No documents are extant to enlighten us; we have only mobile, complex and
confused ideas, incarnate in eccentric, often contradictory theories. That
this character attaches to such ideas should keep us on guard against
framing theories whose symmetry is sometimes their condemnation' ('Daily
Chronicle,' December 10, 1897).
Nothing excites my own suspicion of my provisional hypothesis more than
its symmetry. It really seems to fit the facts, as they appear to me, too
neatly. I would suggest, however, that ancient savage sacred hymns,
and practices in the mysteries, are really rather of the nature of
'documents;' more so, at least, than the casual observations of some
travellers, or the gossip extracted from natives much in contact with
Europeans.
Supposing that the arguments in this essay met with some acceptance, what
effect would they have, if any, on our thoughts about religion? What is
their practical tendency? The least dubious effect would be, I hope, to
prevent us from accepting the anthropological theory of religion, or any
other theory, as a foregone conclusion, I have tried to show how dim is
our knowledge, how weak, often, is our evidence, and that, finding among
the lowest savages all the elements of all religions already developed
in different degrees, we cannot, historically, say that one is earlier
than another. This point of priority we can never historically settle. If
we met savages with ghosts and no gods, we could not be sure but that they
once possessed a God, and forgot him. If we met savages with a God and no
ghosts, we could not be historically certain that a higher had not
obliterated a lower creed. For these reasons dogmatic decisions about the
_origin_ of religion seem unworthy of science. They will appear yet more
futile to any student who goes so far with me as to doubt whether the
highest gods of the lowest races could be developed, or can be shown to
have been developed, by way of the ghost-theory. To him who reaches this
point the whole animistic doctrine of ghosts as the one germ of religion
will appear to be imperilled. The main practical result, then, will be
hesitation about accepting the latest scientific opinion, even when backed
by great names, and published in little primers.
On the hypothesis here offered to criticism there are two chief sources of
Religion, (1) the belief, how attained we know not,[10] in a powerful,
moral, eternal, omniscient Father and Judge of men; (2) the belief
(probably developed out of experiences normal and supernormal) in
somewhat of man which may survive the grave. This second belief is not,
logically, needed as given material for the first, in its apparently
earliest form. It may, for all we know, be the later of the two beliefs,
chronologically. But this belief, too, was necessary to religion; first,
as finally supplying a formula by which advancing intellects could
conceive of the Mighty Being involved in the former creed; next, as
elevating man's conception of his own nature. By the second belief he
becomes the child of the God in whom, perhaps, he already trusted, and in
whom he has his being, a being not destined to perish with the death of
the body. Man is thus not only the child but the heir of God, a 'nurseling
of immortality,' capable of entering into eternal life. On the moral
influence of this belief it is superfluous to dwell.
From the most backward races historically known to us, to those of our own
status, all have been more or less washed by the waters of this double
stream of religion. The Hebrews, as far as our information goes, were
chiefly influenced by the first belief, the faith in the Eternal, and had
comparatively slight interest in whatever posthumous fortunes might await
individual souls. Other civilised peoples, say the Greeks, extended the
second, or animistic theory, into forms of beautiful fantasy, the
material of art. Yet both in Greece and Rome, as we learn from the
'Republic' (Books i. iii.) of Plato, and from the whole scope of the poem
of Lucretius, and from the Painted Porch at Delphi, answering to the
frescoes of the Pisan Campo Santo, there existed, among the people, what
was unknown to the Hebrews, an extreme anxiety about the posthumous
fortunes and possible punishment of the individual soul. A kind of
pardoners and indulgence-sellers made a living out of that anxiety in
Greece. For the Greek pardoners, who testify to an interest in the
future happiness of the soul not found in Israel, Mr. Jevons may be cited:
'The _agyrtes_ professed by means of his rites to purify men from the sins
they had themselves committed ... and so to secure to those whom he
purified an exemption from the evil lot in the next world which awaited
those who were not initiated.' 'A magic mirror' (crystal-gazing) 'was
among his properties.'[11]
In Egypt a moral life did not suffice to secure immortal reward. There
was also required knowledge of the spells that baffle the demons who, in
Amenti, as in the Red Indian and Polynesian Hades, lie in wait for souls.
