existence of a four-dimensional world of spirits, the author would
like to develop one or two ideas of his own on the subject. In the
preceding section it was stated that everything that we perceive by our
senses is three-dimensional and that everything that possesses four
or more dimensions can only be regarded as abstractions or fictions
which our reason forms in its constant efforts after an extension and
generalisation of knowledge. To speak of a two-dimensional matter is
as self-contradictory as the notion of four-dimensional matter. But a
two or a four-dimensional world might exist in some other manner than a
material manner, and for all we know in one which to us does not admit
of representation. But in such a case, if it were without the power of
affecting the material world, we should never be able to acquire any
knowledge concerning its existence, and it would be totally indifferent
to the people of the three-dimensional world, whether such a world
existed or not. Just as an artist during his lifetime produces a number
of different works of art, so also the Creator might have created a
number of different-dimensioned worlds which in no wise interfere with
one another. In such a case, any one world would not be able to know
anything of any other, and we must consequently regard the question
whether a four-dimensional world exists which is incapable of affecting
ours, as insoluble. We have only to examine, therefore, the question
whether the phenomenal world perhaps is a single individual in a great
layer of worlds of which every successive one has one more dimension
than the preceding and which are so connected with one another that
each successive world contains and includes the preceding world, and,
therefore, can produce effects in it. For our reason, which draws its
inferences from the phenomena of this world, tells us, that if outside
the three-dimensional world there exists a second four-dimensional
world, containing ours, there is no reason why worlds of more or less
dimensions should not, with the same right, also exist. But if now,
as Zöllner and his adherents maintain, four-dimensional spirits exist
which can act by the mere efforts of their own wills on our world,
there is surely no reason why we three-dimensional beings should not
also be able to produce effects on some two-dimensional animated world.
Whether we have, generally, any such influence we do not know, but we
certainly do know that we do not act purposely and consciously on a
two-dimensional world. If, therefore, Zöllner were right, the plan of
creation would possess the wonderful feature that four-dimensional beings
are capable of arbitrarily affecting the three-dimensional world, but
that three-dimensional beings have no right in their turn consciously to
affect a two dimensional world.
The supporters of Zöllner’s hypothesis will perhaps reply to the
objection just made, that the plan of creation might, after all, possibly
possess this wonderful peculiarity, that we human beings perhaps, in
some higher condition of culture, will be able to act consciously on
two-dimensional worlds, and that at any rate it is simply an inference
by analogy to conclude from the non-existence of a relation between
three and two dimensions that the same relation is also wanting in the
case of four and three dimensions. As a matter of fact, the objection
above made is not intended to refute Zöllner’s hypothesis, but only to
stamp it as very improbable. But despite this improbability Zöllner
would still be right if the phenomena of the material world actually
made his hypothesis necessary. That, however, is by no means the case.
Although most of the phenomena to which the spiritualists appeal are
probably founded on sense-illusions, humbug, and self-deception, it
cannot be denied that there possibly do exist phenomena which cannot be
brought into harmony with the natural laws now known. There always have
been mysterious phenomena, and there always will be. Yet, as we have
often seen that the progress of science has again and again revealed as
natural what former generations held to be supernatural, it is certainly
wholly wrong to bring in for the explanation of phenomena which now seem
mysterious an hypothesis like that of Zöllner’s, by which everything in
the world can be explained. If we adopt a point of view which regards it
as natural for spirits arbitrarily to interfere in the workings of the
world, all scientific investigation will cease, for we could never more
trust or rely upon any chemical or physical experiment, or any botanical
or zoölogical culture. If the spirits are the authors of the phenomena
that are mysterious to us, why should they also not have control of
the phenomena which are not mysterious? The existence of mysterious
phenomena justifies in no manner or form the assumption that spirits
exist which produce them. Would it not be much simpler, if we _must_ have
supernatural influences, to adopt the naïve religious point of view,
according to which everything that happens is traceable to the direct,
actual, and personal interference of a single being which we call God?
