Practically all the newer cults are quests in one general direction but
down more or less specific roads. Christian Science and New Thought are
endeavours after health and well-being and the endeavour also to
reconcile the more shadowed experiences of life with the love and
goodness of God. Theosophy and kindred cults are quests for illumination
and spiritual deliverance along other than the accepted lines of
Christian "redemption." Spiritualism is practically the quest for the
demonstration of immortality through such physical phenomena as prove,
at least to those who are persuaded by them, the survival of discarnate
personality.
All these movements involve in varying degrees the abnormal or the
supernormal. They imply generally another environment for personality
than the environment which the ordered world of science supplies, and
other laws than the laws of which it takes account. They are one in
affirming the mastery of the psychical over the physical. They either
affirm or imply faculties which do not depend upon the senses for their
material; they suggest a range of personality which, if the facts which
they supply are sound, demands a very considerable recasting of our
accepted beliefs about ourselves.
Christian Science and New Thought confine themselves largely to the
present term of life, though Christian Science affirms strongly enough
that death is an error of the mortal mind. New Thought places a shifting
emphasis upon immortality. Spiritualism centers wholly upon the
phenomena of the discarnate life, upon the power of the discarnate to
communicate with us and upon our power to receive and interpret their
communications.
Spiritualism, or Spiritism, the name its adherents prefer, is, however,
by no means so simple as this definition of it. It may be anything from
the credulity which accepts without question or analysis the trick of a
medium, to the profound speculation of Meyer or Hyslop or the new
adventures in psychology of Emile Boirac and his French associates. It
may be a cult, a philosophy or an inquiry; it may organize itself in
forms of worship and separate itself entirely from the churches. It may
reinforce the faith of those who remain in their old communions.
Spiritism has a long line of descent. The belief that the spirit may
leave the body and maintain a continued existence is very old. Mr.
Herbert Spencer finds the genesis of this belief in dreams. Since
primitive men believed themselves able, in their dreams, to wander about
while the body remained immobile and since in their dreams they met and
spoke with their dead, they conceived an immaterial existence. The
spirit of a dead man, having left the body, would still go on about its
business. They, therefore, set out food and drink upon his grave and
sacrificed his dogs, his horses or his wives to serve him in his
disembodied state. All this is familiar enough and perhaps the whole
matter began as Mr. Spencer suggested, though it by no means ends there.
The animism which grew out of this belief characterizes a vast deal of
early religion, penetrates a vast deal of early thinking. Primitive man
lived in a world constantly under the control of either friendly or
hostile spirits and the really massive result of this faith of his is
registered in regions as remote as the capricious genders of French
nouns and the majestic strophes of the Hebrew Psalms, for the genders
are the shadowy survivals of a time when all things had their spirits,
male or female, and the Psalms voice the faith for which thunder was the
voice of God and the hail was stored in His armoury. It would take us
far beyond the scope of our present inquiry to follow down this line in
all its suggestive ramifications. Animism, medieval witchcraft and the
confused phenomena of knocks, rappings and the breaking and throwing
about of furniture and the like reported in all civilized countries for
the past two or three centuries, supply the general background for
modern Spiritualism. (The whole subject is fully treated in the first
and second chapters of Podmore.)
_The Genesis of Modern Spiritualism_
Modern Spiritualism does not, however, claim for itself so ancient an
ancestry. In 1848 mysterious knockings were heard in the family of John
D. Fox at Hydesville, N.Y. They appeared to have some purpose behind
them; the daughters of the family finally worked out a code: three raps
for yes, one for no, two for doubt, and lo, a going concern was
established. It is interesting to note that mysterious noises had been
about a century before heard in the family of the Wesleys in Epworth
Rectory, England. These noises came to be accepted quite placidly as an
aspect of the interesting domestic life of the Wesleys. It has usually
been supposed that Hattie Wesley knew more about it than she cared to
tell and, as far as the illustrious founders of Methodism were
concerned, there the matter rests.
But the Fox sisters became professional mediums and upon these simple
beginnings a great superstructure has been built up. The modern interest
in Spiritualism thus began on its physical side and in general the
physical phenomena of Spiritualism have become more bizarre and complex
with the growth of the cult. Raps, table tiltings, movements of articles
of furniture, playing upon musical instruments, slate writing, automatic
writing, of late the Ouija Board, materialization, levitation, apparent
elongation of the medium's body, are all associated with Spiritism. It
was natural that the voice also should become a medium of communication,
though trance mediumship belongs, as we shall see, to a later stage of
development.
Incidentally the movement created a kind of contagious hysteria which
naturally multiplied the phenomena and made detached and critical
attitudes unduly difficult. For reasons already touched upon, America
has been strongly predisposed to phases of public opinion which in their
intensity and want of balance have the generally accepted
characteristics of hysteria. Some of them have been religious, great
awakenings, revivals and the like. These in their more extreme form have
been marked by trances, shoutings and catalepsy and, more normally, by a
popular interest, strongly emotionalized, which may possess a real
religious value. Other religious movements have centered about the
second coming of Christ and the end of the world. Many of these peculiar
excitements have been political. The whole offers the psychologists a
fascinating field and awaits its historian.[70] Yet the result is always
the same. The critical faculty is for the time in abeyance; public
opinion is intolerant of contradiction; imposture is made easy and
charlatans and self-appointed prophets find a credulous following.
Movements having this genesis and history are in themselves open to
suspicion.
[Footnote 70: Sidis has a resume of Social Epidemics in part three of
his work on the "Psychology of Suggestion."]
_It Crosses to England and the Continent_
The American interest in Spiritualism from 1848 to 1852 belongs
distinctly to this region. The Fox sisters have been generally
discredited, but what they began carried on. In 1852 a Mrs. Hayden and a
little later a Mrs. Roberts introduced raps and table turnings to
England. There, and more particularly on the Continent, Spiritualism met
and merged with a second line of development which in turn reacted upon
American Spiritualism, and, in America, released movements on the
surface wholly unrelated to Spiritism. In France to a degree and in
Germany strongly Mesmerism lent itself to spiritistic interpretations. I
quote Podmore, who is commenting upon the trance utterances of a Mrs.