That knowledge was contained in copies of the Book of the Dead--the
_gagne-pain_ of priests and scribes.
Early Israel, having, as far as we know, a singular lack of interest in
the future of the soul, was born to give himself up to developing,
undisturbed, the theistic conception, the belief in a righteous Eternal.
Polytheism everywhere--in Greece especially--held of the animistic
conception, with its freakish, corruptible deities. Greek philosophy could
hardly restore that Eternal for whom the Prophets battled in Israel; whom
some of the lowest savages know and fear; whom the animistic theory or cult
everywhere obscures with its crowd of hungry, cruel, interested,
food-propitiated ghost-gods. In the religion of our Lord and the Apostles
the two currents of faith in one righteous God and care for the individual
soul were purified and combined. 'God is a Spirit, and they who worship
Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.' Man also is a spirit, and,
as such, is in the hands of a God not to be propitiated by man's
sacrifice or monk's ritual. We know how this doctrine was again disturbed
by the Animism, in effect, and by the sacrifice and ritual of the
Mediaeval Church. Too eager 'to be all things to all men,' the august and
beneficent Mother of Christendom readmitted the earlier Animism in new
forms of saint-worship, pilgrimage, and popular ceremonial--things apart
from, but commonly supposed to be substitutes for, righteousness of life
and the selflessness enjoined in savage mysteries. For the softness, no
less than for the hardness of men's hearts, these things were ordained:
such as masses for the beloved dead.
Modern thought has deanthropomorphised what was left of anthropomorphic
in religion, and, in the end, has left us for God, at most, 'a stream
of tendency making for righteousness,' or an energy unknown and
unknowable--the ghost of a ghost. For the soul, by virtue of his
belief in which man raised himself in his own esteem, and, more or less,
in ethical standing, is left to us a negation or a wistful doubt.
To this part of modern scientific teaching the earlier position of this
essay suggests a demurrer. By aid of the tradition of and belief in
supernormal phenomena among the low races, by attested phenomena of the
same kinds of experience among the higher races, I have ventured to try to
suggest that 'we are not merely brain;' that man has his part, we know not
how, in we know not what--has faculties and vision scarcely conditioned by
the limits of his normal purview. The evidence of all this deals with
matters often trivial, like the electric sparks rubbed from the deer's
hide, which yet are cognate with an illimitable, essential potency of the
universe. Not being able to explain away these facts, or, in this place,
to offer what would necessarily be a premature theory of them, I regard
them, though they seem shadowy, as grounds of hope, or, at least, as
tokens that men need not yet despair. Not now for the first time have weak
things of the earth been chosen to confound things strong. Nor have men of
this opinion been always the weakest; not among the feeblest are Socrates,
Pascal, Napoleon, Cromwell, Charles Gordon, St. Theresa, and Jeanne d'Arc.
I am perfectly aware that the 'superstitiousness' of the earlier part of
this essay must injure any effect which the argument of the latter part
might possibly produce on critical opinion. Yet that argument in no way
depends on what we think about the phenomena--normal, supernormal, or
illusory--on which the theory of ghost, soul, or spirit may have been
based. It exhibits religion as probably beginning in a kind of Theism,
which is then superseded, in some degree, or even corrupted, by Animism in
all its varieties. Finally, the exclusive Theism of Israel receives its
complement in a purified Animism, and emerges as Christianity.
Quite apart, too, from any favourable conclusion which may, by some, be
drawn from the phenomena, and quite apart from the more general opinion
that all modern instances are compact of imposture, malobservation,
mythopoeic memory, and superstitious bias, the systematic comparison of
civilised and savage beliefs and alleged experiences of this kind cannot
wisely be neglected by Anthropology. _Humani nihil a se alienum putat._
[Footnote 1: _Prim. Cult_. ii. 352.]
[Footnote 2: Abridged from _Prim. Cult_. ii. 119.]
