it was urged by David Hume. Hegel remarks: 'The facts, it might seem,
first of all call for verification. But such verification would be
superfluous to those on whose account it was called for, since they
facilitate the inquiry for themselves by declaring the narratives,
infinitely numerous though they be, and accredited by the education and
character of the witnesses, to be mere deception and imposture. Their _a
priori_ conceptions are so rooted that no testimony can avail against
them, and they have even denied what they have seen with their own eyes,'
and reported under their own hands, like Sir David Brewster. Hegel, it
will be observed, takes the facts as given, and works them into his
general theory of the Sensitive Soul (_fühlende Seele_). He does not try
to establish the facts; but to establish, or at least to examine them, is
the first business of Psychical Research. Theorising comes later.
The years which have passed between the date of Hegel's 'Philosophy of
Mind' and our own time have witnessed the long dispute over the existence,
the nature, and the causes of the hypnotic condition, and over the reality
and limitations of the phenomena. Thus the Academy of Medicine in Paris
appointed a Committee to examine the subject in 1825. The Report on
'Animal Magnetism,' as it was then styled, was presented in 1831. The
Academy lacked the courage to publish it, for the Report was favourable
even to certain of the still disputed phenomena. At that time, in
accordance with a survival of the theory of Mesmer, the agent in hypnotic
cases was believed to be a kind of efflux of a cosmic fluid from the
'magnetiser' to the patient. There was 'a magnetic connection.'
Though no distinction between mesmerism and hypnotism is taken in popular
language, 'mesmerism' is a word implying this theory of 'magnetic' or
other unknown personal influence. 'Hypnotism,' as will presently be seen,
implies no such theory. The Academy's Report (1831) attested the
development, under 'magnetism,' of 'new faculties,' such as clairvoyance
and intuition, also the production of 'great changes in the physical
economy,' such as insensibility, and sudden increase of strength. The
Report declared it to be 'demonstrated' that sleep could be produced
'without suggestion,' as we say now, though the term was not then in use.
'Sleep has been produced in circumstances in which the persons could not
see or were ignorant of the means employed to produce it.'
The Academy did its best to suppress this Report, which attests the
phenomena that Hegel accepted, phenomena still disputed. Six years later
(1837), a Committee reported against the pretensions of a certain Berna,
a 'magnetiser.' No person acted on both Committees, and this Report was
accepted. Later, a number of people tried to read a letter in a box, and
failed. 'This,' says Mr. Vincent, 'settled the question with regard to
clairvoyance;' though it might be more logical to say that it settled the
pretensions of the competitors on that occasion. The Academy now decided
that, because certain persons did not satisfy the expectations raised by
their preliminary advertisements, therefore the question of magnetism was
definitely closed.
We have often to regret that scientific eminence is not always accompanied
by scientific logic. Where science neglects a subject, charlatans and
dupes take it up. In England 'animal magnetism' had been abandoned to this
class of enthusiasts, till Thackeray's friend, Dr. Elliotson, devoted
himself to the topic. He was persecuted as doctors know how to persecute;
but in 1841, Braid, of Manchester, discovered that the so-called 'magnetic
sleep' could be produced without any 'magnetism,' He made his patients
stare fixedly at an object, and encouraged them to expect to go to sleep.
He called his method 'Hypnotism,' a term which begs no question. Seeming
to cease to be mysterious, hypnotism became all but respectable, and was
being used in surgical operations, till it was superseded by chloroform.
In England, the study has been, and remains, rather _suspect_, while on
The Continent hypnotism is used both for healing purposes and in the
inquiries of experimental psychology. Wide differences of opinion still
exist, as to the nature of the hypnotic sleep, as to its physiological
concomitants, and as to the limits of the faculties exercised in or out of
the slumber. It is not even absolutely certain that the exercise of the
stranger faculties--for instance, that the production of anaesthesia and
rigidity--are the results merely of 'suggestion' and expectancy. A
hypnotised patient is told that the middle finger of his left hand will
become rigid and incapable of sensation. This occurs, and is explained by
'suggestion,' though _how_ 'suggestion' produces the astonishing effect
is another problem. The late Mr. Gurney, however, made a number of
experiments in which no suggestion was pronounced, nor did the patients
know which of their fingers was to become rigid and incapable of pain. The
patient's hands were thrust through a screen; on the other side of which
the hypnotist made passes above the finger which was to become rigid. The
lookers-on selected the finger, and the insensibility was tested by a
strong electric current. The effect was also produced _without_ passes,
the operator merely pointing at the selected finger, and 'willing' the
result. If he did not 'will' it, nothing occurred, nor did anything occur
if he willed without pointing. The proximity of the operator's hand
produced no effect if he did not 'will,' nor was his 'willing' successful
if he did not bring his hand near that of the patient. Other people's
hands, similarly situated, produced no effect.
