dreary, and chilly, and unlovely. After that frightful seven years
his nature had grown more sardonic than ever before. He had fought
and suffered beyond the capacity of ordinary men; and to him they now
all seemed like a childish breed, an undistinguishable rabble. It
is incomprehensible why he should have gone on wearing himself out
in labour for this breed even while he choked with scorn of it. He
poured himself into the task of making good the harm that he had done,
of healing the ravaged fields and patching the tattered finances, of
summoning whole industries into existence, of adding a whole province
to his kingdom and rescuing it from neglect by a magnificent system of
colonization. And all this would be incomprehensible unless one thinks
of his sense of duty as a sort of possession and of him as the tool
of a higher will. His industry was a cold and joyless passion. He was
burnt out, he was dry and withered and wicked, he loved nobody, and
nobody loved him; his royal existence was a burden, and no honourable
one, to the rest of the world. And when he needed a little animal
warmth, he was fain to share his bed with his favourite greyhound. He
kept a great many dogs, and it was his wish to be buried near them.
When the last one of these died he wept all day long. He still found
a little pleasure in embroiling his philosophers among themselves;
then he sent them all away. For whereas earlier in his life he had
only mocked at religion, now he mocked at philosophy as well; saying
that a good digestion was more important than knowledge of the essence
of things. And he had a very bad digestion, it was spoilt by the
highly spiced dishes he insisted on eating. When at last he died, at
seventy-four, after a tormenting and repulsive illness, everything, we
are told, was deathly still, but no one mourned. There was not a single
clean, whole shirt in his wardrobe, and his valet gave one of his to
clothe the corpse--which was tiny as a child’s.
One is prone to think of him as a sort of hobgoblin, an object of
hatred and detestation, leading the whole world into a quagmire, a
spiteful, sexless troll, for the destruction of whom a hundred million
men toiled to exhaustion in vain, since he was created and sent to
bring about great and inevitable events upon this earth. Then, after
the performance of them, he vanished, leaving behind him a husk like a
little child’s.
The riddle of his existence lay in the dualism which Jean Jacques
Rousseau reduced to a formula: “_Il pense en philosophe et se conduit
en roi._” That is a great antithesis, and comprises many and many a
pair of active opposites: for instance, right and might, thought and
action, freedom and destiny, reason and dæmon, bourgeois morality and
heroic necessity. Such opposites, united in one flesh and blood and
become a strife of instincts, naturally do not make for a comfortable,
logical, and harmonious existence. There is a resulting irony on
both sides, a radical scepticism, a fanatic zeal for achievement at
bottom quite nihilistic, a sense of power as melancholy as it is evil.
Frederick wrote the _Antimachiavelli_, and that was not hypocrisy,
but literature. He loved the humane spirit, reason, dry clarity of
atmosphere--loved them by contraries and out of the depth of his
being, which was essentially dæmonic, essentially a slave to the
destiny which made him its instrument. Thus he loved Voltaire, the
son of the spirit, the father of enlightenment and of all anti-heroic
civilization. He kissed the lean hand that wrote: “I hate all heroes”;
and he himself mocked his seven years’ struggle with the words: “heroic
weakness.” But he set it down in black and white that if he wanted
to visit a province with the severest punishment, he would sentence
it to be governed by writers; his enlightenment was so skin-deep that
he believed himself bullet-proof; and when he wants to explain why
he preferred the frightful strain and bloody horrors of war to the
tranquil repose of a literary life, he speaks largely of a “secret
instinct.” What he means was stronger in him than literature; it guided
his acts, conditioned his life; and it is certainly a most German
thought to think that this secret instinct, this element of the dæmonic
and super-personal in him, was: the urge of destiny, the spirit of
history.
He was a sacrifice. He felt, indeed, that he had sacrificed himself:
his youth to his father, his manhood to the State. But he erred if he
believed that a choice was open to him. He was a sacrifice. He had to
do wrong, he had to lead a life contrary to his thoughts, he had to
be not a philosopher but a king, in order that the destiny of a great
people might be fulfilled.
