decline to extinction. They are those who lack personality; that is,
they are not moulded into harmony with a social environment which
unfolds self-consciousness. They are strictly biological only when
they are congenital and therefore not educable. They are social
degenerates when they are the product of a degraded education. Both
factors are radical. A born idiot can never be other than an idiot. On
the other hand, the deprivation during childhood and youth of language
and education, as shown by Caspar Hauser, or the wolf-boy of Agra, or
the experiment of Emperor Akbar, leaves the normal natural endowments
as idiotic as though they never existed. The two factors vary
independently through all degrees. Education ranges from the slums to
the pure firesides. The congenital equipment varies from the idiot to
the genius.
The relative weight of these two factors is a matter of statistics.
Absolutely speaking, heredity is everything; relatively, its social
significance depends upon the actual proportion of abnormal to normal
births.
The highest estimate I am able to make of the total number of
degenerates, both born and induced, is five and one-half per cent of
the population, as follows:
ESTIMATED TOTAL OF DEFECTIVES PER MILLION POPULATION.
Census estimate (1890).
Insane 1,697
Feeble-minded 1,526
Deaf and Dumb 659
Blind 805
Prisoners 1,315
Juvenile delinquents 237
Almshouse paupers 1,166
-----
7,405
Outdoor Criminals (five times the number of inmates) 7,760
Tramps (McCook, 1895, New Haven Conference of Charities
and Correction, 85,768) 1,308
Drunkards (Crothers, 1893, Chicago Conference, 1,200,000,
equal to about 10 per cent of voting population) 19,000
Prostitutes (weighted average of Levasseur's estimate for
rural (600) and urban (11,200 to 17,200) France, in
"La Population Française," vol. ii, p. 434) 5,000
Outdoor Paupers (weighted average of report at Nashville
Conference, 1894, 46 per cent in Penna. to 2.2 per cent
in N. Y.) 15,000
------
55,473
This estimate would make the maximum number of all degenerates 5.54
per cent of the population. From these must be deducted those who are
not congenital. We can estimate the congenitals by three methods: by
statistics of _atavism_, or _consanguinity_, and by _experiment_.
In the statistics of atavism we add together the physical
abnormalities of the individual, assuming that a criminal type is
found when these abnormalities reach the number of three or more. The
statistical method always suffers the limitation that it indicates not
identity, but probability. Yet it has an important value, provided it
discovers ratios of probability which concur. This is not the case in
the method by atavism. Sixty to seventy per cent of criminals do not
belong to the assumed criminal type; and sixteen per cent of normal
males are classed as criminals, whereas the actual number is less than
three per cent of the males of criminal age. (See Lombroso, "The
Female Offender," pp. 104, 105.)
While atavism itself is unquestioned, this method seizes upon rigid
physical characters to measure educable qualities. And where the
latter are themselves abnormal the causes may lie with education and
not heredity.
The method by consanguinity seeks not the abnormalities of the patient
himself, but the signs of disease and degeneracy in his blood
relatives. It therefore greatly increases the apparent weight of
heredity, for it collects symptoms from several individuals instead of
one. The medical authorities ascribe fifty to eighty per cent of
inebriety to heredity. This method fails as does the other, for, as
seen in the Jukes or the drunkard, the child gets both its heredity
and its education from the same degraded parents, and the method
provides no measure for separating the two.
In sociology the method of experiment has but limited employment. The
modern sociologist cannot mate the parents nor vivisect the soul,
after the methods of the biologist. He can only move the child from
one education to another, and his experiment is incidental to the
larger purpose of saving the child. His results, too, can appear only
as a ratio of probability; but this ratio measures the mental and
moral qualities themselves directly and not by inference. Elmira
Reformatory and others cure eighty per cent of their charges. Model
placing-out institutions and free kindergartens save nearly all. And
these are taken from the most vicious and criminal parentage in the
land. Our five and one-half per cent of degenerates must therefore be
greatly reduced in order to find the residuum of congenitals. I have
made the following deductions:
ESTIMATED DEFECTIVES NOT CONGENITAL, PER MILLION POPULATION.