Things which formerly stood beyond the sphere of our knowledge and were
regarded as marvellous events, as a storm, for example, now stand in the
most intimate connection with known natural laws. Things that formerly
were mysterious are so no longer. If one hundred and fifty years ago some
scientists were in the possession of our present knowledge of inductional
electricity and had connected Paris and Berlin with a wire by whose aid
one could clearly interpret in Berlin what another person had at that
very moment said in Paris, people would have regarded this phenomenon
as supernatural and assumed that the originator of this long-distance
speaking was in league with spirits.
We recognise, thus, that the things which are termed supernatural depend
to a great extent on the stage of culture which humanity has reached.
Things which now appear to us mysterious, may, in a very few decades,
be recognised as quite natural. This knowledge, however, is not to be
obtained by the lazy assumption of bands of spirits as the authors of
mysterious phenomena, but by performing what in physics and chemistry
is called experiment. But the first and essential condition of all
scientific experimenting is that the experimenter shall be absolutely
master of the conditions under which the experiment is or is not to
succeed. Now, this criterion of scientific experimenting is totally
lacking in all spiritualistic experiments. We can never assign in their
case the conditions under which they will or will not succeed. When all
the preparations in a spiritualistic séance have been properly made, but
nothing takes place, the beautiful excuse is always forthcoming that the
“spirits were not willing,” that there were “too many incredulous persons
present,” and so forth. Fortunately, in physical experiments these
pretexts are not necessary. By the path of experiment, and not by that of
transcendental speculation, physics has thus made incredible progress and
has piled new knowledge strata on strata upon the old. Accordingly, the
prospect is left that the mysteries which the conditions and properties
of the human soul still present can be solved more and more by the
methods of scientific experiment. To this end, however, it is especially
necessary that the physio-psychological experiments in question should
only be performed by men who possess the critical eye of inquiry, who are
free from the dangers of self-illusion, and who are competent to keep
apart from their experiments all superstition and deception. The history
of natural science clearly teaches that it is only by this road that man
can arrive at certain and well-established knowledge. If, therefore,
there really is behind such phenomena as mind-reading, telepathy, and
similar psychical phenomena something besides humbug and self-illusion,
what we have to do is to study privately and carefully by serious
experiments the success or non-success of such phenomena, and not allow
ourselves to be influenced by the public and dramatic performances of
psychical artists, like Cumberland and his ilk.
The high eminence on which the knowledge and civilisation of humanity
now stands was not reached by the thoughtless employment of fanciful
ideas, nor by recourse to four-dimensional worlds, but by hard, serious
labor and slow, unceasing research. Let all men of science, therefore,
band themselves together and oppose a solid front to methods that
explain everything that is now mysterious to us by the interference of
independent spirits. For these methods, owing to the fact that they can
explain everything, explain nothing, and thus oppose dangerous obstacles
to the progress of real research, to which we owe the beautiful temple of
modern knowledge.
HERMANN SCHUBERT.
FOOTNOTES:
[79] This is discussed at greater length in my tract _Zahl und Zählen_ in
Virchow-Holtzendorff’s collection of popular essays, J. F. Richter, 1887.
[80] Victor Schlegel, indeed, has made models of the three-dimensional
nets of all the six structures which correspond in four-dimensioned space
to the five regular bodies of our space, in an analogous manner to that
by which we draw in a plane the nets of five regular bodies. Schlegel’s
models are made by Brill of Darmstadt.
[81] Quoted by Cranz.
CORRESPONDENCE.
I.
THE RELIGIOUS OUTLOOK IN FRANCE.
The return of Mme. Hyacinthe Loyson to France after her American tour,
undertaken, I understand, in order to obtain new support for the Gallican
church, suggests the writing of this article, which will be a brief
survey, from the point of view of an American layman, of the present
religious situation in France.