Lindquist: "It is to be noted that the ascription of these somnambulic
utterances to spirit intelligences was in the circumstances not merely
easy but almost inevitable. The entranced person was in a state
obviously differing very widely from either normal sleep or normal
wakefulness; in the waking state she herself retained no recollection of
what happened in the trance; in the trance she habitually spoke of her
waking self in the third person, as of some one else; the intelligence
which manifested in the trance obviously possessed powers of expression
and intellectual resources in some directions far greater than any
displayed by the waking subject. Add to this that the trance
intelligence habitually reflected the ideas in general and especially
the religious orthodoxy of her interlocutors; that on occasion she
showed knowledge of their thoughts and intentions which could not
apparently have been acquired by normal means; that she was, in
particular, extraordinarily skillful in diagnosing, prescribing for, and
occasionally foretelling the course of diseases in herself and
others--the proof must have seemed to the bystanders complete."[71]
[Footnote 71: "Modern Spiritualism," Podmore, Vol. I, p. 77.]
_The Beginnings of Trance-Mediumship_
We have here plainly enough the beginnings of trance mediumship. It
needed only unstable personalities, capable of self-induced trance
states, so to widen all this as to supply the bases of spiritistic
faith and the material for the immensely laborious investigation of the
Society for Psychical Research. In the main, however, French interest in
Mesmerism and animal magnetism took a more scientific turn and issued in
the brilliant French studies in hypnotism. Spiritualism has made little
headway in Catholic countries. The authority of the Church is thrown so
strongly against it as to prohibit the interest of the credulous and the
penetrating minds of the southern European scientists have been more
concerned with the problems of abnormal personality than the continued
existence of the discarnate.
The interest in Germany took another line. There was less scientific
investigation of hypnotism and trance states as abnormal modifications
of personality and far more interest in clairvoyance and spirit
existence. Men whose names carried weight accepted the spiritistic
explanation of phenomena ranging from broken flower pots to ghosts. Very
likely the German tendency toward mysticism and speculation explains
this. Jung followed Swedenborg and the mystics generally in affirming a
psychic body, but was a pioneer in associating it with the luminiferous
ether in a range of speculation which in our time supplies an
hypothetical scientific basis for the environment of the discarnate. (So
Sir Oliver Lodge.) Podmore concludes that the foundations of modern
Spiritualism were laid by the German magnetists of the first half of the
nineteenth century.
The movement developed along these lines till 1875. Once broadly in
action it touches at one point or another the whole region of the
occult. Many spiritualists found in Theosophy, for which existence is
the endless turning of a wheel, a cycle of death and rebirth, a
pseudo-philosophic support for their belief. Spiritualism appealed
naturally to the lovers of the mystic and the unusual and it associated
itself, to a degree, with extreme liberalism in the general development
of religion. (On the whole, however, as far as religion goes,
Spiritualism has created a religion of its own.) Its advocates were
likely to be interested in phrenology, advanced social experiments, or
modification of the marriage laws. Spiritualistic phenomena themselves
became more varied and complex; trance mediumship became a profession
with a great increase of performers; slate writing was introduced and
finally materialization was achieved. All this might mean that the
spirits were growing more adept in "getting through," the mediums more
adept in technique, or else, which is more likely, that latent abnormal
aspects of personality were being brought to light through suggestion,
imitation and exercise. But no concerted effort was made by trained and
impartial observers to eliminate fraud, collect data and reach
dependable conclusions. This has been finally attempted by the Society
for Psychical Research and the results of their laborious investigations
are now at the service of the student of the occult.
_The Society for Psychical Research Begins Its Work_
The weight which attaches to the names of many English and some
American members of the Society, the carefully guarded admission of some
of them that there is in the whole region a possible residue of
phenomena which indicate communication between the living and the
discarnate and the profoundly unsettling influence of the war, really
account for the renewed interest in Spiritualism in our own time. In
1875 a few Englishmen, one of them a famous medium--Stainton
Moses--formed a Psychological Society for the investigation of
supernormal phenomena. (In general all this account of the history of
Spiritualism is greatly condensed from Podmore and Hill and the reader
is referred to their works without specific reference.)
This first group dissolved upon the death of one of its members--though
that would seem to have been a good reason for continuing it--and in
1882 Professor (afterward Sir) William Barrett, who had already done
some experimenting and had brought hypnotism and telepathy to the notice
of the British association for the advancement of science, consulted
Stainton Moses with the view of founding a society under better auspices
and the Society for Psychical Research was organized, with Professor
Henry Sidgwick as first president. The Society undertook, according to
its own statement:
1. An examination of the nature and extent of any influence which
may be exerted by one mind upon another, otherwise than through the
recognized sensory channels.
2. The study of hypnotism and mesmerism, and an inquiry into the
alleged phenomena of clairvoyance.
3. A careful investigation of any reports, resting on testimony
sufficiently strong and not too remote, of apparitions coinciding
with some external event (as for instance a death) or giving
information previously unknown to the percipient, or being seen by
two or more persons independently of each other.
4. An inquiry into various alleged phenomena apparently
inexplicable by known laws of nature, and commonly referred by
Spiritualists to the agency of extra-human intelligences.
5. The collection and collation of existing materials bearing on
the history of these subjects.[72]
[Footnote 72: "Spiritualism," Hill, p. 100.]
They sought also "to approach these various problems without prejudice
or prepossession of any kind and in the same spirit of exact and
unimpassioned inquiry which has enabled science to solve so many
problems, once not less obscure nor less hotly debated."
As a matter of fact the region is the most obscure which inquiry has
ever been called to enter. A noble rationality pervades the whole normal
material order, causes can be controlled, effects anticipated, laws
formulated and above all, the hypotheses of science are, if true, always
capable of a luminous and splendid verification. The disciplined
intellect moves through it all with a sense of "at-homeness" which is
itself a testimony to profound correspondences between the human mind
and the order with which, during its long, long unfolding, it has been
associated in intimacies of action and reaction too close to be
adequately set forth in words. But the mind does not rest easily in the
region which Spiritism claims for its own.
_The Difficulties It Confronts_
Of course this is to beg the whole question. The more scientifically
minded spiritualists might fairly enough answer that they are attempting
to discover the laws of the occult and reduce an anarchical system to
order, that our feeling of strangeness in these regions is only because
of our little contact with them. There are, they claim, undeveloped
aspects of personality which we have had as yet little occasion to use,
but which would, once they were fully brought into action, give us the
same sense of rapport with a super-sensible order that we now have in
our contact with the sensible order. The crux of the whole contention is
probably just here and in view of what has heretofore been accomplished
in discovering and formulating the laws of the physical universe and in
reducing an immense body of apparently unrelated facts to order, there
is doubtless possible a very great systematization of psychical
phenomena, even the most obscure. Nor may we readily set bounds to the
measure of human development. But at any rate the statement with which
this paragraph began is true. The region which the Society for Psychical
Research set out to explore is obscure and is, as yet, so far from
yielding to investigation that the investigators are not even agreed as
to their facts, let alone the conclusions to be drawn from.
