made for the cure of the insane. A typical instance is to be found at
the shrine of St. Dympna in Belgium. Many persons in various stages
and differing forms of mental derangement were accustomed to go or be
taken to the shrine of this Irish girl missionary, whose martyrdom had
so elevated her in the estimation of the people of the neighborhood
that they thought her tomb worthy of special reverence. The sufferers
who journeyed thither frequently lingered for some time in order to
invoke the aid of the Saint, and, if possible, secure her intercession
for the relief of their {377} ailments. Many of them were found to get
along better in the quiet of the little village than they had done in
their homes, and as they were simply quartered among the people of the
village, their friends were able for a trifling pecuniary
consideration to secure their maintenance there for an indefinite
period, in the hope that what the Saint had not granted at the
beginning might be obtained by more assiduous devotion at her shrine.
At first the friends probably intended to come back and take the
patients away, but after a time, finding that they got along so well
near the shrine, they gradually learned to leave them there entirely.
Thus originated the famous insane colony at Gheel which has in recent
years been the subject of more attention on the part of alienists the
world over than almost any other therapeutic method of our time. This
medieval invention of caring for the non-violent insane, especially
those of low grades of intelligence, in the midst of small families,
where none of the cares of life burden them and where they have
occupation of mind and body and certain human interests, such as might
appeal to their weakened intelligence, is probably the ideal method of
caring for such patients. Certain it is that it is much better than
the large institutional system, the invention of succeeding centuries,
from which we are now trying to get away as fast and as far as
possible.
The Gheel mode of caring for the insane is really the colony system
that is now universally recognized as the most favorable mode of
treatment for these patients. It seems not unlikely that there was
much more of this practice during the Middle Ages in Europe than we
have any idea of.
With regard to the serious accusations so often made {378} against the
people of the Middle Ages for their cruelty to the insane, not much
apology will be needed by those who know anything about the treatment
of the insane, even in quite recent times. Measures of rigid restraint
were employed for dangerous cases. Patients who had shown
manifestations of violence were likely to be chained. Severe and
unusual punishments were sometimes inflicted. Of all this there is no
doubt. Abuses crept into institutions. The insane were sometimes
brutally treated or hideously neglected. These, however, are
objections that can be urged against our system of taking care of the
insane in many places even at the present day. In certain states, in
order to lessen the expense of caring for the insane, they are kept in
departments in the Poor Houses, and every now and then a legislative
committee of investigation tells the story of appalling evils that
have been discovered. It was not because they thought that possessed
people deserved punishment, nor because they hoped thus to get the
devils to go out of them, that the medieval generations allowed such
things in their asylums, but because human nature will neglect its
duties toward the ailing unless carefully superintended, and because
regular attendants become hardened in their feelings sooner or later,
when they serve only for pay, and the result always is the abuse of
patients.
In proportion to the number of patients cared for, there was much more
need for restraint in those old days than at present. As a rule,
during the Middle Ages prisons and asylums were few. Only the
violently insane, who already had actually committed some serious
crime or threatened to, were kept in the asylums. For these restraint
is needed even at the present {379} time. We have learned to apply
milder measures by employing many more attendants, but even that has
come only in the last generation or two. The milder cases of insanity
were not kept in asylums, but were allowed to wander about the
country, or were cared for in their families with a devotion of which
one finds no example at the present time; or if the insane person
belonged to a noble family, very often the patient was kept in the
house of a retainer and gently cared for. The fact that the milder
cases were allowed to wander about the country might seem to be
dangerous, but is not so serious as is ordinarily thought. Only a
limited number of insane patients are likely to be violent, and these,
as a rule, show manifestations of it early in the history of their
affection. It was the frequent meeting with these harmless insane, as
they were to be encountered in the many places through which he
wandered professionally in England, that enabled Shakespeare to make
his pictures of insane characters so true to life, that even at the
present day we are able to recognize from his marvelous description
exactly the form of insanity that was present.