As Père Hyacinthe’s reform has been made the peg on which to hang this
article, perhaps I cannot do better than begin by an examination of the
noble but fruitless labors of the eloquent ex-Carmelite. While one cannot
help being carried away by the oratory of Hyacinthe Loyson and charmed
with his personality, so full of wit, kindliness, and gentility; while
one must admire the devotedness and earnestness of Mme. Loyson and feel
much sympathy for their studious and promising son Paul, one is convinced
in spite of one’s self that this latter-day Gallicanism is doomed to
failure if indeed it has not already failed. You have simply to visit
the poor little church in the Rue d’Arras, in this city, to see what a
mere handful of followers Père Hyacinthe has been able to collect in
this great centre of two million people, after years of work and after
preaching hundreds of magnificent sermons that would fill to overflowing
the largest edifice in America, Sunday after Sunday, if delivered
with similar eloquence by a divine of no matter what denomination or
of no denomination at all. To the practical layman of this practical
age no further demonstration is necessary in order to prove that Père
Hyacinthe’s mission is, as the French say, _un coup dans l’eau_, that
is, an effort which produces no result. Whenever I leave this humble
church and am well out in the narrow, shabby street in which it is
situated and am away from the influence of the preacher’s fascination, I
cannot help exclaiming, What a waste of power, What a casting of pearls
before swine! And all of Mme. Loyson’s enthusiastic conversation in
private, her accounts of the encouraging letters received by the Père,
furtively of course, from discontented priests, and her statements
concerning the warm words of sympathy and support from the churchmen of
foreign lands, cannot remove that abiding feeling that this rejuvenated
Gallican church movement is other than a dismal failure; more than ever
one exclaims: _C’est un coup dans l’eau_.
Père Hyacinthe has always received, in France as abroad, his greatest
support from the Protestants. But Protestantism here in France is a
sickly growth when compared, for instance, with its rich and sturdy
brother in the United States. It has, at most, only a small band of
followers, nearly lost to view in the vast army of Catholicism and
Freethought. Furthermore, the Liberal wing is losing ground and the
Orthodox wing gaining slightly, not an encouraging sign in these days to
those who hope for the final triumph of faith over the growing tendency
towards infidelity. The real truth is that about the only strength left
in French Protestantism to-day lies in the fact that there is a certain
_éclat_ associated, in the eyes of the upper classes, with the being a
Protestant, much as is the case in America and England, in the same rank,
about being a Roman Catholic. It distinguishes you from the multitude,
and in these democratic times human nature, especially when it is that
of the “upper ten,” is very keen for elimination from “the vulgar
throng.” It is difficult for an American to comprehend this peculiar
little streak of innocent vanity running through certain French circles
which shows itself in this wish to be known as Protestants. It is not
too much to say that to the impartial outside observer this phase of the
French Protestantism of to-day is the one that first strikes the eye;
which goes to prove in a peculiar but significant manner the weak hold,
on the one hand, which the doctrine of Luther and Calvin now has on the
French nation, and, on the other hand, how universal must be scepticism,
freethought, and utter indifference to church and religion of every kind.
If native French Protestantism exerts so little influence on the nation,
it is easy to imagine the excessive futility of the work of the foreign
missionary. There is a great deal said in American and religious circles
about the labors in France of the Salvation Army, the McAll Mission,
the Young Men’s Christian Association, etc. I have received more than
one letter from would-be subscribers in the United States asking me if
these and other similar organisations were really accomplishing all that
they pretend. My reply is invariably that if you regard their labors as
charity work some good is being done, but if money is asked for because
of the religious results which have been accomplished, the demand should
be considered to be arrant humbug. If Père Hyacinthe, a Frenchman and a
Catholic, after forty years of labor, has accomplished next to nothing,
it is easy to imagine how this nation, so reserved in its relations
with the foreigner when he attempts to penetrate into its inner life,
would treat Scotch and Yankee missionaries. From a religious standpoint,
therefore, American money and sympathy is absolutely thrown away when
it is sent to France. If it be answered that much misery and physical
suffering is relieved by these foreign missions, the French might well
ask if charity does not begin at home. The French are a peculiarly
thrifty people. Few are poor, beggars are scarce and charitable
institutions are rich and numerous. Hence devoting American dollars to
the relief of French distress is much like sending coals to Newcastle, if
it is not a piece of sheer impertinence, like our protesting to the Czar
against his Siberian convict system when we have one quite as cruel in
full swing in some of our Southern states.
And now, finally, a few paragraphs about the great Roman Catholic
church of France, the only religious institution of any real first-rate
importance in this country.
