are to receive the decisive impulses for their inner life from
well-trained teachers who have had a solid college education. I have
found out that quite a number of these teachers are clients of a
medium who habitually informs them as to their future, and for a
dollar a sitting gives them advice at every turn of their lives. I do
not know whether she takes it from the tea leaves or from an Egyptian
dream book or from her own trance fancies, but I do know that the
prophecies of this fraud have deeply influenced some of their lives
and shaped the faculty of the high school. What does this mean?
Mature educators to whose training society has devoted its fullest
effort and who are chosen to bring to the youth the message of earnest
thought and solid knowledge, and whose intellectual life ought
therefore to be controlled by consistent thinking and real love for
knowledge, fall back into the lowest forms of mental barbarism and
really believe in the most illogical prostitution of truth. The double
life of Jekyll and Hyde is more natural than this. The impulse to
virtuous behaviour and the atrocities of the criminal may after all be
combined in one character, but the desire to master the world by a
disciplined knowledge and to think the universe in ideas of order and
law cannot go together with a real satisfaction and belief in the
chaotic superstitions of mediumistic humbugs. Here we have truly a
twofold personality, one living in a world of culture and the other in
an underworld of intellectual dissipation and vice. It would not be
desirable for the high school teachers who are to be models of virtue
to live a second life as gamblers and pick-pockets, but it is more
dangerous if they are the agents of intellectual culture and indulge
at the same time in intellectual prostitution.
No spirit of false tolerance ought any longer to be permitted, when
the treacherous danger has become so nation wide. It is sufficient to
take up any newspaper between New York and San Francisco and run
through the advertisements of the spiritualists and psychical mediums,
the palmists and the astrologers, the spiritual advisers and the
psychotherapists: it is evident that it is a regular organized
industry which brings its steady income to thousands, and which in the
bigger towns has its red-light districts with its resorts for the
intellectual vice. The servant girl gets her information as to the
fidelity of her lover for fifty cents, the clerk who wants to bet on
the races pays five dollars, the great banker who wants to bet on
stocks pays fifty dollars for his prophetic tips, and the widow who
wants messages from her husband pays five hundred dollars, but they
all come and pay gladly. If this mood permeates the public of all
classes, it is not surprising that the cheapest spiritualistic fraud
creeps into religious circles, that the wildest medical humbug is
successfully rivalling the work of the scientific physician, and that
the intellectual graft of psychical research is beginning to corrupt
the camps of the educated. Surely it is a profitable business, and I
know it from inside information, as not long ago a very successful
clairvoyant came to the Harvard Psychological Laboratory and offered
me a partnership with half his income, not because he himself
believed much in my psychology, but because, as he assured me, there
are some clients who think more highly of my style of psychology than
of his, and if we got together the business would flourish. He told me
just how it was to be done and how easy it is and what persons
frequent his parlours. But I have inside information of a very
different kind before me, if I think of the victims who come to me for
help when superstition has broken their mental springs. There was a
young girl to whom life was one great joy, until for ten dollars she
got the information that she would die in a very big building, and now
she goes into hysterics when her family tries to take her into a
theatre or a hotel or a railway station or a school.
Indeed the psychologist has an unusually good chance to get glimpses
of this filthy underworld, even if he does not frequent the squalid
quarters of the astrologers. Bushels of mail bring this superstition
and mental crookedness to his study, and his material allows him to
observe every variety of illogical thought. If a letter comes to his
collection which presents itself as a new specimen that ought to be
analyzed a little further, nothing is needed but a short word of
reply. It will at once bring a full supply of twisted thought,
sufficient for a careful dissection. It has been said repeatedly in
the various vice investigations that no one can understand the ill
fate of the vicious girls, unless he studies carefully the men whom
they are to please. An investigation into mental vice demands still
more an understanding of those minds which play the part of customers.
There are too many who cannot think in straight lines and to whom the
most absurd linking of facts is the most satisfactory answer in any
question. The crudeness of their intellect, which may go together with
ample knowledge in other fields, predestines them to be deceived and
puts a premium on the imposture. I may try to characterize some
varieties of crooked thinking from chance tests of the correspondence
with which the underworld has besieged me. I have only the letters of
most recent date in hand.
I abstract, of course, from those written by insane individuals. They
come plentifully and show all sorts of distortions and impossible
ideas. But they do not belong here. The confused mind of the patient
is not to be held responsible. His absurdities are symptoms of
disease, and they are sharply to be separated from the lack of logic
in the sound mind, just as the impulse to kill in paranoia is to be
distinguished from the murderous schemes of the criminal. It is
generally not difficult to recognize at once which is which. I find
the most frequent type of letters from evidently diseased persons to
be writings like this: "Dear Sir: I wish to let you know that some
young men have a sort of a comb machine composed of wireless telephone
and reinforced electricity. They can play this machine and make a
person talk or wake or go to sleep. They can tell where you are, even
miles away. They play in the eyes and brain, I think. They have two
machines; so they know when the police or anybody is coming toward
their house. They keep talking most of the time so as to take up a
person's mind. It is about time it was stopped, but people don't
understand such things around here. Could a wireless telephone get
their voices? Hoping you will do something to stop them, I am yours,
ONE WHO HAS BEEN ANNOYED VERY MUCH."