The proceedings of the Society literally fill volumes (thirty-two); it
would require a specialist to follow them through and an analysis here
impossible, rightly to evaluate them. When such careful investigators as
Hill and Podmore, dealing with the same body of fact, differ constantly
and diametrically in their conclusions, it is evident that the facts so
far collected have not cumulative force enough to establish in the
generality of disciplined minds a substantial unanimity of conviction.
There are far too many alternatives in the interpretation of the facts
and, in general, the personal equation of the investigator colours the
conclusions reached. Of course this is, in a measure, true in every
field of investigation, but it is outstandingly true in psychical
research.
_William James Enters the Field_
For some years the Society was mainly occupied with hypnotism and
thought transference, with occasional reports on "apparitions, haunted
houses, premonitions, automatic writing, crystal vision and multiple
personality." Professor William James' experiment with Mrs. Piper
carried the Society over into the field of trance mediumship. James had
a sound scientific interest in every aspect of the play of human
consciousness and was earlier than any of his contemporaries awakened to
the psychological value of abnormal mental states. He also loved fair
play. He made his first report on Mrs. Piper in 1886. He was unable, he
said, "to resist the conviction that knowledge appeared in her trances
which she had never gained by the ordinary waking use of her eyes, ears
and wits.... What the source of this knowledge may be, I know not, and
have not a glimmer of explanatory suggestion to make, but from admitting
the fact of such knowledge I can see no escape."
In a letter to Flourney dated August 9, 1908, James says of later
investigations: "It seems to me that these reports open a new chapter in
the history of automatism.... Evidently automatism is a word that covers
an extraordinary variety of fact." The reports of Mrs. Piper's sittings
fill a large place in the Society's records. Dr. Richard Hodgson and
Professor Hyslop were finally led to accept her trance utterances and
writings as spiritistic revelations. Podmore, after a most careful
analysis, concludes that "Mrs. Piper's trance utterances indicate the
possession of some supernormal power of apprehension, at least the
capacity to read the unspoken and even unconscious thoughts and emotions
of other minds."[73] He is willing to admit that if any case in the
whole history of Spiritualism points at communication with the spirits
of the dead, hers is that case, but he adds, "to other students of the
records, including the present writer, the evidence nevertheless appears
at present insufficient to justify the spiritualistic view even of a
working hypothesis." "I cannot point to a single instance in which a
precise and unambiguous piece of information has been furnished, of a
kind which could not have proceeded from the medium's own mind, working
upon the materials provided in the hints let drop by the sitter."[74]
[Footnote 73: "Modern Spiritualism," Podmore, Vol. II, pp. 342-343.]
[Footnote 74: "Modern Spiritualism," Podmore, Vol. II, p. 345.]
_The Limitations of the Scientist in Psychical Investigation_
It is impossible in this study to follow through the records of the
Society. A representative group of its members, some of them men whose
names carry weight in other regions, have been led by their
investigations to adopt the spiritistic hypothesis. Significantly,
however, it is generally the scientist and not the psychologist who
commits himself most strongly to Spiritism. He is strongly impressed, as
was Sir William Crookes, by phenomena of one sort or another which do
not come under his laws, and he assigns to them causes which lie
altogether out of his field. Indeed the temper and training of the
scientist handicap him in all psychical investigations. He has only one
of two alternatives: to explain what he sees in terms of what his
laboratories have told him, or else in terms of forces with which he is
not familiar. His training in careful experimentation may fit him to
test and isolate physical phenomena, but if they cannot be explained in
terms of the forces and laws with which he is familiar his conclusions
are no more authoritative than the conclusions of any other reasonably
intelligent man. He may, therefore, lend the weight of a great name to
conclusions--or conjectures--entirely outside his own province. The
element of trickery in the ordinary professional seance is
notorious.[75] The ordinary physical phenomena of spiritism have almost
without exception been duplicated by conjurers--many of whom have
mystifying tricks of their own no medium can duplicate and even the most
unusual phenomena, such as Home's apparent ability to handle fire
unburnt and his levitation can be paralleled in savage rites or the
performance of Indian fakirs, to which no professedly spiritistic
explanation is attached. In many instances a trained conjurer would be
far more apt to detect fraud than a trained scientist. He would at least
know where to look for a probable explanation.
[Footnote 75: Carrington, "The Psychical Phenomena of Spiritualism," pp.
6 and 7.]
_The Society for Psychical Research Gives Intellectual Standing to Their
Investigations_
If the explanations of the whole group of phenomena is not in the known
resident forces about us it is presumably in powers or aspects of
personality not yet fully known. Here the psychologist is a better
witness than the scientist and it is significant that psychologists have
been slower to accept the spiritistic hypothesis than the scientist.
Hyslop is an exception but the extent to which Hyslop has of late gone
in some of his reported utterances would seem to indicate that he has
passed far beyond the bonds of the scientific. And indeed, the whole
tendency of those who let themselves go strongly with the spiritistic
tide is exactly in this direction. It ought, however, to be said that
even these members of the S.P.R. who have become spiritistic have
generally been savingly conservative in their conclusions.
At any rate, the work of the Society for Psychical Research has given
intellectual standing to what was before a sort of hole and corner
affair under suspicion twice: first, because of the character of those
involved, second, because of the character of what they revealed. It is
difficult for one not predisposed toward the occult and even strongly
prejudiced against it to deny in alleged spiritistic phenomena a
challenging residuum which may in the end compel far-reaching
modifications in the conclusions both of science and psychology. By one
set of tests this residuum is unexpectedly small. One of the canons of
the S.P.R. is to reject the work of any medium once convicted or
strongly suspected of fraud. There is a vast literature in this region
through whose outstanding parts the writer has for a good while now been
trying to find his way, often enough ready to quote the Pope in the Ring
and the Book.
"I have worn through this sombre wintry day
With winter in my soul ...
