A good many good judges find the world more out of joint, and moving with
a more threatening rattling, than at any previous time since the French
Revolution, and think that this is largely because the machine has lost
too much of that regulation it used to get from the religions. Much of the
regulation came from an interest in things wider than those directly
revealed by sense.
Possibly a revival of such an interest may be promised by the recent
indications of a range of our forces, both physical and psychic, far wider
than previous experience has indicated. This leads us to invite attention
to some unusual psychic phenomena evinced by persons of exceptional
sensibilities not yet as well understood, or even as carefully
investigated, as perhaps they deserve to be. The physical phenomena are
outside of our present purpose.
There are hundreds of well authenticated reports of super-usual visions.
The vast majority of them, however, were experienced when the percipients
were in bed, but believed themselves awake. But almost everybody has often
believed himself awake in bed, when he was only dreaming. Hence the
probability is overwhelming that most of these super-usual experiences
were had in dreams.
But it is certain that not all were, at least in dreams as ordinarily
understood; but there seems to be a waking dream state. Foster's visions
virtually all came while he was awake, and they were generally at once
described by him as if he were describing a landscape or a play. At times
he very closely identified himself with some personality of his visions,
and acted out the personality, just as Mrs. Piper has habitually done. The
following is an approximate instance, quoted by Bartlett (_The Salem
Seer_, p. 51 f.):
Says a writer in the New York _World_, Dec. 27, 1885:
... While we were talking one night, Foster and I, there came a
knock at the door. Bartlett arose and opened it, disclosing as he
did so two young men plainly dressed, of marked provincial
aspect.... I saw at once that they were clients, and arose to go.
Foster restrained me.
"Sit down," he said. "I'll try and get rid of them, for I'm not in
the humor to be disturbed...."
Foster hinted that he had no particular inclination to gratify
them then and there, but they protested that they had come some
distance, and, with a characteristically good-natured smile, he
gave in....
Then follows an account of a fairly good séance--taps on the
marble table, reading pellets, describing persons, etc., until I
thought Foster was tired of the interview and was feigning sleep
to end it. All of a sudden he sprang to his feet with such an
expression of horror and consternation as an actor playing Macbeth
would have given a good deal to imitate. His eyes glared, his
breast heaved, his hands clenched....
"Why did you come here?" cried Foster, in a wail that seemed to
come from the bottom of his soul. "Why do you come here to torment
me with such a sight? Oh, God! It's horrible! It's horrible!... It
is your father I see!... He died fearfully! He died fearfully! He
was in Texas--on a horse--with cattle. He was alone. It is the
prairies! Alone! The horse fell! He was under it! His thigh was
broken--horribly broken! The horse ran away and left him! He lay
there stunned! Then he came to his senses! Oh! his thigh was
dreadful! Such agony! My God! Such agony!"
Foster fairly screamed at this. The younger of the men ... broke
into violent sobs. His companion wept, too, and the pair of them
clasped hands. Bartlett looked on concerned. As for me, I was
astounded.
"He was four days dying--four days dying--of starvation and
thirst," Foster went on, as if deciphering some terrible
hieroglyphs written on the air. "His thigh swelled to the size of
his body. Clouds of flies settled on him--flies and vermin--and he
chewed his own arm and drank his own blood. He died mad. And my
God! he crawled three miles in those four days! Man! Man! that's
how your father died!"
So saying, with a great sob, Foster dropped into his chair, his
cheeks purple, and tears running down them in rivers. The younger
man ... burst into a wild cry of grief and sank upon the neck of
his friend. He, too, was sobbing as if his own heart would break.
Bartlett stood over Foster wiping his forehead with a
handkerchief....
"It's true," said the younger man's friend; "his father was a
stock-raiser in Texas, and after he had been missing from his
drove for over a week, they found him dead and swollen with his
leg broken. They tracked him a good distance from where he must
have fallen. But nobody ever heard till now how he died." ...
Now it is hardly to be supposed that the young visitor could ever have had
this scene in his mind as vividly as Foster had. In that case where and
how did Foster get the vividness and emotion? How do we get them in
dreams? He dreamed while he was awake.
As Bartlett quotes this, and as it declares him to have been present, he
of course attests it by quoting it. So in each of Bartlett's quoted cases,
the original witness is the reporter in the newspaper, and Bartlett, who
was present (he was Foster's traveling companion and business agent) thus
confirms it. We know Mr. Bartlett personally, and have thorough confidence
in his sanity and sincerity. We have also been at the pains to learn that
he commands the confidence and respect of his fellow townsmen in Tolland,
Connecticut, where he is passing a green old age. Moreover, he does not
interpret these phenomena by "spiritism."
We also had a sitting with Foster, in which he undoubtedly showed abundant
telepathy, and satisfied us that he was fundamentally honest, though not
always discriminating between his involuntary impressions, and his natural
impulses to help out their coherence and interest.
* * * * *
Those who explain these things by denying their existence, were at least
excusable thirty, or even twenty, years ago, but since the carefully
sifted and authenticated and recorded evidence of recent years, especially
that gathered by the Society for Psychical Research, the makers of such
explanations simply put themselves in the category of those who, in
Schopenhauer's day, denied the telopsis which is now quite generally
recognized. He said their attitude should not be called skeptical, but
merely ignorant. This brings to mind an excellent very practical friend
who read the first number of this REVIEW, and praised it, but said: "Don't
fool any more with Psychical Research and Simplified Spelling." We
refrained from saying that we had not known that he had ever studied
either, and we would not say it here if we were not confident that his
aversion from the subject will prevent his reading this.
To return to the manifestations: here are some other cases where Foster
identified himself with a personality of his vision. (Bartlett, _op.
cit._, 93.)
From Sacramento _Record_, December 8, 1873:
Foster at one time seized A.'s hand, explaining, "God bless you,
my dear boy, my son. I am thankful I at last may speak to you. I
want you to know I am your father, who loved you in life and loves
you still. I am near to you; a thin veil alone separates us.
Good-by. I am your father, Abijah A----"
"Good heavens!" exclaimed A----, "that was my father's name, his
tone, his manner, his action."
"And," said Foster, "it was a good influence; he was a man of
large veneration."
The above indicates what we will provisionally call Possession. But it is
not possession to the extent of complete expulsion of the original
consciousness, as in the trances of Home, Moses, and Mrs. Piper.
And which is the following? (Bartlett, _op. cit._, 103):
[Letter to editor, written Nov. 30, 1874]
New York _Daily Graphic_: ... He told me he saw the spirit of an
old woman close to me, describing most perfectly my grandmother,
and repeating: "Resodeda, Resodeda is here; she kisses her
grandson." Arising from his chair, Foster embraced and kissed me
in the same peculiar way as my grandmother did when alive.
But here the Possession seems complete (Bartlett, _op. cit._, 140). From
the Melbourne _Daily Age_:
Mr. Foster ... in answer to the question, What he died of?
suddenly interrupted, "Stay, this spirit will enter and possess
me," and instantaneously his whole body was seized with quivering
convulsions, the eyes were introverted, the face swelled, and the
mouth and hands were spasmodically agitated. Another change, and
there sat before me the counterpart of the figure of my departed
friend, stricken down with complete paralysis, just as he was on
his death-bed. The transformation was so life-like, if I may use
the expression, that I fancied I could detect the very features
and physiognomical changes that passed across the visage of my
dying friend. The kind of paralysis was exactly represented, with
the palsied hand extended to me to shake, as in the case of the
original. Mr. Foster recovered himself when I touched it, and he
said in reply to one of my companions that he had completely lost
his own identity during the fit, and felt like waves of water
flowing all over his body, from the crown downwards.
