The late Professor Henry Sidgwick was celebrated for the rare mixture
of ardor and critical judgment which his character exhibited. The
liberal heart which he possessed had to work with an intellect which
acted destructively on almost every particular object of belief that
was offered to its acceptance. A quarter of a century ago, scandalized
by the chaotic state of opinion regarding the phenomena now called by
the rather ridiculous name of "psychic"--phenomena, of which the supply
reported seems inexhaustible, but which scientifically trained minds
mostly refuse to look at--he established, along with Professor Barrett,
Frederic Myers and Edmund Gurney, the Society for Psychical Research.
These men hoped that if the material were treated rigorously, and, as
far as possible experimentally, objective truth would be elicited, and
the subject rescued from sentimentalism on the one side and dogmatizing
ignorance on the other. Like all founders, Sidgwick hoped for a
certain promptitude of result; and I heard him say, the year before his
death, that if anyone had told him at the outset that after twenty
years he would be in the same identical state of doubt and balance that
he started with, he would have deemed the prophecy incredible. It
appeared impossible that that amount of handling evidence should bring
so little finality of decision.
My own experience has been similar to Sidgwick's. For twenty-five
years I have been in touch with the literature of psychical research,
and have had acquaintance with numerous "researchers." I have also
spent a good many hours (though far fewer than I ought to have spent)
in witnessing (or trying to witness) phenomena. Yet I am theoretically
no "further" than I was at the beginning; and I confess that at times I
have been tempted to believe that the Creator has eternally intended
this department of nature to remain _baffling_, to prompt our
curiosities and hopes and suspicions all in equal measure, so that,
although ghosts and clairvoyances, and raps and messages from spirits,
are always seeming to exist and can never be fully explained away, they
also can never be susceptible of full corroboration.
The peculiarity of the case is just that there are so many sources of
possible deception in most of the observations that the whole lot of
them _may_ be worthless, and yet that in comparatively few cases can
aught more fatal than this vague general possibility of error be
pleaded against the record. Science meanwhile needs something more
than bare possibilities to build upon; so your genuinely scientific
inquirer--I don't mean your ignoramus "scientist"--has to remain
unsatisfied. It is hard to believe, however, that the Creator has
really put any big array of phenomena into the world merely to defy and
mock our scientific tendencies; so my deeper belief is that we
psychical researchers have been too precipitate with our hopes, and
that we must expect to mark progress not by quarter-centuries, but by
half-centuries or whole centuries.
I am strengthened in this belief by my impression that just at this
moment a faint but distinct step forward is being taken by competent
opinion in these matters. "Physical phenomena" (movements of matter
without contact, lights, hands and faces "materialized," etc.) have
been one of the most baffling regions of the general field (or perhaps
one of the least baffling _prima facie_, so certain and great has been
the part played by fraud in their production); yet even here the
balance of testimony seems slowly to be inclining towards admitting the
supernaturalist view. Eusapia Paladino, the Neapolitan medium, has
been under observation for twenty years or more. Schiaparelli, the
astronomer, and Lombroso were the first scientific men to be converted
by her performances. Since then innumerable men of scientific standing
have seen her, including many "psychic" experts. Every one agrees that
she cheats in the most barefaced manner whenever she gets an
opportunity. The Cambridge experts, with the Sidgwicks and Richard
Hodgson at their head, rejected her _in toto_ on that account. Yet her
credit has steadily risen, and now her last converts are the eminent
psychiatrist, Morselli, the eminent physiologist, Botazzi, and our own
psychical researcher, Carrington, whose book on "The Physical Phenomena
of Spiritualism" (_against_ them rather!) makes his conquest
strategically important. If Mr. Podmore, hitherto the prosecuting
attorney of the S. P. R., so far as physical phenomena are concerned
becomes converted also, we may indeed sit up and look around us.
Getting a good health bill from "Science," Eusapia will then throw
retrospective credit on Home and Stainton Moses, Florence Cook (Prof.
Crookes' medium), and all similar wonder-workers. The balance of
_presumptions_ will be changed in favor of genuineness being possible
at least in all reports of this particularly crass and low type of
supernatural phenomena.