Over these dismalest of documents"
The reports of sittings cover weary pages of murky statement; the
descriptions of the discarnate life are monotonously uniform and
governed almost without exception by old, old conceptions of planes and
spheres. There is always a preponderance of the trivial--though the
advocates of spiritism claim, and the justice of this claim must be
allowed, that this is inevitable and that only through the veridical
character of the inconsequential can the consequential be established.
Moreover, the impartial student working over the records should at least
recognize the pathetic importance which those, believing themselves to
be in touch with their own dead, naturally attach to even the most
trivial instances. This sense of really being in touch, itself entirely
subjective, probably carries over ninety-nine out of every hundred who
finally become spiritists. It would be foolish to ignore the
contributive force of this sense. In one form or another it is the last
element in our recognition of our friends, and it never can be judged
externally. But on the other hand a recognition of the unwarranted
lengths to which--with lonely longing behind it--it may carry even the
best poised minds, must give us pause in accepting any conclusion thus
reached.
_The Very Small Number of Dependable Mediums_
Spiritistic literature is endlessly diffuse, but on the other hand the
more dispassionate students rest their case on an unexpectedly small
body of undiscredited evidence. Mrs. Piper, Home and Stainton Moses are
the mediums with whom the case of the S.P.R. really stands or falls.
Home was never detected in fraud and was non-professional. Sir William
Crookes' experiments in these physical phenomena were carried on with
him as medium. His work, however, was generally done for a small group
of already convinced followers and their testimony, while sincere and
generally consistent, may often have been influenced in ways of which
they themselves were not conscious. Podmore thinks them to have been
unduly suggestible and offers hallucinations as an alternative
hypothesis. Stainton Moses was respected in his private life, a teacher,
a clergyman and a private tutor. His specialties were the introduction
of a great variety of articles--apports as they are called--at his
sittings, levitation, table-tipping and automatic writing and the direct
voice. His control was known as "Imperator" and this ghostly commander
fills a large place in the S.P.R. literature. "Imperator" had a strong
homiletic instinct (remember that Moses was a clergyman) and
communicated first and last through automatic writing, a considerable
exposition of the spiritualistic creed, the larger part of which could
have been preached from any liberal pulpit with no other effect on the
hearers than to win their assent to blameless commonplaces--or,
possibly, put them to sleep.
Mrs. Piper affords the strongest evidence of what Podmore calls "Some
supernormal power of apprehension" in the entire history of trance
mediumship. She was for years under the constant observation of a
capable group by no means unanimously sympathetic with the spiritistic
hypothesis, and has never been detected in fraud. She contributed a very
great amount of information to her sitters which she apparently could
not and did not obtain from known sources. There are no physical
phenomena in connection with her work. The records of her seances fill a
large place in the proceedings of the S.P.R. and the case for spiritism
could be more safely rested with her than any other medium.
But the point here is that these three--Home, Moses and Mrs.
Piper--supply the larger part of material which the really trained
investigators of the last forty years are at all willing to take
seriously. If there have been only three mediums in forty years who have
commanded the general confidence--and Podmore does not feel absolutely
sure of Home--of the group whose judgment the rest of us have to depend
upon, we have a situation in which the average untrained seeker dealing
with the average medium can have no sound confidence at all. The whole
region is shot through and through with uncertainties, deceits and
alternative hypotheses.
_Spiritism a Question of Testimony and Interpretation_
It is all fundamentally a matter of testimony. We have, or we have not,
a body of fact for which we are in debt to observation. The observation
may be first hand--as in Sir Oliver Lodge's sittings where he reports
what he saw and heard. It may be second hand as the cases reported in
the larger part of the authoritative literature of psychic phenomena.
(Second hand, that is, for the authors and those who depend upon them.)
Trustworthy observation is probably more difficult here than in any
region of investigation. The whole situation is unfavourable; low lights
and high emotion, the instinctive tendency to read into the facts a
desired content even in watching them, the possibility of hallucinations
and forms of hypnosis, all combine to render human testimony unreliable
and introduce errors of observation. Nowhere can we be less sure of our
facts and even when the facts are admitted the interpretation of them
still remains, and here the room for difference is equally great. At
best we are dealing with forces not yet subdued to law, phenomena for
which normal experience supplies no parallel. It is all a region of
intimations and possible permissions, but never for a moment of
inevitable conclusions. One must go slow enough in offering any opinion
at all. The writer recognizes and accepts, to begin with, a
preponderance of dependable testimony for physical phenomena not to be
explained in terms of any force with which science is now familiar.
In this he goes beyond Podmore who would eliminate all physical
phenomena from the problem, and fully as far as Carrington. But Sir
William Crookes never admitted entire error in this region,[76] and the
conclusions of Geley (though he cites in part Eusapia Palladino, who is
more or less discredited) point in the same direction. His studies of
materialization are so vivid as to be uncanny and his photographs a
series of documents which still await explanation.[77] There would seem
to be a possible exercise of personal force not dependent upon muscular
pull or pressure, bodily movements operating against known laws and even
the building of this mysterious force into complete or fragmentary
body-like forms.
[Footnote 76: See Carrington, "The Physical Phenomena of Spiritualism,"
p. 377.]
[Footnote 77: Geley, "From the Unconscious to the Conscious."]
On the psychical side there is dependable evidence for information
conveyed by supernormal means across considerable spaces--possibly long
distances and the power to secure and report information not gained in
any normal way. These are bare statements capable of great
amplification. But they cover the ground.
_Three Possible Explanations of So-Called Spiritistic Phenomena_
Admitting the facts, there are three possible explanations. First, the
Daimonistic. There are, according to this theory, in the unseen
world--wherever and whatever that may be--an order of beings akin to
ourselves, either less or more highly developed, mischievous or benign.
This is an old, old belief; it has pervaded animistic religions,
fathered witchcraft, persisted in the belief of demoniac control,
enriched folk lore, filled the friendly silences of the night with
terror and haunted humanity. Now it has found its renaissance in the
full blaze of Twentieth Century Science.
