But with the mighty dead of these blank ages I could not commune.

Doubtless they loved and hated and rose and fell, and there were broken hearts and broken lives; but as beings of flesh and blood we cannot visualize them, and are in doubt even as to their race.

And of their minds, or their philosophy of life, we know absolutely nothing.

We are able, as Clifford has said in his Cosmic Emotion, to shake hands with the ancient Greeks across the great desert of centuries which divides our day from theirs; but there is no shaking hands with these ancients of Britain--or Albion, seeing that we are on the chalk.

To our souls they are as strange as the builders of Tiuhuanaco, or Mitla and Itzana, and the cyclopean ruins of Zimbabwe and the Carolines.
It is thought by some of our modern investigators of psychic phenomena that apparitions result from the coming out of impressions left in the surrounding matter, or perhaps in the ether pervading it, especially in moments of supreme agitation or agony.