opinion of their own on the “Piper-Hodgson” case to the text of the
_Proceedings_. The case, at the same time, is far from being one of
the most striking; it should rather be classed, were it not for the
importance of the sitters concerned, among the minor successes of
the Piper series. Hodgson, according to the invariable custom of the
spirits, is, first of all, bent on making himself recognized; and the
inevitable, tedious string of trifling reminiscences begins twenty
times over again and fills page after page. As usual in such instances,
the recollections common to both the questioner and the spirit who is
supposed to be replying are brought out in their most circumstantial,
their most insignificant and also their most private details with
astonishing eagerness, precision and vivacity. And observe that, for all
these details, which he discloses with such extraordinary facility, the
dead man answering seeks by preference, one would say, the most hidden
and forgotten treasures of the living listener’s memory. He spares
him nothing; he harps on everything with childish satisfaction and
apprehensive solicitude, not so much to persuade others as to prove to
himself that he still exists. And the obstinacy of this poor invisible
being, in striving to manifest himself through the hitherto uncrannied
doors that separate us from our eternal destinies, is at once ridiculous
and tragic:
“Do you remember, William, when we were in the country at So-and-so’s,
that game we played with the children; do you remember my saying
such-and-such a thing when I was in that room where there was
such-and-such a chair or table?”
“Why, yes, Hodgson, I do remember now.”
“A good test, that?”
“First-rate, Hodgson!”
And so on, indefinitely. Sometimes, there is a more significant incident
that seems to surpass the mere transmission of subliminal thought. They
are talking, for instance, of a frustrated marriage which was always
surrounded with great mystery, even to Hodgson’s most intimate friends:
“Do you remember a lady-doctor in New York, a member of our society?”
“No, but what about her?”
“Her husband’s name was Blair ... I think.”
“Do you mean Dr. Blair Thaw?”
“Oh, yes. Ask Mrs. Thaw if I did not at a dinner-party mention something
about the lady. I may have done so.”
James writes to Mrs. Thaw, who declares that, as a matter of fact,
fifteen years before, Hodgson had said to her that he had just proposed
to a girl and been refused. Mrs. Thaw and Dr. Newbold were the only
people in the world who knew the particulars.
But to come to the further sittings. Among other points discussed is
the financial position of the American branch of the S.P.R., a position
which, at the death of the secretary, or rather factotum, Hodgson, was
anything but brilliant. And behold the somewhat strange spectacle of
different members of the society debating its affairs with their defunct
secretary. Shall they dissolve? Shall they amalgamate? Shall they send
the materials collected, most of which are Hodgson’s, to England? They
consult the dead man; he replies, gives good advice, seems fully aware
of all the complications, all the difficulties. One day, in Hodgson’s
lifetime, when the society was found to be short of funds, an anonymous
donor had sent the sum necessary to relieve it from embarrassment.
Hodgson alive did not know who the donor was; Hodgson dead picks him out
among those present, addresses him by name and thanks him publicly. On
another occasion, Hodgson, like all the spirits, complains of the extreme
difficulty which he finds in conveying his thought through the alien
organism of the medium:
“I find now difficulties such as a blind man would experience in trying
to find his hat,” he says.
But, when, after so much idle chatter, William James at last puts the
essential questions that burn our lips—“Hodgson, what have you to tell us
about the other life?”—the dead man becomes shifty and does nothing but
seek evasions:
“It is not a vague fantasy but a reality,” he replies.
“But,” Mrs. William James insists, “do you live as we do, as men do?”
“What does she say?” asks the spirit, pretending not to understand.
“Do you live as men do?” repeats William James.
“Do you wear clothing and live in houses?” adds his wife.
“Oh yes, houses, but not clothing. No, that is absurd. Just wait a
moment, I am going to get out.”
“You will come back again?”
“Yes.”
“He has got to go out and get his breath,” remarks another spirit, named
Rector, suddenly intervening.