In a word, these generations of the Middle Ages builded better than
they knew in this matter of the care of the mentally afflicted, as in
everything else which they took up for serious consideration. They did
only the most obvious things, and what they could not very well help,
under the circumstances, and yet very often the solutions of grave
problems which they hit upon so naturally, proved to be as efficient
as, indeed sometimes practically identical with, those we have reached
by much more elaborate methods. This story of the treatment of the
insane in the Middle Ages {380} deserves careful study. I have given
only a few suggestions for the interpretation of certain methods of
action on their part, apparently very different from our ideas, yet in
reality anticipating our most recent conclusions.
What many people have not been able to forgive the generations of the
Middle Ages, and especially the ecclesiastics of the centuries before
our own, is that as educated men and leaders of the people they should
have accepted the view that mental diseases may, in some of their
forms at least, be due to possession by the devil or some other
spiritual interference with the working of the human intellect. During
the latter half of the nineteenth century, it became the custom among
the educated to scoff at any possible manifestation of this kind. The
interference of the spiritual world with any of man's actions came to
be looked upon as absurd, except by those who still clung to old-time
beliefs and thought that new fashions in opinion might very well prove
almost as variable as do corresponding fads in the realm of dress or
of interests. The difficulty in the matter was that the generations of
the latter nineteenth century lost their faith, to a great extent, in
the existence of a spiritual world, and consequently it was easy to
laugh at those who had found the interference of such a world as not
only possible, but actual, in a great many affairs in human life. As a
matter of fact, when we realize how many utterly inexplicable
phenomena the earlier centuries tried to explain this way, it is not
surprising to find their explanation sometimes wrong.
It is very easy, to my mind, for men of our generation to be too hard
in their judgments of the men of {381} the Middle Ages with regard to
the curious phenomena, psychic, spiritistic and occult, which, with
all our advance in science, are still almost as obscure to the eye of
the intellect as they were seven centuries ago. The medieval
generations saw a great many things that they could not explain
happening round them, and attributed them to spiritual agencies. We
have learned since that many of these things are merely natural, and
must not be considered as due to anything else than the ordinary laws
of nature. We have not eliminated belief in the spiritual world,
however, and there is still a large proportion of mankind who think
that they see, even in the matter-of-fact world around them of the
present day, many signs of interference in human affairs by agencies
distinct from those of human beings and quite independent of matter.
It is easy to dismiss this side of the question with a shrug of the
shoulders and say that it need not be taken into account. A man who
does this easily succeeds in convincing himself that there are no
evidences for spiritual manifestations in our life, and that the
stories with regard to them are all nonsense.
It is curious, however, that anyone who investigates and does not
merely dismiss at once, is very prone to come to a contrary
conclusion, even though all his training and the traditions of his
education are opposed to such an admission. There are many prominent
scientists who have allowed themselves to be drawn into the
investigation of spiritualistic manifestations so-called. Very few of
them have come away from their investigations entirely convinced that
there was nothing in them. Frauds they have found; sleight-of-hand
impositions they have exposed; but apart from all these, there {382}
is a residue of phenomena which they cannot explain and which
convinces many of them of the existence and the mundane action of
forces independent of matter. The men who come to these conclusions
are not only the ignorant, nor the over-credulous, but frequently
representative leaders in scientific thought--men who are known to be
thoroughly capable of weighing evidence, prominent lawyers and judges,
above all, men who are accustomed to investigation as most painstaking
scientists and faithful students of nature.