Criminals (80 per cent of total) 7,369
Prostitutes (80 per cent of total) 4,000
Outdoor Paupers (80 per cent of total) 16,000
Tramps (80 per cent of total) 1,046
Drunkards (50 per cent of total) 9,500
------
37,915
Which deducted from 55,473
leaves congenital defectives 17,558
equal to 1.75 per cent of the population. Overlappings would diminish
this ratio; greater infant mortality and the omitted youthful
defectives would increase it.
If less than two per cent of the births are below the normal Aryan
brain level, on the other hand possibly two per cent are above the
average, and should be classed as the geniuses who could achieve
eminence regardless of surroundings. The remaining ninety per cent or
more are born with ordinary equipment; they are hereditarily neither
good nor bad, criminal nor virtuous, brilliant nor stupid. With these
masses of the people the first fifteen years of infancy and youth are
decisive.
We may now classify the selective forces of society. Social selection
is partly natural and partly artificial. It originates artificially in
the self-consciousness of dominant individuals. Struggle and conflict
ensue, out of which private property survives in its various forms as
an intended control over others. This control is then transmitted as
the various social institutions to succeeding generations and becomes
for them natural and unintended. These social institutions then
constitute a coercive environment, not over wholly unwilling subjects,
but over those whose wills are shaped by education and social pressure
to coöperate with the very institutions that suppress them.
Gradually, as subordinate classes become self-conscious, innovations
are made which aim to check the unbridled despotism of private
property; new conflicts thereupon take place and certain innovations
survive, which, at first artificial, become natural for the next
generations.
As society becomes more definite, reflective, and humane, as it
acquires fixed laws and government, it increases the range of
artificial selection; it supplants custom by statute, and remodels its
inherited institutions.
It is now animated by a new motive, the development of moral character
in all the people. With reference to this new motive social selection
is either direct or indirect. Direct selection is highly artificial,
but it is only negative. It consists in segregating the degenerates to
prevent propagation. Society cannot, of course, directly interfere
with the marriage choice of normal persons, for that would be to choke
the purest expression of personality. But it can isolate the two per
cent who will never rise to moral responsibility. This would doubtless
increase the wards of the state, but it is needed both for the reason
already given and, more especially, to clarify the public mind on the
causes of delinquency and dependency. As long as these evils can be
charged to heredity the public is blinded to the share that springs
from social injustice.
The increase and classification of the custodial population here
contemplated is a problem for administrative charity. Possibly the
colony system would make that population mutually self-supporting and
also remove the current sentimentalism against long isolation of the
incurables.
With the ground cleared of the true degenerates, the operations of
indirect social selection can be seen. This also is artificial, but in
a less mechanical way. It consists in so adjusting the political,
industrial, and social environment as to affect personality, either to
suppress or develop it. The two instruments are legal rights and
education. For example, the tenement-house congestion, with its
significant educational environment, is the product of laws of
property and taxation which favor owners and speculators instead of
tenants, and of private property in rapid transit which puts a tax on
exit to the suburbs. It cannot be said of this and other selective
factors, such as the profit-making saloon, long hours of work, low
pay, irregular employment, that they permit natural selection to
operate. They suppress personality, which preëminently is the natural
fact in the human being. Social selection is therefore tending to
become less and less arbitrary, but is making room for a higher
natural selection--a natural selection where not brute force and
cunning are the fittest to survive, but where, with freedom, security,
and equal opportunity, the human personality will work out its own
survival. Man alone of all the animals can rise to the angels, but he
alone can fall below the brutes. This is the glory and the penalty of
personality. It becomes a unique selective agency whose standard is
raised with the advance of civilization. The Australian cannibal,
without opium, tobacco, alcohol, or syphilis, may survive with a low
morality. The American exposed to these destroyers must be a better
man or perish. Personality, thus becoming a keen selective principle,
is based not necessarily on overpopulation and competition, but on
that self-destruction which comes from vice, disease, and drunkenness.
