I know much that I could never have known had I not learnt to consider in
the after life what, there as here, is rough and disjointed; nor have I
found that the mediums in Connaught and Soho have anything I cannot find
some light on in Henry More, who was called during his life the holiest
man now walking upon the earth.
All souls have a vehicle or body, and when one has said that, with More
and the Platonists one has escaped from the abstract schools who seek
always the power of some church or institution, and found oneself with
great poetry, and superstition which is but popular poetry, in a pleasant
dangerous world. Beauty is indeed but bodily life in some ideal condition.
The vehicle of the human soul is what used to be called the animal
spirits, and Henry More quotes from Hippocrates this sentence: "The mind
of man is ... not nourished from meats and drinks from the belly, but by a
clear luminous substance that redounds by separation from the blood."
These animal spirits fill up all parts of the body and make up the body of
air, as certain writers of the seventeenth century have called it. The
soul has a plastic power, and can after death, or during life, should the
vehicle leave the body for a while, mould it to any shape it will by an
act of imagination, though the more unlike to the habitual that shape is,
the greater the effort. To living and dead alike, the purity and
abundance of the animal spirits are a chief power. The soul can mould from
these an apparition clothed as if in life, and make it visible by showing
it to our mind's eye, or by building into its substance certain particles
drawn from the body of a medium till it is as visible and tangible as any
other object. To help that building the ancients offered fragrant gum, the
odour of flowers, and it may be pieces of virgin wax. The half
materialised vehicle slowly exudes from the skin in dull luminous drops or
condenses from a luminous cloud, the light fading as weight and density
increase. The witch, going beyond the medium, offered to the slowly
animating phantom certain drops of her blood. The vehicle once separate
from the living man or woman may be moulded by the souls of others as
readily as by its own soul, and even it seems by the souls of the living.
It becomes a part for a while of that stream of images which I have
compared to reflections upon water. But how does it follow that souls who
never have handled the modelling tool or the brush, make perfect images?
Those materialisations who imprint their powerful faces upon paraffin wax,
leave there sculpture that would have taken a good artist, making and
imagining, many hours. How did it follow that an ignorant woman could, as
Henry More believed, project her vehicle in so good a likeness of a hare,
that horse and hound and huntsman followed with the bugle blowing? Is not
the problem the same as of those finely articulated scenes and patterns
that come out of the dark, seemingly completed in the winking of an eye,
as we are lying half asleep, and of all those elaborate images that drift
in moments of inspiration or evocation before the mind's eye? Our animal
spirits or vehicles are but as it were a condensation of the vehicle of
_Anima Mundi_, and give substance to its images in the faint
materialisation of our common thought, or more grossly when a ghost is our
visitor. It should be no great feat, once those images have dipped into
our vehicle, to take their portraits in the photographic camera. Henry
More will have it that a hen scared by a hawk when the cock is treading,
hatches out a hawkheaded chicken (I am no stickler for the fact), because
before the soul of the unborn bird could give the shape "the deeply
impassioned fancy of the mother" called from the general cistern of form a
competing image. "The soul of the world," he runs on, "interposes and
insinuates into all generations of things while the matter is fluid and
yielding, which would induce a man to believe that she may not stand idle
in the transformation of the vehicle of the daemons, but assist the
fancies and desires, and so help to clothe them and to utter them
according to their own pleasures; or it may be sometimes against their
wills as the unwieldiness of the mother's fancy forces upon her a
monstrous birth." Though images appear to flow and drift, it may be that
we but change in our relation to them, now losing, now finding with the
shifting of our minds; and certainly Henry More speaks by the book,
claiming that those images may be hard to the right touch as "pillars of
crystal" and as solidly coloured as our own to the right eyes. Shelley, a
good Platonist, seems in his earliest work to set this general soul in the
place of God, an opinion, one may find from More's friend Cudworth now
affirmed, now combated, by classic authority; but More would steady us
with a definition. The general soul as apart from its vehicle is "a
substance incorporeal but without sense and animadversion pervading the
whole matter of the universe and exercising a plastic power therein,
according to the sundry predispositions and occasions, in the parts it
works upon, raising such phenomena in the world, by directing the parts of
the matter and their motion as cannot be resolved into mere mechanical
powers." I must assume that "sense and animadversion," perception and
direction, are always faculties of individual soul, and that, as Blake
said, "God only acts or is in existing beings or men."