admittance to the closed door of the mysteries of the human soul should
be pitched in the same key as the inquiry. Disappointment is not
uncommon. I have taken part in seances of every kind, with cautious
investigators devoid of all spiritualistic bias, with unsophisticated
believers in a supernatural source of all psychic phenomena, with
scoffers convinced that every medium is an impostor, and that nothing
but a little common sense is needed for the exposure. The results have
been largely dependent on the mentality of the investigators. Failure to
understand this is responsible for much of the disappointment and
contempt with which otherwise intelligent critics have dismissed the
subject. The accumulated thought-power, the collective mind of those who
participate, profoundly influence the medium and the quality of the
communications received. One stubborn soul may wreck the meeting. I
remember an evening at the house of Mr. W. T. Stead. There had been a
series of highly successful demonstrations of "spirit voices,"
distinctly audible and perfectly intelligible. A well-known minister of
the Church visible joined the circle--a man clothed in all the outward
signs of spirituality, uniting clerical decorum with an emotional
fervour in preaching which had made him a popular favourite. Though
feeling has now and then led him into unconventional paths of
theological thought, fate has surely marked him for the adornment of a
bishopric. He came to study the alleged powers of the medium. He doubted
everything and everybody. The easy faith and unquestioning acceptance of
miraculous events of which he was not ashamed whilst in the pulpit had
now been exchanged for vigilant suspicion and impatient analysis. He
plied the medium with questions, bludgeoned her with requests for
evidence that she was not deluded or deluding. He turned himself into
cross-examining counsel, proud of his discrimination and his immunity
against the insidious appeal of the supernatural. He succeeded. The
medium was confounded, she lost her power; the phenomena did not occur.
The atmosphere was chilled. Some of us felt we would rather have been
visited by the village blacksmith than by this priestly exponent of
sweet-faced materialism.
I do not deny that I have often been struck with the intellectual
poverty of messages from the spirit world. They are often silly, and not
seldom untruthful. The silliness and the untruthfulness are faithful
reflections of common human failings, and only show that heavenly wisdom
is as unattainable through the average spiritualistic channels as it is
in the Houses of Parliament or the courts of law.
I can imagine a radiant and purely spiritual being attempting to convey
a true description of the state of spiritual bliss to a circle of men
and women representative of cultured thought, and practical efficiency
in the affairs of the world. Let the circle include a few university
professors, some successful men of business, a couple of judges, a
sprinkling of journalists, an archdeacon or two, and some authors of
repute. Let them all be actuated by a strong desire to obtain reliable
information and to give a fair and unprejudiced hearing to the visitor.
The visitor is necessarily hampered by the necessity for a medium. It
may be that the senior judge is gifted with psychic powers and that the
method of communication chosen is that of trance.
The learned brain-cells would transmit the message up to a certain
point, but when an effort was made to depict unfathomed depths and
heights of transcendental experience, the judicial mind would rebel.
The sense of logic would be strained. The conception of the possible
would be violated. A fearful consciousness of being guilty of uttering
lies would persist, in spite of efforts to subdue reason. Language
would break in the attempt to find words for the inexpressible, the
message would be blurred and incoherent. The judge might pull himself
together, feeling that the turbulent thought-waves of contending
counsel form a much safer ground on which to pronounce truth than the
fourth-dimensional hurricane with which he had just battled. And the
audience might turn with relief to the thought of dinner outside Bedlam.
By some wild flights of imagination we may picture another kind of
circle. Let a poet be the medium; Swedenborg, Dante, Blake, Socrates,
Jacob Boehme, Tasso, Milton, Eckart, Ruysbroek, St. Teresa, Joan of Arc,
Emerson, Shelley, and a few more visionaries, and dreamers be of the
circle. Let our Radiant Being try again. The vibrations of the combined
psychic force would respond more readily to the world-strangeness of the
visitor. There would be fewer mental obstacles raised by the sense of
the impossible. The restraints of logic would be more easily overcome.
The avenues of supersensual impressions would be open. The medium would
transmit the message to a point far beyond that possible to our psychic
judge, and the audience would encourage him by their readiness to grasp
the revelations made. The language of mysticism, philosophy, and
poetry would be strained to its utmost capacity. Then a sense of
incompleteness, of deficiency, of hopeless relativity would overcome the
audience. The medium had exerted every spiritual faculty to receive the
truth. But the visitor could not convey celestial realities to terrene
minds.