Its degraded offspring will perish or feed the ranks of the hereditary
degenerates to be properly segregated and ended.
But with education and opportunity the higher forms of human character
will naturally increase and survive. With the independence and
education of women sexual selection becomes a refined and powerful
agent of progress. With the right to work guaranteed, the tramp and
indiscriminate charity have no excuse, and the honest workman becomes
secure in the training and survival of his family.
We hear much of scientific charity. There is also a scientific
justice. The aim of the former is to educate true character and
self-reliance. The aim of the latter is to open the opportunities for
the free expression of character. Education and justice are the
methods of social selection. By their coöperation is shaped the moral
environment where alone can survive that natural yet supernatural
product, human personality.
PSYCHIC OR SUPERMUNDANE EXPERIENCES.
BY CORA L. V. RICHMOND.
From between ten and eleven years of age I have been endowed with
gifts and favored with experiences that, I am well assured, are very
exceptional, and that, until quite recently, have not been admitted to
the realm of psychical investigation, philosophical discussion, or
even human credence. Lately, however, there have been found a
sufficient number of well authenticated facts in similar lines of
experience to warrant the investigation and classification of them (if
possible) under a modern name, "Psychic Research," and under a well
established and not so recent one, Spiritualism.
I am not intending to discuss these subjects, _per se_, nor to
endeavor to classify or explain the experiences I am about to relate.
They are _experiences_, as real as any of those in my human or mundane
existence; indeed, if I were called upon to decide that one is real
and the other illusion, I should say without hesitation that these,
and similar ones throughout my lifetime, are the real, and the
ordinary mundane experiences unreal.
At the age above referred to I was, without any seeking, and without
any surrounding circumstances to "suggest" such a state, taken
possession of (entranced) by intelligences, distinct personalities in
thought, word, and action, who spoke through my organism, unfolded and
educated my mind, in fact became my mental and spiritual instructors.
The public discourses and teachings given under these conditions are
well known to many of the readers of THE ARENA, as these labors are
the work of a lifetime.
It is not of this public work that I am constrained to write; but I
may as well say here that I have had no other teachers, no other
instructors, and have pursued no course of study or reading of human
books; those whom I call my guides and guardians have been my
teachers. During the time that these outside intelligences are
controlling and speaking through my organism I am wholly unconscious
of what is passing in human life and wholly unaware of that which is
being uttered through my lips. I am also unaware of the lapse of time.
It may be best for me to here declare that I am not, in the usual
sense, peculiar, nor was I different in my childhood from other
children, save as each differs from the other. I was very diffident,
and--not using the word in the psychical sense--sensitive. I was not
given to morbid states or to the "dreaming of dreams." Perhaps I was
imaginative; most children are; and I loved fairy tales, but not
unduly. This is simply to show that there was no abnormal condition of
mind or body to produce the supernormal results that I have referred
to.
I ought also to say that I never made the slightest preparation for
the discourses and poems given through my lips, many of which, as the
reader may know, were listened to by able and thoughtful minds, and
from them received the highest praise. I tell this, not boastingly,
but with humble gratitude that I have been made the instrument of
giving the message of immortality to the world.
My own experiences during this period of entrancement, or while in the
supernormal state, may be of peculiar interest to the reader, since
they seem to be almost unique. While passing into this state I
experience no physical sensations that are describable; a sense of
being set free, of passing into a larger realm,--not of being
transported or going anywhere,--is all that I can ever recall as
sensation. Before I have time or opportunity to think how I feel, I am
in the other state. Then I see, but I now know it is perception more
than sight; I sometimes experience that which we call hearing in the
human state, but I am fully aware; perception supersedes the senses.