There is no help for such a poor sufferer except in the asylum. Here
we want to deal not with the patients, but only with the sinners who
sin against logic, while their minds are undiseased.
There is another large class of correspondents, which is not to be
blamed, and which is one of the most interesting contributers to the
psychologist's files. People write long discussions of theories which
they build up on peculiar happenings in their minds. The theories
themselves may be entirely illogical, or at least in contradiction to
all acknowledged science, but such letters are interesting, because
they disclose abnormal mental states. Here it is not real insanity;
but all kinds of abnormal impulses or ideas, of psychasthenic
emotions, of neurasthenic disturbances, of hysteric inhibition, are
the starting points, and it is only natural that such pathological
intrusions should bewilder the patient and induce him to form the
wildest theories. Again, he may believe in the most improbable and
most fantastic connection of things, but this is due to the
overwhelming power of disturbances which he is indeed unable to
explain to himself. I have a whole set of letters from women who
explain in fantastic theories their magical power to foresee coming
events; and yet it is not difficult to recognize as the foundation of
all such ideas some well-known forms of memory disturbance. Commonly
it is the widespread tendency of women to accompany a scene with the
feeling that they have experienced it once before. They are few who
never have had it, especially in states of fatigue; many have it very
often; and some are led to trust it and to become convinced that they
really experienced the scene, at least in their minds, beforehand.
This uncanny impression then easily develops into untenable
speculations on the borderland of normal intellect. The letters which
approach those of the insane most nearly come from persons who try to
work out a theory to account for hysterical experiences which break
into their normal life. Sometimes the most absurd explanations must be
acknowledged as justified from the standpoint of the patient. A woman
wrote to me that she had the abnormal power to produce railroad wrecks
by her mere will, while she was lying at home in bed. She wanted me to
hypnotize her in order to relieve her from this uncanny power. She had
elaborated this thought in full detail. She did not know, what I found
out only slowly, that in hysterical attacks at night, for which every
memory was lost the next morning, she used a stolen switch key to open
a switch, because she was angry with a railway official. I will ignore
all such cases with an abnormal background here and confine myself to
the healthy crowd.
If I were to characterize their writings from an outside point of
view, I might first say that their expressions are expansive. There is
no limit to their manuscripts, though I have to confess that an
exposition of eighty-five hundred pages which has just been announced
to me by its author has not yet reached me. Nor can it be denied that
their relation to old-fashioned or to new-fashioned spelling is not
always a harmonious one. Nor should I call them always polite: the
criticism of my own opinions, which they generally know only from some
garbled newspaper reports, often takes forms which are not the usual
ones for scholarly correspondence. "Whether it is your darkness or if
it is the badness of the police that go around calling themselves the
government, that probably ordered you to put such ignorance in the
Sunday article, I do not know." Or more straightforward are letters of
this type: "Greeting--You take the prize as an educated fool.
According to reports to me by less stupid and more honest men than
you, the matter is...." It is surprising how often the handwriting is
pretty, coquettish, or affected, but almost half of my crank
correspondence is typewritten.
When the newspapers tell of a mysterious case, minds of this type
immediately feel attracted to mix in. When a few years ago I published
an article disclosing the tricks of Madame Palladino, I was simply
flooded with letters of advice and of explanation. The same thing
occurred recently when the papers reported that I was experimenting
with Beulah Miller. Now it is easy to understand that those who
fancied that the Miller child had supernatural gifts of telepathy and
clairvoyance would wish to bring their questions to me so that I might
make Beulah Miller trace their lost bracelets or predict their fortune
in the Stock Exchange. But I was at a loss to understand why so many
persons from Maine to California felt tempted to write long letters to
me in which they told me what kind of questions I ought to ask the
child, as if I could not formulate a question for myself. Every one
expected a special report for himself with exact statements of her
answers. The whole performance showed a lack of judgment which is
typical of that lower intellectual layer; and yet the letters were
often written on beautifully monogrammed letter paper. More often,
however, my own writings or doings have nothing to do with the case. I
am the perfectly innocent receiver of written messages about anything
between heaven and earth, while the messages which my correspondents
receive from me are not always authentic. One of my psychically
talented writers reports: "On May 31st at eight forty-nine A. M. in
the midst of a thunderstorm I came into communication with Doctor
Münsterberg and asked him to send me a message. He said, 'The name of
my son is Wilhelm Münsterberg.'" It is improbable that I lied so
boldly about my family, even in a telepathic message.