Every true artist in words, or colour, or sound is always haunted by the
inexpressible--by spiritual impotence to overcome the laws of
imprisonment in the flesh. He clutches at symbol and suggestion, at
parable and fable, conscious of the truth that the unreal is the most
real.
The goats have gathered round me as I sit musing in the gloaming. The
leading goat is a handsome animal, generally respected and feared by the
rest of the herd. He has excellent knowledge, inherited and acquired, of
the uses of mountains, and his venerable beard adorns a head of
undisputed male ascendancy in the tribe. I bear him a grudge. He is in
the habit of eating my sapling pines, carefully planted by me and
carelessly nipped in the bud by him. I have expostulated with him in a
variety of ways--some gentle, others forceful, but he is incorrigible.
He will not understand that my young pines are beautiful, and that they
are expected to grow into fine trees. He has no sense of beauty, of
symmetry, of fitness. He is only a beast. He has no soul--I pause,
remembering the ineffectual attempts of my Radiant Being to inspire
human souls with a greater vision. Are we not all goats before the gaze
of more finely organized creatures?
The evolutionist need not be disheartened by the thought. Nature is
unexhausted. Desire and experience are ever creating new forms, new
organs. A child's book of beasts will supply the requisite suggestion:
the neck of the giraffe, the stripes of the tiger, the tail of the
beaver may, without offence, provide analogies for the faith in organic
human perfectibility. The processes of natural selection and variation
cannot have been brought to a standstill; they must be at work now and
may yet--should surroundings and necessity create the demand--halve the
neck of the giraffe, give snow-white lamb's clothing to the tiger, and
turn the rudder of the beaver into the prehensile tail of the monkey.
There is no biological completion, no finitude. It is only a matter of
time--sufficient time--and our bodies may become as strangely
interesting to posterity as are to us the dinosaurs and mammoths of the
remote past.
Mind is not arrested by formal obstacles. It builds, destroys, and
rebuilds. It may take a million years to fashion a useful organ.
Slowness is no deterrent. The powers that shaped the genius of
Michelangelo and Shakespeare out of the rude brain of savage man needed
time, but the achievement was worthy of the labour. To-day there are
signs and portents that psychic faculties once possessed by the very
few are in process of development in the many, that new senses are
awakened which will find contact with realities hitherto unperceived.
The imperfections of mediumship and the remoteness of a psychic
super-humanity, godlike in wisdom and ethereal in constitution, do not
conceal the trend of mental evolution. The medium is often a strange
blend of spiritual and carnal tendencies, of knowledge and ignorance, of
delicate perception and denseness. Those who expect saintliness as the
first attribute of psychic advancement will certainly be disillusioned.
These gifts and graces may appear, not only without any corresponding
degree of culture and learning, but associated with a certain vulgarity
of thought and conduct. The psychic is essentially impressionable,
liable to mental contagion, easily stirred by suggestion. The tendency
to instability, to emotional excess, is part of this receptivity which
culminates in the state of being "controlled." An untrained psychic who
is mastered by his impressions, instead of being their master, may
easily be induced to tell lies and give false messages by a visitor who
is determined to discover fraud. The same psychic may rise to
unaccustomed levels of spiritual clearsight in the presence of a visitor
who demands the truth only.
The ladder of psychic development is long and arduous to mount. The
number of the climbers steadily diminishes as the top is reached. Here,
as elsewhere, there is a common crowd, content with the steps nearest
the earth, in morals a faithful reflection of average humanity. They are
neither better nor worse, they are merely different. They are the masons
of the mind, a race of builders, addicted to a workmanship of their own.
