IS A BELIEF IN A SPIRIT WORLD GROWING? WHY MANY SENSIBLE MEN
CONTINUE TO DOUBT AND DISREGARD IT. WHAT IS IMMORTALITY?
A number of people, including many whose intelligence and achievements
in other directions one is bound to respect, believe and carry on a
propaganda to spread their belief in a world of spirits, disembodied
human beings for the most part, in fact what we used to call ghosts,
which exists invisibly and intangibly side by side with our world of
commonplace things, but which is capable of slight but significant
physical and mental interference with this material, everyday, daylight
world.
This belief, or something very like it, has been held by a certain
number of people in nearly every age. One can trace it continuously
through the last three centuries. It has always been stoutly denied
by a considerable number of people and generally disregarded by the
mass of active human beings. In earlier times, the powers of the
spirits invoked by the necromancers seem to have been greater than
they are to-day. They could inflict serious physical injuries and
associate themselves with a cult of witches and warlocks, unpleasant
in their habits and now happily unfashionable. Then they were more
generally respected. They were respected rather than liked. The chief
solicitude of the believer seems to have been to find expedients to
keep them at a distance. But now they have mended their manners, and
the chief solicitude of a number of people seems to be to develop this
intercourse even at the price of very considerable fatigue and boredom.
Why is there so general a disregard now of allegations which, if
true, should have the profoundest reaction upon our whole lives? Sir
Oliver Lodge and Sir Conan Doyle ask this question in tones of natural
astonishment. They have produced evidence of the real existence of
this other world which they believe to be convincing. Sir Oliver Lodge
has drawn back the veil on a sort of sublimated Hampstead, and Sir
Conan Doyle has drawn back quite a number of veils. His latest book
records the communications of an individual named “Pheneas,” through
various media, to himself and his family, and he asks me to note the
extraordinary quality and significance of the mind of Pheneas thus
displayed. I am sorry to say I can find none of the qualities Sir Conan
seems to expect me to observe. Pheneas seems to me a platitudinous bore
and a reckless maker of vague promises. Ever since the end of 1922 he
has been promising wonderful changes for the better in human life and
knowledge, “the biggest thing in the earth’s history” and so forth.
Well, here is Christmas, 1927.
Now I hate to seem derisive of two such men as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
and Sir Oliver Lodge. I know something of the trade of story-writing,
and I acknowledge Sir Conan Doyle as a master. I can peep up at the
scientific achievements of Sir Oliver Lodge. But in this matter of
the ghosts they put the evidence before us and invite us to judge
for ourselves. _A priori_ I find their ghosts and their ghost worlds
incredible. And when they produce their evidence to convince me that
this queer extra-existence does go on, I am bound to confess I find it
unconvincing.
Now the fact that I find the ghost world revealed by these gentlemen
far less attractive than an everlasting peace does not prove that such
a world does not exist. It may be my fate to follow our old friend
E. W. Hornung into that world of vague featureless satisfaction and
hang about spots of “light” in order to transmit to earth through
unattractive strangers the startling news that “This is wonderful,” and
that I am “sorry and realize things” (never explicitly stated) now. I
may be brought to confess that “I like this place. There is peace here,
and beautiful vibrations. God bless you” (five times!), and suchlike
maunderings. But I want very sound evidence indeed that this dismal
substitute for the pungent liveliness of our present existence, its
tender and flaming moments and its sweet earthliness, awaits me, before
I resign myself to it, and so we come down to the material proofs.
I have done my best to sample the very large mass of records
available. No doubt I start with a bias against the evidence, and that
the reader must allow for, but I have been prepared to go on into the
details of any group of investigations that produced a _prima facie_
case. But I find that I am not given phenomena that I can scrutinize,
recall, and examine in any way that pleases me. I am asked to make
immense concessions before the evidence can be put before me. A person
called the Medium, it is explained, has to be considered. He or she is
the material vehicle of the phenomena. Most Mediums have been caught
cheating. This, I am to grant, may be due to a peculiar temperamental
weakness frequently associated with psychic gifts. Or to nasty, vulgar,
_bad_ ghosts.
I am to believe my eyes and ears. When a conjurer seems to me to take
a large new-laid egg out of the top of his head, I am allowed to say
that he has successfully deceived me without pretending to know how
the trick was done, but when an entranced Medium produces the pet name
of an old schoolfellow long deceased out of _his_ head, I am asked to
believe at once in all the explanations he gives of spirit controls,
high and low spirits and so forth, unless I can trace every step by
which he came to utter a name he had no right to know.
Moreover, I must go into favourable rooms for the phenomena and sit
for a long time in a light so bad that it is the next thing to complete
darkness. I must be still and not hostile. I must sit there until my
fagged attention wanders. Many people must sleep at séances. But they
never mention it. And dream. Possibly as they expect to dream. I must
not complain if after some hours of such horrible boredom nothing
ensues. I must be “fair” to the spirits and try again.
In some slightly incoherent way these moral and intellectual
revelations of the ghosts which reveal nothing, which at best
touch trivially upon quite minor matters in the intimate life, are
inextricably mixed up with queer material phenomena. These are
“materializations.”
