THE EVIDENCE FOR SURVIVAL
(Discusses the data of psychic research, and the proofs of
spiritism thus put before us.)
Let us now take up the question of survival of personality after death
from the strictly scientific point of view; let us consider what facts
we have, and the indications they seem to give. First, we know that to
all appearances the consciousness and the subconsciousness are bound up
with the body. They grow with the body, they decline with the body, they
seem to die with the body. We can irretrievably damage the consciousness
by drawing a whiff of cyanogen gas into the lungs, or by sticking a pin
into the brain, or by clogging one of its tiny blood vessels with waste
matter. It is terrible to us to think that the mind of a great poet or
prophet or statesman may be snuffed out of existence in such a way; but
then, it is no argument against a fact to say that it is terrible.
Insanity is terrible, war is terrible, pestilence is terrible, so also
are tigers and poisonous snakes; but all these things exist, and all
these things have power over the wisest and greatest mind, to put an end
to its work on this earth at least.
And now we come with the new instrument of psychic research, to probe
the question: What becomes of this consciousness when it disappears? Can
we prove that it is still in existence, and is able by any method to
communicate with us? Those who answer "Yes" argue that the mind of the
dead person, unable to use its own bodily machinery any longer, manages
in the hypnotic trance to use the bodily machinery of another person,
called a "medium," and by it to make some kind of record to identify
itself.
This, of course, is a strange idea, and requires a good deal of proof.
The law of probability requires us not to accept an unlikely
explanation, if there is any more simple one which can account for the
facts. When we examine the product of automatic writing, table-tipping,
and other psychic phenomena, we have first to ask ourselves, Is there
anything in all this which cannot be explained by what we already know?
Then, second, we have to ask, Is there any other supposition which will
explain the facts, and which is easier to believe than the spirit
theory?
These "spirits" apparently desire to convince us of their reality, and
they tell us many things which are expected to convince us; they tell us
things which we ourselves do not know, and which spirits might know. But
here again we run up against the problem of the subconsciousness, with
its infinite mass of "forgotten" knowledge. It is not so easy for the
"spirits" to tell us things which we can be sure our subconscious mind
could not possibly contain. Also, there comes the additional element of
telepathy. It appears to be a fact that under trance conditions, or
under any especially exciting conditions of the consciousness, one mind
can reach out and take something out of another mind, or one mind can
cause something to be passed over to another mind; and so information
can be communicated to the mind of a medium, and can appear in automatic
writing, or in clairvoyance, or in crystal gazing.
One of the most conscientious and earnest of all the investigators of
this subject was the late Professor Hyslop, who many years ago sought to
teach me "practical morality" (from the bourgeois point of view) in
Columbia University. Professor Hyslop worked for fifteen years with a
medium by the name of Mrs. Piper, who was apparently sincere and was
never exposed in any kind of fraud. In Professor Hyslop's books you will
find innumerable instances of amazing facts brought out in Mrs. Piper's
trances. You will find Professor Hyslop arguing that the only way
telepathy can account for these facts is by the supposition that there
is a universal subconscious mind, or that the subconscious mind of the
medium possesses the power to reach into the subconscious mind of every
other living person and take out anything from it. But for my part, I
cannot see that the case is quite so difficult. Professor Hyslop
recites, for example, how Mrs. Piper would tell him facts about some
long dead relative--facts which he did not know, but was later able to
verify. But that proves simply nothing at all, because there could be no
possible way for Professor Hyslop to be sure that he had never known
these facts about his relatives. The facts might have been in his
subconscious mind without having ever been in his conscious mind at all;
he might have heard people talking about these matters while he was
reading a book, or playing as a boy, paying no attention to what was
said.
And then came Sir Oliver Lodge with his investigations. I will say this
for his work--he was the first person who was able to make real to my
mind the startling idea that perhaps after all the dead might be alive
and able to communicate with us. You will find what he has to say in his
book, "The Survival of Man," and it seems fair that a great scientist
and a great man should have a chance to convince you of what seem to him
the most important facts in the world.
Sir Oliver's son Raymond was killed in the war, and it is claimed that
he began at once to communicate with his family. Among other things, he
told them of the existence of a picture, which none of them had ever
seen or heard of, a group photograph which he described in detail. But,
of course, other people in this group knew of the existence of the
photograph, and so we have again the possibility that some member of Sir
Oliver's family may have taken into his subconscious mind without
knowing it an impression or description of that picture. If you care to
experiment, you will find that you can frequently play a part in the
dreams of a child by talking to it in its sleep; and that is only one of
a thousand different ways by which some member of a family might
acquire, without knowing it, information of the existence of a
photograph.
