FROM PNEUMATICS TO PNEUMATOLOGY

I have argued for the importance of the relationship between Priestley's pneumatic chemistry and Bentham's legal reform. This relationship provided a knowledge which reformers could use; a description of their social function; and an account of the strategies by which reform could be achieved. This knowledge included the understanding of matter and its powers developed in the laboratories of the pneumatic chemists. Such understanding involved a new practice of rather specific policy recommendations for the better management of the social economy and the human body. The atmosphere was taken to be a major site at which principles of health and disease were produced. Under Priestley's aegis, this practice was also used to revise the picture of body. The distinction between mind and body was erased, by changing the definition of the attributes of matter. Since the mind now became just as accessible to material analysis, it also became just as accessible to management. So medical managers, using their knowledge of medical meteorology, could also be moral managers, using their knowledge of the powers of the mind. When medical management turned its attention to the discipline of minds, it produced a new story about the way interests and passions should be governed for the cause of social welfare. A revised account of pneumatology was therefore a necessary companion of the science of pneumatics. Priestley's pneumatics and Bentham's panopticism were both versions of this model of mind and body. As Foucault suggested, Bentham's Panopticon was an exercise in the economy of powers, "a marvellous machine" where the effects of power could be deployed in the setting of a laboratory: "it could be used as a machine to carry out experiments on men." Bentham explicitly considered the claim that the Panopticon made "machines under the similitude of men." It became an experimental machine for experiments upon machines. "O chemists! " Bentham exclaimed, "much have your crucibles shown us of dead matter—but our industry-house is a crucible for men!" If the Panopticon

[35] Bentham to Priestley, November [?] 1774, and Priestley to Bentham, 16 December 1774, Correspondence of Bentham 1;209, 210-216, 225-226. For work on eudiometry, see Bentham to Samuel Bentham, 9 November 1779 and December 1779, ibid. 2:314-315, 344. For Bentham on jurisprudence as a science of experiment, see Harrison, Bentham, 133, citing Bentham MSS, University College London, 70A.22.

was an exercise in political anatomy and the mechanics of power, then Priestley's technology of airs provided a similar repertoire of strategies for the investigation of powers under a regime of observation, classification, and experiment. His pneumatics investigated those powers on which life depended, and modeled an economy in which these powers were distributed. The move from pneumatics to pneumatology was the key tactic in these philosophies of mind and body.^[36]

The preface to Bentham's Fragment provides evidence of his use of Priestley's pneumatics as the mark of progress. In 1767 Priestley contrasted three forms of historiography. The first was "civil history," which had the appeal of human interest but showed the horrors of human depravity: "a man . . . cannot help being shocked with a view of the vices and miseries of mankind." The second was "natural history," which displayed wise natural order but lacked concern with "human sentiments," a necessary condition for the association of mind. Priestley argued that the history of natural philosophy was the best way of capturing human interests, through the processes of association, for the cause of progress: no history "can exhibit instances of so fine a rise and improvement in things, as we see in the progress of the human mind in philosophical investigations." Hartley's principles worked to good effect here: in Priestley's histories of electricity, optics, and pneumatics, the sympathetic reader could recapitulate the course of actual experimental advance. This was a way of showing what was wrong with Blackstone. Bentham identified the Oxford lawyer as an enemy of progress because he stood opposed to the true principles learned from the history of natural philosophy. "Correspondent to discovery and improvement in the natural world, is reformation in the moral." Blackstone resisted such a reformation. Yet the successes of the pneumatic chemists could and should be extended to the moral realm:

If it be of importance and of use to us to know the principles of the element we breathe, surely it is not of much less importance nor of much less use to comprehend the principles, and endeavour at the improvement of those laws, by which alone we breathe it in security.^[37]

The axiom of utility, the analogy between natural improvement and moral reformation, and the aim of the "security" of respiration were all

[36] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 202-203; Bowring, 4:63-64.

