ATTITUDE OF THE WISE AND PRUDENT
"The vagueness and confusion inevitable at the beginning
of a novel line of research, [are] naturally distasteful
to the _savant_ accustomed to proceed by measurable
increments of knowledge from experimental bases already
assured. Such an one, if he reads this book, may feel as
though he had been called away from an ordnance survey,
conducted with a competent staff and familiar instruments,
to plough slowly with inexperienced mariners through some
strange ocean where beds of entangling seaweed cumber the
trackless way. We accept the analogy; but we would remind
him that even floating weeds of novel genera may foreshow
a land unknown; and that it was not without ultimate gain
to men that the straining keels of Columbus first pressed
through the Sargasso Sea."--F. W. H. M., Introduction to
_Phantasms of the Living_
It is rather remarkable that the majority of learned men have closed
their minds to what have seemed bare and simple facts to many people.
Those who call themselves spiritualists have an easy and simple
faith; they interpret their experiences in the most straightforward
and unsophisticated manner, and some of them have shown unfortunately
that they can be led into credulity and error, without much
difficulty, by unscrupulous people. Nevertheless, that simple-hearted
folk are most accessible to new facts seems to be rather accordant
with history. Whenever, not by reasoning but by direct experience,
knowledge has been enlarged, or when a revelation has come to the
human race through the agency of higher powers, it is not the wise
but the simple who are first to receive it. This cannot be used as an
argument either way; the simple may be mistaken, and may too blithely
interpret their sense-impressions in the most obvious manner; just as
on the other hand the eyes of the learned may be closed to anything
which appears disconnected from their previous knowledge. For after
all it is inevitable that any really new order of things must be so
disconnected; some little time must elapse before the weight of facts
impel the learned in a new direction, and meanwhile the unlearned
may be absorbing direct experience, and in their own fashion may be
forging ahead. It is an example of the ancient paradox propounded in
and about 1 _Cor._ i. 26; and no fault need be found with what is
natural.
It behoves me to mention in particular the attitude of men of
science, of whom I may say _quorum pars parva fui_; for in no way do
I wish to dissociate myself from either such stricture or such praise
as may be appropriate to men who have made a study of science their
vocation,--not indeed the peaks of the race, but the general body.
For it is safe to assume that we must have some qualities in common,
and that these must be among the causes which have switched us on to
a laborious and materially unremunerative road.
Michael Foster said in his Presidential Address to the British
Association at Dover:--
"Men of science have no peculiar virtues, no special
powers. They are ordinary men, their characters are
common, even commonplace. Science, as Huxley said, is
organised common sense, and men of science are common
men, drilled in the ways of common sense."
This of course, like any aphorism, does not bear pressing unduly: and
Dr. Arthur Schuster in a similar Address at Manchester hedged it round
with qualifying clauses:--
"This saying of Huxley's has been repeated so often
that one almost wishes it were true; but unfortunately
I cannot find a definition of common sense that fits
the phrase. Sometimes the word is used as if it were
identical with uncommon sense, sometimes as if it were
the same thing as common nonsense. Often it means
untrained intelligence, and in its best aspect it is, I
think, that faculty which recognises that the obvious
solution of a problem is frequently the right one. When,
for instance, I see during a total solar eclipse red
flames shooting out from the edge of the sun, the obvious
explanation is that these are real phenomena, caused by
masses of glowing vapours ejected from the sun. And when
a learned friend tells me that all this is an optical
illusion due to anomalous refraction, I object on the
ground that the explanation violates my common sense. He
replies by giving me the reasons which have led him to
his conclusions; and though I still believe that I am
right, I have to meet him with a more substantial reply
than an appeal to my own convictions. Against a solid
argument common sense has no power, and must remain a
useful but fallible guide which both leads and misleads
all classes of the community alike."
The sound moral of this is, not that a common-sense explanation is
likely to be the right one, or that it necessarily has any merits if
there are sound reasons to oppose to it, but that the common sense or
most obvious and superficial explanation _may_ turn out to be after
all truer as well as simpler than more recondite hypotheses which
have been substituted for it. In other words--the straightforward
explanation need not be false.