It has not been waste of time, perhaps, to reproduce the general features
of one of these sittings which may be regarded as typical. I will add,
in order to give an idea of the farthest point which it is possible to
attain, the following instance of an experiment made by Sir Oliver Lodge
and related by him. He handed Mrs. Piper, in her “trance,” a gold watch
which had just been sent him by one of his uncles and which belonged
to that uncle’s twin brother, who had died twenty years before. When
the watch was in her possession, Mrs. Piper, or rather Phinuit, one
of her familiar spirits, began to relate a host of details concerning
the childhood of this twin brother, facts dating back for more than
sixty-six years and of course unknown to Sir Oliver Lodge. Soon after,
the surviving uncle, who lived in another town, wrote and confirmed the
accuracy of most of these details, which he had quite forgotten and of
which he was only now reminded by the medium’s revelations; while those
which he could not recollect at all were subsequently declared to be in
accordance with fact by a third uncle, an old sea-captain, who lived in
Cornwall and who had not the least notion why such strange questions were
put to him.
I quote this instance not because it has any exceptional or decisive
value, but simply, I repeat, by way of an example; for, like the case
connected with Mrs. Thaw, mentioned above, it marks pretty accurately the
extreme points to which people have up to now, thanks to spirit agency,
penetrated the mysteries of the unknown. It is well to add that cases
in which the supposed limits of the most far-reaching telepathy are so
manifestly exceeded are fairly uncommon.
7
Now what are we to think of all this? Must we, with Myers, Newbold,
Hyslop, Hodgson and many others, who studied this problem at length,
conclude in favour of the incontestable agency of forces and
intelligences returning from the farther bank of the great river which
it was deemed that none might cross. Must we acknowledge with them that
there are cases ever more numerous which make it impossible for us to
hesitate any longer between the telepathic theory and the spiritualistic
theory? I do not think so. I have no prejudices—what were the use of
having any, in these mysteries?—no reluctance to admit the survival
and the intervention of the dead; but it is wise and necessary, before
leaving the terrestrial plane, to exhaust all the suppositions, all the
explanations there to be discovered. We have to make our choice between
two manifestations of the unknown, two miracles, if you prefer, whereof
one is situated in the world which we inhabit and the other in a region
which, rightly or wrongly, we believe to be separated from us by nameless
spaces which no human being, alive or dead, has crossed to this day. It
is natural, therefore, that we should stay in our own world, as long as
it gives us a foothold, as long as we are not pitilessly expelled from
it by a series of irresistible and irrefutable facts issuing from the
adjoining abyss. The survival of a spirit is no more improbable than the
prodigious faculties which we are obliged to attribute to the mediums
if we deny them to the dead; but the existence of the medium, contrary
to that of the spirit, is unquestionable; and therefore it is for the
spirit, or for those who make use of its name, first to prove that it
exists.
Do the extraordinary phenomena of which we know—transmission of
thought from one subconscious mind to another, perception of events
at a distance, subliminal clairvoyance—occur when the dead are not in
evidence, when the experiments are being made exclusively between living
persons? This cannot be honestly contested. Certainly no one has ever
obtained among living people any series of communications or revelations
similar to those of the great spiritualistic mediums, Mrs. Piper, Mrs.