Experiments in transferring taste, as of salt, sugar, cayenne pepper, from
operator to subject, were also successful. Drs. Janet and Gibert also
produced sleep in a woman at a distance, by 'willing' it, at hours which
were selected by a system of drawing lots.[17] These facts, of course,
rather point to an element of truth in the old mesmeric hypothesis of some
specific influence in the operator. They cannot very well be explained by
suggestion and expectancy. But these facts and facts of clairvoyance and
thought-transference will be rejected as superstitious delusions by people
who have not met them in their own experience. This need not prevent us
from examining them, because _all_ the facts, including those now
universally accepted by Continental and scarcely impeached by British
science, have been noisily rejected again and again on Hume's principles.
The rarer facts, as Mr. Gurney remarks, 'still go through the hollow form
of taking place.' Here is an example of the mode in which these phenomena
are treated by popular science. Mr. Vincent says that 'clairvoyance and
phrenology were Elliotson's constant stock in trade.' (Phrenology was
also Braid's stock in trade.) 'It is a matter of congratulation to have
been so soon delivered from what Dr. Lloyd Tuckey has well called "a mass
of superincumbent rubbish."'[18] Clairvoyance is part of a mass of
rubbish, on page 57. On page 67, Mr. Vincent says: 'There are many
interesting questions, such as telepathy, thought-reading, clairvoyance,
upon which it would be perhaps rash to give any decided opinion.... All
these strange psychical conditions present problems of great interest,'
and are only omitted because 'they have not a sufficient bearing on the
normal states of hypnosis....' Thus what was 'rubbish' in one page
'presents problems of great interest' ten pages later, and, after offering
a decided opinion that clairvoyance is rubbish, Mr. Vincent thinks it rash
to give any decided opinion. It is rather rash to give a decided opinion,
and then to say that it is rash to do so.[19]
This brief sketch shows that science is confronted by certain facts,
which, in his time, Hume dismissed as incredible miracles, beneath the
contempt of the wise and learned. We also see that the stranger and rarer
phenomena which Hegel accepted as facts, and interwove with his general
philosophy, are still matters of dispute. Admitted by some men of science,
they are doubted by others; by others, again, are denied, while most of
the journalists and authors of cheap primers, who inspire popular
tradition, regard the phenomena as frauds or fables of superstition. But
it is plain that these phenomena, like the more ordinary facts of
hypnotism, _may_ finally be admitted by science. The scientific world
laughed, not so long ago, at Ogham inscriptions, meteorites, and at
palaeolithic weapons as impostures, or freaks of nature. Now nobody has
any doubt on these matters, and clairvoyance, thought-transference, and
telepathy may, not inconceivably, be as fortunate in the long run as
meteorites, or as the more usual phenomena of hypnotism.
It is only Lord Kelvin who now maintains, or lately maintained, that in
hypnotism there is nothing at all but fraud and malobservation. In years
to come it may be that only some similar belated voice will cry that in
thought-transference there is nothing but malobservation and fraud. At
present the serious attention and careful experiment needed for the
establishment of the facts are more common among French than among English
men of science. When published, these experiments, if they contain any
affirmative instances, are denounced as 'superstitious,' or criticized
after what we must charitably deem to be a very hasty glance, by the
guides of popular opinion. Examples of this method will be later quoted.
Meanwhile the disputes as to these alleged facts are noticed here, because
of their supposed relation to the Origin of Religion.
[Footnote 1: See Mr. Myers's paper on the 'Ancient Oracles,' in _Classical
Essays_, and the author's 'Ancient Spiritualism,' in _Cock Lane and Common
Sense_.]
[Footnote 2: The italics here are those of Mr. Alfred Russell Wallace, in
his _Miracles and Modern Science_. Mr. Huxley, in his exposure of Hume's
fallacies (in his Life of Hume), did not examine the Jansenist 'miracles'
which Hume was criticising.]
[Footnote 3: Moll, _Hypnotism_, p. 357.]