Now the phenomena encountered in psychical research have long ago
suggested an explanation, in terms of other than living human
intelligences, which may be properly called spiritistic. Every
kind of alternative explanation, including the almost equally
unorthodox one of telepathy from living people, has been tried: and
these attempts have been necessary and perfectly legitimate. If
they had succeeded, well and good; but inasmuch as in my judgment
there are phenomena which they cannot explain, and inasmuch as some
form of spiritistic hypothesis, given certain postulates, explains
practically all, I have found myself driven back on what I may call
the common-sense explanation; or, to adopt Dr. Schuster's parable, I
consider that the red flames round the sun are what they appear to be.
To attribute capricious mechanical performance to the action of live
things, is sufficient as a proximate explanation; as we saw in the
case of the jumping bean, Chapter I. If the existence of the live
thing is otherwise unknown, the explanation may seem forced and
unsatisfactory. But if after trying other hypotheses we find that
this only will fit the case, we may return to it after all with a
clear conscience. That represents the history of my own progress in
Psychical Research.
APOLOGIA
Meanwhile the attitude of scientific men is perfectly intelligible;
and not unreasonable, except when they forget their self-imposed
limitations and cultivate a baseless negative philosophy. People
who study mechanism of course find Mechanics, and if the mechanism
is physiological they find Physics and Chemistry as well; but they
are not thereby compelled to deny the existence of everything else.
They need not philosophise at all, though they should be able to
realise their philosophical position when it is pointed out. The
business of science is to trace out the mode of action of the laws of
Chemistry and Physics, everywhere and under all circumstances. Those
laws appear to be of universal application throughout the material
Universe,--in the most distant star as well as on the earth,--in the
animal organism as well as in inorganic matter; and the study of
their action alone has proved an ample task.
But scientific workers are sometimes thought to be philosophising
seriously when they should be understood as really only expressing
the natural scope of their special subject. Laplace, for instance, is
often misunderstood, because, when challenged about the place of God
in his system, he said that he had no need of such a hypothesis,--a
dictum often quoted as if it were atheistical. It is not necessarily
anything of the kind. As a brief statement it is right, though rather
unconciliatory and blunt. He was trying to explain astronomy on clear
and definite mechanical principles, and the introduction of a "finger
of God" would have been not only an unwarrantable complication but
a senseless intrusion. Not an intrusion or a complication in the
Universe, be it understood, but in Laplace's scheme, his _Systéme
du Monde_. Yet Browning's "flash of the will that can" in _Abt
Vogler_, with all that the context implies, remains essentially and
permanently true.
Theologians who admit that the Deity always works through agents
and rational means can grant to scientific workers all that they
legitimately claim in the positive direction, and can encourage them
in the detailed study of those agents and means. If people knew more
about science, and the atmosphere in which scientific men work, they
would be better able to interpret occasional rather rash negations;
which are quite explicable in terms of the artificial limitation of
range which physical science hitherto has wisely laid down for itself.
It is a true instinct which resents the mediæval practice of freely
introducing occult and unknown causes into working science. To
attribute the rise of sap, for instance, to a 'vital force' would
be absurd, it would be giving up the problem and stating nothing at
all. Progress in science began when spiritual and transcendental
causes were eliminated and treated as non-existent. The simplicity
so attained was congenial to the scientific type of mind; the
abstraction was eminently useful, and was justified by results. Yet
unknown causes of an immaterial and even of a spiritual kind may in
reality exist, and may influence or produce phenomena, for all that;
and it may have to be the business of science to discover and begin
to attend to them, as soon as the ordinary solid ground-plan of
Nature has been made sufficiently secure.
Some of us--whether wisely or unwisely--now want to enlarge the
recognised scope of physical science, so as gradually to take a
wider purview and include more of the totality of things. That is
what the Society for Psychical Research was established for,--to
begin extending the range of scientific law and order, by patient
exploration in a comparatively new region. The effort has been
resented, and at first ridiculed, only because misunderstood. The
effort may be ambitious, but it is perfectly legitimate; and if it
fails it fails.