[37] Joseph Priestley, History and Present State of Electricity, 3d ed. (London, 1775), ii-iv; Bentham, Fragment on Government, 93-94. For Priestley's historiography, see J. G. McEvoy, "Electricity, Knowledge and the Nature of Progress in Priestley's Thought," British Journal for the History of Science 12 (1979): 1-30; J. J. Hoecker, "Joseph Priestley as an Historian and the Idea of Progress," Price-Priestley Newsletter 3 (1979): 29-40.

aspects of the meteorological program which both Bentham and Priestley pursued. In the 1770s Priestley and his colleagues aimed to show how a benevolent aerial economy functioned and to mark the processes that governed this economy. Human beings were an integral part of this system, and their welfare was a consequence of its actions. Priestley's isolation of nitrous air in 1772 and dephlogisticated air in 1775 was part of this strategy. He described a series of processes that vitiated common air, by phlogisticating it. Such processes included "the amazing consumption of air by fires of all kinds, volcanos, &c." together with respiration and putrefaction. The air left above calces or remaining after animal respiration was revealed to be highly phlogisticated by a test comparison with nitrous air. "It is not peculiar to nitrous air to be a test of the fitness of the air for respiration. Any other process by which air is diminished and made noxious answers to the same purpose but the application of them is not so easy or elegant and the effect is not so soon perceived. In fact, it is phlogiston that is the test." Bad air supported neither respiration nor combustion and did not diminish in volume when shaken with nitrous air. This gave the test its key place in his pneumatics. Because Priestley applied an axiom of benevolence, he argued that the aerial economy must act to preserve the virtue of airs. So there must be processes that restored vitiated air and rendered it virtuous and respirable. "It becomes a great object of philosophical inquiry, to ascertain what change is made in the constitution of the air by flame, and to discover what provision there is in nature for remedying the injury which the atmosphere receives by this means." Evidence of restorative processes was produced in the long series of pneumatic trials Priestley made at Bowood between 1774 and 1779 using the "noble apparatus" Shelburne provided him. These processes included atmospheric purification by shaking over water and the beneficient action of green vegetable matter on air under the influence of light. Thus his isolation of dephlogisticated air and his production of evidence for photosynthesis were easily fitted into the scheme of a well-judged economy that balanced vitiation with restoration.^[38]

[38] Joseph Priestley, "Observations on Different Kinds of Air," Philosophical Transactions 62 (1772): 147-252 at 162; Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air and Other Branches of Natural Philosophy, 3 vols. (Birmingham, 1790), 1:359. For Priestley's account of the restoration of the atmosphere, see Priestley, Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air, 2d ed. (London, 1776), 2:91-103; J. G. McEvoy, "Joseph Priestley, Aerial Philosopher: Metaphysics and Methodology in Priestley's Chemical Thought, 1772-1781," Ambix 25 (1978): 1-55, 93-116, 153-175, and 26 (1979): 16-38, at 25:96-101, 158-164. For the importance of the nitrous air test, see A. J. Ihde, "Priestley and Lavoisier," in Joseph Priestley: Scientist, Theologian and Metaphysician, ed. L. Kieft and B. R. Willeford (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1980), 62-91; for the "aerial economy," see H. Laboucheix, "Chemistry, Materialism and Theology in the Work of Joseph Priestley," Price-Priestley Newsletter 1 (1977): 31-48.

These researches were closely linked with human welfare through the scheme of medical meteorology—restoration of respirable air and its variation in quality governed the physiological fate of the human and the social frame. The standard of the atmosphere was a mark of its fitness for human existence. This had initially suggested to Priestley that while atmospheric air was no doubt a compound of variously virtuous sections, nevertheless it must now be the best possible air for human respiration. "I had no idea of procuring air purer than the best common air." Yet his work of 1774-1775 did yield such an air, dephlogisticated air. It was only after eighteen months that Priestley managed to position his new "luxury" air as the ultimate in his scale of virtue, and thereby developed a set of techniques which the medical meteorologists, such as Ingenhousz and Fontana, soon baptized "eudiometry," a strategy for matching the virtues of airs to their physiological benevolence. Priestley planned a collection of airs from different sites. In 1777 he asked his friend, the Birmingham manufacturer Matthew Boulton, for "air as it is actually breathed by the different manufacturers in this kingdom." He also sampled the air left in rooms at Shelburne's house after gatherings there. "Eudiometric tours" were common. Beddoes and Price also worked on the "insalubrity" of varying airs. Fontana and his colleagues in Tuscany and Milan used eudiometry for hospital reform and proposed marsh drainage to remove the evils of "bad air." Ingenhousz was an early advocate of seaside holidays for consumptives, identifying ocean air as peculiarly virtuous for the human frame. Priestley himself wrote that the new "pure air" might be "peculiarly salutary to the lungs in certain morbid cases," and that "pure dephlogisticated air might be very useful as a medicine," even if too powerful in common measure: "a moralist may say that the air which nature has provided for us is as good as we deserve."^[39]