1914
III
AN EXPERIENCE IN THE OCCULT
AN EXPERIENCE IN THE OCCULT
Full though this world is of problems--moral, social, intellectual,
artistic--weighty problems, the treatment of which must redound to
the credit of any writer, shedding reflected lustre on his name and
reaping him the praises of a grateful public; yet I here venture to
approach you with a theme which even I myself cannot do otherwise than
regard as preposterous, and, indeed, suspect. Surprise and contempt, I
know, will be my portion from the general at my choice of it. But do
people choose their subjects, I ask? No, they write and they talk of
what they are ridden by, and nothing else; and that though the themes
a man neglects may lay claim to pre-eminent importance, and the one
which has taken his reason captive be actually mischievous. And all my
good, respectable ideas have been vitiated by personal contacts and
observations, which are at once so puerile, and yet to such a degree
unexplainable (if I may talk about degrees of unexplainableness), that
I cannot get away from them, and find myself, for the moment at least,
spoilt for the contemplation of those more unsullied, those saner,
chaster realms of thought where I could move with so much honour and
credit to myself. I say spoilt. And truly it is a sort of corruption
which breathes from the region I have in mind: that probably not
deep, yet subterraneous region, that turbid and equivocal plane of
existence, with which, in my folly, I have put myself in touch; it
lures me astray from my lawful concerns to those which I know full well
are none of mine, though they exercise upon my fancy and my brain a
pungent attraction, like the fumes of wood-alcohol (by contrast with
the bouquet from the pure wine of the spirit of civilization). Well
do I comprehend how a man may fall victim to them as to a vice, and
through that monomaniac, vain-foolish preoccupation be lost for ever to
the moral upper world.
My case is no other than this: I have fallen into the hands of the
occultists. Not precisely the spiritualists--though there were some of
them too in the gathering I lately visited. But we must distinguish.
The spiritualistic dogma is by no means obligatory, among the group
of international scholars--not such a very small group now--whose
members call themselves occultists because they are given to the
study of phenomena which at present seem to us to contradict the
natural order as we know it. The whole spirit-theory, as a method of
explaining certain puzzles, is even, by many investigators, rejected
with a gesture of stern scientific probity. And yet in fairness it
must be said that in the production of occult events these scientific
gentlemen do take advantage of the supra-normal, or at all events
anormal disposition of certain persons who do not weigh very heavy in
the intellectual scale; and that this technique (I refer, of course, to
the somnambulistic state of the so-called mediums) constantly passes
over into the transcendental and metaphysical. But metaphysics, of
course, is not spiritualism; even less is spiritualism metaphysics. The
difference in degree is so great as to become a difference in kind;
and it is surely quite comprehensible that philosophical metaphysics
should aim to keep spiritualism at arm’s length. For spiritualism--the
belief in spirits, ghosts, _revenants_, spook intelligences with whom
one gets into touch by interrogating a table and getting the most
utter banalities by way of reply--spiritualism is in fact a kind of
backstairs metaphysics, a blind credulity which is on the one hand
not up to the conception of idealistic speculation, and on the other
hand quite incapable of metaphysical orgies of emotion. A good example
of the first alternative is Schopenhauer’s masterpiece _The World as
Will and Idea_; while in Wagner’s _Tristan und Isolde_ we possess the
classic _opus metaphysicum_. And one only needs to mention these lofty
flights of intuition to feel at once the lamentable triviality of the
whole of that which calls itself spiritualism--though what it is is
not so much metaphysics as it is a Sunday afternoon diversion for the
servants’ hall.
But is human dignity a criterion of truth? Yes, in a way it is.
There is a man, Herr Krall of Elberfeld, well known for his famous
calculating horses, a man whose trade and activities hover on the
borders of the occult. I heard Herr Krall say: “If there are ghosts,
then there is every reason why a man should pray for a long life; for
there could not possibly be anything more insipid, childish, futile,
confused, and pathetic than the existence of these creatures, to judge
from their supposed manifestations.” One is reminded of the famous
utterance of the shade of Achilles on the Cimmerian shore, the time
that Odysseus held a seance there. Vain and senseless, the son of
Peleus calls the existence of the dead; and, after all, the pagan world
might so conceive the life after death, without making any mistake
about this one as truth, fact, or dogma. On the other hand, it would
go very much against the grain for a Christian to conceive another
world in which things were even paltrier, stupider, and more futile
than they are in this our earthly sphere; and when, as indeed it may
easily happen, an intelligence knocks on a table and introduces itself
to society as the spirit of Aristotle or Napoleon Bonaparte, only to
belie the statement by a hundred blunders, gaucheries, and obviously
intentional shufflings, then I think we are justified, on grounds
of taste, in the conclusion that this is not only not Aristotle or
Napoleon, it is nobody at all, but only acting as though it were;
and that any complaisance toward such goings-on is beneath all human
dignity.