But advance in new directions may be wisely slow, and it is readily
admissible that Societies devoted to long-established branches
of science are right to resist extraneous novelties, as long as
possible, and leave the study of occult phenomena to a Society
established for the purpose. Outlandish territories may in time
be incorporated as States, but they must make their claim good and
become civilised first.
Yet unfamiliar causes must be introduced occasionally into
systematised knowledge, unless our scrutiny of the Universe is
already exhaustive. Unpalatable facts can be ruled out from
attention, but they cannot without investigation be denied. Strange
facts do really happen, even though unprovided for in our sciences.
Amid their orthodox relations, they may be regarded as a nuisance.
The feeling they cause is as if capricious or mischievous live
things had been allowed to intrude into the determinate apparatus of
a physical laboratory, thereby introducing hopeless complexity and
appearing superficially to interfere with established laws. To avoid
such alien incursion a laboratory can be locked, but the Universe can
not. And if ever, under any circumstances, we actually do encounter
the interaction of intelligences other than that of living men, we
shall sooner or later become aware of the fact, and shall ultimately
have to admit it into a more comprehensive scheme of existence. Early
attempts, like those of the present, must be unsatisfactory and
crude; especially as the evidence is of a kind to which scientific
men for the most part are unaccustomed; so no wonder they are
resentful. Still the evidence is there, and I for one cannot ignore
it. Members of the Society for Psychical Research are aware that the
evidence already published--the carefully edited and sifted evidence
published by their own organisation--occupies some forty volumes of
_Journal_ and _Proceedings_; and some of them know that a great deal
more evidence exists than has been published, and that some of the
best evidence is not likely to be published,--not yet at any rate. It
stands to reason that, at the present stage, the best evidence must
often be of a very private and family character. Many, however, are
the persons who are acquainted with facts in their own experience
which appeal to them more strongly than anything that has ever been
published. No records can surpass first-hand direct experience in
cogency.
Nevertheless we are also aware, or ought to be, that no one crucial
episode can ever be brought forward as deciding such a matter. That
is not the way in which things of importance are proven. Evidence
is cumulative, it is on the strength of a mass of experience that an
induction is ultimately made, and a conclusion provisionally arrived
at; though sometimes it happens that a single exceptionally strong
instance, or series of instances, may clinch it for some individual.
But indeed the evidence, in one form and another, has been crudely
before the human race from remote antiquity; only it has been treated
in ways more or less obfuscated by superstition. The same sort of
occurrences as were known to Virgil, and to many another seer--the
same sort of experiences as are found by folk-lore students, not only
in history but in every part of the earth to-day--are happening now
in a scientific age, and sometimes under scientific scrutiny. Hence
it is that from the scientific point of view progress is at length
being made; and any one with a real desire to know the truth need
not lack evidence, if he will first read the records with an open
mind, and then bide his time and be patient till an opportunity for
first-hand critical observation is vouchsafed him. The opportunity
may occur at any time: the readiness is all. Really clinching
evidence in such a case is never in the past; a _prima facie_ case
for investigation is established by the records, but real conviction
must be attained by first-hand experience in the present.
The things to be investigated are either true or false. If false,
pertinacious inquiry will reveal their falsity. If true, they are
profoundly important. For there are no half-truths in Nature; every
smallest new departure has portentous consequences; our eyes must
open slowly, or we should be overwhelmed. I once likened the feeling
of physical investigators in the year 1889 to that of a boy who had
long been strumming on the keyboard of a deserted organ into which
an unseen power had begun to blow a vivifying breath.[40] That was
at the beginning of the series of revolutionary discoveries about
radiation and the nature of matter which have since resounded
through the world. And now once more the touch of a finger elicits a
responsive note, and again the boy hesitates, half delighted, half
affrighted, at the chords which it would seem he can now summon forth
almost at will.
[Footnote 40: _Modern Views of Electricity_, p. 408 of
third and current edition.]