Now for some tentative explanation of these rather unusual proceedings. It
is generally known that a hypnotized person will imagine things and do
things willed by the hypnotizer, that the sensibility of persons to
hypnotism varies, and that persons frequently hypnotized become
increasingly susceptible to the influence.
Now what is ordinarily called thought transference has all these symptoms,
and the combined indications seem to be that persons who readily
experience thought-transference are specially susceptible to hypnotic
influence, and get the transferred thought from almost anybody, just as
the recognized hypnotic subject gets it from his hypnotizer; and that
persons of excessive sensibility, like Foster, Home, Mrs. Holland, Mrs.
Piper and mediums generally--the genuine ones,--simply get their
impressions hypnotically from their sitters.
But this explanation (?) by no means covers the whole situation. In the
first place, it does not cover the vividness and the emotional content
often displayed by the sensitive. The sitter is very seldom conscious of
anything approaching it. It comes nearer to, in fact almost seems
identical with, the frequent vividness and intensity of dreams. But where
do dreams come from, whether in sleep, or in a waking "dream state" like
that of Foster and many other sensitives? They don't come from any
assignable "sitter." This present scribe dreams architecture and
bric-a-brac finer than any he ever saw, or than any ever made. Yet he is
no architect, or artist of any kind. Where does it all come from?
Dreams, moreover, are filled with memories of forgotten things. Where do
they come from? Dreams, too, are by no means devoid of truths not
previously known to the dreamer, or, it would sometimes seem, to anybody
else. Where do they come from?
Du Prel and his school say they come from a "subliminal self," and Myers
picks up the term and spreads it through Anglo-Saxondom. But those queer
dreams frequently include persons who oppose the self--argue with it, and
even down it, sometimes very much for its information, regeneration and
increased stability. That does not seem like a house divided against
itself; such an one, we have on very high authority, is apt to fall.
James, cornered by his studies in Psychical Research, was inclined to
posit a "cosmic reservoir" of all thoughts and feelings that ever existed,
and of potentialities of all the thoughts and feelings that are ever going
to exist; and under various designations, this cosmic reservoir or,--it
seems a better metaphor--the cosmic soul filling it, and dribbling into
our little souls,--is a guess of virtually all the philosophers from James
back to Plato, and farther still--into the mists.
Moreover this guess is powerfully backed up by another guess: men's
speculations have been reaching back for the beginning of mind, until they
recognize that a consistent doctrine of evolution finds no beginning, and
demands mind as a constituent of the star-dust, and, when it really comes
down to the scratch, is unable to imagine matter unassociated with mind.
This is admirably expressed by James (Psychology I, 140):
If evolution is to work smoothly, consciousness in some shape must
have been present at the very origin of things. Accordingly we
find that the more clear-sighted evolutionary philosophers are
beginning to posit it there. Each atom of the nebula, they
suppose, must have had an aboriginal atom of consciousness linked
with it; and, just as the material atoms have formed bodies and
brains by massing themselves together, so the mental atoms, by an
analogous process of aggregation, have fused into those larger
consciousnesses which we know in ourselves and suppose to exist in
our fellow-animals.
That mind is not limited to this connection with matter, we see proved _a
posteriori_ every day by the appearance from _some_ source, it may be only
from the memories of survivors, of minds whose accompanying matter is long
since dissipated.
Moreover, in life, the matter is changing constantly and
entirely--"renewed once in seven years." Yet not only does the "plan," the
"idea," of the material man remain the same, but his mind grows for forty,
sixty, sometimes eighty years, while the body begins to go down hill at
twenty-eight.
Moreover, we never see the sum of matter in the universe increasing, and
we do see the sum of mind increasing every time two old thoughts coalesce
into a new one, or even every time matter assumes a new form before a
perceiving intelligence, not to speak of every time Mr. Bryan or Mr.
Roosevelt opens his mouth. We cite these last as the extreme examples of
increase--in quantity. We see another sort of increase every time Lord
Bryce takes up his pen--the mental treasures of the world are added
to--the contents of the cosmic reservoir worthily increased--the cosmic
soul greater and more significant than before.
Parts of it farther and farther removed in time and space seem to be
manifesting themselves through the sensitives every day: so the evidence
is increasing that none of it has ever been extinguished. The evidence
that any part has been, is merely the evidence that it has stopped flowing
through each man when he dies. But there are pretty strong indications
that it has welled up occasionally through another man, and yet with the
original individuality apparently even stronger than it was in the first
man--strong enough to make an alien body--Foster's, in the instances
quoted, look and act like the original twin body.
Yet while the cosmic soul idea seems very illuminating, and even
stimulating, as far as it goes, it soon lands us in the swamp of paradox
surrounding all our knowledge. How reconcile it with our
individuality--the individuality as dear as life itself--virtually
identical with life itself? Well, we can't reconcile them, at least just
yet. But we can pull our feet up from the swamp, and make a step that may
be towards a reconciliation. Each of our brains is a network of channels
through which the cosmic soul flows; and there are no two brains
alike--hence our individuality.
But those brains perish. Must individuality be conceded at the cost of our
mental continuity? Perhaps not. Grant even the original mind-atom to be a
constituent, or inseparable companion, of an original matter-atom
(wouldn't it be more up to date to say vibration in each case?), mind, as
we have already tried to demonstrate, is not limited, as matter seems to
be, to those primitive atoms.
* * * * *
The vague but almost unescapable notion of the cosmic soul also opens up
some hint of an explanation of hypnotism, including, of course, thought
transference. These vague hints or gleams on the borderland of our
knowledge are of course something like what must be such hints of what we
know as color, as go through the pigment spots on the surface of one of
the lower creatures. Such as our limits are, we can express them only in
metaphors. But for that matter all of our language beyond a few material
conceptions, is metaphor from them. Well, on the hypothesis (or facing the
fact, if you prefer) of the cosmic soul, telepathy, hypnotism and all that
sort of thing at once affiliates itself with all our easy conceptions of
interflow--in fluids, gases, sounds, colors, magnetism, electricity, etc.
It's all a vague groping, but there seems something there which, as we
evolve farther, we may get clearer impressions of.
Well, to return to our sheep. Foster didn't get the clearness and
intensity of his visions from the comparatively indistinct and placid
impressions in his sitters' minds. There must be something more than
hypnotism from the sitter.
* * * * *
Now here is a tougher case which opens a new element of the problem. It is
from _The Autobiography of a Journalist_, by W.J. Stillman, Boston, 1901,
Vol. I, pp. 192-4: Not many of our older readers will require any
introduction of Stillman. For the younger ones, we may say that he was a
very eminent art-critic; spent most of the latter half of his life abroad,
being part of the time our consul at Crete; wrote a history of the Cretan
Rebellion, and other books; and was a regular correspondent of _The
Nation_, and of _The London Times_. We never knew his veracity questioned.
Here is the story:
A "spiritual medium," Miss A. was "under the control" of Stillman's dead
cousin "Harvey." The "possession" seems to have been throughout free from
trance. Stillman says:
I asked Harvey if he had seen old Turner, the landscape painter,
since his death, which had taken place not very long before. The
reply was "Yes," and I then asked what he was doing, the reply
being a pantomime of painting. I then asked if Harvey could bring
Turner there, to which the reply was, "I do not know; I will go
and see," upon which Miss A. said, "This influence [Harvey's.