Now, this would all be well and good if only there did not linger a
doubt whether dignity and good taste are absolute criteria in the field
of science, in the search for truth, in that process, in short, whereby
nature explores herself through the mind of man. Dignity there is
only in the province of pure spirit; and metaphysics, in the sense of
transcendental speculation in the theory of knowledge, belongs to that
province. But when metaphysics becomes empirical; when it condescends,
or begins to feel the obligation, or yields to the temptation, to track
out the riddle of the universe _experimentally_--and that is what
it does in occultism, which is nothing but empirical, experimental
metaphysics--then it must not count on keeping its hands clean or
its bearing stately. The only dignity it has left is the irreducible
remnant that must cleave to all honourable service in the cause of
truth; and it must make up its mind that it will have to deal with a
great deal of filth and foolishness. For mediumism and somnambulism,
the sources of occult phenomena, are a mixing of suprasensual mysteries
with the mystery of organic life; and the result is turbid. There is
no longer any talk of taste, of mental or spiritual _niveau_, or of
the beauty of rashness. For here nature takes the field; and nature
is an equivocal element: impure, obscene, spiteful, dæmonic; while
man, proud man, in his very essence opposed to her, loves to put on an
aristocratic air and find his own peculiar dignity in forgetting that
he is a child of nature just as much as he is a child of spirit. And
yet, if one were seriously, on humane grounds, to forbid metaphysics
to become experimental--that is, to practise occultism--that would be
to deny to natural research, to knowledge of nature in general, every
human value and importance, as did the Middle Ages and the Church. As
though the exact natural sciences themselves stop at the point where
an encounter with metaphysics becomes unavoidable! The fact that I
know and understand very little of the famous doctrines of Einstein
(except that, more or less, things have a fourth dimension--namely,
time) prevents me as little as it does every other intelligent layman
from seeing that in this doctrine of relativity the border-line between
mathematical physics and metaphysics has become fluid. Is it still
“physics,” or what is it, when they tell us--and they are telling us
today--that matter is ultimately and inmostly not material, it is just
one manifestation of energy, and its smallest parts, which are neither
small nor large, are, though surrounded indeed by time-spatial fields
of power, themselves timeless and spaceless?
But enough of theorizing. Let us get on to my experiences. They begin
at my acquaintance with a man about whom opinions have been of late
strongly divided, some finding him a charlatan and traitor betrayed,
others respecting him as a genuine and meritorious investigator, and
one of the initiators of a new science. He is Dr. Albert Freiherr von
Schrenck-Notzing. A practising physician, from a family of physicians,
specialist in nervous diseases, sexual pathologist, he more than
thirty years ago arrived at the study of the occult by the route of
hypnotism and somnambulism. It appears that for a time he leaned toward
spiritualism; but today he rejects it, and refers all the unexplainable
phenomena he evokes and observes to the operation of unknown but
natural forces, which will in time be recognized as such.
The appearance of his book _Phenomena of Materialization_, a few
years before the war, produced a full-grown public scandal. From the
official and learned world came a perfect hail of protests against such
a combination of credulity, confused thinking, and fraud. The public,
in so far as it came to hear about it at all, held its sides with
laughter; and really the book was a severe trial of our seriousness,
as to both text and illustrations--photographs which struck one
as at once silly and grotesque. Evidence was not lacking that Dr.
Schrenck-Notzing had been bamboozled--and this was probably true in
more than one case. Most unfortunately, the mediumistic faculty,
however genuine, is no guarantee of good character. On the contrary, it
even seems to have a perfect flair for mystification. Anyhow, it looked
for years as though Schrenck-Notzing had irretrievably damaged his good
name as a scholar.
The years passed. The war came and with it undreamed-of chances and
changes. When the second volume of _Phenomena of Materialization_
came out, it was in an entirely altered atmosphere. Not that the
second volume was less crazy than the first, or that the official
world of science, the press, or the public welcomed it more cordially
than before. No, there was no stinting of scorn and contumely. But
both seemed to lack conviction, to be less fortified than before by
comfortable self-assurance. There was a mild resignation, a fatalistic
_laissez-faire_ in the air. People had borne so much they never dreamed
of bearing, such outrageous experiences had been their lot, that
even their honest indignation lacked the right ring; it betrayed an
unmistakable tendency to compound.