There is another possibility to be considered--that a portion of the
consciousness may survive, and not necessarily forever. We are
accustomed when death takes place to see the body before us, and we know
that we can preserve the body for thousands of years if we wish. Why is
it not possible that when conscious life is brought to a sudden end,
there may remain some portion of the consciousness, or of the
subconsciousness, cut off from the body, and slowly fading back into the
universal mind energy, whatever we please to call it? There is a hard
part of the body, the skeleton, which survives for some time; why might
there not be a central core of the mind which is similarly tough and
enduring? Of course, if consciousness is a function of the brain, it
must decay as the brain decays; but how would it be if the brain were a
function of the consciousness--which is, so far as I can see, quite as
likely a guess.
I find many facts which seem to indicate the plausibility of this idea.
I notice that in trance phenomena it is the spirits of those recently
dead which seem to manifest the most vitality. Of course, you can go to
any seance in the "white light" district of your city and receive
communications from the souls of Caesar and Napoleon and Alexander the
Great and Pocahontas, and if the medium does not happen to be literary,
you can communicate with Hamlet and Don Quixote and Siegfried and
Achilles; but you will not find much reality about any of these people,
they will not tell you very much about the everyday details of their
lives. This fact that so much of what the "spirits" tell us is of our
own time tends to cast doubt on the idea that the dead survive forever.
How simple it would be to convince us, if the spirit of Sophocles would
come back to earth and tell us where to dig in order to find copies of
his lost tragedies! You would think that the soul of Sophocles, seeing
our great need of beauty and wisdom, would be interested to give us his
works! From genius, operating under the guidance of the conscious mind,
we get sublimity, majesty and power; but what the trance mediums give us
suggests, both in its moral and intellectual quality, the operation of
the subconscious. It is exactly like what we get, for example, from
dissociated personalities.
There are, to be sure, the books of Patience Worth, produced by the
automatic writing of a lady in St. Louis, who tells us in evident good
faith that her conscious personality is entirely innocent of Patience,
and all her thought and doings. Patience writes long novels and dramas
in a quaint kind of old English, and the lady in St. Louis knows nothing
about this language. But does she positively know that when she was a
child, she never happened to be in the room with someone who was reading
old English aloud? Nothing seems more likely than that her subconscious
mind heard some quaint, strange language, and took possession of it, and
built up a personality around it, and even made a new language and a new
literature from that starting point.
That is precisely the kind of thing in which the subconscious revels. It
creates new characters, with an imagination infinite and inexhaustible.
Who has not waked up and been astounded at the variety and reality of a
dream? Who has not told his dreams and laughed over them? The
subconscious will play at games, it will act and rehearse elaborate
roles; it will put on costumes, and delight in being Caesar and Napoleon
and Alexander the Great and Pocahontas and Hamlet and Don Quixote and
Siegfried and Achilles. Yes, it will even play at being "spirits"! It
will be mischievous and impish; it will be swallowed up with a sense of
its own importance, taking an insolent delight in convincing the world's
most learned scientists of the fact that its play-acting is reality. It
will call itself "Raymond" to move and thrill a grief-stricken family;
it will call itself "Phinuit" and "Dr. Hodgson," and cause an earnest
professor of "practical morality" to give up a respectable position in
Columbia University and write books to convince the world that the dead
are sending him messages.
Consider, for example, the multiple personality of Miss Beauchamp.
Remember that here we are not dealing with any guess work about
"spirits"; here we have half a dozen different "controls," none of them
the least bit dead, but all of them a part of the consciousness of one
entirely alive young lady. A specialist has spent some six years
investigating the case, day after day, week after week, writing down the
minute details of what happens. And now consider the miscreant known as
"Sally." Sally is just as real as any child whom you ever held in your
arms. Sally has love and hate, fear and hope, pain and delight--and
Sally is a little demon, created entirely out of the subconsciousness of
a highly refined and conscientious young college graduate of Boston.
Sally spends Miss Beauchamp's money on candy, and eats it; Sally pawns
Miss Beauchamp's watch and deliberately loses the ticket; Sally uses
Miss Beauchamp's lips and tongue to tell lies about Miss Beauchamp;
Sally strikes Miss Beauchamp dumb, or makes her hear exactly the
opposite of what is spoken to her. Yes, and Sally pleads and fights
frantically for her life; Sally enters into intrigues with other parts
of Miss Beauchamp, and for years deliberately fools Doctor Prince, who
is her Recording Angel and Heavenly Judge!
And can anybody doubt that Sally could have fooled a grieving mother,
and made that mother think she was talking to the ghost of a long lost
child? Can anybody doubt that Sally could and would play the part of any
person she had ever known, or of any historic character she had ever
read about? And don't overlook the all-important fact that the conscious
Miss Beauchamp was absolutely innocent of all this, and was horrified
when she was told about it. So here you have the following situation, no
matter of guesswork, but definitely established: your dearest friend may
act as a medium, and in all good faith may bring to the surface some
part of his or her subconsciousness, which masquerades before you in a
hundred different roles, and plays upon you with deliberate malice the
most subtle and elaborate and cruel tricks.
