The Ghost-Seer; or, Apparitionist

The Ghost-Seer; or the Apparitionist is an unfinished novel by Friedrich Schiller. It first appeared in several instalments from 1787 to 1789 in the journal Thalia, later appearing as a three-volume book in its own right. Although it remained unfinished, its audiences were the largest for any of Schiller's work during his lifetime. The readership was attracted by its elements typical of its time, such as necromancy, spiritualism and conspiracies. Structurally and stylistically it is not a single story, but tells of a Jesuit secret society trying to convert a Protestant German prince to Catholicism and bring him to the throne back home in order to bolster its own power base. Writing of the Prince's fate, Schiller shows him as the key to the conflict between passion and morality, passion and duty. The work's passages on religious and historical philosophy show Schiller's Enlightenment ideals, with his critique of religion and society to the fore, though a deeper exploration of Immanuel Kant was to follow later. Due to the novel's slow formation and the author's antipathy to it, it was not planned from start to finish and its style and structure is not uniform throughout, ranging from rhetorical prose, to theatrical prose, to dialogues reminiscent of Don Carlos, to the popular elements of Gothic fiction.