Thompson and Stainton Moses, nor anything that can compare with them
for continuity or lucidity. But, though the quality of the phenomena
will not bear comparison, it cannot be denied that their inner nature is
identical. Our logical inference is that the real cause lies not in the
source of inspiration, but in the personal value, the sensitiveness, the
power of the medium. For the rest, Mr. J. G. Piddington, who devoted an
exceedingly detailed study to Mrs. Thompson, plainly perceived in her,
when she was not “entranced” and when there were no spirits whatever in
question, manifestations inferior, it is true, but absolutely analogous
to those involving the dead.[7] These mediums are pleased, in all good
faith and probably unconsciously, to give to their subliminal faculties,
to their secondary personalities, or to accept, on their behalf, names
which were borne by beings who have crossed to the farther side of the
mystery: this is a matter of vocabulary or nomenclature which neither
lessens nor increases the intrinsic significance of the facts. Well, in
examining these facts, however strange and really unparalleled some of
them may be, I never find one which proceeds frankly from this world
or which comes indisputably from the other. They are, if you wish,
phenomenal border incidents; but it cannot be said that the border has
been violated. In the story of Sir Oliver Lodge’s watch, for instance,
which is one of the most characteristic and one which carries us farther
than most, we must attribute to the medium faculties that have ceased to
be human. She must have put herself in touch, whether by perception of
events at a distance, or by transmission of thought from one subconscious
mind to another, or again by subliminal clairvoyance, with the two
surviving brothers of the deceased owner of the watch; and, in the
past subconsciousness of those two brothers, distant from each other,
she had to rediscover a host of circumstances which they themselves had
forgotten and which lay hidden beneath the heaped-up dust and darkness of
six-and-sixty years. It is certain that a phenomenon of this kind passes
the bounds of the imagination and that we should refuse to credit it if,
first of all, the experiment had not been controlled and certified by a
man of the standing of Sir Oliver Lodge, and if, moreover, it did not
form one of a group of equally significant facts which clearly show that
we are not here concerned with an absolutely unique miracle or with an
unhoped-for and unprecedented concourse of coincidences. It is simply
a matter of distant perception, subliminal clairvoyance and telepathy
raised to the highest power; and these three manifestations of the
unexplored depths of man are to-day recognized and classified by science,
which is not saying that they are explained: that is another question.
When, in connection with electricity, we use such terms as positive,
negative, induction, potential and resistance, we are also applying
conventional words to facts and phenomena of whose inward essence we are
utterly ignorant; and we must needs be content with these, pending any
better. There is, I insist, between these extraordinary manifestations
and those given to us by a medium who is not speaking in the name of the
dead, but a difference of the greater and the lesser, a difference of
extent or degree and in no wise a difference in kind.
8
For the proof to be more decisive, it would be necessary that no one,
neither the medium nor the witnesses, should ever have known of the
existence of him whose past is revealed by the dead man, in other words,
that every living link should be eliminated. I do not believe that this
has actually occurred up to the present, nor even that it is possible;
in any case, it would be very difficult to control such an experiment.
Be this as it may, Dr. Hodgson, who devoted part of his life to the
quest of specific phenomena wherein the boundaries of mediumistic power
should be plainly overstepped, believes that he found them in certain
cases, of which—as the others were of very much the same nature—I will
merely mention one of the most striking.[8] In a course of excellent
sittings with Mrs. Piper the medium, he communicated with various dead
friends who reminded him of a large number of common memories. The
medium, the spirits and he himself seemed in a wonderfully accommodating
mood; and the revelations were plentiful, exact and easy. In this
extremely favourable atmosphere, he was placed in communication with the
soul of one of his best friends, who had died a year before and whom
he simply calls “A.” This A, whom he had known more intimately than
most of the spirits with whom he had communicated previously, behaved
quite differently and, while establishing his identity beyond dispute,
vouchsafed only incoherent replies. Now A “had been troubled much, for
years before his death, by headaches and occasionally mental exhaustion,
though not amounting to positive mental disturbance.”
The same phenomenon appears to recur whenever similar troubles have come
before death, as in cases of suicide.
“If the telepathic explanation is held to be the only one,” says Dr.
Hodgson (I give the gist of his observations), “if it is claimed that all
the communications of these discarnate minds are only suggestions from
my subconscious self, it is unintelligible that, after having obtained
satisfactory results from others whom I had known far less intimately
than A and with whom I had consequently far fewer recollections in
common, I should get from him, in the same sittings, nothing but
incoherencies. I am thus driven to believe that my subliminal self is
not the only thing in evidence, that it is in the presence of a real,
living personality, whose mental state is the same as it was at the
hour of death, a personality which remains independent of my subliminal
consciousness and absolutely unaffected by it, which is deaf to its
suggestions and draws from its own resources the revelations which it
makes.”