And how much worse the situation becomes when to this there is added the
possibility of conscious fraud! When the medium is a person who is
taking your money, and thrives by making you believe in the "spirits"
she produces! You may go to Lily Dale, in New York state, the home of
the Spiritualists, where they have a convention every summer, and in row
after row of tents you may hear, and even see, every kind of spirit you
ever dreamed of, ringing bells and shaking tambourines and dancing jigs.
And you may see poor farmers' wives, with tears streaming down their
cheeks, listening to the endearments of their dead children, and to
wisdom from the lips of Oliver Wendell Holmes speaking with a Bowery
accent. This kind of thing was exposed many years ago by Will Irwin in a
book called "The Medium Game"; and then--after traveling from one kind
of medium to another, and studying all their frauds, Irwin tells how he
went into a "parlor" on Sixth Avenue, and there by a fat old woman who
had never seen him before, was suddenly told the most intimate secrets
of his life!
It has recently been announced that Thomas A. Edison is at work upon a
device to enable spirits to communicate with the living, if there really
are spirits seeking to do this. It is Edison's idea that spirits may
inhabit some kind of infinitely rarefied astral body, and he proposes to
manufacture an instrument which is sensitive to an impression many
millions of times fainter than anything the human body can feel. This
should make it easier for the spirits, and should constitute a fairer
test, possibly a decisive one. When that machine is perfected and put to
work by scientific men, I wish to suggest a few tests which will
convince me that there really are spirits, and that the results are not
to be explained by telepathy.
First, assuming that the spirits live forever, there are some useful
things which were known to the people of ancient time, and are not known
to anyone living now. For example, let one of the Egyptian craftsmen
come forward and tell us the secret of their glass-staining, which I
understand is now a lost art. And then Sophocles, as I have already
suggested, will tell us where we can find his lost dramas; or if he
doesn't know where any copies are buried, let him find in the spirit
world some scribe or librarian or book-lover who can give us this
priceless information. All over the ancient lands are buried and
forgotten cities, and in those cities are papyrus scrolls and graven
tablets and bricks. Infinite stores of knowledge are thus concealed from
us; and how simple for the ancient ones who possess this information to
make it known to us, and so to convince us of their reality!
Or, again, supposing that spirits are not immortal, but that they slowly
fade from life as do their bodies. Suppose that a Raymond Lodge or other
recently dead soldier wishes to communicate with his father and to
convince his father that it is really an independent being, and not
simply a part of the father's subconscious mind--let him try something
like this. Let the father write six brief notes, and put them in six
envelopes all alike, and shuffle them up and put them in a hat and draw
out one of them. Now, assuming that the experimenter is honest, there is
no living human being who knows the contents of that envelope, and if
the medium is dipping into the subconscious mind of the experimenter,
the chances are one in six of the right note being hit upon. Assuming
that spirits may not be able to get inside an envelope and read a folded
letter, there is no objection to the experimenter, provided he is
honest, and provided there are no mirrors or other tricks, holding the
envelope behind his back, and tearing it open, and spreading it out for
the convenience of the spirit. And now, if the spirit can read that
letter correctly every time, we shall be fairly certain that whatever
force we are dealing with, it is not the subconscious mind of the
experimenter.
Or, let us take another test. Let us have a roulette wheel in a covered
box, or hidden away so that no one but the spirit can see it. We spin
the wheel, and any one of the habitues of Monte Carlo can figure out the
chance of the little ball dropping into any particular number. If now
the spirit can tell us each time where we shall find the ball, we shall
know that we are dealing with knowledge which does not exist either in
the conscious or the subconscious mind of any living human being.
Among the things that "spirits" have been accustomed to do, since the
days when they first made their appearance with the Fox sisters in
America, are the lifting of tables and the ringing of bells and the
assuming of visible forms. These are what is known as
"materializations," and when I was a boy, and used to hear people
talking about these things, there was always one test required: let the
materializations manifest themselves upon recording instruments
scientifically devised; let photographs be taken of them, let them be
weighed and measured, and so on. Well, time has moved forward, and these
tests have been met, and it appears that "materializations" are
facts--although it is still as uncertain as ever what they are
materializations of. An English scientist, Professor Crawford, has
published a book entitled "The Reality of Psychic Phenomena," in which
he tells the results of many years of testing materializations by the
strictest scientific methods. When the medium "levitates" a table--that
is, causes it to go up in the air without physical contact--it appears
that her own weight increases by exactly the weight of the table. When
she exerts any force, which apparently she can do at a distance, the
recording instruments show the exact counter-force in her own body.
