9. Thunderbolts - Page 2

fanciful, or verbal representation. We all of us know now
that lightning is a mere flash of electric light and heat; that it has
no solid existence or core of any sort; in short, that it is dynamical
rather than material, a state or movement rather than a body or thing.
To be sure, local newspapers still talk with much show of learning about
'the electric fluid' which did such remarkable damage last week upon the
slated steeple of Peddlington Torpida Church; but the well-crammed
schoolboy of the present day has long since learned that the electric
fluid is an exploded fallacy, and that the lightning which pulled the
ten slates off the steeple in question was nothing more in its real
nature than a very big immaterial spark. However, the word thunderbolt
has survived to us from the days when people still believed that the
thing which did the damage during a thunderstorm was really and truly a
gigantic white-hot bolt or arrow; and, as there is a natural tendency in
human nature to fit an existence to every word, people even now continue
to imagine that there must be actually something or other somewhere
called a thunderbolt. They don't figure this thing to themselves as
being identical with the lightning; on the contrary, they seem to regard
it as something infinitely rarer, more terrible, and more mystic; but
they firmly hold that thunderbolts do exist in real life, and even
sometimes assert that they themselves have positively seen them.

But, if seeing is believing, it is equally true, as all who have looked
into the phenomena of spiritualism and 'psychical research' (modern
English for ghost-hunting) know too well, that believing is seeing also.
The origin of the faith in thunderbolts must be looked for (like the
origin of the faith in ghosts and 'psychical phenomena') far back in the
history of our race. The noble savage, at that early period when wild in
woods he ran, naturally noticed the existence of thunder and lightning,
because thunder and lightning are things that forcibly obtrude
themselves upon the attention of the observer, however little he may by
nature be scientifically inclined. Indeed, the noble savage, sleeping
naked on the bare ground, in tropical countries where thunder occurs
almost every night on an average, was sure to be pretty often awaked
from his peaceful slumbers by the torrents of rain that habitually
accompany thunderstorms in the happy realms of everlasting dog-days.
Primitive man was thereupon compelled to do a little philosophising on
his own account as to the cause and origin of the rumbling and flashing
which he saw so constantly around him. Naturally enough, he concluded
that the sound must be the voice of somebody; and that the fiery shaft,
whose effects he sometimes noted upon