Editor] is going away--it is gone"; and after a short pause added,
"There is another influence coming, in that direction," pointing
over her left shoulder. "I don't like it," and she shuddered
slightly, but presently sat up in her chair with a most
extraordinary personation of the old painter in manner, in the
look out from under the brow, and the pose of the head. It was as
if the ghost of Turner, as I had seen him at Griffiths's, sat in
the chair, and it made my flesh creep to the very tips of my
fingers, as if a spirit sat before me. Miss A. exclaimed, "This
influence has taken complete possession of me, as none of the
others did. I am obliged to do what it wants me to." I asked if
Turner would write his name for me, to which she replied by a
sharp, decided negative sign. I then asked if he would give me
some advice about my painting, remembering Turner's kindly
invitation and manner when I saw him. This proposition was met by
the same decided negative, accompanied by the fixed and sardonic
stare which the girl had put on at the coming of the new
influence. This disconcerted me, and I then explained to my
brother what had been going on, as, the questions being mental, he
had no clue to the pantomime. I said that as an influence which
purported to be Turner was present, and refused to answer any
questions, I supposed there was nothing more to be done.
But Miss A. still sat unmoved and helpless, so we waited.
Presently she remarked that the influence wanted her to do
something she knew not what, only that she had to get up and go
across the room, which she did with the feeble step of an old man.
She crossed the room and took down from the wall a colored French
lithograph, and, coming to me, laid it on the table before me, and
by gesture called my attention to it. She then went through the
pantomime of stretching a sheet of paper on a drawing-board, then
that of sharpening a lead pencil, following it up by tracing the
outlines of the subject in the lithograph. Then followed in
similar pantomime the choosing of a water-color pencil, noting
carefully the necessary fineness of the point, and then the
washing-in of a drawing, broadly. Miss A. seemed much amused by
all this, but as she knew nothing of drawing she understood
nothing of it. Then with the pencil and her pocket handkerchief
she began taking out the lights, "rubbing-out," as the technical
term is. This seemed to me so contrary to what I conceived to be
the execution of Turner that I interrupted with the question, "Do
you mean to say that Turner rubbed out his lights?" to which she
gave the affirmative sign. I asked further if in a drawing which I
then had in my mind, the well-known "Llanthony Abbey," the central
passage of sunlight and shadow through rain was done in that way,
and she again gave the affirmative reply, emphatically. I was so
firmly convinced to the contrary that I was now persuaded that
there was a simulation of personality, such as was generally the
case with the public mediums, and I said to my brother, who had
not heard any of my questions [He says above that they were
mental. Ed.] that this was another humbug, and then repeated what
had passed, saying that Turner could not have worked in that way.
Six weeks later I sailed for England, and, on arriving in London,
I went at once to see Ruskin, and told him the whole story. He
declared the contrariness manifested by the medium to be entirely
characteristic of Turner, and had the drawing in question down for
examination. We scrutinized it closely, and both recognized beyond
dispute that the drawing had been executed in the way that Miss A.
indicated. Ruskin advised me to send an account of the affair to
the _Cornhill_, which I did; but it was rejected, as might have
been expected in the state of public opinion at that time, and I
can easily imagine Thackeray putting it into the basket in a rage.
I offer no interpretation of the facts which I have here recorded,
but I have no hesitation in saying that they completed and fixed
my conviction of the existence of invisible and independent
intelligences to which the phenomena were due.
To me they seem perhaps the nearest I have come to a communication of
something not known to any earthly intelligence, and yet it _may_ have
been so known.
When manifestations of this general nature first attracted systematic
study, they were attributed, as already stated, to telepathy from the
sitter. Stillman knew Turner, and as Stillman had an artist's vividness of
impression, the sensitive could have got from him a pretty good idea of
Turner, and have acted it out. But how about the innumerable cases not
unlike the Foster cases quoted, where sensitives get impressions much more
vivid than the sitter appears capable of holding, and act them out with
dramatic verisimilitude of which the sitter is absolutely incapable; and
how about the innumerable cases where the sensitive gets impressions and
memories which the sitter never had?
These have been accounted for as being picked up from absent persons, by a
kind of wireless telegraphy, for which we have ventured, with the
assistance of a couple of Grecian friends, to suggest the name
teloteropathy.
Well! In this Turner case, _somebody_ somewhere, _may_ have known what
neither the sensitive nor Stillman knew of Turner's method of work, and
the sensitive's wireless _may_ have picked up all those detailed
impressions and dramatic impressions of them from that unknown _somebody_.
But is that any easier to swallow than that old Turner himself was the
somebody--that his share of the cosmic soul, or a sufficient portion of
his share, flowed into or hypnotized the sensitive, and made her act as
she did?
* * * * *
And now let us go on to some of the developments of these phenomena
manifested by Mrs. Piper. Unlike the manifestations already given, hers
are not from waking dreams, but from dreams in trance. Moreover, so far
the sensitives have manifested impressions of but one personality at a
time, but Mrs. Piper has manifested one by speech and, at the same time,
another by writing, the expressions of the two apparent personalities
progressing independently, with full coherence and consistency. Moreover,
in many of her trances she seemed as if surrounded by a crowd of persons
endeavoring, with different degrees of success, to express themselves
through her, or she endeavoring to express them. All this of course, is
counter to the impression prevailing during the early years of her career,
that her soul had left her body, and the body was "possessed" by a
postcarnate soul expressing itself through her. The present aspect of the
facts is more as if she had impressions such as we all have in dreams, of
any number of personalities around her. Some of her typical manifestations
may give still further indications of interflowing of mental impressions.
The George "Pelham" famous in the annals of Psychical Research was a
friend of the present writer, and his alleged postcarnate self appeared
through Mrs. Piper to the following effect. There could not have been
anything cooked up about it; it was my first and only sitting with Mrs.
Piper, who knew nothing about me or my friends. In fact, the old theories
of some form of fraud, now, in the light of the vast accumulation of later
knowledge, seem ridiculous. However the phenomena have to be explained,
that explanation is out of date.
G.P. speaks.--"A" [assumed initial. Ed.] "is in a critical state.
He's not himself now. He's terribly depressed." Sitter--"Can you
tell anything [more] about A?" G.P.--"Friend of yours in body."
S.--"Of Hodgson?" [Who was present. This question and the
following were mild "tests": I knew the man well. Ed.]
G.P.--"Yes." S.--"Did I ever know him?" G.P.--"Yes, you knew him
very well. You're connected with him." S.--"Through whom?"
G.P.--"Do you know any B----?" [assumed initial. Ed.] S.--"Are A.
and I connected through B?" G.P.--"Write to B. and he'll tell you
all about it."
It turned out later that A. actually was low in his mind, and that B.,
whom nobody present knew, _was_ trying to get him occupation. I knew
nothing whatever about any such circumstances, nor did Hodgson. To suppose
that Mrs. Piper did, would be absurd. _But_ they were known to other minds
"in the body," and hence the medium's utterance of them is open to the
interpretation of teloteropathy. Similar instances are not rare, but the
interpretation of teloteropathy seems to be rapidly losing probability.
In this instance, I _was_ "connected with" B., but only so far as he had
become a professor at Yale long after my graduation: I did not know him
personally. But my intimate connection with A. was not only direct, but
through several persons intimate with us both, including G.P. when living.
Mere telepathy, certainly mere telepathy from my mind, would have
"spotted" some one of these connections much more readily than the alleged
one with B., which was hardly a connection at all.
The _simplest_ solution for the whole business, though perhaps not the
most "scientific," or even probable, is that the spirit of G.P. was
troubled about A. and habitually thinking of me at the University Club as
a Yale man, on my turning up at the séance, was reminded of the solution
of A.'s troubles proposed through B., and wanted me to help.
And now to this rather commonplace manifestation comes an interesting
sequel illustrating the reach of mind spoken of at the outset. Out of a
perfectly clear sky came to me in New York on April 8, 1894, the message
from G.P., to look out for A., who was low in his mind, and that B. was
trying to get a place for him. On May 29th, Hodgson writes me as follows,
showing that the same thing had come up _through the heteromatic writing
of A.'s wife at Granada in Spain_, and meant nothing to her or to A.
