says, and as ignorant as when he began, by citing cultivons notre jardin.