[Footnote 3: _Histoire des Religions_, ii. 237, note. M. Réville's system,
it will be observed, differs from mine in that he finds the first essays
of religion in worship of aspects of nature (_naturisme_) and in 'animism
properly so called,' by which he understands the instinctive, perhaps not
explicitly formulated, sense that all things whatever are animated and
personal. I have not remarked this aspect of belief as much prevalent in
the most backward races, and I do not try to look behind what we know
historically about early religion. I so far agree with M. Réville as to
think the belief in ghosts and spirits (Mr. Tylor's 'Animism') not
necessarily postulated in the original indeterminate conception of
the Supreme Being, or generally, in 'Original Gods.' But M. Réville
says, 'L'objet de la religion humaine est nécessairement un esprit'
(_Prolégoménes_, 107). This does not seem consistent with his own theory.]
[Footnote 4: Compare Mr. Frazer's _Golden Bough_ with Mr. Grant Allen's
_Evolution of the Idea of God_.]
[Footnote 5: _J.A.I_. x. 85.]
[Footnote 6: Massey. Note to Du Prel. _Philosophy of mysticism_, ii 10.]
[Footnote 7: _Science and Christian Tradition_, p. 197]
[Footnote 8: Op. cit. p. 195.]
[Footnote 9: _Religion of the Semites_, p. 53.]
[Footnote 10: The hypothesis of St. Paul seems not the most
unsatisfactory, Rom. i. 19.]
[Footnote 11: _Introd. to Hist. of Rel_. p. 333; Aristoph. _Frogs_, 159.]
APPENDICES
APPENDIX A
OPPOSITIONS OF SCIENCE
The most elaborate reply to the arguments for telepathy, based on The
Report of the Census of Hallucinations, is that of Herr Parish, in his
'Hallucinations and Illusions.'[1]
Herr Parish is, at present, opposed to the theory that the Census
establishes a telepathic cause in the so-called 'coincidental' stories,
'put forward,' as he says, 'with due reserve, and based on an astonishing
mass of materials, to some extent critically handled.'
He first demurs to an allowance of twelve hours for the coincidence of
hallucination and death; but, if we reflect that twelve hours is little
even in a year, coincidences within twelve hours, it may be admitted,
_donnent à penser_, even if we reject the theory that, granted a real
telepathic impact, it may need time and quiet for its development into a
complete hallucination. We need not linger over the very queer cases from
Munich, as these are not in the selected thirty of the Report. Herr Parish
then dwells on that _hallucination of memory_, in which we feel as if
everything that is going on had happened before. It may have occurred to
most of us to be reminded by some association of ideas during the day, of
some dream of the previous night, which we had forgotten. For instance,
looking at a brook from a bridge, and thinking of how I would fish it, I
remembered that I had dreamed, on the previous night, of casting a fly for
practice, on a lawn. Nobody would think of disputing the fact that I
really had such a dream, forgot it and remembered it when reminded of it
by association of ideas. But if the forgotten dream had been 'fulfilled,'
and been recalled to memory only in the moment of fulfilment, science
would deny that I ever had such a dream at all. The alleged dream would be
described as an 'hallucination of memory.' Something occurring, it would
be said, I had the not very unusual sensation, 'This has occurred to me
before,' and the sensation would become a false memory that it _had_
occurred--in a dream. This theory will be advanced, I think, not when an
ordinary dream is recalled by a waking experience, but only when the dream
coincides with and foreruns that experience, which is a thing that dreams
have no business to do. Such coincidental dreams are necessarily 'false
memories,' scientifically speaking. Now, how does this theory of false
memory bear on coincidental hallucinations?
The insane, it seems, are apt to have the false memory 'This occurred
before,' and _then_ to say that the event was revealed to them in a
vision.[2] The insane may be recommended to make a note of the vision, and
have it properly attested, _before_ the event. The same remark applies to
the 'presentiments' of the sane. But it does _not_ apply if Jones tells me
'I saw my great aunt last night,' and if news comes _after_ this remark
that Jones's aunt died, on that night, in Timbuctoo. Yet Herr Parish
(p. 282) seems to think that the argument of fallacious memory comes in
part, even when an hallucination has been reported to another person
_before_ its fulfilment. Of course all depends on the veracity of the
narrator and the person to whom he told his tale. To take a case given:[3]
Brown, say, travelling with his wife, dreams that a mad dog bit his boy at
home on the elbow. He tells his wife. Arriving at home Brown finds that it
was so. Herr Parish appears to argue thus:
Brown dreamed nothing at all, but he gets excited when he hears the bad
news at home; he thinks, by false memory, that he has a recollection of
it, he says to his wife, 'My dear, didn't I tell you, last night, I had
dreamed all this?' and his equally excited wife replies, 'True, my Brown,
you did, and I said it was only one of your dreams.' And both now believe
that the dream occurred. This is very plausible, is it not? only science
would not say anything about it if the dream had _not_ been fulfilled--if
Brown had remarked, 'Egad, my dear, seeing that horse reminds me that I
was dreaming last night of driving in a dog-cart.' For then Brown was not
excited.