"It seems not improbable," says Sir William Barrett, "that many of the
_physical_ manifestations witnessed in a spiritualistic seance are the
product of human-like but not really human intelligence--good or bad
daimonia they may be, _elementals_ some have called them, which
aggregate round the medium; drawn from that particular plane of mental
and moral development in the unseen which corresponds to the mental and
moral plane of the medium."[78] This is, with little enough alteration,
the very point from which we set out in the remote dawn of our endeavour
to interpret the mystery of the world about us. The only difference is
that Sir William has his daimon for a tipping table and the savage had
his for a flowing spring. Sir William may be right but primitive man was
wrong. The whole trend of science heretofore has been to eliminate
capricious and isolated elements from observed phenomena and include
them in a sweep of law for whose operation the resident forces in the
universe and human personality are seen to be sufficient. The
daimonistic hypothesis has always up to this time been proved not only
unnecessary but positively misleading. It belongs to a region where
proof and disproof are equally impossible, but the weight of experience
and especially all our truer understandings of ourselves and our world,
dearly bought through the intellectual travail of our race, are against
it. To accept it is really to turn back the clock and populate the
unseen again with the creation of our fears or our fancies. It is at the
best the too easy solution of a challenging problem, at the worst an
aspect of that renaissance of superstition which is one of the strangest
characteristics of our own time.
[Footnote 78: "On the Threshold of the Unseen," p. 113.]
The second explanation is spiritistic. There are unseen presences but
they are the discarnate who seek in the more trivial phenomena to bring
themselves to our attention and in the more important to assure us of
their continued existence and satisfy their longing and ours in renewed
personal contacts. Given a faith in immortality, this explanation is
natural enough--even inevitable. If the discarnate still live they must
remember and desire. Death does not end affection on our side. It should
not end affection on their side. There must be, moreover, what one may
call a discarnate status--an order, that is, of relationships and
activities in which discarnate personality realizes and expresses
itself. Our racial curiosities about the state of the dead are
quenchless. Every religion has its creeds, its dreams, its assurances.
From the Nirvana of the Buddhist to the ardent paradise of the
Mohammedan, faith and longing have built their structure and peopled it
with their dead. Great ranges of literature are coloured by such
speculations. Christian hymnology is instinct with them and not a little
of our noblest poetry. We have set our hells over against our heavens
and opposed their terror to celestial splendours. Modern Spiritualism
has to head it the whole drive of such speculations as these. For if the
generality have been content to leave the solution of the very great
difficulties which any faith in immortality involves, to the
demonstrations of eventual experience, and rest in what is really the
poetry of their faith, others either more curious or more credulous seek
the testimony of the senses. Such as these naturally find what they seek
in the phenomena of trance mediumship. They believe that the discarnate
are constantly seeking to penetrate the veil between their order and
ours and avail themselves of every opportunity to recall themselves to
the memory of the incarnate.
_Myers' Theory of Mediumship_
F.W.H. Myers undertakes to describe how this may be done from the point
of view of the spirit. "Seeking then for some open avenue, it discerns
something which corresponds to a _light_--a glimmer of translucency in
the confused darkness of our material world. This 'light' indicates a
_sensitive_--a human organism so constituted that a spirit can
temporarily _inform_ or _control_ it, not necessarily interrupting the
stream of the sensitive's ordinary consciousness; perhaps using a hand
only, or perhaps, as in Mrs. Piper's case, using voice as well as hand,
and occupying all the sensitive's channels of self-manifestation."
There are, naturally, in all this unescapable elements of speculation.
As a matter of fact anything which we may imagine about the discarnate
life may be almost unbelievably wide of the mark. Memory more than
anything else is the binding force in personality. We know ourselves to
be in the morning what we were when we went to sleep the night before,
simply because memory reassembles immediately the continuing elements of
our individual existences. More than that, we are greatly helped by our
surroundings; everything which meets us in the morning has associations
by which memory is served and, therefore, by the almost automatic
process of putting together what we remember and surrendering ourselves
to the suggestions of what we see and meet we find our places in a
waking, working world and go about our business.
If we were to awake in a totally strange world where nothing was in any
degree at all similar to the world in which we went to sleep, we might
find ourselves so sadly puzzled as to doubt our own identity, even
though memory persisted in its identifying suggestion. And if in
addition to this we found ourselves without the contribution of physical
sensation to which we have always been used--sightless, soundless,
touchless--one can easily imagine a shock in the face of which even the
most strongly centered personality would give way. And yet such changes
as this probably only faintly indicate the adjustments which the
discarnate are called upon to meet. It is as if we were asked to argue
or to imagine from one dimension to another.
These are difficulties, of course, which attend any conception of
immortality, but we usually escape them by refusing to follow through
what they involve and taking refuge in a free poetic imagination
sustained by faith and enriched by tradition. In the face of all this
Myers' supposition, ingenious as it is, can do no more than repeat the
more prosaic assumption which is the basis of spiritism, and that is
that the discarnate naturally desire to communicate with those whom they
have left, one hardly dares say behind them for even that simple word
introduces suppositions which may have no meaning at all, and would
naturally avail themselves of any possible opportunity. The whole
process, if it be a process, must lie in the region of suggestion. If
there be a telepathy between the living it is not impossible that there
should be a telepathy between the living and the discarnate.
_Telepathy: Between the Living or the Living and the Discarnate?_
There might be thus a kind of eager pressing of the departed against
the doors which had been shut and not quite locked behind them, taking
the form of more or less obscure suggestion to which the medium would be
sensitive and so recreate in ways at which we can only guess some hint
of the voice or presence of the discarnate. The suggestion would come
from the other side. The form in which it is given to our world would be
the contribution of the medium. As far as there is any possible
explanation of the facts of trance mediumship as a revelation from the
dead it is somewhere here.
Telepathy between the living is fairly well enough established to make
this a not impossible hypothesis, and even materialization might be
accounted for in the same way. Sir Oliver Lodge is inclined to discover
in the luminiferous ether an environment in which discarnate personality
could function. But this is pure supposition, though others have adopted
it. Walker, for example, in his extremely suggestive work on Monism and
Christian Theism. But he suggests the ether only as a help to the
imagination in meeting the difficulties of an immortal existence--the
old Heaven and Hell having been made astronomically and geologically
impossible. But if Einstein should upset the hypothesis of the ether all
this would go the way of the Heaven and Hell of Dante.
We cannot eliminate, however, in a supposition so vague as this the
contributive elements supplied by the friends themselves to whom the
communication is supposed to be addressed and by whom it is certainly
interpreted, for if the trance medium is open to suggestion from the
discarnate side, the medium must be equally open to suggestion from the
living, a suggestion likely to be very much stronger, more distinct,
more compelling.