A few examples will illustrate this. Mr. Alfred Russell Wallace, the
co-discoverer with Darwin of the theory of natural selection, has a
name in the scientific world that places him among the leaders of
scientific thought. For many years he has been convinced that
spiritualism contains in itself truths that deserve careful
investigation, and he for one is persuaded that the neglect of
investigation of this subject, on the part of recent generations, is
one of the most serious mistakes, from a purely scientific standpoint,
that they have made. Sir William Crookes, whose brilliant theories
with regard to the fourth stage of matter, radiant matter, would seem
to have quite appropriately prepared him for the proper investigation
of existences even beyond the domain of the attenuated substances with
which he had been so much concerned, is another of the prominent
scientists of the day who confesses to a belief in the truth of
spiritualistic phenomena. He made his first publication on the subject
more than a quarter of a century ago. When a score of years after this
he was elected as the President of the British Association for the
Advancement of Science, the most prominent scientific body in Great
Britain, and, it may be said, in the {383} English-speaking world, he
recurred in his Presidential address to the subject of spiritualism,
and said that in the meantime he not only had not changed his mind
with regard to the truth of certain spiritualistic phenomena, but had
even become more convinced than he was originally.
These are prominent English scientists, and Englishmen are supposed to
be more conservative, less likely to be influenced by personal
motives, and less prone to be led astray by imaginative influences,
than their colleagues on the Continent. Besides these two whom we have
mentioned, there is a third one, of quite as great prominence, Sir
Oliver Lodge, who is also a convert to belief in the reality of
certain spiritual manifestations, and other names might readily be
mentioned. Over in France, the most prominent of living physiologists,
Professor Charles Richet, who is well known for investigating work of
a high order and successful original research that has made his name
familiar throughout the medical world at least, is another modern
scientist who cannot but think that there is something in
spiritualistic manifestations. The latest convert to these notions is
an even more surprising addition to such a group of witnesses to the
possibility of the interference of spirits with human affairs. This is
no less a person than Lombroso, the well-known writer on criminology,
who has recently confessed that certain tests made by him showed
beyond all doubt that there were influences at work quite independent
of human powers, and showing the existence of a world apart from
matter. This immaterial world evidently interpenetrates, and may
interfere with things in the material world as we know it.
{384}
In a word, it may be said that if a man wants to keep the spiritual
side of things out of his purview of life, he may do so by refusing to
investigate any evidence that would demonstrate the existence of
spiritual forces in the world around him. The heavy price, however,
that he pays for absolute certainty and peace of mind in this
matter--is peremptory refusal to investigate. If he gives himself up
to investigations, he comes inevitably to the conclusion that there is
something in the belief in the existence of spirits all round us, and
of the possibility of their interference in the ordinary affairs of
life. It is true that after he has come to this conclusion he may not
be able to demonstrate it to others. His conviction of it, however,
will be none the less absolute because of this. His adhesion to the
new belief may seem to many people absurd. He will accept this view of
his state of mind quite calmly, and apparently enjoy the compensation
of finding the absurdity to be in the other point of view. It matters
not how distinguished a scientist he may be, he comes out of
investigation of spiritual phenomena persuaded of the existence of a
spiritual world.
This persuasion seems to come by some form of intuition not quite
dependent on the ordinary processes of intelligence. It is as if
spirit called to spirit across the abyss, from the immaterial to the
material, as if somehow we obtained a conviction of the existence of
spirits around us by the very sympathy of our natures and their
relationship to the immaterial world, rather than by the ordinary
avenues of intelligence. It is, in a word, a telepathy, the other
agent in which is not material, but quite independent of matter, yet
somehow is able to set up those vibrations in the ether which {385}
affect brain cells, and thus bring about communications, as Sir
William Crookes explains the curious phenomena in this line that occur
between human beings. Such an explanation may easily be dismissed as
highly imaginative and altogether theoretic. As a student of
psychology now for many years, it has appealed to me, however, as the
only possible hypothesis that gives any plausible explanation of the
curious conversions which so inevitably result from sympathetic
attempts at investigation of the possibility of spirit interference in
mundane affairs.