Those whom I meet are individualities; many are friends known to me in
the form before they passed from the mortal state; many are those who
were unknown to me personally, only known by name and fame; and many I
have never known until they revealed themselves to me in this "inner,"
"higher," other realm. When returning to outward consciousness, I
often see, or remember as sight, such visions of surpassing loveliness
that no language, no gift of art, even with genius-portraiture, could
describe or picture them. These scenes and visions are associated with
individuals who exist in that state, and, apparently, are objective;
yet I am fully aware that they illustrate or depict the states and
tastes of the individuals with whom they are seen, and are not organic
physical forms, but psychic projections of the individual spirits.
These forms and scenes readily pass and change according to the state
of the one seeing them, or according to the state of the individual
with whom they are associated. The "sphere" of a spirit, or of
spirits, is the state or condition, not the environment.
In early life, before my mind had thought on the "objective" and
"subjective" meanings of thoughts and things, I thought these scenes
were "objective" in the human, mundane sense. I am now perfectly aware
that every sensuous faculty--seeing, hearing, etc.--is superseded by
this "perception" to which I have before referred; in fact, that the
bodily senses as well as the mental faculties--brain expression--are
but the different avenues of perceiving and conveying the intelligence
of the individual spirit while associated with material form, this
perception, or awareness, being the one supreme state of the spirit.
Still I have been shown series after series of beautiful
scenes,--gardens, landscapes, visions of art, transcendent pictures of
tint, form, and tone that no language can portray; and I am sure these
abide for all who wish for or have need of them, and are the
illustrations of the spiritual states of those with whom one comes in
spiritual contact--_rapport_. Yet the greater the degree of
perception, the less important become these illustrations of states;
we not only see "face to face," but perceive soul to soul. I became
ashamed, almost, of the state of mind requiring these illustrations or
any similar presentations. I found knowledge, however, in all the
methods employed by my teachers, for they knew my needs.
Conversation in that state is not by means of speech or even language;
sometimes before the thought is formulated the answer comes. Such is
the rare sympathy existing between teacher and pupil in this state
that the guide knows before the question is formed. Still, there must
be the conscious desire for knowledge, or no knowledge can be
received; reminding one of the "Seek, and ye shall find" of the
ancient Truth-Teller.
When in that state I readily pass to a knowledge of what intimate
friends in earth-life are doing and thinking. I even enter into such
_rapport_ as to be aware of their material surroundings, their states
of mind, and their bodily health, obtaining all this from their minds,
not from physical consciousness or sensation. Many times they have
been also conscious of my presence, and we have afterward verified
these experiences by outward correspondence, mostly to satisfy our
friends. One or two instances will suffice to illustrate this class of
experiences.
When I was yet a child, twelve years of age, my father accompanied me
on one of my pilgrimages of spiritual work to western New York, our
former home. During that visit or tour a circle for investigation and
experiment was formed in Dunkirk, N. Y. After we returned to our then
home in Wisconsin, I was one evening entranced,--as was usual,--and
while in that state was distinctly conscious of being in Dunkirk, of
seeing every member of the circle, with all of whom I was acquainted
except one lady. She proved to be the seer of the evening. She saw me
and described me so accurately that everyone in the circle recognized
me, and, of course, thought I was dead. This so disturbed her mental
or psychic state that I could not impress upon her mind that my body
was entranced and that this was but one of my usual spiritual
pilgrimages. On returning to my mundane state I narrated what I had
experienced, and asked my father to write at once to the circle in
Dunkirk and relieve their minds. He did so, but, as naturally would
occur, they had also written, the letters crossing each other on the
way, and their letter confirmed what I had told in every particular.