[Footnote 4: _Animal Magnetism_, p. 355.]
[Footnote 5: A translation of his work was published in the _New Review_,
January 1693.]
[Footnote 6: _La Vérité des Miracles_, Cologne, 1747, Septièmo
Démonstration.]
[Footnote 7: See Dr. Russell Reynolds's paper in _British Medical
Journal_, November 1869.]
[Footnote 8: James, _Principles of Psychology_, ii. 612. Charcot,
op. cit.]
[Footnote 9: I do not need to be told that Dr. Maudsley denied the fact in
1886. I am prepared with the evidence, if it is asked for by some savant
who happens not to know it.]
[Footnote 10: I am not responsible, of course, for the scientific validity
of Dr. Charcot's theory of healing 'by idea.' My point merely is that
certain experts of no slight experience or mean reputation do now admit,
as important certainties within their personal knowledge, exactly the
phenomena which Hume asks the wise and learned to laugh at, indeed, but
never to investigate.]
[Footnote 11: Pp. 353-356.]
[Footnote 12: P. 93.]
[Footnote 13: _Träume_, p. 76.]
[Footnote 14: Hegel accepts the clairvoyance of the Pucelle.]
[Footnote 15: See Dr. Dessoir, in _Das Doppel Ich,_ as quoted by Mr.
Myers, _Proceedings_, vol. vi. 213.]
[Footnote 16: _Philosophie des Geistes, Werke,_ vol. vii. 179. Berlin.
1845. The examples and much of the philosophising are in the _Zusätze_,
not translated in Mr. Wallace's version, Oxford, 1894.]
[Footnote 17: _Proceedings_, S.P.R., vol. ii. pp. 201-207, 390-392.]
[Footnote 18: _Elements of Hypnotism_, p. 67.]
[Footnote 19: Possibly Mr. Vincent only means that Elliotson's
experiments, 'little more than sober footing' (p. 57), with the sisters
Okey, were rubbish. But whether the sisters Okey were or were not honest
is a question on which we cannot enter here.]
III
ANTHROPOLOGY AND RELIGION
Among the various forms of science which are reaching and affecting the
new popular tradition, we have reckoned Anthropology. Pleasantly enough,
Anthropology has herself but recently emerged from that limbo of
the unrecognised in which Psychical Research is pining. The British
Association used to reject anthropological papers as 'vain dreams based on
travellers' tales.' No doubt the British Association would reject a paper
on clairvoyance as a vain dream based on old wives' fables, or on
hysterical imposture. Undeniably the study of such themes is hampered by
fable and fraud, just as anthropology has to be ceaselessly on its guard
against 'travellers' tales,' against European misunderstandings of savage
ideas, and against civilised notions and scientific theories unconsciously
read into barbaric customs, rites, traditions, and usages. Man, _ondoyant
et divers_, is the subject alike of anthropology and of psychical
research. Man (especially savage man) cannot be secluded from disturbing
influences, and watched, like the materials of a chemical experiment in a
laboratory. Nor can man be caught in a 'primitive' state: his intellectual
beginnings lie very far behind the stage of culture in which we find the
lowest known races. Consequently the matter on which anthropology works is
fluctuating; the evidence on which it rests needs the most sceptical
criticism, and many of its conclusions, in the necessary absence of
historical testimony as to times far behind the lowest known savages, must
be hypothetical.
For these sound reasons official science long looked askance on
Anthropology. Her followers were not regarded as genuine scholars, and,
perhaps as a result of this contempt, they were often 'broken men,'
intellectual outlaws, people of one wild idea. To the scientific mind,
anthropologists or ethnologists were a horde who darkly muttered of
serpent worship, phallus worship, Arkite doctrines, and the Ten Lost
Tribes that kept turning up in the most unexpected places. Anthropologists
were said to gloat over dirty rites of dirty savages, and to seek reason
where there was none. The exiled, the outcast, the pariah of Science, is,
indeed, apt to find himself in odd company. Round the camp-fire of
Psychical Research too, in the unofficial, unstaked waste of Science,
hover odd, menacing figures of Esoteric Buddhists, _Satanistes_,
Occultists, Christian Scientists, Spiritualists, and Astrologers, as the
Arkites and Lost Tribesmen haunted the cradle of anthropology.