None of this exquisite reasoning as to dreams applies to waking
hallucinations, reported before the alleged coincidence, unless we accept
a collective hallucination of memory in seer or seers, and also in the
persons to whom their story was told.
But, it is obvious, memory is apt to become mythopoeic, so far as to
exaggerate closeness of coincidence, and to add romantic details. We do
not need Herr Parish to tell us _that_; we meet the circumstance in all
narratives from memory, whatever the topic, even in Herr Parish's own
writings.
We must admit that the public, in ghostly, as in all narratives on all
topics, is given to 'fanciful addenda.' Therefore, as Herr Parish justly
remarks, we should 'maintain a very sceptical attitude to all accounts' of
veridical hallucinations. 'Not that we should dismiss them as old wives'
fables--an all too common method--or even doubt the narrator's good
faith.' We should treat them like tales of big fish that get away;
sometimes there is good corroborative evidence that they really were
big fish, sometimes not. We shall return to these false memories.
Was there a coincidence at all in the Society's cases printed in the
Census? Herr Parish thinks three of the selected twenty-six cases very
dubious. In one case is a _possible_ margin of four days, another
(wrongly numbered by the way) does not occur at all among the twenty-six.
In the third, Herr Parish is wrong in his statement.[4] This is a lovely
example of the sceptical slipshod, and, accompanied by the miscitation of
the second case, shows that inexactitude is not all on the side of the
seers. However the case is not very good, the two percipients fancying
that the date of the event was less remote than it really was. Unluckily
Herr Parish only criticises these three cases, how accurately we have
remarked. He had no room for more.
Herr Parish next censures the probable selection of good cases by
collectors, on which the editors of the Census have already made
observations, as they have also made large allowances for this cause of
error. He then offers the astonishing statement that, 'in the view of the
English authors, a view which is, of course, assumed in all calculations
of the kind, an hallucination persists equally long in the memory and is
equally readily recalled in reply to a question, whether the experience
made but a slight impression on the percipient, or affected him deeply,
as would be the case, for instance, if the hallucination had been found to
coincide with the death of a near relative or friend.'[5] This assertion
of Herr Parish's is so erroneous that the Report expressly says 'as years
recede into the distance,' the proportion of the hallucinations that are
remembered in them to those which are forgotten, or at least ignored, 'is
very large.' Again, 'Hallucinations of the most impressive class will not
only be better remembered than others, but will, we may reasonably
suppose, be more often mentioned by the percipients to their friends.'[6]
Yet Herr Parish avers that, in all calculations, it is assumed that
hallucinations are equally readily recalled whether impressive or not!
Once more, the Report says (p. 246), '_It is not the case_' that
coincidental (and impressive) hallucinations are as easily subject to
oblivion as non-coincidental, and non-impressive ones. The editors
therefore multiply the non-coincidental cases by four, arguing that no
coincidental cases (hits) are forgotten, while three out of four
non-coincidentals (misses) are forgotten, or may be supposed likely to be
forgotten. Immediately after declaring that the English authors suppose
all hallucinations to be equally well remembered (which is the precise
reverse of what they do say), Herr Parish admits that the authors multiply
the misses by four, 'influenced by other considerations' (p. 289). By what
other considerations? They give their reason (that very reason which they
decline to entertain, says Herr Parish), namely, that misses are four
times as likely to be forgotten as hits. 'To go into the reason for
adopting this plan would lead us too far,' he writes. Why, it is the
very reason which, he says, does _not_ find favour with the English
authors!