--You may be interested in the inclosed. Keep private. [This
injunction is of course outlawed by time, but I still conceal the
names of the parties. Ed.] and please return. I am writing from my
den, and haven't copy of your sitting at hand. But I remember that
something was said at your sitting _re_ B. and A.
(_Copy of Enclosure._)
"GRANADA, May 6, 1894.
"Dear H.[odgson]:
"Those suggestions from Geo. that I write to B. prove interesting
in the light of what I first learned here: that he had been
lamenting my silence and had been urging me to a place as ----
[at] Yale where he is. I had no notion of this move on his part
till four days ago when I received a letter telling me. Of course
nothing came of it, but anything less known than that cannot be
imagined. The message came once earlier thro' [his wife. Ed.] to
whom George wrote it [heteromatically. Ed.]. George [in life. Ed.]
never heard of B. nor saw him, nor did we ever speak of B. to Geo.
or Phinuit.... Of course I don't want mention made of the effort
of B. to get me the Yale place. What Geo. said was to write to B.;
he is a good friend of yours [_i.e._, of A. Ed.]
"All send kind messages. Yrs. ever.
"A----."
Being intensely busy, and not as much interested in the matter as later
experiences have made me, I did not at the moment catch the full purport
of Hodgson's letter, or write him till June 5th, and did not keep any copy
that I can find of my letter. He wrote me on the 8th:
"Thanks for yours of June 5th, with return of A.'s letter. I knew
nothing whatever of the circumstances connected with B., neither,
so far as I can tell by cross-questioning, did Mrs. Piper."
And I, the present scribe, certainly did not. A. did not. B. alone did,
with whatever persons he may have approached on the matter, and Mrs. Piper
had presumably never seen one of the group. So where did Mrs. Piper and
Mrs. A. get it? The only answers that seem possible are that she and Mrs.
A. either got it teloteropathically from one of those absent, or that the
postcarnate George Pelham himself wrote her about it, and also told me of
it through Mrs. Piper's organism in New York, and four days later was
working it into a cross-correspondence through Mrs. A. in Spain. At first
blush the latter seems easier; and I am not sure but that it does on
reflection.
Hodgson's letter continues:
"I never knew of any B. connected with Yale. When B. was first
mentioned at the sitting, I had a vague notion that some B. or
other had gone to England or France as United States consul. I
also knew the name of ---- ---- B. [a celebrated author. Ed.], and
met her after she became Mrs. C. two or three years ago.
"On questioning Mrs. Piper, which I did by referring to books
first, I found that she remembered the name of ---- ---- B. when I
mentioned it, and connected it in some way with [a certain book.
Ed.], which was widely circulated some years ago. This was the
only B. that she seemed to know anything about....
"Yours sincerely,
"R. HODGSON."
Now does not all this give a strong impression of an interflow among minds
all over--in New York (the place of the sitting), Granada (Mrs. A.'s place
of sojourn), Boston (A.'s home), New Haven (B.'s home), and the universe
in general (G.P.'s apparent home)--of an interflow free from the
limitations of time and space, and independent of all means of
communication known to us?
This impression tends to grow deeper with farther study. We have had a
cross-correspondence between two incarnate intelligences and one apparently
postcarnate. Mr. Piddington has unearthed a cross-correspondence between
one apparently postcarnate intelligence and seven "living" ones.
Perhaps the significance of cross-correspondences justifies a little more
specific treatment, and even the repetition of a paragraph from the first
number of this REVIEW. The topic has lately attracted more attention from
the S.P.R. than any other.
If Mrs. Verrall in London and Mrs. Holland in India both, at about the
same time, write heteromatically about a subject that they both
understand, that is probably coincidence; but if both write about it when
but one of them understands it, that is probably teloteropathy; and if
both write about it when neither understands it, and each of their
respective writings is apparently nonsense, but both make sense when put
together, the only obvious hypothesis is that both were inspired by a
third mind.
There are many instances of strict cross-correspondence of this type. The
one we have given was perhaps more impressive than a stricter one would be
apt to be.
* * * * *
Accounts of sittings generally suggest apparent intercommunication
independent of time and space between postcarnate intelligences: often the
controls say that they will go and find other controls, and, generally,
after a short interval, the new control manifests. It is impossible to
read many of the accounts, whether one regards them as fictitious or not,
without getting an impression--like that given by a good story-teller, if
you please, of a life outside this one, among a host of personalities who
communicate freely with each other and, through difficulties, with us. The
nature of the communication we have already tried to express by
"interflow." But all metaphors are weak beside the impression of the
Cosmic Soul that has been brought to most of those who have persistently
studied the phenomena, as to nearly all those who have speculated _a
priori_ on the nature of mind.
* * * * *
Judged by the foregoing specimens, the literature of what we are
provisionally considering as hypnotic telepathy would not be regarded as
very cheerful. As a whole, however, the pictures it presents from an
alleged postcarnate life, are cheerful, and some of them very attractive.
Below are some from an alleged George Eliot. They are from notes of Piper
sittings kindly placed at our disposal by Professor Newbold.
To my taste the matter savors _very_ little of the reputed author. And yet
assuming for the moment that our great authors survive in a fuller life,
presumably they would have to communicate under very embarrassing
conditions: for not only would they have to cramp themselves to produce
work comprehensible here, but the System of Things would have to limit
them, lest their competition should upset the whole system of our literary
development, or rather would have involved a different one from the
beginning.
My first reading of the alleged George Eliot matter inclined me to scout
it entirely. It is certainly not in all particulars what that great soul
would have sent from a better world if she had been permitted to
communicate anything more profound than we have been left to find out for
ourselves, or even if she had had the commonplace chance to revise her
manuscript. But on reflection I realized that, although the matter came
through Mrs. Piper, it could not have come _from_ her, wherever it came
from; and that if George Eliot were communicating tidings naturally within
our comprehension, and merely descriptive of superficial experience as
distinct from reflection, and were communicating, through a poor
telephone, words to be recorded by an indifferent scribe, this material
would not seem absolutely incongruous with its alleged source, and to a
reader knowing that the stuff claimed to be hers, might possibly suggest
the weakest possible dilution or reflection of her. Yet in ways which I
have no space for, it abounds in the sort of anthropomorphism that might
be expected from the average medium or average sitter, but not from George
Eliot.
And now, since writing the last paragraph and going through the material
half a dozen times more, I have about concluded, or perhaps worked myself
up to the conclusion, that if a judicious blue pencil were to take from it
what could be attributed to imperfect means of communication, and what
could be considered as having slopped over from the medium, there would be
a pretty substantial and not unbeautiful residuum which might, without
straining anything, be taken for a description by George Eliot, of the
heaven she would find if, as begins to seem possible, she and the rest of
us, have or are to have heavens to suit our respective tastes. But what
would have to be taken out is often ludicrously incongruous with George
Eliot, and taking it out would certainly be open to serious question.
Yet whatever may be the qualities, merits, or demerits of this "George
Eliot" matter, what character it has is its own, and different materially
from any I have seen recorded from any other control. What is vastly more
important, despite the lapses in knowledge, taste, and style, which
negative its being the unmodified production of George Eliot, it
nevertheless presents, _me judice_, the most reasonable, suggestive, and
attractive pictures of a life beyond bodily death that I know of: it is
not a reflection of previous mythologies, it is congruous with the tastes
of what we now consider rational beings, and might well fill their
desires; and it _tallies with our experiences_--in dreams. Yet it is not a
great feat of imagination; but in recent times no great genius has
attacked the subject, and George Eliot would not have been expected to
devote her imagination to it, which raises a slight presumption that what
is told is really told by her from experience.