Later in life I had a lady friend whom I repeatedly visited and
comforted, for she was in great sorrow. One time I made her see my
body, or its apparition, so plainly that she saw the dress in which it
was clothed--precisely what I had wished, as it was the color she most
liked to see me wear. Another friend in California became so
susceptible to my presence that she wrote long letters from
me--automatically--which I, in this state, dictated to her, thus
rendering correspondence between us almost superfluous except for
verification to our outward senses. My own mother was aware of my
presence almost daily; and it was a curious fact that my telltale
spirit would go to her and reveal the very things I wished to keep
from her,--any little surprises or presents, or the time of my
arrival home on a visit. However late the hour, I always found her
ready with a warm supper to receive me. When arriving after the
journey home she would say: "You came to me last night in spirit and
told me you were coming in body." All important things connected with
my welfare she knew in a similar way.
Two friends, Mr. and Mrs. B----, were extensive travellers. At one
time they were absent three years, taking a tour of the Orient. We did
not keep up a regular correspondence, as mutually our time was too
much taken up with our respective duties or pleasures, but I could
always locate them while I was in this "inner" state. At one time I
saw them surrounded by what seemed more like a scene in the spirit
state than in earth-life. They were on an island, surrounded by
water-lilies; the skies were full of golden light, and they were amid
pavilions, grottos, and altars of quaint and unique design. I could
not place them, but on returning to my mundane state I related to my
family what I had seen, and I wrote down the date. In about three or
four weeks I had a letter from them dated at Tokio, giving a
description of this very island I had seen; they were there on that
very day when I saw them, and the island was as I had seen it. It
proved to be one of the sacred islands in Japan.
This consciousness of visiting earth friends is, however, only the
smallest part of these inner experiences; and usually occurs when I am
passing into or out of the deeper or more spiritual states. Although I
could fill volumes with these interesting experiences,--verified by
being shared with others in human life,--I feel it due to the reader
that I narrate my more inner experiences; at least in sufficient
degree that they may be recorded, and that there may be some
perception, however inadequately expressed, of what is possible in
this surpassing realm.
I cannot pass from this subject of my visits to human friends,
however, without here recording one other phase of this many-threaded
line of experiences. While in this realm of spirit I often meet and
converse freely, or commune, with friends that are yet in human forms,
but who appear as spirits and seem to possess all the activities of
the spiritual state. They meet and mingle freely with those who have
"died" to human life, yet I am perfectly sure they recall nothing of
this when in their human state. Why I should remember or take with me
these experiences that the others whom I saw within this realm could
not recall, I could not divine until it was explained by my guide.
The explanation is this: "In sleep mortals pass into this realm for
spiritual rest and change, as it is the normal realm of the spirit;
but they do not pass through the spiritual awakening of the faculties
as those do who are endowed with 'spiritual gifts,' therefore the
experiences cannot be recalled _as experiences_; still, they sometimes
have vague reminiscences or glimpses of 'unremembered dreams' that aid
them throughout the whole day, often for days; and thus the outward
life is sustained and fed from this realm. By and by the race will
have spiritual growth to know and remember the experiences of the
spirit as they now do of the human life." I have frequently met those
in that state who were strangers to me here, and who were still in
human life; and in after years I have met them face to face in outward
form, often wondering if they thought they had seen me before, as I
was certain I had seen them. When the whole of this other side of
human experience is made known, how many things now veiled will stand
revealed! By far the greater number of volumes could be filled with
those transcendent experiences referred to earlier in these pages,
with friends in spirit states, with teachers and guides in their own
realm.
My mother, always intuitive, sympathetic, religious, and caring much
for the sick and ailing while in earth life, I was accustomed to see
in a sphere or state of her own near the "Healing Sphere" of one
of my teachers. She was surrounded with her own favorite
flowers--old-fashioned hollyhocks, sweet-williams, and fragrant
healing herbs. My guide explained that in _her thought_, or spiritual,
state she requires these things to aid her in healing or ministering
to those on earth. Whenever I visited her state it seemed to be in the
midst of scenery such as she loved on earth, and under a
morning-glory-covered lattice, where she sat in a low chair like one I
had seen her use in earth life. Though not limited to that state, she
always revealed herself thus to me; and I would return to my earth
state with a sense of homesickness, and with the odor of thyme and
rosemary clinging to my _psychic olfactories_.