But there was found at last to be reason in the thing, and method in the
madness. Evolution was in it. The acceptance, after long ridicule, of
palaeolithic weapons as relics of human culture, probably helped to bring
Anthropology within the sacred circle of permitted knowledge. Her topic
was full of illustrations of the doctrine of Mr. Darwin. Modern writers on
the theme had been anticipated by the less systematic students of the
eighteenth century--Goguet, de Brosses, Millar, Fontenelle, Lafitau,
Boulanger, or even Hume and Voltaire. As pioneers these writers answer to
the early mesmerists and magnetists, Puységur, Amoretti, Ritter,
Elliotson, Mayo, Gregory, in the history of Psychical Research. They
were on the same track, in each case, as Lubbock, Tylor, Spencer,
Bastian, and Frazer, or as Gurney, Richet, Myers, Janet, Dessoir, and Von
Schrenck-Notzing. But the earlier students were less careful of method and
evidence.
Evidence! that was the stumbling block of anthropology. We still hear, in
the later works of Mr. Max Müller, the echo of the old complaints.
Anything you please, Mr. Max Müller says, you may find among your useful
savages, and (in regard to some anthropologists) his criticism is just.
You have but to skim a few books of travel, pencil in hand, and pick out
what suits your case. Suppose, as regards our present theme, your theory
is that savages possess broken lights of the belief in a Supreme Being.
You can find evidence for that. Or suppose you want to show that they have
no religious ideas at all; you can find evidence for that also. Your
testimony is often derived from observers ignorant of the language of the
people whom they talk about, or who are themselves prejudiced by one or
other theory or bias. How can you pretend to raise a science on such
foundations, especially as the savage informants wish to please or to
mystify inquirers, or they answer at random, or deliberately conceal their
most sacred institutions, or have never paid any attention to the subject?
To all these perfectly natural objections Mr. Tylor has replied.[1]
Evidence must be collected, sifted, tested, as in any other branch of
inquiry. A writer, 'of course, is bound to use his best judgment as to
the trustworthiness of all authors he quotes, and, if possible, to obtain
several accounts to certify each point in each locality.' Mr. Tylor then
adduces 'the test of recurrence,' of undesigned coincidence in testimony,
as Millar had already argued in the last century.[2] If a mediaeval
Mahommedan in Tartary, a Jesuit in Brazil, a Wesleyan in Fiji, one may add
a police magistrate in Australia, a Presbyterian in Central Africa, a
trapper in Canada, agree in describing some analogous rite or myth in
these diverse lands and ages, we cannot set down the coincidence to chance
or fraud. 'Now, the most important facts of ethnography are vouched for in
this way.'
We may add that even when the ideas of savages are obscure, we can
often detect them by analysis of the institutions in which they are
expressed.[3]
Thus anthropological, like psychical or any other evidence, must be
submitted to conscientious processes of testing and sifting. Contradictory
instances must be hunted for sedulously. Nothing can be less scientific
than to snatch up any traveller's tale which makes for our theory, and to
ignore evidence, perhaps earlier, or later, or better observed, which
makes against it. Yet this, unfortunately, in certain instances (which
will be adduced) has been the occasional error of Mr. Huxley and Mr.
Spencer.[4] Mr. Spencer opens his 'Ecclesiastical Institutions' by the
remark that 'the implication [from the reported absence of the ideas of
belief in persons born deaf and dumb] is that the religious ideas of
civilised men are not innate' (who says they are?), and this implication
Mr. Spencer supports by 'proofs that among various savages religious ideas
do not exist.' 'Sir John Lubbock has given many of these.' But it would be
well to advise the reader to consult Roskoff's confutation of Sir John
Lubbock, and Mr. Tylor's masterly statement.[5] Mr. Spencer cited Sir
Samuel Baker for savages without even 'a ray of superstition' or a trace
of worship. Mr. Tylor, twelve years before Mr. Spencer wrote, had
demolished Sir Samuel Baker's assertion,[6] as regards many tribes, and so
shaken it as regards the Latukas, quoted by Mr. Spencer. The godless
Dinkas have 'a good deity and heaven-dwelling creator,' carefully recorded
years before Sir Samuel's 'rash denial.' We show later that Mr. Spencer,
relying on a single isolated sentence in Brough Smyth, omits all his
essential information about the Australian Supreme Being; while Mr.
