Why is it that living fish add nothing to the "weight of the bucket of
water in which they swim?" Charles II. is said to have asked the Royal
Society. A still more extraordinary question has been propounded in the
grave pages of the _Quarterly Journal of Science_, edited by Mr. Crookes,
a Fellow of the Royal Society, and the discoverer of the useful metal
thallium. The problem set in this learned review does not, like that of
the Merry Monarch, beg the question of facts. "What is the scientific
inference from the various accounts, modern and traditional, of human
levitation?" is the difficulty before the world at this present moment.
Now, there may be people who never heard of levitation, nor even of
"thaums," a term that frequently occurs in the article we refer to. A
slight acquaintance with the dead languages, whose shadows reappear in
this queer fashion, enables the inquirer to decide that "levitation"
means the power of becoming lighter than the surrounding atmosphere, and
setting at nought the laws of gravitation.
Thaums, again, are wonders, and there is no very obvious reason why they
should not be called wonders. But to return to levitation. Most of us
have heard how Mr. Home and other gifted people possess the faculty of
being raised from the ground, and of floating about the room, or even out
of the window. There are clouds of witnesses who have observed these
phenomena, which generally occur in the dark. In fact, they are part of
that vague subject called spiritualism, about which opinion is so much
divided, and views are so vague. It has been said that the human race,
in regard to this high argument, is divided into five classes. There are
people who believe; people who investigate; people who think the matter
really ought to be looked into; people who dislike the topic, but who
would believe in the phenomena if they were proved; and people of common
sense, who would not believe in them if they were proved. Now, the
article in the _Journal of Science_ only deals with one of the phenomena
we hear so much of--that of the sudden suspension of the laws of
gravitation, in the case of individual men. The author has collected a
vast variety of traditions bearing on this subject, and his conclusion
apparently is, that events of this kind, though rather rare, are natural,
are peculiar to people of certain temperament and organization, and,
above all, bring no proof as to the truth of the doctrines asserted by
the persons who exhibit the phenomena. Now, men of science, as a rule,
and the world at large, look on stories of this sort as myths, romances,
false interpretations of subjective feelings, pious frauds, and absurd
nonsense. Before expressing an opinion, it may be well to look over the
facts, as they are called, which are brought under our notice.
What accounts, then, are there of levitation among the civilized people
of the Old World? First, there is Abaris, the Scythian, "in the time of
Pythagoras," says our author. Well, as a matter of evidence, Abaris may
have been levitated in the eighth century before Christ, or it may have
been two hundred and fifty years later. Perhaps he was a Druid of the
Hebrides. Toland thought so, and Toland had as good a chance of knowing
as any one else. Our earliest authority, Herodotus, says he took no
earthly food, and "went with his arrow all round the world without once
eating." It seems that he rode on this arrow, which, Mr. Rawlinson
thinks, may possibly have been an early tradition of the magnet. All our
detailed information about him is of later date than the Christian era.
The fact remains that tradition says he was able to fly in the air.
Pythagoras is said to have had the same power, or rather the same faculty
came upon him. He was lifted up, with no will or conscious exertion of
his own. Now, our evidence as to the power of Pythagoras to be "like a
bird, in two places at once," is exactly as valuable as that about
Abaris. It rests on the tradition repeated by superstitious philosophers
who lived eight hundred years after his death. "To Pythagoras,
therefore," as Herodotus has it, "we now say farewell," with no further
knowledge than that vague tradition says he was "levitated." The writer
now leaves classical antiquity behind him--he does not repeat a saying of
Plotinus, the mystic of Alexandria, who lived in the third century of our
era. The best known anecdote of him is that his disciples asked him if
he were not sometimes levitated, and he laughed, and said, "No; but he
was no fool who persuaded you of this." Instead of Plotinus, we are
referred to a mass of Jewish and anti-Christian apocryphal traditions,
which have the same common point--the assertion of the existence of the
phenomenon of levitation. Apollonius of Tyana is also said to have been
a highly accomplished medium. We are next presented with a list of forty
"levitated" persons, canonized or beatified by the Church of Rome. Their
dates range from the ninth to the seventeenth century, and their
histories go to prove that levitation runs in families. Perhaps the best
known of the collection is St. Theresa (1515-1582), and it is only fair
to say that the stories about St. Theresa are very like those repeated
about our lady mediums. One of these, Mrs. Guppy, as every one knows,
can scatter flowers all over a room, "flowers of Paradise," unknown to
botanists. Fauna, rather than flora, was St. Theresa's province, and she
kept a charming pet, a little white animal of no recognized species.
Still, about her, and about her friend St John of the Cross, the legend
runs that they used to be raised off the ground, chairs and all, and
float about in the most soothing way. Poor Peter of Alcantara was
levitated in a less pleasant manner; "he uttered a frightful cry, and
shot through the air as if he had been fired from a gun." Peter had a
new form of epilepsy--the rising, not the falling, sickness. Joseph
Copertino, again, floated about to such good effect, that in 1650 Prince
John of Brunswick foreswore the Protestant faith. The logical process
which converted this prince is not a very obvious one.
Why do we quote all these old monkish and neoplatonic legends? For some
the evidence is obviously nil; to other anecdotes many witnesses bear
testimony; but then, we know that an infectious _schwarmerei_ can
persuade people that the lion now removed from Northumberland House
wagged his tail. The fact is that there is really matter for science in
all these anecdotes, and the question to be asked is this--How does it
happen that in ages and societies so distant and so various identical
stories are current? What is the pressure that makes neoplatonic gossips
of the fourth century circulate the same marvels as spiritualist gossips
of the nineteenth? How does it happen that the mediaeval saint, the
Indian medicine-man, the Siberian shaman (a suggestive term), have nearly
identical wonders attributed to them? If people wanted merely to tell "a
good square lie," as the American slang has it, invention does not seem
to have such pitifully narrow boundaries. It appears to follow that
there are contagious nervous illusions, about which science has not said
the last word. We believe that the life of children, with its innocent
mixture of dreams and waking, facts and fancies, could supply odd
parallels to the stories we have been treated to. And as we are on the
subject, we should like, as the late President Lincoln said, to tell a
little story. It occurred to a learned divine to meet a pupil, who ought
by rights to have been in the University of Oxford, walking in Regent
Street. The youth glided past like a ghost, and was lost in the crowd;
next day his puzzled preceptor received a note, dated on the previous day
from Oxford, telling how the pupil had met the teacher by the Isis, and
on inquiry had heard he was in London. Here is a case of levitation--of
double levitation, and we leave it to be explained by the followers of
Abaris and of Mr. Home.