The results of these investigations are calculated at first to take your
breath away. It begins to appear that the theosophists may be right, and
that we may have one or more "astral" bodies within or coincident with
the physical body; and that under the trance conditions we mold and make
over this "astral" body in accordance with our imaginations, precisely
as a sculptor molds the clay. At any rate, our subconsciousness has the
power to project from it masses of substance, and to cause these to take
all kinds of forms, for example, human faces, which have been
photographed innumerable times. Or the body can shoot out long rods or
snaky projections, which lift tables, and exert force which has been
recorded upon pressure instruments and weighed by scales.
As I write, a friend lends me a fifteen-dollar volume, a translation
just published of an elaborate work by Baron von Schrenck-Notzing, a
physician of Munich, giving minute details of four years' experiments in
this field. So rigid was this investigator in his efforts to exclude
fraud, that not merely was the medium stripped and sewed up in black
tights, but the "cabinet" in which she sat was a big sack of black
cloth, everywhere sewed tight by machine. Every crevice of the medium's
body was searched before and after the tests, and every inch of the
"cabinet" gone over. The investigators sat within a couple of feet of
the medium, and would draw back the curtains, and while holding her
hands and her feet, would watch great masses of filmy gray and white
stuff exude from the medium's mouth, from her armpits and breasts and
sides. This would happen in red light of a hundred candle power, by
which print could be easily read; and the medium would herself
illuminate the phenomena with a red electric torch. The investigators
would be privileged to examine these "phantom" forms, to touch them
gently, and be touched by them--soft and slimy, like the tongue of an
animal; but sometimes the things would misbehave, and strike them in the
eye, hurting them.
The medium, a young French girl living in the home of the wife of a
well-known French playwright, had begun with spiritualist ideas, but
came to take a matter-of-fact attitude to what happened, and in her
trances would labor to mold these emanations into hands or faces, as
requested by those present. She finally succeeded in allowing them to
separate the soft mucous stuff from her body, and keep it for chemical
and bacteriological examination. All this time she would be surrounded
by a battery of cameras, nine at once, some of them inside the cabinet;
and when the desired emanation was in sight, all these cameras would be
set off by flashlight, and in the book you have over two hundred such
photographs, showing faces and hands from every point of view. There are
even moving-pictures, showing the material coming out of her mouth and
going back!
It is evident that we have here a whole universe of unexplored
phenomena; and it seems that many of the old-time superstitions which
were dumped overboard have now to be dragged back into the boat and
examined in the light of new knowledge. What could smack more of magic
and fraud than crystal-gazing? Yet it appears that the subconsciousness
has power to project an image of its hidden memories into a crystal
ball, where it may be plainly seen. We find so well-recognized an
authority as Dr. Morton Prince using this method to enable one of the
many Miss Beauchamps to recall incidents in her previous life which were
otherwise entirely lost to her. Likewise this exploration of the
disintegration of personality enables us to watch in the making all the
phenomena of trance and ecstasy which have had so much to do with the
making of religions. We know now how Joan of Arc heard the "voices," and
we can make her hear more voices or make her stop hearing voices, as we
prefer. Also we know all about demons and "demoniac possession." We can
cast out demons--and without having to cause them to enter a herd of
swine! We may some day be prepared to investigate the wonder stories
which the Yogis tell us, about their ability to leave their physical
bodies in a trance, and to appear in England at a few moments' notice
for the transaction of their spiritual business!
But we want things proven to us, and we don't want the people with whom
we work to be animated either by religious fanaticism or by money greed.
We are ready to unlimber our minds, and prepare for long journeys into
strange regions, but we want to move cautiously, and choose our route
carefully, and be sure we do not lose our way! We want to deal
rationally with life; we don't want to make wild guesses, or to choose a
complicated and unlikely solution when a simple one will suffice. But,
on the other hand, we must be alive to the danger of settling down on
our little pile of knowledge, and refusing to take the trouble to
investigate any more. That is a habit of learned men, I am sorry to say;
the law of inertia applies to the scientist, as well as to the objects
he studies. The scientists of our time have had to be prodded into
considering each new discovery about the subconscious mind, precisely as
the scientists of Galileo's time had to be prodded to watch him drop
weights from the tower of Pisa. When he told them that the earth moved
round the sun instead of the sun round the earth, they tortured him in a
dungeon to make him take it back, and he did so, but whispered to
himself, "And yet it moves." And it did move, of course, and continued
to move. And in exactly the same way, if it be true that we have these
hidden forces in us, they will continue to manifest themselves, and
masses of people will continue to flock to Lily Dale, and to pay out
their hard-earned money, until such a time as our learned men set to
work to find out the facts and tell us how we can utilize these forces
without the aid of either superstition or charlatanry.