In politics there is always a right and a left wing. So in the
scientific world there is, with reference to the occult, a strongly
conservative and a radical-revolutionist position, together with all
sorts of shadings and gradings between, on the one hand, obstinate
denial of all rationally unexplainable but persistently reported
manifestations like telepathy, true-dreaming, and second sight, and,
on the other, a fanatical and uncritical credulity, based, this last,
less on a solid reverence for the mystery than an inhuman prejudice
against all reason and science. And the intransigent conservative
position has a good deal on its side--as, after all, it has in politics
too. For between the right and the left lies an inclined plane where
it is only too easy to slip; to concede belief in one single case
of the occult is to reach your little finger to a devil who almost
infallibly ends by taking the whole hand and therewith the whole man.
_Principiis obsta!_ There is beginning to prevail in Germany today a
dangerous liberalism in the camp of orthodox science--in Germany, which
might hitherto have been regarded as the stronghold of conservatism
in this respect. Abroad--in England, in France--there had always been
a more yielding temper, and more often displayed. (I will not speak
of America, where an unnecessary amount of humbug seems to have got
mixed up with occult studies.) Perhaps we Germans were influenced by
the fact that Schrenck-Notzing’s book was translated into English;
that the Society for Psychical Research two years ago summoned to
London his principal medium, a person named Eva C., and published a
very serious report of the sittings with her; that French savants like
Richet, Flammarion, Gustave Geley, Dr. Bourbon, and others supported
this report in its boldness, tested its experiments, confirmed
its results. All in all, a slight shakiness is evident, a certain
demoralization of our conservative and sceptical front. There are
traitors, and the traitors are secret before they become public. There
are university professors, and not only philosophers and psychologists,
but natural scientists, physicists, physiologists, and physicians,
who take advantage of the bad street-lighting in Munich to steal like
conspirators to the evening sittings of Herr von Schrenck-Notzing to
see what it does not profit them to see. For they must know, and they
do, that the only way of remaining intact is to shut their eyes and
not see. They are lost, or as good as lost, it is all up with their
scepticism--or, rather, their scepticism _begins_--when they see. There
are instances. A much-sought-after Munich oculist openly confessed
that after what he had seen at Schrenck-Notzing’s he had grown “very
cautious in his scepticism.” A charming phrase--the most equivocal
phrases are usually the charmingest. For I aver that that can be no
true scepticism which is not sceptical of itself; and a sceptic, in
my humble view, is not merely one who believes the prescribed things
and averts his eyes from everything that might imperil his virtue.
Rather your true sceptic will, in ordinary language, find all sorts of
things possible, and he will not, for the sake of convention, deny the
evidence of his sound senses.
As for me, I have always stood, theoretically, rather far left in this
business of the occult; holding, in the sense of the thoroughgoing
scepticism I just defined, that all sorts of things are quite possible;
but not boasting any personal or practical experience in suprasensual
realms. I have rested in a theoretical benevolence. I have felt, and
may have even casually expressed, a desire to attend a sitting, but
nothing came of it, and that nothing came of it was probably my own
doing.
And now? At the present moment? Just lately? You must let me tell
the tale as it fell out. I had a visitor, an artist man from a comic
paper, with an order to make a caricature of me. Very good. He drew me
a crooked nose, and one thing led up to another. God knows how we came
to speak of Herr von Schrenck-Notzing. Had I heard that he was working
with a new medium, my guest asked, as he went on cracking jokes with
his pencil. It was a youth, hardly a man yet, named Willy S., a dentist
by profession and a devil of a fellow in the psychical line. Schrenck
got perfectly crazy manifestations through him. He had discovered him,
brought him to Munich, found him lodgings and a job, besides paying a
deposit to ensure Willy’s exclusive services. He had been working with
him a year now, and had him so well trained, psychically speaking, that
Willy, unlike most mediums, could endure an almost constant change
of audience, with the rarest disappointments. That was important for
Schrenck-Notzing for the sake of the propaganda.--“Might one get to see
a sitting?” I asked. The artist man thought it quite possible. He knew
Schrenck-Notzing, and he would like to go to one himself. Leave it to
him, he would arrange an invitation.