[39] Priestley, Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air, 2d ed. (London, 1776), 2:40-49, 100-103; Priestley to Matthew Boulton, [?] 1777, in Schofield, Scientific Autobiography of Priestley, 161-162; on eudiometry, see ibid., 164-166, 174-175, and Joseph Priestley (with Richard Price), "On the Noxious Quality of the Effluvia of Putrid Marshes," Philosophical Transactions 64 (1774): 90-98; Felice Fontana, "Of the Airs Extracted from Different Kinds of Waters," Philosophical Transactions 69 (1779): 432-453; Jan Ingenhousz, "Observations sur la construction et l’usage de l'eudiomètre de M. Fontana," Journal de physique 26 (1785): 339-359; and P. Knoefel, "Famine and Fever in Tuscany: Eighteenth-Century Italian Concern with the Environment," Physis 21 (1979): 7-35 at 20-35; H. Reed, "Jan Ingenhousz: Plant Physiologist," Chronica Botanica 11 (1949): 285-396.

Bentham began work on eudiometry when he contacted Priestley in 1774-1775. He told Priestley that "in using nitrous air as a test of the comparative purity of the atmosphere in different places, it is of importance to be certain of its being utterly free from all previous admixture with Common air." To use such a test in this way was to declare allegiance to the principles of pneumatics. Throughout the 1770s Bentham was concerned with the development of this program: his "Athanor" was one contribution to it, anticipating eudiometers made by Cavendish and Fontana in the 1780s. He talked to Fontana about publications on the improvement of the virtue of airs and better ways of making artificial airs. He also became involved in Priestley's disputes with chemists such as Scheele, who denied that vegetation purified airs.^[40] Natural philosophical understanding of the atmospheric powers was to become ever more closely linked with civil policy. John Pringle was a typical practitioner in this field. His treatises in the 1750s on hospital and jail fevers based themselves on the pneumatics of restored and corrupted airs. As Christopher Lawrence has suggested, Pringle and his reformist colleagues, including Priestley, were instrumental in the construction of a specifically aerial analysis of epidemic fevers, locating their aetiology in noxious components of the atmosphere detectable by pneumatic chemistry. Priestley defended Pringle's doctrine against Scot-fish critics in 1773, while successive volumes of Experiments and Observations on Air during the 1770s carried testimonies by physicians on the medicinal uses of airs and the aerial causation of fever. When Pringle presented Priestley with the Royal Society's Copley Medal in 1773, he placed Priestley's pneumatics in the context of the aerial system of fevers, and also linked it with the model of a benevolent economy which Priestley had begun to map: "from these discoveries, we are assured that . . . every individual plant is serviceable to mankind, if not always distinguished by some private virtue, yet making a part of the whole which cleanses and purifies our atmosphere." Storms and tempests would shake "the waters and the air together to bury in the deep those putrid and pestilential effluvia which the vegetables upon the face of the Earth have been insufficient to consume."^[41] The pneumatic system pro-

[40] Bentham to Priestley, November [?] 1774, and Priestley to Bentham, 16 December 1774, Correspondence of Bentham 1:210-216, 225-226. For work on eudiometry, see Bentham to Samuel Bentham, 9 November 1779 and December 1779, ibid. 2:314-315, 344. For Priestley's dispute with Scheele, see Priestley to Kirwan, August 1780, in Schofield, Scientific Autobiography of Priestley, 182-186.