The argument is not without value, but its full force would be obtained
only if it were certain that none of those present knew of A’s madness;
otherwise it can be contended that, the notion of madness having
penetrated the subconscious intelligence of one of them, it worked upon
it and gave to the replies induced a form in keeping with the state of
mind presupposed in the dead man.
9
Of a truth, by extending the possibilities of the medium to these
extremes, we furnish ourselves with explanations which forestall nearly
everything, bar every road and all but deny to the spirits any power
of manifesting themselves in the manner which they appear to have
chosen. But why do they choose that manner? Why do they thus restrict
themselves? Why do they jealously hug the narrow strip of territory which
memory occupies on the confines of both worlds and from which none but
indecisive or questionable evidence can reach us? Are there then no other
outlets, no other horizons? Why do they tarry around us, stagnant in
their little pasts, when, in their freedom from the flesh, they ought to
be able to wander at ease over the virgin stretches of space and time?
Do they not yet know that the sign which will prove to us that they
survive is to be found not with us, but with them, on the other side of
the grave? Why do they come back with empty hands and empty words? Is
that what one finds when one is steeped in infinity? Beyond our last hour
is it all bare and shapeless and dim? If it be so, let them tell us;
and the evidence of the darkness will at least possess a grandeur that
is all too absent from these cross-examining methods. Of what use is it
to die, if all life’s trivialities continue? Is it really worth while
to have passed through the terrifying gorges which open on the eternal
fields, in order to remember that we had a great-uncle called Peter and
that our Cousin Paul was afflicted with varicose veins and a gastric
complaint? At that rate, I should choose for those whom I love the august
and frozen solitudes of the everlasting nothing. Though it be difficult
for them, as they complain, to make themselves understood through a
strange and sleep-bound organism, they tell us enough categorical details
about the past to show that they could disclose similar details, if not
about the future, which they perhaps do not yet know, at least about
the lesser mysteries which surround us on every side and which our
body alone prevents us from approaching. There are a thousand things,
large or small, alike unknown to us, which we must perceive when feeble
eyes no longer arrest our vision. It is in those regions from which a
shadow separates us and not in foolish tittle-tattle of the past that
they would at last find the clear and genuine proof which they seem to
seek with such enthusiasm. Without demanding a great miracle, one would
nevertheless think that we had the right to expect from a mind which
nothing now enthrals some other discourse than that which it avoided when
it was still subject to matter.
IV
OUR ULTIMATE CONSCIOUSNESS
1
Survival with our present consciousness is nearly as impossible and
incomprehensible as total annihilation. Moreover, even if it were
admissible, it could not be dreadful. This is certain that, when the body
disappears, all physical sufferings will disappear at the same time;
for we cannot imagine a spirit suffering in a body which it no longer
possesses. With them will vanish simultaneously all that we call mental
or moral sufferings, seeing that all of them, if we examine them well,
spring from the ties and habits of our senses. Our spirit feels the
reaction of the sufferings of our body or of the bodies that surround
it; it cannot suffer in itself or through itself. Slighted affection,
shattered love, disappointments, failures, despair, betrayal, personal
humiliations, as well as the sorrows and the loss of those whom it
loves, acquire their potent sting only by passing through the body which
it animates. Outside its own pain, which is the pain of not knowing,
the spirit, once delivered from its flesh, could suffer only in the
recollection of the flesh. It is possible that it still grieves over the
troubles of those whom it has left behind on earth. But to its eyes,
since it no longer reckons the days, these troubles will seem so brief
that it will not grasp their duration; and, knowing what they are and
knowing whither they lead, it will not behold their severity.