The real crux of the whole problem is the disentanglement of these
possible lines of suggestion and the assignment of them to their true
sources. We may, the writer believes, eliminate as far as their
evidential value is concerned, all physical phenomena. In doing this we
need not necessarily deny the reality of some of the physical phenomena
but the larger part of the residue which might possibly be left after
the elimination of fraud on the part of the medium and unintentional
misrepresentation on the part of the witnesses is so utterly meaningless
as to have no value at all. The only physical phenomena which can have
any direct bearing on spirit communication are the tappings and table
tippings which can by a deal of ingenuity be made to spell out a message
or answer questions yes or no. The same question as to the source of the
suggestion enters here. Even if we admit the taps to spell out a
message, we have still to decide from whom the message comes and the
messages alleged to be contributed through the voice are so much more
full and intelligible as to leave the whole question standing or falling
with the credibility of voice trance mediumship.
_Controls_
The usual machinery of a seance creates suspicion. Most mediums have
controls. Nothing is more capricious than these controls. They may be
people who really never existed at all. The genesis of Mrs. Piper's
control, Dr. Phinuit, is suggestive. "It would appear that Mrs. Piper in
1884 had visited for advice a professional clairvoyant whose leading
control claimed to be a Frenchman named Finne, or Finnett."[79] When
Mrs. Piper was later seen by William James, a French doctor had
succeeded in obtaining almost exclusive control and his name was
reported to be Phinuit. Beyond debate, as far as name goes, here is a
kind of transmuted suggestion. The Finnett of the French clairvoyant,
who may or may not have really lived, becomes the Phinuit of Mrs. Piper,
for whose existence there is apparently no testimony at all.
[Footnote 79: Podmore's "Modern Spiritualism," Vol. II, p. 333.]
The controls have sometimes been Indians and indeed almost any one may
appear as a control--Longfellow, for example, or Mrs. Siddons, or Bach
or Vanderbilt. In a region where disproof and proof are equally
impossible this element of capricious control is suspicious. It is much
more likely to be some obscure casting up of the medium's mind, through
lines of association of which the medium is utterly unconscious, than to
represent the personalities so named. In Raymond the control is one
Moonstone, or a little Indian girl called Freda or Feda, who speaks of
herself in the third person and who reports a great many silly things in
a very silly way.
It is possible, of course, to say that these thus named are spirit
mediums as necessary for the transfer of suggestion from the discarnate
order as mediums seem to be in the incarnate order, and that abnormal
personalities are as much needed on one side as the other through the
abnormality of the whole process. But this is patently to beg the
question. There is room in the whole process for the trivial, even the
inconsequential. As the advocates of spiritism have urged,
identification very often turns on apparently trivial things but it is
difficult to justify the very great element of the capricious and
actually foolish which enters so largely into the records of all
sittings. It would seem as if death robbed grave personalities of their
gravity, the strong of their force and the wise of their wisdom, and
this is so hard to believe as to make us wonder whether we are not
really dealing with something which belongs to an entirely different
region and is open to an entirely different line of explanation.
But beyond such considerations as these, which may or may not have
force, there remains the graver question still--the question of the
identification of the sources from which the intelligible residue of
communications is received. If we fall back upon suggestion there are
always two general sources of suggestion--the incarnate and the
discarnate, and among the incarnate themselves there are manifold
sources of suggestion. The sitter may be unconsciously supplying the
material which the medium is receiving, recasting and giving back again,
or the medium may be reporting what is received from other incarnate
sources than the sitter. (This, of course, when we have eliminated all
that might possibly be contributed by the medium.)
_The Dilemma of Spiritism_
Anything, therefore, which is known to the living may be the source of
the medium's information. Only those things, therefore, which are
utterly unknown to the living anywhere, which cannot possibly have been
known by the medium himself or herself, can be finally and conclusively
a testimony to communications from the dead. But unless the information
thus received is known to the living, its truth or falsity can never be
proved or disproved. This is the dilemma which spiritism is finally
brought to face and from this dilemma there is absolutely no escape. It
does not forbid the conclusions which may be drawn from a seeming
preponderance of evidence, but it does forbid absolute certainty, for,
to repeat, if the information is to be verified it must be verified by
the living, which proves that some one does possess it and may have
communicated it--if we assume such communication to be possible--to the
medium. On the other hand, if no one at all possesses the information,
then we may never be sure that it is real information, or anything else
than a creation of an excited imagination.
There is one test here which, if it were really made under absolutely
dependable conditions, conditions, that is, in no wise open to suspicion
or misunderstanding, might be final. If a message written before death
and so sealed as to be unknown to any one save the one who wrote it,
could be correctly reported, it would have, everything else being
right, an immense force. (Though even here clairvoyance--for which, on
the whole, there is a pretty dependable evidence--might afford the true
explanation.) F.W.H. Myers left such a message as this. In January,
1891, he sent Sir Oliver Lodge a "sealed envelope, in the hope that
after his death the communication contained in the envelope would be
able to be given by means of a medium. Many different messages obtained
by a well-known medium, Madame Verrall, and coming supposedly from
Frederick Myers, led them to believe that they represented this
communication. The envelope was opened in December, 1904, and 'it was
found that there was no resemblance between its actual contents and what
was alleged by the script to be contained in it.'"[80] If there is any
authentic case of this final test being successfully maintained, the
writer does not know it. There are instances of hidden articles
discovered, but these tests by no means possess the same force of
testimony.
[Footnote 80: Boirac, "The Psychology of the Future," p. 278.]
We may assume, then, that we have no absolute demonstration of spirit
communication. We have only a very complex group of phenomena capable of
varying explanations. Any fair-minded student of the whole subject must
recognize that men who have had ample opportunity for first hand
investigation, not hasty in their conclusions and in some instances of
very great intellectual force, have taken an opposite view. They have
felt the testimony to be both sound and sufficient. There is an
unescapable personal equation here which probably finally determines
divergent attitudes. As has been said before, those generally who have
accepted the spiritistic explanation have been led to do so through
communications in which they discovered some personal note or touch, to
which they themselves would be hospitably susceptible and which would
have far less weight with those whose affections and previous
associations were not thus involved. This does not necessarily prove
their conclusions to have been false. Perhaps just this personal element
is necessary to give final meaning to what otherwise is so perplexing
and even contradictory. The dogmatism which shuts the door squarely in
the face of spiritism is as unreasonable, as unscientific, as the
credulity which opens the door wide and accepts everything which comes
through.