To a discerning psychologist they are profoundly interesting, heralds of
a new race and a new age; to an unsophisticated alienist they are merely
insane, dangerous victims of sick brains. The whole fabric of evidence
relating to lunacy would be broken up by the admission that these
strange people who fall into trance and speak unknown tongues or convey
messages from the dead are sane. Current theories of psycho-pathology
would be hopelessly disturbed by the admission that there may be a
super-sanity in which clairvoyance and clairaudience are normal and
healthy manifestations of life. A person who professes to be an exponent
of psychometry, who recalls circumstances and events from the "aura" of
inanimate objects, such as a letter or a glove, is naturally classed
with the insane. Hallucinations _en masse_ are proffered as explanation
of the physical phenomena which take place. Thus only can orthodox
psychiatry remain unperturbed when heavy objects are lifted without any
apparent cause, when unearthly sounds and voices are produced, when
human forms take shape, are seen, and disappear.
The study of psychic faculties is above all a study of consciousness.
Maeterlinck speaks of "the gravest problem that can thrill mankind, the
knowledge of the future." The knowledge of the present, of the hidden
powers and graces within our souls, is even more thrilling. I can
imagine no science of greater importance, no investigation more worthy
of devotion. The profundity of the problems is but an incitement. We
have not hesitated to tabulate the stars, to weave precious conjectures
as to their courses and destinies. Is the human soul more remote and
inscrutable? We are assured that it has five windows and no more, that
it is useless to look for others. But when an increasing number of
explorers in the house of life tell us that there are six or seven or
more, we may at any rate listen and follow their directions.
Obscurantism is revelling in proclaiming prohibited areas of
investigation.
I recognize that the problem is complicated by the mixture of truth and
falsehood, of genuine psychic powers and counterfeit practices. There
are impostors and parasites who by dint of glib tongues and nimble wit
deceive the foolish and the credulous. Browning's Sludge is not entirely
extinct. Honest workers who turn their gifts to professional uses and
who depend on the patronage of the public are subject to peculiar
temptations. They are visited by the worldly and the covetous, they are
exploited by sensation-mongers and fraud-hunters, they are subjected to
conditions entirely inimical to spiritual poise and lucidity. Some
resort to fraud. The report that the medium failed to satisfy the client
is apt to interfere with business, and failure is, therefore, shunned.
But the law does not trouble to distinguish between the honest and the
dishonest person who claims psychic gifts. From the legal point of view
it is all pretence. It is imperatively necessary that genuine psychic
gifts should be protected from the depredations of frivolity as well as
from the interference of an obsolete law. We have some idea of
protecting great and uncommon gifts in music, mathematics, and poetry,
but we leave psychic gifts without help or training. An institute for
the study of Psychic Science in all its branches, with facilities for
training and assisting individual gifts, would remove some of the worst
features of the present system. A genuine psychic should be the holder
of some form of certificate or licence entitling him to use his gifts
for the benefit of others.
Of course, the subject bristles with difficulties, but I do not see that
they are more insuperable than those which presented themselves when
first the idea of registering and licensing the medical and legal
professions presented itself. And those who are indignant at the thought
of the clairvoyant charging a fee may profitably reflect on the general
assumption that the labourer is worthy of his hire. The deans and
bishops who discourse so eloquently on the sins of the necromancers are
not, I believe, renouncing the material benefits and emoluments of
their priestly calling.
I do not look to visits to professional mediums for initiation into the
higher mysteries of the human spirit. They may show the casket--precious
as an indication of the contents, but of little value to those who are
bent on finding the jewel within. And I agree that no advanced soul is
"controlled" by a discarnate spirit, but rises through aspiration and
self-restraint to union with higher intelligences. I can see no light or
love in the attitude of those professors of Christianity who denounce
all spiritualistic tendencies as anti-Christian. It seems to me that the
whole Christian faith is spiritualistic in the widest sense of the word.
The Old and the New Testaments are permeated with the belief in the
reality of communication between the living and the dead. The injunction
in the Old Testament against sorcerers and wizards was intended to check
tendencies to unreasonable and dangerous superstition.
Moses may have had excellent reasons for forbidding occult practices
amongst the Jews. Saul, who had put away those that had familiar spirits
and the wizards out of the land, was not unlike some modern adversaries
of spiritualism when in the day of his trouble and fear he consulted the
medium of Endor. The accepted prophets of Israel were, after all,
typical of mediumship. "And the Spirit of the Lord will come upon thee,
and thou shalt prophesy with them, and shalt be turned into another
man." They practised bold fortune-telling in matters large and small,
national and cosmic. To-day they would surely be imprisoned as rogues
and vagabonds under the Vagrancy Act. The New Testament contains no
direct prohibition of the use of psychic powers and many stories of
dreams, visions, and premonitions.
"Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit," wrote St.
Paul in the First Epistle to the Corinthians. "For to one is given, by
the Spirit, the word of wisdom; to another the word of knowledge, by the
same Spirit.... To another the working of miracles; to another prophecy;
to another discerning of spirits; to another divers kinds of tongues; to
another the interpretation of tongues.... And God hath set some in the
Church; first, apostles, secondarily prophets, thirdly teachers, after
that miracles, then gifts of healings, helps, governments, diversities
of tongues." The praises of charity and prophecy are sung by the
Apostle--a strange combination in harmony to those who now seek to
separate the Christian faith from its supernatural origins. Christianity
exhorts us not to believe every spirit, but to "try the spirits whether
they are of God," whilst the ecclesiastic bids us chase away the
spirits, which he assumes to be of Satan.
The dull materialism which smothers all signs of independent spiritual
experience is the negation of all the forces which animated the Master.
The earthly life of Christ, with its supernatural manifestations, its
miracles, and its wonders, was the supreme demonstration of the
spiritualistic conception of the power of transcending matter. The
appearance of Moses and Elias on the Mount of Transfiguration, whether
regarded as a vision or as a materialization, was of the order of the
phenomena which are now banned as anti-Christian.
No; those who, having wandered in the darkness of death and blindness,
find a ray of light within their own being need not fear the judgment of
the Mediator. Here in the freedom of the mountains I feel something of
the inscrutable certainty, the joy of a secret conviction, that wisdom
waits on our tortuous paths in the Borderland.
REFORMERS
Of all generalizations--false and semi-false--the one dividing human
beings into those who are content with the world as it is and those who
wish to reform it is the most comforting to me. No division of sheep
and goats was ever more blatantly simple. Some are born dull-witted,
conservative, insensitive, unimaginative--they cling passive to the
old planet, content to be whirled round in the purposeless dance
of the heavenly bodies. Others are chronic sufferers from divine
discontent--they open their eyes with critical intent, they are always
conscious of the oblique, the unrighteous, the worthless in their
surroundings. They have a sense of power, a will to change things. To
them the world is a lump of dough, to be shaped and trimmed into good,
serviceable bread.
I know the division is unreal and that reformatory ardour in one
direction is not seldom combined with flint-hearted indifference in
another. But the proposition is good and sufficient for everyday
purposes, and acts as an admirable stimulus in the Camp of the
Challengers.
Who can deny that reformers are more interesting than preservers? They
vibrate with life and creative energy, they defy impossibilities, they
carry enthusiasm aloft on their banners of assault on the existing order
of things. Our preservers seem tame and stale indeed. They hobble about
the borders of the well-cultivated garden of custom and propriety, they
find admirable shelter against the fierce winds of revolt in the offices
of bureaucracy. Officialdom is their divinity and respectability their
key to life. They may be necessary--as buffers--but they depress us by
their dulness.
Reformers can be dull too, but they are redeemed by the homage which
they pay to spiritual adventures. They are narrow-minded, but their
narrow-mindedness is relieved by intensity of purpose. They are not
seldom aggressive, argumentative, unpleasant, but they refresh the dry
world by being thoroughly alive. It seems, indeed, as if life were only
made tolerable through the ferment of the desire to reform. Even the
most stagnant pools of the human soul are sometimes stirred by the
breeze of change. We all hope, we all look forward, we all grope for a
future which will be better than the present. In some the hope is firmly
rooted to earth and man-made conventions, in others it soars to
other-worldly perfection.
The world teems with causes and movements that rouse the imagination and
press human lives into the service of the future. The genesis and
development of causes show similar features wherever and whenever they
appear. A soul is astir with an idea, a resentment, a call for change.