[41] For Pringle's work on pneumatic medicine, see D. W. Singer, "Sir John Pringle and His Circle," Annals of Science 6 (1948-1950): 127-180, 229-261 at 150-153 and 229-247 for work with Priestley; for the Copley address of 1773, see the reprint in Douglas McKie, "Joseph Priestley and the Copley Medal," Ambix 9 (1961): 1-22. For Priestley's medical interests, see Christopher Lawrence, "Priestley in Tahiti: The Medical Interests of a Dissenting Chemist," in Science, Medicine and Dissent:Joseph Priestley, ed. R. G. W. Anderson and C. Lawrence (London: Wellcome Trust, 1987), 1-10; for Priestley's defense of Pringle, see Priestley, "On the Noxious Quality of the Effluvia of Putrid Marshes," 91; compare Priestley, Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air, 2d ed. (London, 1775), vol. 1, appendix, 288-324.

posed by Priestley and Pringle gave an account of the circulation of virtuous power in the world. It was deeply influential on the work of radical physicians in the 1790s, including both Darwin and Beddoes. It also provided an image of the perfectly managed economy in human society, where medical administration and civil hygiene, the "burial of pestilential effluvia," were equally important.^[42]

Hygiene became a key principle of Bentham's vision of civil order. In his mature survey of that order, the Constitutional Code, the "Health Minister" was to discharge a range of eudiometric functions. What he called the "exemplificational-antimalarial function" involved the control of dangerous exhalations; other roles included registration of changes in the air and its relation to health. These were, perhaps, Hippocratic commonplaces: their management and the knowledge that sustained them were not. The utilitarian state was to be compared with the strategy of medical police fostered by the German cameralists. Where authorities such as Justi, Sonnenfels, and Frank argued during the period 1750-1780 for a centralized state bureaucracy invigilating over social and moral conduct in order to control welfare and population growth, Priestley and Bentham proffered an account of philosophical necessity and reasoned self-interest in civil society; the role of the state was as guarantor of that society, not as its despot. The progress of society was safely left in the hands of expert philosophers and medical managers whose legitimacy was derived from their understanding of the natural powers, not from their subservience to the civil powers.^[43] Pneumatics

[42] For pneumatic medicine in the 1790s, see Stansfield, Beddoes, chap. 7; Ludmilla Jordanova, "Earth Science and Environmental Medicine: The Synthesis of the Late Enlightenment, " in Images of the Earth, ed. L. J. Jordanova and Roy Porter (Chalfont St. Giles: British Society for the History of Science, 1978), 119-146. For Beddoes, see Thomas Beddoes and James Watt, Considerations on the Medicinal Use of Factitious Airs (Bristol, 1794), vol. 1; for Darwin, see Erasmus Darwin, Temple of Nature, 21n and Zoonomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life (London, 1796), 1:115.

[43] For the work of the Health Minister, see Bowring, 9:439-445. For medical police and cameralism, see George Rosen, From Medical Police to Social Medicine: Essays on the History of Health Care (New York: Science History Publications, 1974), 120-141, 189-190; Michel Foucault, "The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century," in Gordon, Power-Knowledge, 166-182; Marc Raeff, The Well-ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change through Law in the Germanies and Russia, 1600-1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 119-135. For Bentham and medical reform, see Benjamin Spector, "Jeremy Bentham: His Influence upon Medical Thought and Legislation," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 37 (1963): 25-42.

was an important example of this understanding. The Benthamite reforms of the 1830s testify eloquently to this fact. Edwin Chadwick was Bentham's amanuensis at the time when his master was composing the Constitutional Code. Chadwick's great 1842 Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population was a homage to the connections between management and medical meteorology which Bentham had discussed: "bad ventilation or overcrowding, and the consequences on the moral habits" were demonstrably based on "an original cause we have high scientific authority for stating to be easily and economically controllable." As Roger Cooter has suggested, Bentham's loyal disciples among reforming physicians made the atmosphere the key site of medical management: Cooter cites the work of Southwood Smith, a convert from Calvinism to Priestley's unitarianism and the personal physician to Bentham. Southwood Smith's anticontagionism refused to speak of disease-causing miasmas and refused to define the aerial principle that might be pathogenic. In his Treatise on Fever (1830), he argued that disease was spread via air because "poverty in her hut . . . striving with all her might to keep out the pure air and to increase the heat, imitates Nature but too successfully." As a result, "penury and ignorance can create a mortal plague." Cooter argues that at the hands of the Benthamite anticontagionists, the air became the proper concern of expert managers and the way to moralize society. The human and the social body were engrossed by pneumatics.^[44]

