The Ghost of Dr. Ascher
The night I spent at Goslar something very remarkable occurred. Terror seizes me even now as I think back. I am not timid by nature, but I have a mortal terror of ghosts. What is fear? Is it a product of the understanding or of the soul? About this question I had many a discussion with Dr. Saul Ascher in Berlin when we met in the Café Royal, where I used to dine. He would have it that we fear a thing because our reason recognises therein due cause for terror. While I was eating and drinking to my satisfaction he was fond of constantly demonstrating the fine qualities of Reason. Toward the end of his demonstration he would look at his watch, and he always ended with: “Reason is the highest principle!” Reason! When I so much as hear the word I see before me Dr. Ascher with his abstract legs, his tight waistcoat of transcendental grey, and his harsh bitter-cold face, which might have served as a title-vignette to a book on geometry. The man was a straight line personified. In his search after the Positive the poor man had philosophised all grandeur out of life, all sunbeams, all faith, and all flowers, and all that remained to him was a cold, positive grave. He cherished a pet aversion for the Apollo of Belvedere and for Christianity. He even went so far as to write a pamphlet about the latter, proving it to be unreasonable and untenable. Indeed he wrote a host of books, in each of which Reason brags of its own excellence. The poor Doctor was serious enough about it, and in this respect they deserve esteem. But it was just this which was the best joke of all—that he would put on so fatuously serious a mien when he could not understand what every child understands by very reason of its childhood. I called upon this reasonable Doctor in his own house once or twice, and I found beautiful women there, for Reason does not forbid sensuality. Once when I intended to call upon him his servant said: “The Doctor has just died.” It did not impress me any more strongly than if he had said: “The Doctor is gone out.”
But to return to Goslar. “The highest principle is Reason!” I said consolingly to myself as I got into bed. It did not answer the purpose, however. I had just been reading that horrible story in Varnhagen von Ense’s Deutsche Erzählungen, which I had brought with me from Clansthal, how a son, whose father intended to murder him, was warned at night by his mother’s ghost. The marvellous effectiveness of the story caused me to shiver with horror while reading. Then, too, ghost stories excite the most uncanny sensations when read on a journey, and especially at night in a town, in a house, in a room where one has never been. How many horrible things may have happened upon this very spot where I am now lying? One cannot refrain from conjecturing. Moreover, the moon shone so doubtfully into the room; all sorts of uncalled-for shadows were moving along the wall, and when I raised myself in bed to look closer, I saw——
There is nothing more weird than to come unintentionally upon one’s own face in a mirror by the light of the moon. At the same moment a lumbering sleepy clock began to strike, and, moreover, it struck so long and so slowly that after the twelfth stroke I verily believed twelve hours had gone by, and it would have to begin over again and strike twelve once more. Between the last beat and the last but one, another clock struck very rapidly with a rasping shrillness, put out of temper perhaps by the dulness of its kinswoman. When at last both iron tongues subsided and the silence of death reigned in the house, it seemed to me suddenly as if I heard something slur and drag along the passage just outside of my door like the unsteady gait of a man. At last my door was opened, and slowly the late Dr. Saul Ascher walked into my room. A cold chill passed through my bones. I trembled like a leaf, and hardly did I dare to look at the ghost. He looked just the same as ever—the same transcendental grey waistcoat, the same abstract legs, and the same mathematical face; only that the latter was a little yellower than I remembered it, and the mouth, which had always formed two angles of 22½ degrees, was tightly shut, and the circles of his eyes had a longer radius. Wavering and leaning, as had been his custom, upon a slender stick, he approached me, and in his usual lazy dialect said pleasantly, “Do not be afraid, and don’t believe me to be a ghost. It is an illusion of the senses if you imagine you see a ghost. What is a ghost? Give me a definition. Deduce the conditions for the possibility of a ghost. In what reasonable relation to your reason would such a phenomenon be! Reason, I say Reason——”
And now the ghost proceeded to analyse Reason, quoting Kant, Part 2, Division 1, Book 2, Proposition 3, “The distinction between phenomena and noumena,” constructing the problematic belief in ghosts, piling syllogism upon syllogism with the logical conclusion that there is positively no such thing as a ghost. All the while the perspiration was cold upon my back, my teeth were chattering; in my terror I nodded unqualified assent to every sentence in which the spook-doctor had proved the absurdity of my fears, and the latter was demonstrating so eagerly that in a moment of abstraction, instead of his gold watch he pulled a handful of worms out of his vest pocket, and discovering his error he replaced them with ridiculous nervous haste. “Reason is the highest——” The clock struck one, and the ghost vanished.
Heinrich Heine (1799-1856).