I may select a few typical theories, which all come from evidently
otherwise normal and harmless people. I have before me a whole series
of manuscripts from a druggist who is sure that his ego theory is
"very near the truth." It is in itself very simple and convincing.
"The right and the left cerebral egos united with one sublime ego are
in the body in a loose union in possession of an amoeboid cell. During
sleep they may separate. The sublime ego wanders through nerve paths
to the bowels, and the bowel experiences are the dreams." An
experiment brought a definite proof of this. The druggist dyed some
crackers deep blue with methylene blue, and later dreamed that a large
train of blue food was passing by. As each carriage of the train
corresponded to a granule of starch in the crackers, he was able to
figure that the ego which saw those parts of the crackers was about
one thousandth of an inch large. "The fact of seeing in dreams is due
to vital force, the peculiar low speed to the high vibration force of
living albuminoids emitted from every tendril of bioplasm and
perceived by the eye of the ego-bion during its visit." "Within the
ego-bion is the ego itself, which is much simpler looking, about one
hundredth of a micromillimeter." I do not want to go into details of
how these egos can be transmitted "by kiss or otherwise" from one
generation to another, but I can say that as soon as the reader has
grasped the fundamental thesis of the author, everything follows with
perfect logic. The good man, who is doubtless a faithful druggist and
whose mind is perfectly clear, has simply twisted some of the ideas
which he has gathered from his ample reading and developed his pet
theory.
His case is very similar to that of a dignified, elderly trained nurse
who is faithfully devoted to her noble daily work and who follows her
vocation without indicating to any one that she is the author of a
great unpublished philosophical work. She has spent twenty-five years
of her life on the elaboration of this _magnum opus_, which is richly
illustrated. Everything in the book is consistent and in harmony with
its presuppositions. The theory again is very simple; every detail is
perfectly convincing, if you acknowledge the starting point. As to
this, there may be difference of opinion. The fundamental thought is
that all human souls are born in the forests of Central Africa. "Souls
are sexless forces. Never is one soul born into life. There are always
two. Often we find three pairs of almost the same type with but a
shadow of density to distinguish each pair. Man evolutes upward on the
scale of life by two tribes of apes. Ere man becomes human, he
represents one cell force. When man takes the human form as Maquake,
he becomes a double life cell." I do not claim to be an expert in this
system, but if I understand the whole work rightly, the idea is that
any human soul born there by the monkeys in Africa has to pass in
circles of one thousand years from individual to individual, becoming
at first negro, then Indian, then Malayan, then Hindu, then Greek,
Celt, and Roman, then Jew, and finally American. After a thousand
years the soul begins to degenerate and enters sinners and criminals.
Which stage the soul has reached can easily be seen from the finger
nails. The chief illustrations of the great work were therefore
drawings of finger nails of all races. It is a side issue of the
theory that "souls once matured generally pass on to another star. The
nearer the sun is to the star holding life, the denser is all growth
in nature." I acknowledge that this view of evolution does not
harmonize exactly with my own, but I cannot deny that the whole system
is worked out with perfect consistency, and wherever I asked the
writer difficult questions as to some special problems, she was at
once ready to give the answers with completely logical deduction from
her premises. She is by no means mentally diseased, and she does not
mix her theories with her practical activity. If she sits as nurse at
the bedside of a patient, she recognizes of course from the finger
nails that this particular soul may be three or five thousand years
old, and accordingly in a decaying state, but that does not interfere
with her conscientious work as a nurse and helper.
To be sure, not every one spends twenty-five years on the elaboration
of some twisted fancies. Most of my correspondents write the
monumental thoughts of their systems with decisive brevity. A
physician informs me that every thought and act of our lives is
transfixed on the etheric vapours that surround our earth, and that it
is therefore only natural that a clairvoyant is able to see those
fixed events and write them down afterward from the ethereal
inscriptions. Another tells about his discovery that the human body is
a great electrical magnet. I am the more glad to make this fact widely
known, as the author writes that he has not given it to the public
yet, as he is not financially able to advertise it. Yet he himself
adds that after all it is not necessary to advertise truth. On eight
quarto pages he draws the most evident consequences of his discovery
and shows how he is able to explain by it the chemical change of each
cell in the brain and to prove that "foolish so-called spirits are
simply electrical demonstrations." "I can demonstrate every current,
nerve cell, and atom of the human body. It may seem strange to you
that I claim so much, but with the induction every investigation has
been so easy for me. I have never been puzzled for any demonstration
yet, but I am still searching for more knowledge. Yours for
investigation...." I may say that this is a feature common to most of
my correspondents of this metaphysical type. They are never "puzzled."
