non-coincidental apparitions of the living who do not happen to be in any particular crisis. In these instances it cannot be demonstrated that telepathy has not been at work, as when a person is seen at a place which he thought of visiting, but did not visit. F. W. Myers even upheld a theory of psychorhagy, holding that the spirits of some persons have a way of manifesting themselves at a distance by a psychic invasion. This involves, as he remarked, paleolithic psychology, and the old savage doctrine of animism, rather than telepathy (see Myers, Human Personality). Of belief in coincidental hallucinations or wraiths among savages, records are scanty; the belief, however, is found among Maoris and Fuegians (see Lang, Making of Religions). The perception of apparitions of distant but actual scenes and occurrences is usually called clairvoyance (q.v.). The belief is also familiar under the name of second sight (see Second Sight), a term of Scots usage, though the belief in it, and the facts if accepted, are of world-wide diffusion. The apparitions may either represent actual persons and places, or may be symbolical, taking the form of phantasmic lights, coffins, skeletons, shrouds and so forth. Again, the appearances may either represent things, persons and occurrences of the past (see Retrocognition), or of the present (clairvoyance), or of the future (see Premonition). When the apparitions produce themselves in given rooms, houses or localities, and are exhibited to various persons at various times, the locality is popularly said to be haunted by spirits, that is, of the dead, on the animistic hypothesis (see Hauntings). Like the other alleged facts, these are of world-wide diffusion, or the belief in them is world-wide, and peculiar to no race, age, or period of culture. A haunted place is a centre of permanent possibilities of hallucinations, or is believed to be so. A distinct species of hauntings are those in which unexplained sounds and movements of objects, apparently untouched, occur. The German term Poltergeist (q.v.) has been given to the supposed cause of these occurrences where the cause is not ascertained to be sportive imposture. In the performances of modern spiritualists the Poltergeist appears, as it were, to be domesticated, and to come at the call of the medium.
An intermittent kind of ominous haunting attached, not to places, but to families, is that of the banshee (Celtic) or family death omen, such as the white bird of the Oxenhams, the Airlie drummer, the spectral rider of Clan Gilzean, the rappings of the Woodde family. These apparitions, with fairies and djinns (the Arab form of fairy), haunt the borderland between folk-lore and psychical research.
So far we have been concerned with spontaneous apparitions, or with the belief in them. Among induced apparitions may be reckoned the materialized forms of spiritual séances, which have a material basis of veils, false moustaches, wigs and the corpus vile of the medium. It is also possible that mere expectancy and suggestion induce hallucinatory perceptions among the members of the circle. That apparitions of a sort can be induced by hypnotic and posthypnotic suggestion is certain enough (see Hypnotism). Savages produce apparitions in similar ways by suggestion, accompanied by dances, fumigations, darkness, fasting, drugs, and whatever can affect the imaginations of the onlookers (see Magic). Both in savage and civilized life, some persons can provoke themselves into beholding apparitions usually fantastic, but occasionally coincidental, by sedulously staring into any clear deep water, a fragment of rock crystal, a piece of polished basalt or obsidian, a mirror, a ring, a sword blade, or a glass of sherry (see Crystal Gazing). Indeed any object, a wall, the palm of the hand, the shoulder-blade-bone of a sheep, may be, and has been used to this end (see Divination).
Almost all known apparitions may accommodate themselves to one or other of the categories given, whether they be pathological, coincidental or spontaneous, induced, permanently localized, or sporadic.
See generally, Spiritualism and Psychical Research. (A. L.)
APPARITOR, or Apparator (Latin for a servant of a public official, from apparere, to attend in public), an attendant who executed the orders of a Roman magistrate; hence a beadle in a university, a pursuivant or herald; particularly, in English ecclesiastical courts, the official who serves the processes of the court and causes defendants to appear by summons.
APPEAL, in law. In the old English common law the term “appeal” was used to describe a process peculiar to English criminal procedure. It was a right of prosecution possessed as a personal privilege by a party individually aggrieved by a felony, a privilege of which the crown could not directly or indirectly deprive him, since he could use it alike when the prisoner was tried and acquitted, and when he was convicted and pardoned. It was chiefly known in practice as the privilege of the nearest relation of a murdered person. When in 1729 (after Colonel Oglethorpe’s inquiry and report on the London prisons) Banbridge and other gaolers were indicted for their treatment of prisoners, but were acquitted for deficiency of evidence, appeals for murder were freely brought by relatives of deceased prisoners. In the case of Slaughterford (1708) the accused was charged with murdering a woman whom he had seduced; the evidence was very imperfect, and he was acquitted on indictment. But public indignation being aroused by the atrocities alleged to have been perpetrated, an appeal was brought, and on conviction he was hanged, as his execution was a privilege belonging to the prosecutor, of which the crown could not deprive him by a pardon. In 1818 an appeal was ingeniously met by an offer of battle, since if the appellee were an able-bodied man he had the choice between combat or a jury (see Wager). This neutralizing of one obsolete and barbarous process by another called the attention of the legislature to the subject, and appeal in criminal cases, along with trial by battle, was abolished in 1819. The history of this appeal is fully dealt with in Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, 1898.
In its usual modern sense the term appeal is applied to the proceeding by which the decision of a court of justice is brought for review before another tribunal of higher authority. In Roman jurisprudence it was used in this and in other significations; it was sometimes equivalent to prosecution, or the calling up of an accused person before a tribunal where the accuser appealed to the protection of the magistrate against injustice or oppression. The derivation from appellare (“call”) suggests that its earliest meaning was an urgent outcry or prayer against injustice. During the republic the magistrate was generally supreme within his sphere, and those who felt themselves outraged by injustice threw themselves on popular protection by provocatio, instead of looking to redress from a higher official authority. Under the empire different grades of jurisdiction were established, and the ultimate remedy was an appeal to the emperor; thus Paul, when brought before Festus, appealed unto Caesar. Such appeals were, however, not heard by the emperor in person but by a supreme judge representing him. In the Corpus Juris the appeal to the emperor is called indiscriminately appellatio and provocatio. A considerable portion of the 49th book of the Pandects is devoted to appeals; but little of the practical operation of the system is to be deduced from the propositions there brought together.
During the middle ages full scope was afforded for appeals from the lower to the higher authorities in the church. In matters ecclesiastical, including those matrimonial, testamentary and other departments, which the church ever tried to bring within the operation of the canon law, there were various grades of appeal, ending with the pope. The claims of the church to engross appeals in matters trenching on the temporal rights of princes led to continual conflicts between church and state, terminated in England at the reformation by the suppression in 1534 of appeals to Rome, which had previously been discouraged by legislation of Edward III. and Richard II.
In temporal, as distinct from spiritual matters, it became customary for ambitious sovereigns to encourage appeals from the courts of the crown vassals to themselves as represented by the supreme judges, and Charlemagne usually enjoys the credit of having set the example of this system of centralization by establishing missi dominici. It is not improbable that his claim was suggested or justified by the practice of the Roman empire, to the sovereignty whereof he claimed to be successor.