How far this persuasion of spiritual interference in ordinary human
affairs has gone, will not be realized except by those who are
familiar with some of the literature which has been made in the last
twenty years on the subject of psychical research. Not long since, a
distinguished European professor of physical science went so far as to
warn people of the dangers there might be in dismissing the opinion
that other intelligences than those of men could interfere for the
abrogation of certain natural laws. This may be scoffed at as the
height of credulity, and may be received in sceptical mood by those
who refuse to look into such matters, because they know _a priori_
that they _cannot be true!_ It is hard, however, to differentiate the
attitude of mind of such persons from that which Galileo deprecated so
much, in that letter of complaint to Kepler, in which he said so
bitterly that they refused to look through his telescope and
demolished, as they thought, his observations by logical conclusions
from what they knew already. It is to be remarked that it was not
ecclesiastics of whom he was talking at this time, but professors of
science at the University of {386} Pisa, who were quite as
unsympathetic towards certain of his astronomical discoveries as were
any of the ecclesiastics of his time.
Alfred Russell Wallace has summed up this matter in a well-known
chapter on psychic research, which he places among what he calls the
failures of A Wonderful Century--the nineteenth. While personally
viewing this matter from a very different standpoint to that from
which it is viewed by Mr. Wallace, I cannot help but think that the
position he occupies is much nearer the truth than the absolute
refusal to credit stories of supra-natural or ultra-natural, if not
supernatural interferences in human affairs. When Mr. Wallace has an
opinion he is likely to express it very forcibly, and he has done so
in this case. He does not hesitate to attribute a great many marvelous
happenings to practically the same forces as the medieval people
formulated for them, though they would disagree utterly in the
purposes attributed to these events. Mr. Wallace says:
"The still more extraordinary phenomena--veridical hallucinations,
warnings, detailed predictions of future events, phantoms, voices or
knockings, visible or audible to numerous individuals, bell-ringing,
the playing on musical instruments, stone-throwing and various
movements of solid bodies, all without human contact or any
discoverable physical cause, still occur among us as they have
occurred in all ages. These are now being investigated, and slowly
but surely are proved to be realities, although the majority of
scientific men and of writers for the press still ignore the
cumulative evidence and ridicule the inquirers. These phenomena
being comparatively rare, are as yet known to but a limited number
of persons; but the evidence for their reality is {387} also very
extensive, and it is absolutely certain that during the coming
century they too will be accepted as realities by all impartial
students and by the majority of educated men and women."
Mr. Wallace has insisted further on the utterly unscientific position
of many of those who refuse to look into the evidence for these
phenomena, so plainly beyond the power of the ordinary forces of
nature as we know them, or of the human intelligences in the body,
that are immediately around us. He deprecates, as does Galileo, the
method by which this subject has been kept from receiving its due meed
of attention. He points out that it is because of intellectual
intolerance that this subject has been relegated to the background of
scientific attention. He even contends that a great lesson is to be
learned from this neglect, and one which will help men to free
themselves from that burden of overconservatism which, much more than
religion or theology, has impeded the progress of knowledge and the
advance of science. He says:
"The great lesson to be learnt from our review of this subject is,
distrust of all _a priori_ judgments as to facts; for the whole
history of the progress of human knowledge, and especially of that
department of knowledge now known as psychical research, renders it
certain that whenever the scientific men or popular teachers of any
age have denied, on _a priori_ grounds of impossibility or opposition
to the 'laws of nature,' the facts observed and recorded by numerous
investigators of average honesty and intelligence, these deniers
have always been wrong."
"Future ages will, I believe, be astonished at the vast amount of
energy and ignorance displayed by so many {388} of the great men of
this century in opposing unpalatable truths, and in supposing that
_a priori_ arguments, accusations of imposture or insanity, or
personal abuse, were the proper means of determining matters of fact
and of observation in any department of human knowledge."