If I had to venture a guess as to how it came into existence, I should
guess that somebody within range, hardly Mrs. Piper herself, had been
reading George Eliot, or about George Eliot, and the musk-melon pollen had
affected the cucumbers. Professor Newbold, for instance, was entirely able
involuntarily to create and telepath the stories, and better shaped ones.
Some real George Eliot influence may have flowed in too, but on that my
judgment is in suspense.
"George Eliot" comes in abruptly to Hodgson, on February 26, 1897. After a
few preliminaries, in response to a remark of Hodgson's on her dislike of
and disbelief in spiritism, she says:
"... You may have noted the anxiety of such as I to return and
enlighten your fellow men. It is more especially confined to
unbelievers before their departure to this life."
This remark and the persistent efforts of the alleged G.P. who, living,
was a thorough skeptic, would seem strongly "evidential."
_March 5, 1897._
_Hodgson sitting._
[G.E. writes:] "Do you remember me well?... I had a sad life in
many ways, yet in others I was happy, yet I have never known what
real happiness was until I came here.... I was an unbeliever, in
fact almost an agnostic when I left my body, but when I awoke and
found myself alive in another form superior in quality, that is,
my body less gross and heavy, with no pangs of remorse, no
struggling to hold on to the material body, I found it had all
been a dream...." R.H.: "That was your first experience?" G.E.:
"... The moment I had been removed from my body I found at once I
had been thoroughly mistaken in my conjectures. I looked back upon
my whole life in one instant. Every thought, word, or action which
I had ever experienced passed through my mind like a wonderful
panorama as it were before my vision. You cannot begin to imagine
anything so real and extraordinary as this first awakening.... I
awoke in a realm of golden light. I heard the voices of friends
who had gone before calling to me to follow them. At the moment
the thrill of joy was so intense I was like one standing
spellbound before a beautiful panorama. The music which filled my
soul was like a tremendous symphony. I had never heard nor dreamed
of anything half so beautiful....
"Another thing which seemed to me beautiful was the tranquillity
of everyone. You will perhaps remember that I had left a state
where no one ever knew what tranquillity meant."
_March 13, 1807:_ "I was speaking about the songs of our birds.
Then the birds seemed to pass beyond my vision, and I longed for
music of other kinds.... When, to my surprise, my desires were
filled.... Just before me sat the most beautiful bevy of young
girls that eyes ever rested upon. Some playing stringed
instruments, others that sounded and looked like silver bugles,
but they were all in harmony, and I must truly confess that I
never heard such strains of music before. No mortal mind can
possibly realize anything like it. It was not only in this one
thing that my desires were filled, but in all things accordingly.
I had not one desire, but that it was filled without any apparent
act of myself.
"I longed to see gardens and trees, flowers, etc. I no sooner had
the desire than they appeared.... Such beautiful flowers no human
eye ever gazed upon. It was simply indescribable, yet everything
was real.... I walked and moved along as easily as a fly would
pass through a ray of sunlight in your world. I had no weight,
nothing cumbersome, nothing.... I passed along through this
garden, meeting millions of friends. As they were all friendly to
me, each and every one seemed to be my friend.... I then thought
of different friends I had once known, and my desire was to meet
some one of them, when like every other thought or desire that I
had expressed, the friend of whom I thought instantly appeared."
How much all this is like dreams!
_March 27, 1897._ (A good deal of confusion, out of which appears)
"He will insist upon calling me Miss, but let him if he wishes. I
am very much Mrs. Never mind so long as it suits him....
"I have a desire for reading, when instantly my whole surrounding
is literally filled with books of all kinds and by many different
authors.... When I touched a book and desired to meet its author,
if he or she were in our world, he or she would instantly appear.
[Is this purely incidental reiterated claim for female authors, by
one of them, 'evidential,' or was Mrs. Piper ingenious enough to
invent it? Ed.]...."
The change of the instrument below is a specially dreamlike touch.
_March 30, 1897._ "I wished to see and realize that some of the
mortal world's great musicians really existed, and asked to be
visited by some one or more of them. When this was expressed,
instantly several appeared before me, and Rubinstein stood before
me playing upon an instrument like a harp at first. Then the
instrument was changed and a piano appeared and he played upon it
with the most delightful ease and grace of manner. While he was
playing the whole atmosphere was filled with his strains of
music."
She wanted to see Rembrandt, and he came, with a quantity of pictures. She
wanted a symphony, and an orchestra "of some thirty musicians" at once
appeared and gave her several, which she enjoyed to the full.
Now George Eliot was a remarkably good musician. If she wanted an
orchestra, she would have wanted at least sixty, and probably more than a
hundred. Perhaps they do these things with more limited resources in
Heaven? Such an incongruity as this, and the inane dilution of the writing
(which of course does not appear at its worst in the selected passages)
make a genuine George Eliot control hard to predicate, and yet this
control, like virtually every other one, is an individuality, and is less
unlike George Eliot than is any other control I know. Will difficulties of
communication or any other _tertium quid_, make up the difference? I first
read the record with repulsion, and now find in it some elements of
attraction.
Do you care for a little more? She wanted to see "angels," and gives a
very pretty picture of an experience with a bevy of children. Telepathy
from the sitter will hardly account for the following, especially the
strange turn at the end, which is signally dreamlike.
"I being fond, very fond of writers of ancient history, etc., felt
a strong desire to see Dante, Aristotle and several others.
Shakespeare if such a spirit existed. [An odd bunch of 'writers of
ancient history'! Ed.] As I stood thinking of him a spirit
instantly appeared who speaking said 'I am Bacon.' ... As Bacon
neared me he began to speak and quoted to me the following words
'You have questioned my reality. Question it no more. I am
Shakespeare.'"
_June 4, 1897._ "... Speak to me for a moment and if you have
anything to say in the nature of poetry or prose would you kindly
recite a line or two to me. It will give me strength to remain
longer than I could otherwise do. [R.H. recites a poem of Dowden's
beginning,
'I said I will find God and forth I went
To seek him in the clearness of the sky,' etc. Excitement.]
G.E.: 'I will go and see G. and return presently (R.H.: Who says
that?) I do. (R.H.: I do not understand what you mean by G.) I do.
My husband. Do you not know I had a husband? (R.H.: Do you mean by
G. Mr. George Henry Lewes?) [Hand is writing Lewes while I am
saying George Henry] Lewes. Yes I do. Oh I am so happy. And when I
did not mistake altogether my deeds I am more _happy than tongue
can utter_."
As bearing on her feeling for Lewes not many months after his death, the
foregoing does not correspond with some widely credited but unpublished
allegations.
Now does not all this read as if Mrs. Piper were dreaming of George Eliot,
just as any of us might dream? Its quality seems as if it might be a
transcript of one of my own dreams, with the important exceptions that the
dreamer wrote it all out, and that it is made up from a series of dreams,
coming up at intervals for about six months, and apparently only when
Hodgson was present, though there are records of George Eliot appearing to
other sitters at other seances.
* * * * *
We have, then, groped our way to a vague notion of a dream-life on the
part of certain sensitives, which seems to participate in another life, in
some ways similar, that is led by intelligences who have passed beyond the
body.
We are not saying that this interpretation of the phenomena is the correct
one: on the contrary we are constantly haunted by a suspicion that any day
it may be exploded by some new discovery. But we do say, with considerable
confidence, that of all the interpretations yet offered--even including
the pervasive one that "the little boy lied," it surpasses all the others
in the portion of the facts that it fits, and in the weight attached to it
by the most capable students--even by James, who, however, did not accept
it as established, though he gave many indications that he felt himself
likely to. Myers definitely accepted it, not from the impressions of the
sensitives, but from having them capped by a veridical impression of his
own. Through the church service one Sunday morning, he felt an inner voice
assuring him: "Your friend is still with you." Later he found that Gurney,
with whom he had a manifestation-pact, had died the night before. We are
not aware that Myers ever published this, but he told it to the present
writer and presumably to others. The convictions of Hodgson and Sir Oliver
Lodge were interpretations of the phenomena of the sensitives, though
Hodgson, it is now known, was probably mainly influenced by communications
from the alleged postcarnate soul of all possible ones most dear to him.