Huxley--overlooking the copious and conclusive evidence as to their
ethical religion--charges the Australians with having merely a non-moral
belief in casual spirits. We have also to show that Mr. Huxley, under the
dominance of his theory, and inadvertently, quotes a good authority as
saying the precise reverse of what he really does say.
If the facts not fitting their theories are little observed by authorities
so popular as Mr. Huxley and Mr. Spencer; if _instantiae contradictoriae_
are ignored by them, or left vague; if these things are done in the green
tree, we may easily imagine what shall be done in the dry. But we need not
war with hasty _vulgarisateurs_ and headlong theorists.
Enough has been said to show the position of anthropology as regards
evidence, and to prove that, if he confines his observations to certain
anthropologists, the censures of Mr. Max Müller are justified. It is
mainly for this reason that the arguments presently to follow are strung
on the thread of Mr. Tylor's truly learned and accurate book, 'Primitive
Culture.'
Though but recently crept forth, _vix aut ne vix quidem_, from the chill
shade of scientific disdain, Anthropology adopts the airs of her elder
sisters among the sciences, and is as severe as they to the Cinderella of
the family, Psychical Research. She must murmur of her fairies among the
cinders of the hearth, while they go forth to the ball, and dance with
provincial mayors at the festivities of the British Association. This is
ungenerous, and unfortunate, as the records of anthropology are rich in
unexamined materials of psychical research. I am unacquainted with any
work devoted by an anthropologist of renown to the hypnotic and kindred
practices of the lower races, except Herr Bastian's very meagre tract,
'Über psychische Beobachtungen bei Naturvölkern.'[7] We possess, none the
less, a mass of scattered information on this topic, the savage side of
psychical phenomena, in works of travel, and in Mr. Tylor's monumental
'Primitive Culture.' Mr. Tylor, however, as we shall see, regards it as a
matter of indifference, or, at least, as a matter beyond the scope of his
essay, to decide whether the parallel supernormal phenomena believed
in by savages, and said to recur in civilisation, are facts of actual
experience, or not.
Now, this question is not otiose. Mr. Tylor, like other anthropologists,
Mr. Huxley, Mr. Herbert Spencer, and their followers and popularisers,
constructs on anthropological grounds, a theory of the Origin of Religion.
That origin anthropology explains as the result of early and fallacious
reasonings on a number of biological and psychological phenomena, both
normal and (as is alleged by savages) supernormal. These reasonings led to
the belief in souls and spirits. Now, first, anthropology has taken for
granted that the Supreme Deities of savages are envisaged by them as
'spirits.' This, paradoxical as the statement may appear, is just what
does not seem to be proved, as we shall show. Next, if the supernormal
phenomena (clairvoyance, thought-transference, phantasms of the dead,
phantasms of the dying, and others) be real matters of experience, the
inferences drawn from them by early savage philosophy may be, in some
degree, erroneous. But the inferences drawn by materialists who reject the
supernormal phenomena will also, perhaps, be, let us say, incomplete.
Religion will have been, in part, developed out of facts, perhaps
inconsistent with materialism in its present dogmatic form. To put it less
trenchantly, and perhaps more accurately, the alleged facts 'are not
merely dramatically strange, they are not merely extraordinary and
striking, but they are "odd" in the sense that they will not easily fit in
with the views which physicists and men of science generally give us of
the universe in which we live' (Mr. A.J. Balfour, President's Address,
'Proceedings,' S.P.R. vol. x. p. 8, 1894).
As this is the case, it might seem to be the business of Anthropology, the
Science of Man, to examine, among other things, the evidence for the
actual existence of those alleged unusual and supernormal phenomena,
belief in which is given as one of the origins of religion.
To make this examination, in the ethnographic field, is almost a new
labour. As we shall see, anthropologists have not hitherto investigated
such things as the 'Fire-walk' of savages, uninjured in the flames, like
the Three Holy Children. The world-wide savage practice of divining by
hallucinations induced through gazing into a smooth deep (crystal-gazing)
has been studied, I think, by no anthropologist. The veracity of
'messages' uttered by savage seers when (as they suppose) 'possessed' or
'inspired' has not been criticised, and probably cannot be, for lack of
detailed information. The 'physical phenomena' which answer among savages
to the use of the 'divining rod,' and to 'spiritist' marvels in modern
times, have only been glanced at. In short, all the savage parallels
to the so-called 'psychical phenomena' now under discussion in England,
America, Germany, Italy, and France, have escaped critical analysis and
comparison with their civilised counterparts.