Not long after Darwin's "Origin of Species" appeared I was studying
with that excellent anatomist and man, Jeffries Wyman, at Harvard. He
was a convert, yet so far a half-hesitating one, to Darwin's views; but
I heard him make a remark that applies well to the subject I now write
about. When, he said, a theory gets propounded over and over again,
coming up afresh after each time orthodox criticism has buried it, and
each time seeming solider and harder to abolish, you may be sure that
there is truth in it. Oken and Lamarck and Chambers had been
triumphantly despatched and buried, but here was Darwin making the very
same heresy seem only more plausible. How often has "Science" killed
off all spook philosophy, and laid ghosts and raps and "telepathy" away
underground as so much popular delusion. Yet never before were these
things offered us so voluminously, and never in such authentic-seeming
shape or with such good credentials. The tide seems steadily to be
rising, in spite of all the expedients of scientific orthodoxy. It is
hard not to suspect that here may be something different from a mere
chapter in human gullibility. It may be a genuine realm of natural
phenomena.
_Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus_, once a cheat, always a cheat, such
has been the motto of the English psychical researchers in dealing with
mediums. I am disposed to think that, as a matter of policy, it has
been wise. Tactically, it is far better to believe much too little
than a little too much; and the exceptional credit attaching to the row
of volumes of the S. P. R.'s Proceedings, is due to the fixed intention
of the editors to proceed very slowly. Better a little belief tied
fast, better a small investment _salted down_, than a mass of
comparative insecurity.
But, however wise as a policy the S. P. R.'s maxim may have been, as a
test of truth, I believe it to be almost irrelevant. In most things
human the accusation of deliberate fraud and falsehood is grossly
superficial. Man's character is too sophistically mixed for the
alternative of "honest or dishonest" to be a sharp one. Scientific men
themselves will cheat--at public lectures--rather than let experiments
obey their well-known tendency towards failure. I have heard of a
lecturer on physics, who had taken over the apparatus of the previous
incumbent, consulting him about a certain machine intended to show
that, however the peripheral parts of it might be agitated, its centre
of gravity remained immovable. "It _will_ wobble," he complained.
"Well," said the predecessor, apologetically, "to tell the truth,
whenever _I_ used that machine I found it advisable to _drive a nail_
through the centre of gravity." I once saw a distinguished
physiologist, now dead, cheat most shamelessly at a public lecture, at
the expense of a poor rabbit, and all for the sake of being able to
make a cheap joke about its being an "American rabbit"--for no other,
he said, could survive such a wound as he pretended to have given it.
To compare small men with great, I have myself cheated shamelessly. In
the early days of the Sanders Theater at Harvard, I once had charge of
a heart on the physiology of which Professor Newell Martin was giving a
popular lecture. This heart, which belonged to a turtle, supported an
index-straw which threw a moving shadow, greatly enlarged, upon the
screen, while the heart pulsated. When certain nerves were stimulated,
the lecturer said, the heart would act in certain ways which he
described. But the poor heart was too far gone and, although it
stopped duly when the nerve of arrest was excited, that was the final
end of its life's tether. Presiding over the performance, I was
terrified at the fiasco, and found myself suddenly acting like one of
those military geniuses who on the field of battle convert disaster
into victory. There was no time for deliberation; so, with my
forefinger under a part of the straw that cast no shadow, I found
myself impulsively and automatically imitating the rhythmical movements
which my colleague had prophesied the heart would undergo. I kept the
experiment from failing; and not only saved my colleague (and the
turtle) from a humiliation that but for my presence of mind would have
been their lot, but I established in the audience the true view of the
subject. The lecturer was stating this; and the misconduct of one
half-dead specimen of heart ought not to destroy the impression of his
words. "There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood," is a maxim
which I have heard ascribed to a former venerated President of Harvard.
The heart's failure would have been misunderstood by the audience and
given the lie to the lecturer. It was hard enough to make them
understand the subject anyhow; so that even now as I write in cool
blood I am tempted to think that I acted quite correctly. I was acting
for the _larger_ truth, at any rate, however automatically; and my
sense of this was probably what prevented the more pedantic and literal
part of my conscience from checking the action of my sympathetic
finger. To this day the memory of that critical emergency has made me
feel charitable towards all mediums who make phenomena come in one way
when they won't come easily in another. On the principles of the S. P.