So it came about. There followed an appointment by telephone; and one
winter evening at eight o’clock, toward Christmas-time, I found myself
on the tram with my caricaturist, bound for the seance. Both of us were
in high spirits, exhilarated, curious, in a mood between bluster and
funk, something like the feelings of a young man going for the first
time to a girl.
The palatial residence of Baron von Schrenck-Notzing is near the
Karolinenplatz, in an exclusive quarter. We arrived, and a servant led
us through a marble vestibule and up some steps to an antechamber.
As we took off our things we were greeted by our host, with cool,
aristocratic politeness, and ushered into a good-sized library, where
the other participants in the coming seance were already gathered.
Only one of them was known to me. I addressed him, expressing my
surprise at finding him here. This was Professor G., the zoologist,
an enthusiastic sportsman, ski-runner, yachtsman, and Alpinist, a
beardless, young-looking man, though certainly in the middle forties;
distinctly out-of-doorish and nature-loving--I should never have taxed
him with any hankerings after the occult. Introductions followed. I
was delighted to meet Emanuel Reicher, celebrated actor and hyphenated
American, just then living in Germany. Then there was the medium’s
housekeeper and foster-mother, a widow in middle life, named Frau P.
Likewise a Polish artist, blond and clean-shaven, full of friendly talk
in a gruff, hearty voice. Then this and that member of the Schwabing
intelligentsia. But the intellectual laity were outnumbered, on this
occasion at least, by the medical men and natural scientists. There
was another professor of zoology, a typical _Gelehrter_, mild and shy;
a young doctor from Switzerland; a still youthful German physician,
assistant at a Munich hospital, who had brought along an apparatus to
measure blood-pressure; a jolly, fair-haired lady specialist in nerve
massage.... Many of those present were novices, Reicher for one. He
seemed to have no affiliations with the occult, but merely with the
social circle represented.
The medium, Willy S., kept rather in the background. The Baron
introduced me to him among others. “Here,” he said, “is our star
performer.” He repeated the phrase more than once, obviously with the
idea of stimulating the young man’s sense of importance, but also by
way of prepossessing me in favour of this precious and delicately
organic instrument of his experiments. In my case, his concern was
quite unnecessary. My sympathies were boundless, and I took pains to
let our artist feel that I was no hostile onlooker, present with the
sole idea of pouncing and unmasking, with a bellow of triumph. I was
a sceptic on the positive side, who would rejoice at his success--I
wished him to know that. Deception? Between deception and reality
there were many degrees, and at some point they were one. Perhaps
there was a sort of natural deception, which might be just as good to
talk to as reality! I had come hither, not humbugging myself in the
least, to see what there was to be seen, just that, no more and no
less. I exchanged a few words with Willy S. and tried to get an idea
of his personality. I found a dark-haired youth of some eighteen or
nineteen, not unattractive, certainly with nothing striking about him.
His origins were plainly simple; his speech a South-German-Austrian
dialect, and his manner decent and friendly, with no signs of wanting
to curry favour by over-politeness. His answers to my matter-of-fact
questions were monosyllabic; and he seemed, quite excusably, in a sort
of stage-fright, a state of suppressed excitement united with the
shyness natural to his youth.
The young clinician summoned Master Willy to have his blood-pressure
measured, and I turned away and followed our host’s invitation to have
a look round in the laboratory adjoining. It was a large room, filled
with a confusion of photographic apparatus and arrangements for a
magnesium flash-light. There were tables and chairs upon which stood
or lay a variety of objects: a music-box, a little table-bell with a
handle, a typewriter, several white felt rings, and so on--objects
uninteresting in themselves, which yet would be employed by young
Willy to accomplish strange matters. We shall come back to them. There
was a sort of cage made of fine wire in which they had confined the
youth during a severely scientific and critical sitting. It had not
prevented him from doing what they could not explain. Lastly there was
the so-called “black cabinet,” about which so much had been said and
so much more whispered. Some of Willy’s predecessors had been sorely
in need of it. I looked within. There was nothing special about it.
Indifferent lumber stood behind the ceiling-high curtain which shut
off one corner of the room from the rest. “We shall not require the
cabinet,” said Dr. von Schrenck-Notzing. Willy did not need it. He was
strong. He sat right out in the room in his operations. So much the
better. My positive scepticism had swallowed the cabinet too--but if
Willy was strong, why, so much the better. We returned to the library.
Beyond it lay a study with a writing-table, where Willy made his toilet
for the sitting.