While it is true that the Catholic Church, at least as a church, still
has a strong hold on the French nation, it is also quite true that
indifference, infidelity, free thought, and atheism are on the increase.
Matthew Arnold says, in his essay on Tolstoi, written in 1887: “Between
the age of twenty and that of thirty-five he [Tolstoi] had lost, he tells
us, the Christian belief in which he had been brought up, a loss of which
examples nowadays abound certainly everywhere, but which in Russia, as
in France, is among all young men of the upper and cultivated classes
more a matter of course, perhaps, more universal, more avowed, than it is
with us.” Arnold might have enlarged, at least in the case of France, his
limits and stated that in the cities the middle and lower classes, too,
particularly the male portion, have abandoned Rome. One has only to visit
a Paris church to be convinced of the contempt which men feel for the
priesthood and religion: you can count ten female devotees for one of the
masculine gender. In the village church, far away from the great centres,
the priest may still have the large majority of the population, men and
women alike, as faithful attendants upon service. But even here, for one
man who confesses, a dozen or score of women will kneel at the chair.
Then again, this more general participation in religious ceremonies by
the rural population is due in a large measure to the fact that these
Sunday masses and vespers are almost the only break and variety in a very
dead and monotonous existence. The church is a sort of meeting place,
where whole families, babies, children, and adults, congregate. The hum
of idle conversation, the crying of infants, and the ardent exhortations
of the priest are often mingled in a manner that would astonish and shock
a pious Protestant, accustomed to the highly proper atmosphere of an
Episcopalian or Presbyterian Church in the United States.
Another sign of the disfavor in which French Catholicism finds itself
to-day is seen in the quality of its future priests. You have simply to
look into the faces of the seminarists as they pass by you in procession
in the streets of Paris to be convinced of the well-known fact that these
young men are, for the most part, the faint-hearted and dull-headed sons
of the peasantry, eager to escape the drudgery of farm life and not
intelligent enough for business or the petty employments offered by the
State.
“Anybody can make a priest,” is often heard in France. The result is that
just as the English army is the receptacle for the riff-raff—the Tommy
Atkinses of Rudyard Kipling’s “Barrack-room Ballads”—of the cities, so
the French priesthood draws most of its recruits from the scum of the
farming districts. This fact contrasts strongly, by the way, with the
manner in which the Protestants fill their pulpits. The young man who
becomes a pastor is not looked upon by his friends and companions as a
failure and a numskull. Quite the contrary; he is immediately classed
among those taking a high moral stand. Some of the best families of
France are descended from, or have relatives who are, clergymen, and they
are quite proud of the fact; another example of that sentiment of halo
surrounding French Protestantism to which reference has already been made.
Another cause of this boycotting of the cloth as a profession by the
youth of the élite is due to the Church having got on the wrong side
during the struggle for the foundation of the present Republic. The
Catholics supported the Monarchists and Bonapartists and took an active
part in the attempt to prevent the advent of republican institutions and
to overthrow these institutions when they had been accepted by a majority
of the nation. This unpatriotic course brought the Church into bad odor
among republicans, so that the having a son in orders, for example, would
be apt to be an impediment to a father aspiring to political preferment,
especially if the latter belonged to the Radical or Socialist wing of the
Republican army. The result is that a whole great political party is, in
its general tendency, opposed to the Catholic Church.
Nor is the harm occasioned thereby limited to lowering the quality of
the seminarists. It makes a vast number of intelligent and influential
citizens sworn enemies of religion. Thus, when Gambetta attended
funerals, he would not enter the church, but wait outside in the porch.
When Louis Blanc was buried neither church nor priest participated in
the pageant. On the death of Henri Martin, a free-thinking Protestant
clergyman officiated at the burial service. Hundreds of other prominent
Republicans, who have died or been buried since 1870, never entered a
church, perhaps, except when their bodies were borne there by their
families, acting under the influence of its female members, or out of
respect for public sentiment.
One of the shrewdest acts of Leo XIII. is his recent declaration in
favor of the French Republic. He not only accepts the situation, but
has ordered the faithful, both ecclesiastical and lay, in France to do
likewise. But this demand has not been complied with without a murmur.