R., my conduct on that one occasion ought to discredit everything I
ever do, everything, for example, I may write in this article,--a
manifestly unjust conclusion.
Fraud, conscious or unconscious, seems ubiquitous throughout the range
of physical phenomena of spiritism, and false pretence, prevarication
and fishing for clues are ubiquitous in the mental manifestations of
mediums. If it be not everywhere fraud simulating reality, one is
tempted to say, then the reality (if any reality there be) has the bad
luck of being fated everywhere to simulate fraud. The suggestion of
humbug seldom stops, and mixes itself with the best manifestations.
Mrs. Piper's control, "Rector," is a most impressive personage, who
discerns in an extraordinary degree his sitter's inner needs, and is
capable of giving elevated counsel to fastidious and critical minds.
Yet in many respects he is an arrant humbug--such he seems to me at
least--pretending to a knowledge and power to which he has no title,
nonplussed by contradiction, yielding to suggestion, and covering his
tracks with plausible excuses. Now the non-"researching" mind looks
upon such phenomena simply according to their face-pretension and never
thinks of asking what they may signify below the surface. Since they
profess for the most part to be revealers of spirit life, it is either
as being absolutely that, or as being absolute frauds, that they are
judged. The result is an inconceivably shallow state of public opinion
on the subject. One set of persons, emotionally touched at hearing the
names of their loved ones given, and consoled by assurances that they
are "happy," accept the revelation, and consider spiritualism
"beautiful." More hard-headed subjects, disgusted by the revelation's
contemptible contents, outraged by the fraud, and prejudiced beforehand
against all "spirits," high or low, avert their minds from what they
call such "rot" or "bosh" entirely. Thus do two opposite
sentimentalisms divide opinion between them! A good expression of the
"scientific" state of mind occurs in Huxley's "Life and Letters":
"I regret," he writes, "that I am unable to accept the invitation of
the Committee of the Dialectical Society. . . . I take no interest in
the subject. The only case of 'Spiritualism' I have ever had the
opportunity of examining into for myself was as gross an imposture as
ever came under my notice. But supposing these phenomena to be
genuine--they do not interest me. If anybody would endow me with the
faculty of listening to the chatter of old women and curates in the
nearest provincial town, I should decline the privilege, having better
things to do. And if the folk in the spiritual world do not talk more
wisely and sensibly than their friends report them to do, I put them in
the same category. The only good that I can see in the demonstration
of the 'Truth of Spiritualism' is to furnish an additional argument
against suicide. Better live a crossing-sweeper, than die and be made
to talk twaddle by a 'medium' hired at a guinea a _Seance_." [2]
Obviously the mind of the excellent Huxley has here but two
whole-souled categories namely revelation or imposture, to apperceive
the case by. Sentimental reasons bar revelation out, for the messages,
he thinks, are not romantic enough for that; fraud exists anyhow;
therefore the whole thing is nothing but imposture. The odd point is
that so few of those who talk in this way realize that they and the
spiritists are using the same major premise and differing only in the
minor. The major premise is: "Any spirit-revelation must be romantic."
The minor of the spiritist is: "This _is_ romantic"; that of the Huxley
an is: "this is dingy twaddle"--whence their opposite conclusions!
Meanwhile the first thing that anyone learns who attends seriously to
these phenomena is that their causation is far too complex for our
feelings about what is or is not romantic enough to be spiritual to
throw any light upon it. The causal factors must be carefully
distinguished and traced through series, from their simplest to their
strongest forms, before we can begin to understand the various
resultants in which they issue. Myers and Gurney began this work, the
one by his serial study of the various sorts of "automatism," sensory
and motor, the other by his experimental proofs that a split-off
consciousness may abide after a post-hypnotic suggestion has been
given. Here we have subjective factors; but are not transsubjective or
objective forces also at work? Veridical messages, apparitions,
movements without contact, seem _prima facie_ to be such. It was a
good stroke on Gurney's part to construct a theory of apparitions which
brought the subjective and the objective factors into harmonious
co-operation. I doubt whether this telepathic theory of Gurney's will
hold along the whole line of apparitions to which he applied it, but it
is unquestionable that some theory of that mixed type is required for
the explanation of all mediumistic phenomena; and that when all the
psychological factors and elements involved have been told off--and
they are many--the question still forces itself upon us: Are these all,
or are there indications of any residual forces acting on the subject
from beyond, or of any "meta-psychic" faculty (to use Richet's useful
term) exerted by him? This is the problem that requires real
expertness, and this is where the simple sentimentalisms of the
spiritist and scientist leave us in the lurch completely.