The spirit is insensible to all that is not happiness. It is made only
for infinite joy, which is the joy of knowing and understanding. It can
grieve only at perceiving its own limits; but to perceive those limits,
when there are no more bonds to space and time, is already to transcend
them.
2
It becomes a question of knowing whether that spirit, sheltered from all
sorrow, will remain itself, will perceive and recognize itself in the
bosom of infinity and up to what point it is important that it should
recognize itself. This brings us to the problems of survival without
consciousness, or survival with a consciousness different from that of
to-day.
Survival without consciousness seems at first sight the more probable.
From the point of view of the good or ill awaiting us on the other side
of the grave, it amounts to annihilation. It is lawful, therefore, for
those who prefer the easiest solution and that most consistent with the
present state of human thought to limit their anxiety to that. They have
nothing to dread; for, on close inspection, every fear, if any remained,
should deck itself with hopes. The body disintegrates and can no longer
suffer; the mind, separated from the source of pleasure and pain, is
extinguished, scattered and lost in a boundless darkness; and what comes
is the great peace so often prayed for, the sleep without measure,
without dreams and without awakening.
But this is only a solution that fosters indolence. If we press those who
speak of survival without consciousness, we perceive that they mean only
their present consciousness, for man conceives no other; and we have just
seen that it is almost impossible for that manner of consciousness to
persist in infinity.
Unless, indeed, they would deny every sort of consciousness, even that
cosmic consciousness into which their own will fall. But this were to
solve very quickly and very blindly, with a stroke of the sword in the
night, the greatest and most mysterious question that can arise in a
man’s brain.
3
It is evident that, in the depths of our thought limited on every
side, we shall never be able to form the least idea of an infinite
consciousness. There is even an essential antinomy between the words
consciousness and infinity. To speak of consciousness is to mean the
most definite thing conceivable in the finite; consciousness, properly
speaking, is the finite self-concentrated in order to discover and feel
its closest limits, to the end that it may enjoy them as closely as
possible. On the other hand, it is impossible for us to separate the idea
of intelligence from the idea of consciousness. Any intelligence that
does not seem capable of transforming itself into consciousness becomes
for us a mysterious phenomenon to which we give names more mysterious
still, lest we should have to admit that we understand nothing of it at
all. Now, on this little earth of ours, which is but a dot in space, we
see expended in every scale of life, as for instance, in the wonderful
combinations and organisms of the insect world, a mass of intelligence
so vast that our human intelligence cannot even dream of assessing it.
Everything that exists—and man first of all—is incessantly drawing upon
that inexhaustible reserve. We are therefore irresistibly driven to
ask ourselves if that cosmic intelligence is not the emanation of an
infinite consciousness, or if it must not, sooner or later, elaborate
one. And this sets us tossing between two irreducible impossibilities.
What is most probable is that here again we are judging everything from
the lowlands of our anthropomorphism. At the summit of our infinitesimal
life, we see only intelligence and consciousness, the extreme point of
thought; and from this we infer that, at the summits of all lives, there
could be naught but intelligence and consciousness, whereas these perhaps
occupy only an inferior place in the hierarchy of spiritual or other
possibilities.
4
Survival absolutely denuded of consciousness would, therefore, be
possible only if we deny the existence of a cosmic consciousness.
When once we admit this consciousness, under whatsoever form, we are
bound to share in it; and, up to a certain point, the question is
indistinguishable from that of the continuance of a more or less modified
consciousness. There is, for the moment, no hope of solving it; but we
are free to grope in its darkness, which is not perhaps equally dense at
all points.
Here begins the open sea. Here begins the splendid adventure, the only
one abreast with human curiosity, the only one that soars as high as its
highest longing. Let us accustom ourselves to regard death as a form of
life which we do not yet understand; let us learn to look upon it with
the same eye that looks upon birth; and soon our mind will be accompanied
to the steps of the tomb with the same glad expectation that greets a
birth.