Others heed the message, respond to the cry for action, feel that this
idea, this one idea, is the most important in the world. Societies and
leagues are formed, opposition is encountered, and the leader becomes
sanctified through abuse and resentment. The idea is embraced by
hundreds and thousands; it becomes a doctrine, a creed, a mental
atmosphere in which men live and have their being. Fierce battles take
place between the adherents of the idea and the opponents. Blind
prejudice and hatred are encountered. Martyrs are made. The crusade is
hallowed by suffering and sacrifice. It becomes an impelling spiritual
necessity, an expression of religion. Gradually the forces of the
opposition are weakened. Concessions and compromises are offered. There
are signs of the contagiousness of the idea even in the house of the
adversaries. The triumph comes with time, and the turbulent waves of
controversy recede into gentle ripples of approval. And for many a cause
for which men have suffered and died, posterity has but a yawn. "Just
think of it--all that fuss and all that turmoil over something so
obvious."
Seen superficially, this is a fairly accurate account of the fate of
movements for the reform of some glaring injustice, some hoary cruelty
of the past. But is it true? Is the world slowly but surely getting
better--are the monsters of ignorance and tyranny slain one by one by
our great reformers and laid to rest for ever in a grave of ignominy? We
accept the axiom that slavery has been abolished. Of all causes that
commanded devotion, struggle, persistency, the anti-slavery movement
stands forth as a moral protest of supreme import. Wilberforce and
Lincoln, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Clarkson fought for a principle
which may well be regarded as the very soul of civilization. The Civil
War brought the ideals of human rights and equality into bloody conflict
with the forces of oppression and commercial exploitation. The new
consciousness of human fellowship made white men lay down their lives
for the freedom of black men. A worthy cause, a sublime offering, a task
to which we would like to say "Done, done, once and for all time!" But
is it done? Slavery is not only inherent in every savage and barbaric
race, it is not only paramount in the mind of the Arab trader. Once the
social bulwark of the ancient civilizations of Babylon, Egypt, and
India, of Greece and Rome, it persisted in Europe throughout the Middle
Ages, and survived as serfdom of one kind or another through centuries
of advancing culture. The desire for power over fellow-beings, for
opportunities to control their lives and exploit their labour, is
apparently irradicable. Slavery is still amongst us in a hundred forms
and under new names. All military conquest involves the ancient
practices of serfdom. The conquered nations become slaves of the
invader; by obedience they live, by disobedience they die. The
persistence of slavery seems, then, to be a demonstration of the
unchangeability of human nature and of the ultimate hopelessness of
idealist causes. In every reform accomplished the practical application
is local, transitory, dependent on racial and geographical conditions.
There is obviously a great change in our penal methods. We do not
mutilate our criminals or scalp them for the preservation of their
souls, and we have lost confidence in the rack and the thumb-screw. But
we need only transport ourselves to other lands and study other people's
views of judicial necessities, and we shall find that the punitive
systems of the thirteenth or the eighteenth centuries are still with us.
Theoretically the blood of the black and the white man is of the same
good quality, and yet very little provocation is needed for the outbreak
of race riots. Negroes and negresses who have given offence to white
people need harbour no illusions concerning the restraining influences
of our Western civilization.
Like a mountain in eruption the war has thrown up the sordid passions,
the hidden reserves of destructive hate and cruelty in our common human
soul. In war all things are permissible. To murder, to maim, to
destroy, to deceive, to make hideous waste of fertile land, to cause
weeping and wailing amongst the innocent--these are the necessities of
warfare. They are the commonplace incidents of war. There are others. It
brings to the surface strata of human nature to which culture has never
descended. It explodes our humanitarian theories by a series of
well-directed mines. The ancient horrors of devices for the punishment
of the enemy are feeble competitors with our modern inventions. Our
poison gas, our burning oil, our metallic monsters that spit death on
the enemy and crush his fine defences, our flying bomb-throwers, all
show that we have not as yet succumbed to humanitarian or Christian
ethics. There have been some startling illustrations of the folly of
assuming that we have safely and irrevocably traversed certain stages of
human indifference. We shuddered at the revelations which called
Florence Nightingale to the Crimea; we now shudder at the heartless
carelessness revealed by Commissions and Reports. The triumph of Red
Cross organization, the mass of charitable and voluntary effort to
relieve suffering, the heroism and splendour of individual sacrifice,
soften, but do not reverse, the impression of a general humanitarian
debacle.