"Psychics" form indeed a special branch of education, in which experts
are only gradually becoming developed. The phenomena are as massive
and wide-spread as is anything in Nature, and the study of them is as
tedious, repellent and undignified. To reject it for its unromantic
character is like rejecting bacteriology because _penicillium glaucum_
grows on horse-dung and _bacterium termo_ lives in putrefaction.
Scientific men have long ago ceased to think of the dignity of the
materials they work in. When imposture has been checked off as far as
possible, when chance coincidence has been allowed for, when
opportunities for normal knowledge on the part of the subject have been
noted, and skill in "fishing" and following clues unwittingly furnished
by the voice or face of bystanders have been counted in, those who have
the fullest acquaintance with the phenomena admit that in good mediums
_there is a residuum of knowledge displayed_ that can only be called
supernormal: the medium taps some source of information not open to
ordinary people. Myers used the word "telepathy" to indicate that the
sitter's own thoughts or feelings may be thus directly tapped. Mrs.
Sidgwick has suggested that if living minds can be thus tapped
telepathically, so possibly may the minds of spirits be similarly
tapped--if spirits there be. On this view we should have one distinct
theory of the performances of a typical test-medium. They would be all
originally due to an odd _tendency to personate_, found in her dream
life as it expresses itself in trance. [Most of us reveal such a
tendency whenever we handle a "ouija-board" or a "planchet," or let
ourselves write automatically with a pencil.] The result is a
"control," who purports to be speaking; and all the resources of the
automatist, including his or her trance-faculty of telepathy are called
into play in building this fictitious personage out plausibly. On such
a view of the control, the medium's _will to personate_ runs the whole
show; and if spirits be involved in it at all, they are passive beings,
stray bits of whose memory she is able to seize and use for her
purposes, without the spirit being any more aware of it than the sitter
is aware of it when his own mind is similarly tapped.
This is one possible way of interpreting a certain type of psychical
phenomenon. It uses psychological as well as "spiritual" factors, and
quite obviously it throws open for us far more questions than it
answers, questions about our subconscious constitution and its curious
tendency to humbug, about the telepathic faculty, and about the
possibility of an existent spirit-world.
I do not instance this theory to defend it, but simply to show what
complicated hypotheses one is inevitably led to consider, the moment
one looks at the facts in their complexity and turns one's back on the
_naïve_ alternative of "revelation or imposture," which is as far as
either spiritist thought or ordinary scientist thought goes. The
phenomena are endlessly complex in their factors, and they are so
little understood as yet that off-hand judgments, whether of "spirits"
or of "bosh" are the one as silly as the other. When we complicate the
subject still farther by considering what connection such things as
rappings, apparitions, poltergeists, spirit-photographs, and
materializations may have with it, the bosh end of the scale gets
heavily loaded, it is true, but your genuine inquirer still is loath to
give up. He lets the data collect, and bides his time. He believes
that "bosh" is no more an ultimate element in Nature, or a really
explanatory category in human life than "dirt" is in chemistry. Every
kind of "bosh" has its own factors and laws; and patient study will
bring them definitely to light.
