The net result of his inquiries and research, when, at the age of
nearly forty, he established his own Private Home for unusual,
so-called hopeless cases in North-West London--it was free to all, and
as Spiritual Clinique he thought of it sometimes with a smile--may be
summed up in the single sentence that man is greater than he knows, and
that completer realization of his full possibilities lies accessible to
his subconscious and superconscious powers. Herein he saw, indeed, the
chief hope of progress for humanity.
And it was to the failures, the diseased, the evil and the broken
that he owed chiefly his inspiring optimism, since it was largely in
collapse that occurred the sporadic upheaval of those super-normal
forces which, controlled, co-ordinated, led, must eventually bring
about the realization he foresaw.
The purpose, however, of these notes is not to furnish a sensational
story of various patients whom he studied, healed, or failed to heal.
Its object is to give some details of one case in particular whose
outstanding peculiarities affected his theories and convictions,
leaving him open-minded still, but with a breath of awe in his heart
perhaps, before a possibility his previous knowledge had ruled entirely
out of court, even if--which is doubtful--he had ever considered it as
a possibility at all.
He had realized early that the individual manifests but an
insignificant portion of his being in his ordinary existence, the
normal self being the tip of his consciousness only, yet whose fuller
expression rises readily to adequate evocation; and it was the study
of genius, of prodigies, so-called, and of certain faculties shown
sometimes in hysteria, that led him to believe these were small jets
from a sea of power that might, indeed ought, to be realizable at
will. The phenomena all pointed, he believed, to powers that seemed as
superior to cerebral functions as they were independent of these.
Man's possible field of being, in other words, seemed capable of
indefinite extension. His heart glowed within him as he established,
step by step, these greater powers. He dared to foresee a time when the
limitations of separate personality would have been destroyed, and the
vast brotherhood of the race become literally realized, its practical
unity accomplished.
The difficulties were endless and discouraging. The inventive powers of
the bigger self, its astonishing faculty for dramatizing its content in
every conceivable form, blocked everywhere the search for truth.
It could, he found, also detach a portion of its content into a series
of separate personalities, each with its individual morals, talents,
tendencies, each with its distinct and separate memory. These fragments
it could project, so to speak, masquerading convincingly as separate
entities, using strange languages, offering detailed knowledge of
other conditions, distant in time and space, suggesting, indeed, to
the unwary that they were due to obsessing spirits, and leaving the
observer in wonder before the potential capacity of the central self
disgorging them.
The human depths included, beyond mere telepathy and extended
telepathy, an expansion of consciousness so vast as to be, apparently,
limitless. The past, on rare occasions even the future, lay open; the
entire planetary memory, stored with rich and pregnant accumulated
experience, was accessible and shareable. New aspects of space and time
were equally involved. A vision of incredible grandeur opened gradually
before his eyes.
The surface consciousness of to-day was really rather a trumpery
affair; the gross lethargy of the vast majority _vis à vis_ the
greater possibilities afflicted him. To this surface consciousness
alone was so-called evil possible--as ignorance. As "ugly is only
half-way to a thing," so evil is half-way to good. With the greater
powers must come greater knowledge, shared as by instantaneous wireless
over the entire planet, and misunderstanding, chief obstacle to
progress always, would be impossible. A huge unity, sense of oneness
must follow. Moral growth would accompany the increase of faculty.
And here and there, it seemed to him, the surface ice had thawed
already a little; the pressure of the great deeps below caused cracks
and fissures. Auto-suggestion, prototype of all suggestion, offered
mysterious hints of the way to reach the stupendous underworld, as the
Christian Scientists, the miraculous healers, the New Thought movement,
saints, prophets, poets, artists, were finding out.
The subliminal, to state it shortly, might be the divine. This was the
hope, though not yet the actual belief, that haunted and inspired him.
Behind his personality lurked this strange gigantic dream, ever beating
to get through....
In his Private Home, helping, healing, using his great gifts of
sympathy and insight, he at the same time found the material for
intimate study and legitimate experiment he sought. The building
had been altered to suit his exact requirements; there were private
suites, each with its door and staircase to the street; one part of it
provided his own living quarters, shut off entirely from the patients'
side; in another, equally cut off and self-contained, yet within easy
communication of his own rooms, lived Paul Devonham, his valued young
assistant. There was a third private suite as well. The entire expenses
he defrayed himself.
Here, then, for a year or two he worked indefatigably, with the measure
of success and failure he anticipated; here he dreamed his great dream
of the future of the race, in whose progress and infinite capacities
he hopefully believed. Work was his love, the advancement of humanity
his god. The war availed itself of his great powers, as also of his
ready-made establishment, both of which he gave without a thought of
self. New material came as well from the battlefields into his ken.
The effect of the terrible five years upon him was in direct proportion
to his sincerity. His mind was not the type that shirks conclusions,
nor fears to look facts in the face. For really new knowledge he was
ever ready to yield all previous theories, to scrap all he had held
hitherto for probable. His mind was open, he sought only Truth.
The war, above all the Peace, shook his optimism. If it did not wholly
shatter his belief in human progress, it proved such progress to be so
slow that his Utopia faded into remotest distance, and his dream of
perfectibility became the faintest possible star in his hitherto bright
sky of hope.
He felt shocked and stupefied. The reaction was greater than at
first he realized. He had often pitied the mind that, aware only
of its surface consciousness, uninformed by thrill or shift of the
great powers below and above, lived unwarned of its own immenser
possibilities. To such, the evidence for extended human faculties must
seem explicable by fraud, illusion, derangement, to be classed as
abnormal rubbish worthy only of the alienist's attention as diseases.
To him such minds, though able, with big intellects among them, had
ever seemed a prejudiced, fossilized, prehistoric type. Restricted by
their very nature, violently resisting new ideas, they might be intense
within their actual scope, but, with vision denied them, they never
could be really great.
One effect of the shock he had undergone will be evident by merely
stating that he now understood this type of mind a good deal better
than before.