But to return to the sensitives. They seem to be somnambulists who talk
out and write out what they see and hear in their dreams. What they see,
and consequently what they say, is a good deal of a jumble. They see and
hear persons they never saw before. Sometimes they identify themselves
more or less with these personalities. Mrs. Piper nearly always does.
Those others say many things, and very often correct things, unknown to
sensitives, to anybody present, or to anybody else that can be found.
Rather unusual among ordinary dreamers, but by no means unprecedented. But
from here on the experiences of the sensitives are more and more unusual.
Some of the people Mrs. Piper (I speak of her as the representative of a
class) never saw before, and of whom she never saw portraits, she
identifies from photographs. Very few people have done that: perhaps very
few have had the chance. There have been many times when I am sure I
could, if photographs had been presented.
Her personalities and those of many sensitives are nearly always "dead"
friends, not of the sensitives, but of the sitters, and abound in
indications of genuineness in scope and accuracy of memory, in
distinctness of individual recollections and characteristics, and in all
the dramatic indications that go to demonstrate personalities. She sees
and hears these personalities again and again, and _keeps them distinct_
in feature and character.
Now what do we mean by personalities? Is one, after all, anything more or
less than an individualized aggregate of cosmic vibrations, physical and
psychical, with the power of producing on us certain impressions. You and
I know our friends as such aggregates, and nothing more.
And what do we mean by discarnate personalities? In most minds, the first
answer will probably bear a pretty close resemblance to Fra Angelico's
angels, and very nice angels they are! But to some of the more prosy minds
that have thought on the subject in the light of the best and fullest
information, or misinformation, probably the answer will be more like
this: A personality, incarnate or postcarnate, in the last analysis, is a
manifestation of the Cosmic Soul. From that the raw material is supplied
with the star dust, and later, through our senses, from the earliest
reactions of our protozoic ancestors, up to our dreams; and the material
is worked up into each personality through reactions with the environment.
Thus it becomes an aggregate of capacities to impress another personality
with certain sensations, ideas, emotions. As already said, the incarnate
personality impresses us thru certain vibrations. But after that portion
of the vibrations constituting "the body" disappears, there still abides
somewhere the capacity of impressing us, at least in the dream life.
Perhaps it abides only in the memory of survivors, and gets into our
dreams telepathically, though that is losing probability every day; and,
with our anthropomorphic habits, we want to know "where" this capacity to
impress us abides. The thinkers generally say: In the Cosmic reservoir,
which I would rather express as the psychic ocean, boundless, fathomless,
throbbing eternally. It seems to be made up of the original mind-potential
plus all thoughts and feelings that have ever been. And into this ocean
seem to be constantly passing those currents that we know as
individualities, that can each influence, and even intermingle with, other
individualities, here as well as there: for here really is there. While
each does this, it still retains its own individuality. This is, of
course, a vague string of guesses venturing outward from the borderland of
our knowledge. It may be a little clearer, the more we bear in mind that
the apparent influencings and interminglings seem to be telepathic.
Now apparently among the accomplishments of a personality, does not
_necessarily_ inhere that of depressing a scale x pounds: for when that
capacity is entirely absent, from the apparent personalities who visit us
in the dream state, they can impress us in every other way, even to all
the reciprocities of sex. But for some reasons not yet understood, with
ordinary dreamers these impressions are not as congruous, persistent,
recurrent, or regulable in the dream life as in the waking life. But with
Mrs. Piper, Hodgson after his death, and especially G.P. and others, were
about as persistent and consistent associates as anybody living, barring
the fact that they could not show themselves over an hour or two at a
time, which was the limit of the medium's psychokinetic power, on which
their manifestations depended. But that these personalities are not in
time to be evolved so that they will be more permanent and consistent with
dreamers generally, would be a contradiction to at least some of the
implications of evolution.
* * * * *
Accepting provisionally the identity of a postcarnate life with the life
indicated in dreams, are there any further indications of its nature?
There are some, which may lend some slight confirmation to the theory of
identity.
It seems to show itself not only in the visions of the sensitives, but in
the dream life of all of us. If Mrs. Piper's dream state (I name her only
as a type) is really one of communication with souls who have passed into
a new life, dream states generally may not extravagantly be supposed to be
foretastes of that life. And so far as concerns their desirability, why
should they not be? Our ordinary dreams are, like the dreams of the
sensitives, superior to time, space, matter and force--to all the trammels
of our waking environment and powers. In dreams we experience unlimited
histories, and pass over unlimited spaces, in an instant; see, hear, feel,
touch, taste, smell, enjoy unlimited things; walk, swim, fly, change
things, with unlimited ease; do things with unlimited power; make what we
will--music, poetry, objects of art, situations, dramas, with unlimited
faculty, and enjoy unlimited society. Unless we have eaten too much, or
otherwise got ourselves out of order in the waking life, in the dream life
we seldom if ever know what it is to be too late for anything, or too far
from anything; we freely fall from chimneys or precipices, and I suppose
it will soon be aeroplanes, with no worse consequences than comfortably
waking up into the everyday world; we sometimes solve the problems which
baffle us here; we see more beautiful things than we see here; and, far
above all, we resume the ties that are broken here.
The indications seem to be that if we ever get the hang of that life, we
can have pretty much what we like, and eliminate what we don't
like--continue what we enjoy, and stop what we suffer--find no bars to
congeniality, or compulsion to boredom. To good dreamers it is unnecessary
to offer proof of any of these assertions, and to prove them to others is
impossible.
The dream life contains so much more beauty, so much fuller emotion, and
such wider reaches than the waking life, that one is tempted to regard it
as the real life, to which the waking life is somehow a necessary
preliminary. So orthodox believers regard the life after death as the real
life: yet most of their hopes regarding that life--even the strongest hope
of rejoining lost loved ones--are realized here during the brief throbs of
the dream life.
There seems to be no happiness from association in our ordinary life which
is not obtainable, by some people at least, from association in the dream
life. And as this appears to exist between incarnate A and postcarnate B,
there is at least a suggestion that it may exist between postcarnate A and
postcarnate B, and to a degree vastly more clear and abiding than during
the present discrepancy between the incarnate and postcarnate conditions?
This of course assumes, that B's appearance in A's dream life, just as he
appeared on earth (though, as I know to be the case, sometimes wiser,
healthier, jollier, and more lovable generally), is something more than a
mild attack of dyspepsia on the part of A.
Dreams do not seem to abound in work, and are often said not to abound in
morality, but I know that they sometimes do--in morality higher than any
attainable in our waking life. Certainly the scant vague indications from
the dream suggestions of a future life do not necessarily preclude
abundant work and morality, any more than work and sundry self-denials are
precluded on a holiday because one does not happen to perform them.
Moreover, the hoped-for future conditions may not contain the necessities
for either labor or self-restraint that present conditions do: they may
not be the same dangers there as here in the _dolce far niente_, or in
Platonic friendships.
