3 - Inner vision and spiritual optics

Summary

My discussion of the role of physiological optics in Victorian anti-ghost treatises might seem to imply not only that visual evidence was regarded as deeply problematic when it came to ghosts, but that sight in Victorian culture was generally construed as a corporeal sense. Whether or not seeing is believing, that is, believability, appears to hinge on the correspondence (or lack thereof) between what is retinally registered and what actually exists out there to be perceived. Yet many contemporaries considered retinal vision as an obstacle to developing or recovering a different way of seeing – a truer, because more primal, intuitive, and spiritual, vision. The high stakes in the contest between these different conceptualizations of vision are powerfully articulated in Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus (1833–4), where Diogenes Teufelsdrockh commits the near-fatal error of forsaking his divine gift of spiritual sight for the blinkered vision of the bodily eyes. Teufelsdrockh's despairing question, “where is the Godhead; our eyes never saw him?” (SR, p. 122) sums up for Carlyle the distressingly common error of seeking evidence of spiritual existence with the corporeal senses. “Till the eye have vision,” the misguided Professor of Things in General eventually learns, “the whole members are in bonds” (SR, p. 143).