The only way to rescue the "pure bosh" view of the matter is one which
has sometimes appealed to my own fancy, but which I imagine few readers
will seriously adopt. If, namely, one takes the theory of evolution
radically, one ought to apply it not only to the rock-strata, the
animals and the plants but to the stars, to the chemical elements, and
to the laws of nature. There must have been a far-off antiquity, one
is then tempted to suppose, when things were really chaotic. Little by
little, out of all the haphazard possibilities of that time, a few
connected things and habits arose, and the rudiments of regular
performance began. Every variation in the way of law and order added
itself to this nucleus, which inevitably grew more considerable as
history went on; while the aberrant and inconstant variations, not
being similarly preserved, disappeared from being, wandered off as
unrelated vagrants, or else remained so imperfectly connected with the
part of the world that had grown regular as only to manifest their
existence by occasional lawless intrusions, like those which "psychic"
phenomena now make into our scientifically organized world. On such a
view, these phenomena ought to remain "pure bosh" forever, that is,
they ought to be forever intractable to intellectual methods, because
they should not yet be organized enough in themselves to follow any
laws. Wisps and shreds of the original chaos, they would be connected
enough with the cosmos to affect its periphery every now and then, as
by a momentary whiff or touch or gleam, but not enough ever to be
followed up and hunted down and bagged. Their relation to the cosmos
would be tangential solely.
Looked at dramatically, most occult phenomena make just this sort of
impression. They are inwardly as incoherent as they are outwardly
wayward and fitful. If they express anything, it is pure "bosh," pure
discontinuity, accident, and disturbance, with no law apparent but to
interrupt, and no purpose but to baffle. They seem like stray vestiges
of that primordial irrationality, from which all our rationalities have
been evolved.
To settle dogmatically into this bosh-view would save labor, but it
would go against too many intellectual prepossessions to be adopted
save as a last resort of despair. Your psychical researcher therefore
bates no jot of hope, and has faith that when we get our data numerous
enough, some sort of rational treatment of them will succeed.
When I hear good people say (as they often say, not without show of
reason), that dabbling in such phenomena reduces us to a sort of jelly,
disintegrates the critical faculties, liquifies the character, and
makes of one a _gobe-mouche_ generally, I console myself by thinking of
my friends Frederic Myers and Richard Hodgson. These men lived
exclusively for psychical research, and it converted both to spiritism.
Hodgson would have been a man among men anywhere; but I doubt whether
under any other baptism he would have been that happy, sober and
righteous form of energy which his face proclaimed him in his later
years, when heart and head alike were wholly satisfied by his
occupation. Myers' character also grew stronger in every particular
for his devotion to the same inquirings. Brought up on literature and
sentiment, something of a courtier, passionate, disdainful, and
impatient naturally, he was made over again from the day when he took
up psychical research seriously. He became learned in science,
circumspect, democratic in sympathy, endlessly patient, and above all,
happy. The fortitude of his last hours touched the heroic, so
completely were the atrocious sufferings of his body cast into
insignificance by his interest in the cause he lived for. When a man's
pursuit gradually makes his face shine and grow handsome, you may be
sure it is a worthy one. Both Hodgson and Myers kept growing ever
handsomer and stronger-looking.
Such personal examples will convert no one, and of course they ought
not to. Nor do I seek at all in this article to convert any one to
belief that psychical research is an important branch of science. To
do that, I should have to quote evidence; and those for whom the
volumes of S. P. R. "Proceedings" already published count for nothing
would remain in their dogmatic slumber, though one rose from the dead.
No, not to convert readers, but simply to _put my own state of mind
upon record publicly_ is the purpose of my present writing. Some one
said to me a short time ago that after my twenty-five years of dabbling
in "Psychics," it would be rather shameful were I unable to state any
definite conclusions whatever as a consequence. I had to agree; so I
now proceed to take up the challenge and express such convictions as
have been engendered in me by that length of experience, be the same
true or false ones. I may be dooming myself to the pit in the eyes of
better-judging posterity; I may be raising myself to honor; I am
willing to take the risk, for what I shall write is _my_ truth, as I
now see it.