* * * * *
Men are not consistent in their attitude regarding dreams. They admit the
dream state to be ideal--constantly use such expressions as "A dream of
loveliness," "Happier than I could even dream," "Surpasses my fondest
dreams," and yet on the other hand they call its experience "but the
baseless vision of a dream." What do they mean by "baseless"? Certainly it
is not lack of vividness or emotional intensity. It is probably the lack
of duration in the happy experiences, and of the possibility of
remembering them, and, still more, of enjoying similar ones at will. Yet
the sensitives do both in recurrent instalments of the dream life, and
like the rest of us, through the intervening waking periods, after the
first hour or so, generally know nothing of the dreams. It is not
vividness of the dream life itself that is lacking, but vividness in our
memories of it. James defines our waking personality as the stream of
consciousness: the dream life gives no such stream. To-night does not
continue last night as to-day continues yesterday. The dream life is not
like a stream, but more like a series, though hardly integral enough to be
a series, of disconnected pools, many of them perhaps more enchanting than
any parts of the waking stream, but not, like that stream, an organic
whole with motion toward definite results, and power to attain them. But
suppose the dream life continues after the body's death, and under
direction toward definite ends, at least so far as the waking life is, and
still free from the trammels of the waking life--suppose us to have at
least as much power to secure its joys and avoid its terrors as we have
regarding those of the waking life; and with all the old intimacies which
it spasmodically restores, restored permanently, and with the discipline
of separation to make them nearer perfect. What more can we manage to
want?
The suggestion has come to more than one student, that when we enter into
life--as spermatozoa, or star dust if you please--we enter into the
eternal life, but that the physical conditions essential to our
development into appreciating it, are a sort of veil between it and our
consciousness. In our waking life we know it only through the veil; but
when in sleep or trance, the material environment is removed from
consciousness, the veil becomes that much thinner, and we get better
glimpses of the transcendent reality.
Does it not seem then as if, in dreams, we enter upon our closer relation
with the hyper-phenomenal mind? All sorts of things seem to be in it, from
the veriest trifles and absurdities up to the highest things our minds can
receive, and presumably an infinity of things higher still. They appear to
flow into us in all sorts of ways, presumably depending upon the condition
of the nerve apparatus through which they flow. If that is out of gear
from any disorder or injury, what it receives is not only trifling, but
often grotesque and painful; while if it is in good estate, it often
receives things far surpassing in beauty and wisdom those of our waking
phenomenal world.
Apparently every dreamer is a medium for this flow, but dreamers vary
immensely in their capacity to receive it--from Hodge, who dreams only
when he has eaten too much, or Professor Gradgrind who never dreams at
all, up to Mrs. Thompson and Mrs. Piper.
As oft remarked, dreams generally are nonsense, but some dreams, or parts
of some dreams, are perhaps the most significant things we know. Each
vision, waking or sleeping, must have a cause, and as an expression of
that cause, must be veridical. On the one hand, the cause of a trivial
dream is generally too trivial to be ascertained: it may be too much
lobster, or impaired circulation or respiration; while on the other hand
(and here the paradox seems to be explained), the cause of an important
dream must, _ex vi termini_, be some important event. But important events
are rare, and therefore significant dreams are rare; while trivial events
are frequent, and therefore trivial dreams are frequent.
The important and rare event _may_ be such a conjunction of circumstances
and temperaments as makes it possible for a postcarnate intelligence,
assuming the existence of such, to communicate with an incarnate one. That
such apparent communications are rare tends to indicate their genuineness.
* * * * *
Now to develop a little farther the time-honored hypothesis of a cosmic
soul as explaining dreams, and supported by them.
Admit, provisionally at least, that the medium is merely an extraordinary
dreamer. Does a man do his own dreaming, or is it done for him? Does a man
do his own digesting, circulating, assimilating, or is it done for him? If
he does not do these things himself, who does? About the physical
functions through the sympathetic nerve, we answer unhesitatingly: the
cosmic force. How, then, about the psychic functions? Are they done by the
cosmic psyche?
Like respiration, they are partly under our control, but that does not
affect the problem. Who runs them when we do not run them, even when we
try to stop them that we may get to sleep? Even when, after they have
yielded to our entreaties to stop, and we are asleep, they begin going
again--without our will. The only probability I can make out is that our
thinking is run by a power not ourselves, as much as our other partly
involuntary functions.
To hold that a man does his own dreaming--that it is done by a secondary
layer of his own consciousness--is to hold that we are made up of layers
of consciousness, of which the poorest layer is that of what we call our
waking life, and the better layers are at our service only in our
dreams--that when a man is asleep or mad he can solve problems, compose
music, create pictures, to which, when awake and in his sober senses, and
in a condition to profit by his work, and give profit from it, he is
inadequate.
Nay more, the theory claims that a man's working consciousness--his
self--the only self known to him or the world, will hold and shape his
life by a set of convictions which, in sleep, he will _himself_ prove
wrong, and thereby revolutionize his philosophy and his entire life.
Wouldn't it be more reasonable to attribute all such results--the
solutions of the problems, the music, the pictures, the corrections of the
errors--to a power outside himself?
I cannot believe that there's anything in my individual consciousness
which my experience or that of my ancestors has not placed there--in raw
material at least; or that in working up that raw material _I_ can exert
any genius in my sometimes chaotic dreams that I cannot exert in my
systematized waking hours. All the people I meet and talk with in my
dreams _may_ have been met and talked with by me or my forebears, though I
don't believe it; but the works of art I see have not been known to me or
my ancestors or any other mortal; nor have I any sign of the genius to
combine whatever elements of them I may have seen, into any such designs.
And when in dreams _other_ persons tell me things contrary to my firmest
convictions, in which things I later discover germs of most important
workable truth, the persons who tell me that, and who are different from
me as far as fairly decent persons can differ from each other, are
certainly not, as the good Du Prel would have us believe, myself. All
these things are not figments of _my_ mind--if they are figments of a
mind, it's a mind bigger than mine. The biggest claim I can make, or
assent to anybody else making, is that my mind is telepathically receptive
of the product of that greater mind.
Here are some farther evidences of the greater mind, given by Lombroso
(_After Death, What?_, 320 f.):
It is well known that in his dreams Goethe solved many weighty
scientific problems and put into words many most beautiful verses.
So also La Fontaine (_The Fable of Pleasures_) and Coleridge and
Voltaire. Bernard Palissy had in a dream the inspiration for one
of his most beautiful ceramic pieces....
Holde composed while in a dream _La Phantasie_, which reflects in
its harmony its origin; and Nodier created _Lydia_, and at the
same time a whole theory on the future of dreaming. Condillac in
dream finished a lecture interrupted the evening before. Kruger,
Corda, and Maignan solved in dreams mathematical problems and
theorems. Robert Louis Stevenson, in his _Chapters on Dreams_,
confesses that portions of his most original novels were composed
in the dreaming state. Tartini had while dreaming one of his most
portentous musical inspirations. He saw a spectral form
approaching him. It is Beelzebub in person. He holds a magic
violin in his hands, and the sonata begins. It is a divine adagio,
melancholy-sweet, a lament, a dizzy succession of rapid and
intense notes. Tartini rouses himself, leaps out of bed, seizes
his violin, and reproduces all that he had heard played in his
sleep. He names it the _Sonata del Diavolo_,...
Giovanni Dupré got in a dream the conception of his very beautiful
_Pietà_. One sultry summer day Dupré was lying on a divan thinking
hard on what kind of pose he should choose for the Christ. He fell
asleep, and in dream he saw the entire group at last complete,
with Christ in the very pose he had been aspiring to conceive, but
which his mind had not succeeded in completely realizing.
It is a quite frequent experience that a person perplexed by a problem at
night finds it solved on waking in the morning. Efforts to remember, which
are unsuccessful before going to sleep, on waking are often found
accomplished.