_The Influence of Spiritism Upon Its Adherents_
There are other considerations which bear more or less indirectly upon
this difficult matter, but which have their weight. In general, those
who have whole-heartedly accepted spiritism have been unable thereafter
to maintain the balanced detachment which they urge upon others. They
tend to become unduly credulous; they force their explanation beyond its
necessary limits; they tend to become persons of the idee fixe type;
they become sponsors for extravagant stories, and, in general, lead
those who are influenced by their position or name far beyond the limits
which impartial investigation, even on the part of those sympathetic,
has as yet justified. Those descriptions of the discarnate state,
moreover, which reach us through mediums are undependable.
There is a machinery of planes and spheres and emanations and
reincarnations which is not at all peculiar to spiritism but belongs to
the fringes of the occult in every manifestation of it, which is
perpetually recurrent in modern spiritualistic literature. We are on the
frontiers of a region where the reason which steadies us in the
practical conduct of life and guides us in an order with which we are
familiar through age-old inheritances, has no value at all. Our very
terminology ceases to have any meaning. A generous creative imagination
may build for itself what cities it will of habitation, furnish them as
it desires and try to conceive, as it has power, the experiences and
progressions of the discarnate, but to invest these imaginations with
evidential accuracy is to break down all the limits between the
dependable and the undependable.
And finally, though this is rather a commonplace observation than an
aspect of our investigation, there is little to be gained in the
necessary business of solid living by such an interweaving of the two
worlds as spiritism carries with it. One life at a time is plainly
enough all that we are equal to. Those who surrender themselves to such
conclusions and inquiries are in very great danger of being so detached
from the actualities of the present order as to become themselves errant
and eccentric spirits, finding their true interests in endless seances
and investigations which have no practical bearing upon life as it now
is.
_The Real Alternative to Spiritism_
The writer's observation of the effect of much going to mediums upon
those whom he has personally known leads him to distrust the whole
matter and possibly to react too strongly against it. A discriminating
critic has said that Spiritualism is not Spiritualism at all, but a
subtle materialism, in that it is the effort to verify the reality of
the spiritual in terms of the material. It is, therefore, just one more
unexpected aspect of the hard skepticism of the time, which trusts
nothing it cannot hear, or see, or touch. A faith which is not solidly
established in reason, which does not continue and complete in its own
regions what we know and understand, is a cloud-built faith, but a
faith, on the other hand, which refuses to adventure beyond the limits
of the senses is a faith too largely empty of any noble content.
If the phenomena under examination, then, cannot be explained in terms
of animism and if the spiritistic hypothesis is gravely open to
question, what explanation is left? In what follows the writer has been
greatly influenced by the suggestion of the students of abnormal
personality generally, and partly by the work of certain Frenchmen who,
with French logic and brilliancy of insight, are working toward
far-reaching psychological restatements and even to recasting of the
accepted scientific understandings of matter and force. Maeterlinck says
somewhere in substance that our universe is as tightly sealed as a
sphere of steel and that whatever happens inside must be explained in
terms of its own resident forces, and, in general, the whole of science
and the weight of experience are on Maeterlinck's side. Of course this
assumes that a good many things have been put inside this sphere to
begin with. Speaking in terms of religion, this does not shut God out of
the world, but it does shut up life and experience to conformity with
their own laws and forces them to explain their phenomena in terms of
their own content.
In a sentence, just as the resident forces of the outside world have
been heretofore sufficient, in the measure that we have been able to
discover them, to explain all the phenomena of the outside world, it is
reasonable to believe that the content of personality is sufficient to
explain all personal phenomena, whether normal or abnormal, and that it
is to ourselves and not to the discarnate that we have to look for the
explanation of the phenomena of alleged spiritism.
_The Investigations of Emile Boirac_
The men who are working along this line, particularly Geley and Emile
Boirac, by no means deny the phenomena, but they offer another solution.
Boirac, particularly, finds his point of departure in hypnotism and
suggestibility. Now here is a continuation of the line of approach and
interpretation which cleared up the whole confused matter of mesmerism.
We have already seen how the French investigators found the explanation
of what Mesmer and those who followed him have been able to accomplish,
not in magnetic influence or any such thing, but in the remarkable
changes produced in personality by exterior or autosuggestion, and just
as this was the key to the phenomena of mesmerism, it is more likely
than anything else to prove the key to the explanation of the phenomena
of spiritualism, for these are really nothing more than simply aspects
of the trance state, however induced.
It is not necessary to follow, in this connection, Boirac's analysis of
the phenomena attendant upon the trance state, or to consider his
theories as to hypnosis itself. He believes that there are in our
personalities hidden forces which, in the normal conduct of life, are
not brought into action. They are no necessary part of our adjustment to
our working environment; on the whole they complicate rather than
simplify the business of living and they are best--though this is not
his statement but the writer's conclusion from the whole matter--they
are best left unawakened. What we are normally is the outcome of the
adjustment of personality to those creative and shaping forces in
response to which life is most happily and usefully carried on. But when
the waking self and normal self is for the moment put in abeyance and
new forces are evoked from the "vasty deep" of our souls, we are capable
of an entirely different set of manifestations. First of all, those
usually associated with the hypnotic state which do not need to be
further considered here--a great docility to suggestion, unconsciousness
to pain and the like. We have also the possibility of powers which
Boirac calls magnetoidal. "These appear to involve the intervention of
forces still unknown, distinct from those that science has so far
discovered and studied, but of a physical nature and more or less
analogous to the radiating forces of physics: light, heat, electricity,
magnetism, etc."[81]
[Footnote 81: Boirac, "The Psychology of the Future," p. 24. Some recent
French investigations seem to indicate that this force--Myers'
Telekinesis--operating through barriers, changes the magnetic properties
of that through which it passes. Carrington, the most skeptical student
in this region, is inclined to admit its existence. See "The Physical
Phenomena of Spiritualism," p. 359.]