If these hard-headed scientists, whose training has been obtained in
what physical scientists themselves, at least, are fain to call the
rigid school of the logic of facts, and under the severe mental
discipline of the inductive method, accept on the evidence afforded
them, the manifestations of the spiritual world and its influences in
this as true, surely we will not condemn these men of the Middle Ages,
who approached the subject in such a different temper, if they came to
the same conclusion. We recognize that the modern scientist, with his
trained powers of observation and his elaborate facilities for
eliminating the adventitious in his experiments, is in a position to
judge impartially with regard to such subjects. More than this, his
life has usually been spent in making such syntheses of evidence for
and against the significance of facts, as should enable him to be a
proper judge. If, then, whenever he seriously devotes himself to such
an investigation, he comes almost inevitably to the conclusion that
spirits do intervene in our affairs, yet we refuse to believe with
him, it is hard to know on what principle we shall accept his
scientific conclusions. If we cannot bring ourselves to think his
conclusions are of equal value in both cases, we place ourselves in a
strange dilemma. The medieval scholars were prone, because of the
faith to which they had given their whole-hearted adhesion, to see
spiritual powers at work in many things. In this they were {389}
sometimes sadly mistaken, but not so much mistaken as certain
generations of the nineteenth century, who absolutely refused to
accept any possibility of spiritual interference in things mundane.
Both the extremes are mistakes. It is manifestly more of a mistake,
however, to deny spiritual influence entirely (I talk now from the
standpoint of the scientist and not the believer), than to accept so
much of spiritual interference as the medieval generations permitted
themselves to be convinced of.
This whole subject is one that cannot be dismissed as the conclusion
of a bit of vapid superficial argumentation. It is one of the great
mysteries of life and of the significance of man in the world. The
medieval peoples did much harm by accepting the position, that many
persons suffering from ordinary nervous and mental diseases as we now
know them were really possessed by the devil. The treatment accorded
these supposedly possessed (for the moment we lay aside the question
as to the possibility of the reality of diabolic possession) was not
any worse than has frequently been accorded to sufferers from mental
and nervous disease in presumably much more intelligent times, either
because of fear of them, or neglect on account of the absence of a
sufficient number of keepers, or because of curious theories of
medical science. Mankind, it is hoped, is progressing, but the amount
of progress from generation to generation is not enough, that any
succeeding age should criticise severely the well-intentioned though
mistaken efforts of their predecessors to meet, according to the best
of their ability, problems that are as deep as those involved in
nervous and mental diseases.
{390}
APPENDIX.
"The truth seeker has had to struggle for his physical life. Each
acquisition of truth has been resisted by the full force of the
inertia of satisfaction with preconceived ideas. Just as a new
thought comes to us with a shock which rouses the resistance of our
personal conservatism, so a new idea is met and repelled by the
conservatism of society." (_Jordan, The Struggle for Realities, in
Footsteps of Evolution._)
I.
OPPOSITION TO SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS.
The main purpose of this book has not been accomplished unless it has
been shown that the Church, the Popes, and ecclesiastics generally
during the Middle Ages, and especially during the three centuries
before the reformation so-called, far from opposing scientific advance
or investigation, were constantly in the position of encouraging and
fostering science, even if the meaning of that term be limited, as it
has come to be in modern times, to the physical or natural sciences.
The Popes and the great ecclesiastics were patrons of learning of
every kind, and that they not only encouraged, but aided very
materially the institutions of learning in which the problems of
science with which we are now engaged, were discussed in very much the
same way as we discuss them at the present time, is evident from the
story of the foundation of the universities. It will be a source of
wonder to many people how, with all this as a matter of simple
educational history, the traditions with regard to the supposed
opposition of the Church and the Popes to science have grown up. This
is not so difficult to understand, however, as might be thought, {391}
and a few words of explanation will serve to show that there was
opposition to science, but that this was not due to religious
intolerance in any proper sense of the term.
Those who give the religious element a prominent place in this, forget
how much natural opposition to the introduction of new ideas there is
in men's minds, quite apart from their religious convictions. Nearly
two centuries ago Dean Swift said, in his own bitter frame of mind of
course, but still with an approach to truth that has made the
expression one of the oft-quoted passages from his works: "When a true
genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign--that all
the asses are in confederacy against him."