A dream is a work of genius, and in many respects, perhaps most,
especially in vividness of imagination, the best example we have. It is
the most spontaneous, constructed with the least effort from fewest
materials, the least restrained, and often immeasurably surpassing all
works of waking genius in the same department. A genius gets a trifling
hint, and being inspired by the gods (anthropomorphic for: flowed in upon
by the cosmic soul?) builds out of the hint a poem or a drama or a
symphony. You and I build dreams surpassing the poem or the drama or the
symphony, but our friends Dryasdust and Myopia inquire into our
experiences, and sometimes find a little hint on which a dream was built,
and then all dreams are demonstrated things unworthy of serious
consideration. Is it not a more rational view that the fact that the soul
can in the dream state elaborate so much from so little, indicates it to
be then already in a life which has no limits?
Havelock Ellis, in his _World of Dreams_, says (p. 229):
Our eyes close, our muscles grow slack, the reins fall from our
hands. But it sometimes happens that the horse knows the road home
even better than we know it ourselves.
He puts "the horse" outside of the dreamer plainly enough here. He further
says (p. 280).
If we take into account the complete psychic life of dreaming,
subconscious as well as conscious, it is waking, not sleeping,
life which may be said to be limited.... Sleep, Vaschide has said,
is not, as Homer thought, the brother of Death, but of Life, and,
it may be added, the elder brother....
He quotes from Bergson (_Revue Philosophique_, December, 1908, p. 574):
This dream state is the substratum of our normal state. Nothing is
added in waking life; on the contrary, waking life is obtained by
the limitation, concentration, and tension of that diffuse
psychological life which is the life of dreaming.... To be awake
is to will; cease to will, detach yourself from life, become
disinterested: in so doing you pass from the waking ego to the
dreaming ego, which is less _tense_, but more _extended_ than the
other.
Ellis continues (p. 281):
I have cultivated, so far as I care to, my garden of dreams, and
it scarcely seems to me that it is a large garden. Yet every path
of it, I sometimes think, might lead at last to the heart of the
universe.
But with the exception of a few spasmodic inspirations, the records of
dreams, ordinary or from the sensitives, contain nothing new--nothing to
relieve man from the blessed necessity of eating his bread, intellectual
as well as material, in the sweat of his brow; and, perhaps more important
still, little to make the interests or responsibilities of this life
weaker because of any realized inferiority to those of a possible later
life.
It would apparently be inconsistent in Nature, or God, if you prefer, to
start our evolution under earthly conditions, educating us in knowledge
and character through labor and suffering, but at the same time throwing
open to our perceptions, from another life, a wider range of knowledge and
character attainable without labor or suffering.
I have no time or space or inclination to argue with those who deny a plan
in Nature. He who does, probably lives away from Nature. It appears to
have been a part of that plan that for a long time past most of us should
"believe in" immortality, and that, at least until very lately, none of us
should know anything about it. Confidence in immortality has been a
dangerous thing. So far we haven't all made a very good use of it. Many of
the people who have had most of it and busied themselves most with it, so
to speak, have largely transferred their interests to the other life, and
neglected and abused this one. "Other-worldliness" is a well-named vice,
and positive evidence of immortality might be more dangerous than mere
confidence in it.
All this, I think, supports the notion that whatever, if anything, is in
store for us beyond this life, it would be a self-destructive scheme of
things (or Scheme of Things, if you prefer) that would throw the future
life into farther competition with our interests here, at least before we
are farther evolved here. Looking at history by and large, we children
have not generally been trusted with edge tools until we had grown to some
sort of capacity to handle them. If the Mesopotamians or Egyptians or
Greeks or Romans had had gunpowder, it looks as if they would have blown
most of themselves and each other out of existence, and the rest back into
primitive savagery, and stayed there until the use of gunpowder became one
of the lost arts. But the new knowledge of evolution has given the modern
world a new intellectual interest; and the new altruism, a new moral one.
The reasons for doing one's best in this life, and doing it actively, are
so much stronger and clearer than they were when so many good people could
fall into asceticism and other-worldliness, that perhaps we are now fit to
be trusted with proofs of an after life. It is very suggestive that these
apparent proofs came contemporaneously with the new knowledge tending to
make them safe; and equally suggestive that it is when we have begun to
suffer from certain breakdowns in religion, that we have been provided
with new material for bracing it up.
At the opposite extreme, it also is suggestive that these new indications
that our present life is a petty thing beside a future one, have come just
when modern science has so increased our control over material nature that
we are in peculiar danger of having our interest in higher things buried
beneath material interests, and enervated by over-indulgence in material
delights.
If it be true that, roughly speaking, we are not entrusted with dangerous
things before we are evolved to the point where we can keep their danger
within bounds, the fact that we have not until very lately, if yet, been
entrusted with any verification of the dream of the survival of bodily
death, would seem to confer upon the spiritistic interpretation of the
recent apparent verifications, a pragmatic sanction--an accidental embryo
pun over which the historic student is welcome to a smile, and which,
since the preceding clause was written, I have seen used in all
seriousness by Professor Giddings. Conclusive or not, that "sanction" is
certainly an addition to the arguments that existed before, including the
general argument from evolution. And, so far as the phenomena go to
establish the spiritistic hypothesis, surely they are not to be lightly
regarded because as yet they do not establish it more conclusively.
* * * * *
When during the last century science bowled down the old supports of the
belief in immortality, there grew up a tendency to regard that belief as
an evidence of ignorance, narrowness, and incapacity to face the music.
May not disregard of the possible new supports be rapidly becoming an
evidence of the same characteristics?
When the majority of those who have really studied the phenomena of the
sensitives, starting with absolute skepticism, have come to a new form of
the old belief; and when, of the remaining minority, the weight of
respectable opinion goes so far as suspense of judgment, how does the
argument look? Isn't it at least one of those cases of new phenomena where
it is well to be on guard against old mental habits, not to say
prejudices?
Is it not now vastly more _reasonable_ to believe in a future life than it
was a century ago, or half a century, or quarter of a century? Is it not
already more reasonable to believe in it than not to believe in it? Is it
not already appreciably harder _not_ to believe in it than it was a
generation ago?
* * * * *
So far as I can see, the dream life, from mine up to Mrs. Piper's, vague
as it is, is an argument for immortality _based on evidence_.
The sensitives are not among the world's leading thinkers or
moralists--are not more aristocratic founders for a new faith than were a
certain carpenter's son and certain fishermen; and only by implication do
the sensitives suggest any moral truths, but they do offer more facts to
the modern demand for facts.
Spiritism has a bad name, and it has been in company where it richly
deserved one; but it has been coming into court lately with some very
important-looking testimony from very distinguished witnesses; and some
rather comprehensive minds consider its issues supreme--the principal
issues now upon the horizon, between the gross, luxurious, unthinking,
unaspiring, uncreating life of today, and everything that has, in happier
ages, given us the heritage of the soul--the issues between increasing
comforts and withering ideals--between water-power and Niagara.
The doubt of immortality is not over the innate reasonableness of it: the
universe is immeasurably more reasonable with it than without it; but over
its practicability after the body is gone. We, in our immeasurable wisdom,
don't see how it can work--we don't see how a universe that we don't begin
to know, which already has given us genius and beauty and love, and which
seems to like to give us all it can--birds, flowers, sunsets, stars,
Vermont, the Himalayas, and the Grand Canyon; which, most of all, has
given us the insatiable soul, can manage to give us immortality. Well!
Perhaps we ought not to be grasping--ought to call all we know and have,
enough, and be thankful--thankful above all, perhaps, that as far as we
can see, the hope of immortality cannot be disappointed--that the worst
answer to it must be oblivion. But on whatever grounds we despair of more
(if we are weak enough to despair), surely the least reasonable ground is
that we cannot see more: the mole might as well swear that there is no
Orion.