Bentham's campaign was to go further: the legislator could wisely extend the accomplishments of the medical manager. In the 1770s he argued that "the art of legislation is but the art of healing practised upon a large scale. It is the common endeavour of both to relieve men from

[44] Edwin Chadwick, Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (1842), ed. M. W. Flinn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1965), 29-43, 167; Thomas Southwood Smith, Treatise on Fever (London, 1830), 324; Roger Cooter, "Anticontagionism: History's Medical Record," in The Problem of Medical Knowledge: Examining the Social Construction of Medicine, ed. P. Wright and A. Treacher (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1982), 87-108. Compare Southwood Smith, Treatise, 349: "Vegetable and animal matter, during the process of putrefaction, give off a principle or give origin to a new compound, which, when applied to the human body, produces the phenomena constituting fever." For Southwood Smith's career, see Mrs. C. L. Lewes, Dr. Southwood Smith: A Retrospect (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1898); F. N. L. Poynter, "Thomas Southwood Smith—the Man," Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 55 (1962): 381-392.

the miseries of life. But the physician relieves them one by one: the legislator by millions at a time." This was just the sense of Southwood Smith's parliamentary evidence in 1840: the Government must relieve the poor of "the sources of poison and disease," for otherwise "the effect is the same as if twenty or thirty thousand of them were annually taken out of their wretched homes and put to death." The accumulation of numbers and the collective origin of social pathology were essential principles of reformist medical management. Bentham insisted that "this is not a fanciful analogy": it was to be taken as a literal account of the managers' work.^[45] Once again, the comparison of the body politic and the body natural was banal, but by using a specific account of how medical management worked, Bentham gave his political reform a peculiar slant. The attention to detail and the production of "docile bodies" were characteristics of this anatomical strategy. The "Code" and the "Punishments" were respectively described by Bentham as the "principles" and the "materia medica" of his political therapeutics. But, most importantly, the references to medical management pointed to the significance of a science of mind, a pneumatology. The reformer stood in urgent need of a science that would locate the "springs of action." This was the principle of utility. Bentham called it a "moral thermometer" in the hands of the expert jurist and natural philosopher. In his texts on Legislation, first drafted in the late 1770s, Bentham argued, with Priestley, that the progress of philosophy was opposed by prejudices, which enlightened understanding of the springs of mental and physical action would remove. The name for the branch of philosophy that investigated and extirpated such obstacles was "mental pathology." "By pathology, I mean the study and the knowledge of the sensations, affections, passions, and of their effects upon happiness." Thus it was a founding axiom of Bentham's reform that the link between aerial physiology, natural philosophy, and materialist epistemology be made more than a figure of speech: "Medicine, commonly so called . . . has for its basis the observations of the axioms of pathology, commonly so-called. Morals is the medicine of the soul. The science of legislation is the practical part of this medicine." Hence, "mental pathology" should provide the axioms for the science of legislation: "God forbid that any disease in the constitution of a state should be without its remedy."^[46]

[45] Mack, Bentham, 264, citing Bentham MSS, University College London, 27.13; Lewes, Southwood Smith, 104.

[46] For "docile bodies," see Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 135-141. For Bentham on the medical comparison, see Bowring, 1:304-305, 367 and 2:204; Harrison, Bentham, 141, citing Bentham MSS, University College London, 32.6; Mack, Bentham, 264-266. For "mental pathology, " see Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, vii; for the cure of disease in the state, see Bentham, Fragment on Government, 224.