Nearly related to this type of theories are the systems of astrology;
and in our upper world very few are really aware what a rôle astrology
is still playing in the intellectual underworld. Some of the
astrological communications I receive periodically go so far beyond my
understanding that I do not even dare to quote them. But some of the
astrological authors present very neat and clean theories which are so
simple and so practical that it is almost a pity that they are absurd.
For instance, I am greatly interested in the question of determining
how far the mind of individuals is predisposed for particular
vocations, and in the psychological laboratory we are busy with
methods to approach the problem. The astrologers have a much more
convincing scheme. My friend writes that he has observed "over two
thousand cases wherein the dates of birth have been the means to give
the position of the planets at the hour of birth, the purpose being to
ascertain the influence they had on man. Now the furniture business
calls for an artistic temperament, and after careful observation
through birth dates it is found that the successful furniture men have
the planet Venus in their nativities. But the Venus influence is
prominent also in other lines of business such as art, jewellery, and
in all lines where women's necessities are manufactured. Other
planetary influences on success in business are: Saturn for miners,
tanners, gardeners, clowns, and beggars; Mercury for teachers,
secretaries, stationers, printers, and tailors; Jupiter for clergymen,
judges, lawyers, and senators; Mars for dentists, barbers, cutlers,
carpenters, and apothecaries; Uranus for inventors, chemists,
occultists, and others."
One system which is still more frequent than the astrological is the
strictly spiritualistic one, which expresses itself in spirit returns
and messages from the other world. Geographically the most favoured
stations for wireless heavenly connections seem to be Brooklyn, New
York, and Los Angeles, California. The adherents of this underworld
philosophy have a slang of their own, and the result is that their
letters, while they spring from the deepest emotions, sound as if
they were copied from the same sample book. The better style begins
about like this: "Knowing that you are intensely interested in things
psychological, I beg to enclose you copies of some of the automatic
letters which I have received. I have a young lawyer friend in the
city, and he and I can throw down fifteen or twenty sheets of paper on
a table, take hold of hands and get them written full, and in this way
I have received letters from Pericles, Aristides, Immanuel Kant, and
many others. I got letters from Julia Ward Howe a week after her
transition, and I got letters from Emerson and Abraham Lincoln by
asking for them. I enclose copy of the last letter which I received
from Charlotte Cushman, and I think you will agree there is nothing
foolish about it or indeed about any of the letters. I have recently
married again, and my present wife is a wonderful trance medium,
probably the best means of communication between the two worlds living
to-day." This is not exceptional, as practically every one of my
spiritualistic correspondents has some "best means of communication
between the two worlds." The messages themselves usually begin: "My
loved one, out of the realms of light and truth, I come to you ..."
and so on. If the letters do not come from the spiritualists
themselves, some of their friends feel the need of turning my
attention to the "wonderful psychic powers" of their acquaintances.
Not seldom the spirits take a more refined form. "The forms of the
newly dead come to me in bulk. I see and feel them. They are purplish
inky in colour. When a real spirit comes to me in white, I close my
eyes. I seem to have to. The spirit or presence most commonly seen, I
believe, is a thought form. It frequently comes off the cover of a
magazine, and were I not getting wise, I would think the universe
turned suddenly to beauty. But I am learning that a person can receive
wonderfully exaggerated reports from the very soul of the artist."
From here we see before us the wide vista of the individual gifts and
talents: the underworld people are sometimes bragging of them,
sometimes grafting with them, if not blackmailing, and often simply
enjoying them with the sweet feeling of superiority. The powers turn
in all valuable directions. Here is one who wishes to know whether I
have ever heard of any other "person who senses the magnetism of the
earth and is able to tell many kinds of earthquakes? Also volcanic
heats? A quick reply will favour me." Many have the regular prophetic
gift; practically every one of them foresaw the assassination of
McKinley. Most of them, however, are gifted in curing diseases. The
typical letter reads as follows: "There is a young man living here
who seems to be endowed with a wonderful occult power by the use of
which he is able to diagnose almost any human ailment. He goes into a
trance, and while in this condition the name of the subject is given
him, and then without any further questions he proceeds to diagnose
his case fully and correctly and prescribes a treatment for the relief
of the trouble. In every case yet diagnosed a cure has almost
immediately resulted." This kind of gift is so frequent that it is
really surprising that so many physicians still rely on their clumsier
method. Marvellous also are the effects which hypnotism can secure in
this paradise of the ignorant. After having hypnotized patients many
hundred times, I fancied that I had a general impression as to the
powers and limits of hypnotism. But there is no end to the new
information which I get from my hypnotizing correspondents. "Has it
ever occurred to you that by hypnotism death will be prevented, and
all ills, mental or otherwise, be cured before long? Why do I think
so?" Of course I do not know why she thinks so. I usually do not know
why the writers of the underworld letters think so. Or rather I
usually do know that they do not think at all.