I began this article by confessing myself baffled. I _am_ baffled, as
to spirit-return, and as to many other special problems. I am also
constantly baffled as to what to think of this or that particular
story, for the sources of error in any one observation are seldom fully
knowable. But weak sticks make strong faggots; and when the stories
fall into consistent sorts that point each in a definite direction, one
gets a sense of being in presence of genuinely natural types of
phenomena. As to there being such real natural types of phenomena
ignored by orthodox science, I am not baffled at all, for I am fully
convinced of it. One cannot get demonstrative proof here. One has to
follow one's personal sense, which, of course, is liable to err, of the
dramatic probabilities of nature. Our critics here obey their sense of
dramatic probability as much as we do. Take "raps" for example, and
the whole business of objects moving without contact. "Nature," thinks
the scientific man, is not so unutterably silly. The cabinet, the
darkness, the tying, suggest a sort of human rat-hole life exclusively
and "swindling" is for him the dramatically sufficient explanation. It
probably is, in an indefinite majority of instances; yet it is to me
dramatically improbable that the swindling should not have accreted
round some originally genuine nucleus. If we look at human imposture
as a historic phenomenon, we find it always imitative. One swindler
imitates a previous swindler, but the first swindler of that kind
imitated some one who was honest. You can no more create an absolutely
new trick than you can create a new word without any previous
basis.--You don't know how to go about it. Try, reader, yourself, to
invent an unprecedented kind of "physical phenomenon of spiritualism."
When _I_ try, I find myself mentally turning over the regular
medium-stock, and thinking how I might improve some item. This being
the dramatically probable human way, I think differently of the whole
type, taken collectively, from the way in which I may think of the
single instance. I find myself believing that there is "something in"
these never ending reports of physical phenomena, although I have n't
yet the least positive notion of the something. It becomes to my mind
simply a very worthy problem for investigation. Either I or the
scientist is of course a fool, with our opposite views of probability
here; and I only wish he might feel the liability, as cordially as I
do, to pertain to both of us.
I fear I look on Nature generally with more charitable eyes than his,
though perhaps he would pause if he realized as I do, how vast the
fraudulency is which inconsistency he must attribute to her. Nature is
brutal enough, Heaven knows; but no one yet has held her non-human side
to be _dishonest_, and even in the human sphere deliberate deceit is
far rarer than the "classic" intellect, with its few and rigid
categories, was ready to acknowledge. There is a hazy penumbra in us
all where lying and delusion meet, where passion rules beliefs as well
as conduct, and where the term "scoundrel" does not clear up everything
to the depths as it did for our forefathers. The first automatic
writing I ever saw was forty years ago. I unhesitatingly thought of it
as deceit, although it contained vague elements of supernormal
knowledge. Since then I have come to see in automatic writing one
example of a department of human activity as vast as it is enigmatic.
Every sort of person is liable to it, or to something equivalent to it;
and whoever encourages it in himself finds himself personating someone
else, either signing what he writes by fictitious name, or, spelling
out, by ouija-board or table-tips, messages from the departed. Our
subconscious region seems, as a rule, to be dominated either by a crazy
"will to make-believe," or by some curious external force impelling us
to personation. The first difference between the psychical researcher
and the inexpert person is that the former realizes the commonness and
typicality of the phenomenon here, while the latter, less informed,
thinks it so rare as to be unworthy of attention. _I wish to go on
record for the commonness_.
The next thing I wish to go on record for is _the presence_, in the
midst of all the humbug, _of really supernormal knowledge_. By this I
mean knowledge that cannot be traced to the ordinary sources of
information--the senses namely, of the automatist. In really strong
mediums this knowledge seems to be abundant, though it is usually
spotty, capricious and unconnected. Really strong mediums are
rarities; but when one starts with them and works downwards into less
brilliant regions of the automatic life, one tends to interpret many
slight but odd coincidences with truth as possibly rudimentary forms of
this kind of knowledge.
What is one to think of this queer chapter in human nature? It is odd
enough on any view. If all it means is a preposterous and inferior
monkey-like tendency to forge messages, systematically embedded in the
soul of all of us, it is weird; and weirder still that it should then
own all this supernormal information. If on the other hand the
supernormal information be the key to the phenomenon, it ought to be
superior; and then how ought we to account for the "wicked partner,"
and for the undeniable mendacity and inferiority of so much of the
performance? We are thrown, for our conclusions, upon our instinctive
sense of the dramatic probabilities of nature. My own dramatic sense
tends instinctively to picture the situation as an interaction between
slumbering faculties in the automatist's mind and a cosmic environment
of _other consciousness_ of some sort which is able to work upon them.