Under this general head he considers Animal Magnetism, what is known
generally as mesmerism, the power, that is, to create hypnotic states in
others; the phenomena of Telepathy "comprising numerous varieties, such
as the transmission or penetration of thought, the exteriorization of
the sensitiveness, psychometry, telepathy, clairvoyance or lucidity,
etc.," and finally states "where physical matter appears to exert over
animate beings, especially human beings, an action that does not seem to
be explicable by any physical or chemical properties already known." He
believes also that there is in human beings a radiating influence
susceptible of being exercised at a distance over other animate beings
or else upon inanimate objects. He finds in trance mediumship all the
elements which enter into any hypnotic state. "The trance is produced
and developed spontaneously, without the intervention of any visible
operator, under the sole effect of the nervous and mental conditions in
which the medium is placed, and among which the _belief in spirits_ and
the expectation of their intervention would appear to play a
considerable part."[82] The italicized words "a belief in spirits" are
extremely significant. In the entranced personality there is the
suggestion, already strongly established, that whatever is experienced
during the trance will be due to spirit intervention or revelation. This
introduces the element of expectant attention. We know on the physical
side of what expectant attention is capable. It becomes a real factor in
all faith healing; it may produce, either for the better or the worse,
far-reaching changes in physical states and it is perfectly possible for
such an expectant attention once fully in action in the trance--given of
course, to begin with, the attitude and interests of the medium in a
waking state--to create all the machinery of controls, revelation and
the like, which characterize trance mediumship.
[Footnote 82: Boirac, "The Psychology of the Future," p. 271.]
Boirac finds, therefore, in spiritism a complex determined by certain
particular nervous and mental states into which there enter, in one form
or another, almost all the facts of abnormal psychology and he believes
that science, faithful to the principle of economy, should consider the
alleged phenomena of spiritism, until proved to the contrary, reducible
to facts of the preceding orders. He does not call the spiritistic
hypothesis impossible; he does believe it ought not to be called in
until every other explanation has been examined and found inadequate and
he is not inclined to believe that we have as yet exhausted other
possible explanations.
One man's authority here is by no means final. F.W.H. Myers has taken
into consideration many of the facts upon which Boirac dwells and on the
whole has reached a different conclusion. But, in general, the more
deeply we advance into the region of abnormal personality and the
phenomena of hypnotic and related states, the more reason there seems to
be for believing that there are resident in human personality powers
which, if at once evoked and released, are sufficient to account for all
mediumistic revelations without assuming that they come from the
discarnate.
_Geley's Conclusions_
Geley has gone much farther in some directions here than any one else.
He is more concerned with the physical phenomena. He has a striking
series of photographs of materialization, the authenticity of which it
is difficult to doubt. He finds an ascending series in abnormal
psychology from neuropathic states to mediumship with gradations which
intensify the abnormal or the supernormal, but in which the continuity
of development is never broken. His analyses here are both keen and
suggestive and tend to confirm the conclusions of other students that we
have resident in human personality elements which are adequate to the
explanation of any phenomena which have been as yet presented.
As far as the physical phenomena go, he cites experiments which seem to
reveal "threads of substance and rigid rods, sometimes visible,
sometimes invisible, proceeding from the fingers of the medium" and
serving as a real mechanism for the movement of distant and sometimes
quite heavy articles. He argues from this that there is a possible
exteriorization of power which may itself be governed by ideas and
believes also that such facts as this will eventually compel us to
recast our conceptions of matter and force and profoundly affect biology
and all evolutionary theories. The whole matter is necessarily obscure,
but such studies do give a new direction and a larger significance to
our whole subject matter.
In substance the spiritistic hypothesis is inadequate; it is too simple,
too easy. We are evidently only upon the threshold of the whole subject.
All conclusions are necessarily inconclusive; there is no region in
which one has less right to be dogmatic. The bearing of it all upon
immortality seems to the writer to be not at all where the spiritists
place it. If human personality has in itself such latent powers, if
there are these extensions of a mysterious force which operate beyond
our normal mechanism, if there are contacts of consciousness deeper than
consciousness itself in which information is given and received outside
normal methods of communication, we are led to conceive that what for
want of a better name we call spirit has an unexpected range and force.
We are by no means so shut in by the walls of the material and the
sensible as we have heretofore supposed. There is a transcendence of
spirit over matter and materially imposed conditions which must give us
pause. If, in the murky ways which have been brought to our attention,
spirit can transcend matter, we have at least one more reason for
affirming its supremacy and one more suggestion of a force or a reality
which may be able to survive even the dissolution of matter itself. In
other words, here is a line of testimony, richly suggestive, though by
no means clear, to the power of the soul to make its own conditions, and
what is immortality but just this?
The phenomena of so-called spiritism, while not as yet justifying
Spiritualism, certainly make a dogmatic materialism increasingly
different. Those of us who are as anxious for a sustaining faith in
immortality as any of our comrades in the great quest may possibly be,
but who are as yet unwilling to accept their conclusions, may
nevertheless find in this subject matter which is common both to us and
to them, the permission to believe that that which is most distinctly
ourselves possesses enduring possibilities. If it may from time to time
break through in curious ways the walls which now shut it in, may it not
in some very real way pass through the gate which Death opens and still
continue in such a richness of consciousness and identity as to organize
for itself another life beyond the grave?
_The Meaning of Spiritism for Faith_
Faith may find its permissions and witnesses in many regions. The writer
believes that faith in immortality finds an added permission in this
region also. Beyond debate, there are laws which we now but dimly
discern and possible forces which only now and again touch the coasts of
our present experience, as tides which sweep in from distant and
mysterious seas. Beyond debate, we may not confine the interplay of mind
with mind to purely physical channels, and under exceptional
circumstances effects may be produced whose causes we have not yet been
able to tabulate. Our conscious lives are rooted deeper than we dream.
They reach out in directions which we do not ourselves know. It may well
be, therefore, that they ascend to heights whose summits we do not see,
and possess a permanence independent of the body which they inhabit, or
the things of seeming sense which surround them, and it may be also that
what is now occult and perplexing and capricious may in the future
become as truly an organized science as the alchemy and the astrology of
the Middle Ages have become the chemistry and astronomy of our own time.
Beyond this one may assert the wholesome commonplace that the main
business of living is in the region of the known and the normal. It is
for our own well-being that the veil hangs dark between this world and
the next. An order in which there was constant passing and repassing
would be impossible. It would be either one thing or the other. It does
demoralize us to be always searching after the secrets of the unseen.
Might it not demoralize those who have passed through the veil to be
always trying to come back? Surely the most fitting preparation for what
awaits us hereafter is the brave conduct of life under those laws and
conditions which are the revelation of the whole solid experience of our
race. Beyond this it is difficult to go and beyond this it is not
necessary to go.