Hillingford

An iconoclast who questions much of religious orthodoxy, and most everything which holds to the belief that only physical reality and the scientifically verifiable is worth accepting. 

Remember the words of Hamlet, "And therefore as a stranger give it welcome. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." 

Horatio, a model of rationality, has a difficult time accepting the whole idea of apparitions. Ghosts are not the sort of beings his "philosophy" easily takes into account. We know that Horatio is, like Hamlet, a student at the University of Wittenberg, a notable outpost of Protestant humanism. The philosophy he studies there is probably classical -a mixture of ethics, logic, and natural science. The emphasis on the everyday physical phenomena very much excludes speculation about talking ghosts or anything of a more ethereal nature. However, by simply excluding other possibilities humanity is denied both the ability and the right to question, explore, and consider other possibilities and, possibly, to come to what might be the actual truth underlying the creation and functioning of the universe; indeed, in being closed minded about things unseen, allowing their learned bias and own fears to shut their eyes, humans for all time may rob themselves even of the possibility in realizing the truth about the existence of the universe and that of the human species.

It has been said that 'there are none so blind as those who will not see'. This is even more so for those who through arrogance or fear of ridicule deny the possibility that they themselves may be blind; so locked into a belief in only physical processes, they have thus denied themselves the opportunity at even a chance to discover if they are really as 'sighted' as they think.