If there were in the universe a lot of diffuse soul-stuff, unable of
itself to get into consistent personal form, or to take permanent
possession of an organism, yet always craving to do so, it might get
its head into the air, parasitically, so to speak, by profiting by weak
spots in the armor of human minds, and slipping in and stirring up
there the sleeping tendency to personate. It would induce habits in
the subconscious region of the mind it used thus, and would seek above
all things to prolong its social opportunities by making itself
agreeable and plausible. It would drag stray scraps of truth with it
from the wider environment, but would betray its mental inferiority by
knowing little how to weave them into any important or significant
story. This, I say, is the dramatic view which my mind spontaneously
takes, and it has the advantage of falling into line with ancient human
traditions. The views of others are just as dramatic, _for the
phenomenon is actuated by will of some sort anyhow_, and wills give
rise to dramas. The spiritist view, as held by Messrs. Hyslop and
Hodgson, sees a "will to communicate," struggling through inconceivable
layers of obstruction in the conditions. I have heard Hodgson liken
the difficulties to those of two persons who on earth should have only
dead-drunk servants to use as their messengers. The scientist, for his
part, sees a "will to deceive," watching its chance in all of us, and
able (possibly?) to use "telepathy" in its service.
Which kind of will, and how many kinds of will are most inherently
probable? Who can say with certainty? The only certainty is that the
phenomena are enormously complex, especially if one includes in them
such intellectual flights of mediumship as Swedenborg's, and if one
tries in any way to work the physical phenomena in. That is why I
personally am as yet neither a convinced believer in parasitic demons,
nor a spiritist, nor a scientist, but still remain a psychical
researcher waiting for more facts before concluding.
Out of my experience, such as it is (and it is limited enough) one
fixed conclusion dogmatically emerges, and that is this, that we with
our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest.
The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves, and
Conanicut and Newport hear each other's fog-horns. But the trees also
commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also
hang together through the ocean's bottom. Just so there is a continuum
of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but
accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a
mother-sea or reservoir. Our "normal" consciousness is circumscribed
for adaptation to our external earthly environment, but the fence is
weak in spots, and fitful influences from beyond leak in, showing the
otherwise unverifiable common connection. Not only psychic research,
but metaphysical philosophy, and speculative biology are led in their
own ways to look with favor on some such "panpsychic" view of the
universe as this. Assuming this common reservoir of consciousness to
exist, this bank upon which we all draw, and in which so many of
earth's memories must in some way be stored, or mediums would not get
at them as they do, the question is, What is its own structure? What
is its inner topography? This question, first squarely formulated by
Myers, deserves to be called "Myers' problem" by scientific men
hereafter. What are the conditions of individuation or insulation in
this mother-sea? To what tracts, to what active systems functioning
separately in it, do personalities correspond? Are individual
"spirits" constituted there? How numerous, and of how many hierarchic
orders may these then be? How permanent? How transient? And how
confluent with one another may they become?
What again, are the relations between the cosmic consciousness and
matter? Are there subtler forms of matter which upon occasion may
enter into functional connection with the individuations in the psychic
sea, and then, and then only, show themselves?--So that our ordinary
human experience, on its material as well as on its mental side, would
appear to be only an extract from the larger psycho-physical world?
Vast, indeed, and difficult is the inquirer's prospect here, and the
most significant data for his purpose will probably be just these dingy
little mediumistic facts which the Huxleyan minds of our time find so
unworthy of their attention. But when was not the science of the
future stirred to its conquering activities by the little rebellious
exceptions to the science of the present? Hardly, as yet, has the
surface of the facts called "psychic" begun to be scratched for
scientific purposes. It is through following these facts, I am
persuaded, that the greatest scientific conquests of the coming
generation will be achieved. _Kühn ist das Mühen, herrlich der Lohn!_
[1] Published under the title "Confidences of a Psychical Researcher"
in the _American Magazine_, October, 1909. For a more complete and
less popular statement of some theories suggested in this article see
the last pages of a "Report on Mrs. Piper's Hodgson-Control" in
_Proceedings of the [Eng.] Society for Psychical Research_, 1909, 470;
also printed in _Proc. of Am. Soc. for Psychical Research_ for the same
year.
[2] T. H. Huxley, "Life and Letters," I, 240.