How curiously remote from being 'coincidental' with plain facts, or
'veridical' at all, is this scientific criticism! Herr Parish says that a
'view' (which does not exist) is 'of course assumed in all calculations;'
and, on the very same page, he says that it is _not_ assumed! 'The
witnesses of the report--influenced, it is true, by other considerations'
(which is not the case), 'have sought to turn the point of this objection
by multiplying the whole number of (non-coincidental) cases by four.' Then
the 'view' is _not_ 'assumed in all calculations,' as Herr Parish has just
asserted.
What led Herr Parish, an honourable and clearheaded critic, into this maze
of incorrect and contradictory assertions? It is interesting to try to
trace the causes of such _non-veridical illusions_, to find the _points
de repère_ of these literary hallucinations. One may suggest that when
Herr Parish 'recast the chapters' of his German edition, as he says in his
preface to the English version, he accidentally left in a passage based
on an earlier paper by Mr. Gurney,[7] not observing that it was no longer
accurate or appropriate.
After this odd passage, Herr Parish argues that a 'veridical'
hallucination is regarded by the English authors as 'coincidental,' even
when external circumstances have made that very hallucination a probable
occurrence by producing 'tension of the corresponding nerve element
groups.' That is to say, a person is in a condition--a nervous condition--
likely, _a priori_, to beget an hallucination. An hallucination _is_
begotten, quite naturally; and so, if it happens to coincide with an
event, the coincidence should not count--it is purely fortuitous.[8]
Here is an example. A lady, facing an old sideboard, saw a friend, with no
coat on, and in a waistcoat with a back of shiny material. Within an hour
she was taken to where her friend lay dying, without a coat, and in a
waistcoat with a shiny back.[9] Here is the scientific explanation of Herr
Parish: 'The shimmer of a reflecting surface [the sideboard?] formed the
occasion for the hallucinatory emergence of a subconsciously perceived
_shiny black waistcoat_ [quotation incorrect, of course], and an
individual subconsciously associated with that impression.[10] I ask any
lady whether she, consciously or subconsciously, associates the men she
knows with the backs of their waistcoats. Herr Parish's would be a
brilliantly satisfactory explanation if it were only true to the printed
words that lay under his eyes when he wrote. There was no 'shiny black
waistcoat' in the case, but a waistcoat with a shiny _back_. Gentlemen,
and especially old gentlemen who go about in bath-chairs (like the man in
this story), don't habitually take off their coats and show the backs of
their waistcoats to ladies of nineteen in England. And, if Herr Parish had
cared to read his case, he would have found it expressly stated that the
lady 'had never seen the man without his coat' (and so could not associate
him with an impression of a shiny back to his waistcoat) till _after_ the
hallucination, when she saw him coatless on his death-bed. In this
instance Herr Parish had an hallucinatory memory, all wrong, of the page
under his eyes. The case is got rid of, then, by aid of the 'fanciful
addenda,' to which Herr Parish justly objects. He first gives the facts
incorrectly, and then explains an occurrence which, as reported by him,
did not occur, and was not asserted to occur.
I confess that, if Herr Parish's version were as correct as it is
essentially inaccurate, his explanation would leave me doubtful. For the
circumstances were that the old gentleman of the story lunched daily with
the young lady's mother. Suppose that she was familiar (which she was not)
with the shiny back of his waistcoat, still, she saw him daily, and daily,
too, was in the way of seeing the (hypothetically) shiny surface of the
sideboard. That being the case, she had, every day, the materials,
subjective and objective, of the hallucination. Yet it only occurred
_once_, and then it precisely coincided with the death agony of the old
gentleman, and with his coatless condition. Why only that once? _C'est là
le miracle!_ 'How much for this little veskit?' as the man asked David
Copperfield.
Herr Parish next invents a cause for an hallucination, which, I myself
think, ought not to have been reckoned, because the percipient had been
sitting up with the sick man. This he would class as a 'suspicious' case.
But, even granting him his own way of handling the statistics, he would
still have far too large a proportion of coincidences for the laws of
chance to allow, if we are to go by these statistics at all.