More than one priest and noble has shown himself more ultramontane than
the Pope. The important fact remains true, however, that officially
the Vatican recognises the political change in France, and, though the
Republicans, particularly those of the Radical camp, are wary of these
new converts and still believe with Gambetta, that “_le clericalisme,
voilà l’ennemi_,” yet the mere fact that the Vatican lays down its arms
means a great deal, even if the hatchet may not be definitively buried.
Moderate Republicans, those who go to church even if they do not believe
what is said there, think they see in this action of the Holy Father a
new source of strength for the Republic. And it seems to me that they are
right, and that this view is the soundest. If the priesthood ceases its
attacks on the political powers that be, and if these latter keep a sharp
watch, which will be done while the Radical and Socialist elements are so
strong in Chamber and Senate, the clerical party can be held in check,
and the Republic will have so many less enemies, even if these quondam
enemies are but lukewarm friends.
THEODORE STANTON.
II.
NEW FRENCH BOOKS.
I am happy to have the opportunity in my present letter to speak
of a book of real importance, _La pathologie des emotions, Études
physiologiques et cliniques_, by M. CH. FÉRÉ. The name of this learned
physician of the Bicêtre is sufficiently well known to dispense me from
the necessity of speaking of his personality, so that I can devote all
that I have to say to his work. Its great merit is not so much the
novelty of the psychological theory which is laid at its foundation, as
the wealth of facts presented and the sureness of the methods pursued.
M. Féré’s mind is of a distinctly positive cast, and he possesses in a
high degree the ability to draw from the thesis which he illustrates and
confirms, the various consequences which from a medical and social point
of view this thesis involves.
States of intellectual consciousness, he writes, citing Spencer, cannot
be dissociated from emotional states. The emotions are the products
of our mental representations of agreeable states or painful states,
and are the stronger according as they contain a greater number of
present or nascent sensations competent to recall these states. The
emotions, accordingly, being simply representations of states of
consciousness provoked by external excitations, it is to be presumed
that the physiological conditions of emotions (of central or cerebral
origin) present a striking analogy, if not an absolute resemblance,
to the physiological conditions of sensations (of peripheral origin,
either internal or external); and this relation should be as prominently
marked in pathological as in normal states. The upshot of all this is,
continues M. Féré, that physical agents capable of modifying a state of
consciousness of peripheral origin (sensations), are also capable of
modifying states of consciousness of central origin (emotions). “The
external signs of these different states of consciousness can be studied
by the same methods. Psychology is only specialised physiology; mental
medicine only a specialisation of general medicine, from which it must
borrow its methods of research and action—all purely physical. The
demonstration of these relations is the object of the present work.”
The work, which contains almost six hundred pages, presents no divisions
but that of chapters. But it would not be difficult to group its contents
under the four general titles: (1) physiological and pathological effects
of physical agents on man; (2) physiological conditions and pathological
and curative effects of emotions; (3) psychopathy and morbid emotivity;
(4) the consequences to individuals and society of morbid emotivity, its
medical treatment, prophylaxis and legislation. The entire demonstration
of M. Féré, I might add, is essentially aimed at the two following
propositions: the first, that all the symptoms of emotions possess a
certain resemblance to those of fatigue or physical pain; the other, that
the original source of morbid emotivities and their resultant disorders
is a state of depression congenital or acquired.
M. Féré reverts constantly to these fundamental ideas. After having
exhibited, for example, the reciprocal influences of the emotions, or
disorders of the imagination, and of disorders which are of physical
origin, he concludes that “physical disease and moral disease have the
same basis.” It is thus only in appearance, he writes, that the mind has
any influence on the functions of the body; the phenomena of mind are,
quite the reverse, the necessary effect of certain modifications of the
body, and it is by the intermediary action of the manifestations of the
body that the representations of the mind act. It is found convenient to
regard the gray matter of the brain as the central organ of the emotions,
and the great sympathetic as the peripheral organ that presides over
their “exteriorisation”; but we have no right to think of the emotions
without their external signs, and we are thus led to the conclusion that
“emotion is essentially a generalised reflex phenomenon the centrifugal
path of which is principally the great sympathetic system.”