Mental pathology was a foundation of reform. Bentham's successive drafts for his Table of the Springs of Action examined the relationship between this psychology, the philosophy of mind, and the reformer's work. This "Table" was supposed to be the analogue of an "anatomical table," which showed "the seats of physical enjoyment and sufferance and the source of physical action." Bentham proposed the same for psychology. Equipped with such a table and the utility calculus, the wise expert would show that certain actions were in citizens' interests, and the legislator would make these actions depend on these interests. In a manuscript of the 1770s, Bentham figured this relationship in heavenly terms:

Between us two might the philosopher and the lawyer say, there is a great gulph. I have endeavoured to throw a bridge over this gulph: so that on it, as on Jacob's Ladder, if not Angels, man, however, may continually henceforth be seen ascending and descending.... Should I be found so happy as to succeed in bringing these celestial artizans into a more close acquaintance, what a rich and serviceable manufacture may not be hoped for from their united labours.^[47]

The Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, completed by 1780, was Bentham's first sustained analysis of the link between these powers and his juridical and political plans. The study of mental pathology identified the sources of pleasure and pain, sensibility and will. So this reconstruction of pneumatology indicated two functions for the study of mind: understanding and control. Such an inquiry would provide a knowledge of mental powers which the reformer needed. For Bentham, "intellectual powers" were always compared to the appropriate "physical powers," and this was an identity guaranteed by the medical function of the philosophical reformer. The "science of law " was merely a branch of the superior "logic of the will." It would also locate the sources of resistance to reform derived from corruption and interest. The interests that opposed reform were just as susceptible to analysis and management as those on which reform depended.^[48]

[47] Bentham, A Table of the Stings of Action, in Goldworth, Deontology, 71; Mack, Bentham, 130, citing Bentham MSS, University College London, 27; Harrison, Bentham, 270-271. For a discussion of the Table, see Paul McReynolds, "The Motivational Psychology of Jeremy Bentham, part 1," Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences 4 (1968): 230-244.

[48] For the "logic of the will," see Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, xiii. Compare Parekh, Bentham's Political Thought, 146-156, which prints Bentham MSS, University College London, 69.70-75.

The doctrine of association, developed in Hartley and edited by Priestley, satisfied these demands. The mind was materialized since matter could think. Mental principles could be translated, or, as Bentham put it, "paraphrased" as their physical correlates. Speech about the pernicious "fictions" in which the law dealt must be turned into talk of material entities. Punishments must be spelled out in physical terms, just as pain and pleasure must be read as corporeal principles. Because it used fictions, the existing condition of the legal establishment was marked by all the evils of the condition of natural philosophy before the recent advances of the pneumatic chemists. Common law was a "fictitious composition which has no known person for its author, no known assemblage of words for its substance... like that fancied aether, which, in default of sensible matter, fills up the measure of the universe."^[49] Bentham's assault on this form of legal fiction was part of a strategy that modeled itself on the reforms of pneumatic chemists and in particular on the language they used. In 1774, as we have shown, he began corresponding with Priestley on the proper nomenclature to be used in medical and chemical philosophy. "Much more I could offer you on the same subject... other articles on Nomenclature." Bentham condemned Scheele for his "metaphysical" inquiry as to whether "fire be a real or fictitious entity." At the same period, he identified the close connection between the forms of chemical nomenclature and the flourishing of corrupt fantasy. "In speaking of an pneumatic (or say immaterial or spiritual ) object, no name has ever been employed, that had not first been employed as the name of some material (or say corporeal ) one. Lamentable have been the confusion and darkness produced by taking the names of fictions for the names of real entities." Priestley agreed: his pneumatics showed the proper understanding of spirits and the disasters visited upon true philosophy by assuming that material entities were really immaterial substances. Utilitarianism expelled fictions from legal discourse: pneumatic chemistry expelled them from philosophy. This great expulsion was accompanied by a revision of the principle that individuated human subjects. The belief in an immortal soul was simply the understandable consequence of the wrong state of mind: "a human soul would be a ghost, " according to Bentham, if it were separable and

[49] For Bentham on "paraphrasis" and fictions, see Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, xiii; for an analysis of these techniques, see Ogden, Bentham's Theory of Fictions, cxiii-cxxi, on Bowring, 3:177, 241; Harrison, Bentham, 53-74. For Bentham's comments on the connection between the disease of fiction and the immaterial principles of mind, see Bowring, 8:174; Parekh, Bentham's Political Thought, 48; Ogden Bentham's Theory of Fictions, 18.

immaterial. "At this time of day, custom scarcely does, fashion certainly does not, command us to believe in ghosts."^[50]