Most Mediums are committed to these material phenomena, and by them
their reputations stand or fall. There is this “ectoplasm,” which is
our earthly foretaste of the wonderful loveliness of over there. Queer
stuff, sometimes queer-smelling stuff, is exuded by the Mediums in
the obscurity, often rather disagreeably. Its texture and appearance
varies very greatly. This exudation defies all our daylight experiences
of physical and chemical phenomena. It leaps in its character across
gulfs that it has taken normal life vast ages to traverse. It becomes
organized, in a few minutes, we are assured, as skin, muscle, nerve. It
takes on the character of limbs, of heads, of entire quasi-human beings
who move about.
Artists, like John Tissot, attending such séances have put on record
their impression of these exuded beings in all their dignity and
beauty. In Paris an International Metapsychic Institute has been
endowed for these experimentations, and the late Dr. Geley, a man of
high scientific standing, produced a considerable book giving cases in
which beautiful beings from another world have been exuded by Mediums,
snapshotted in all their beauty and returned again through the pores
and passages of the Mediums into that marvellous other world.
I have looked at Geley’s illustrations with interest. I note that the
hands of the Medium when they appear in these pictures do not seem to
be held as he says they were held. The head and face of a young woman
are visible projecting from the body of the Medium, and it is certainly
a very pretty face, rather of the Monna Lisa type, but when Dr. Geley
assures me that it is a substantial face, I find myself sceptical. The
eyes, the eyelids, the mouth and pose and expression of this being
coming into our world from the mysterious outside remain absolutely
the same throughout the séance in a series of photographs. But living
eyes move. Living lips breathe. Living eyelids quiver. These do not.
Living souls display interest. The more one looks at these pictures
the less like a living face that face is seen to be and the more like
a face painted or photographed on some distensible bladder. Dr. Geley
considers many possibilities of fraud, but he never considers the part
distensible pellicles may play in these manifestations. I find it more
intelligible to suppose that this was the particular device adopted
in this case than to suppose the hundred incredible things that are
involved if one accepts this appearance as a “materialized” ghost.
Years ago in “Love and Mr. Lewisham” I ventured to hint that the
possibilities of distensible skins were far too much neglected in the
criticism of spiritualistic séances. Dr. Geley’s ideas recall that idea
very vividly.
Another point about the material evidence for these phenomena upon
which Sir Oliver Lodge, Sir Conan Doyle and their associates rest their
belief in a whole second universe of immortal spirits interwoven with
our own, is its unprogressive and unconfirmatory character. As Dr.
Fournier d’Albe has recently pointed out in “Nature,” these phenomena
keep on repeating themselves with variations in the same vague and
inconclusive way without ever coming to a gripping demonstration.
In spite of the promises of “Pheneas,” they never get on. There
are changes in fashion, but no progress. With the tightening up of
observation and the introduction of photography and moulds, for
example, the noble and exalted figures put on record by John Tissot
give place to these pellicular faces, to grotesque and horrible
half-shapen things, and even to mere suggestively shaped lumps.
With the introduction of proper and complete photographic records
of the mutterings of entranced Mediums there will probably be a very
considerable diminution in the characteristic flavour that now makes
the recognition of the revenants so facile. The phenomena still abound,
but they deteriorate in quality even if they increase in abundance. We
are told of floods of spiritual light, and, behold, “Pheneas speaks!”
Wonderful prophecies are spoken of. Where are they?
For me the most fatal line of thought for all this stuff lies in the
steadily changing ideas of modern people about individuality. Beneath
all these necromancies is an assumption of the complete and incurable
integrity of the eternal human person from the rest of the universe.
The normal man, who is unaccustomed to analysis, assumes, it may be too
readily, that his self is something detached and _vis à vis_ with all
other things. It may end, but it cannot amalgamate.
But that may be no more than an innate delusion by which for our
lifetimes we carry on a fight for certain qualities and characteristics
against our environment. We are self-centred for the ends of
life, and we are most of us so richly endowed with self-love and
self-appreciation that we find it extremely difficult to imagine or
tolerate an existence turning on some other centre to which we may
be merely incidental and contributory. Yet we lay aside self in deep
sleep, and in our moments of greatest exaltation, and for most of us
who are over thirty, the self of childhood has already faded out for us.
We may be but parts of a larger whole, as the quivering cells in our
living bodies are parts of us. Perhaps the blood corpuscles in our
arteries have a dim sense of being living individuals in a crowded
thoroughfare. Perhaps we ourselves share a mightier immortality.
Perhaps the dear lives we have loved close to our own are finished and
done, not like something ended and cast away, but like beautiful deeds
done for ever and fruitful for ever.
I do not know how new these ideas are to the reader, but he will find
them set out very strikingly from the biological side in such a book as
Huxley and Haldane’s recent volume on “Animal Biology.” Along that line
he will come to conceptions of individuality and personality that will
make the idea of Pheneas, who lived at Ur before the time of Abraham
and was an Arab, “a magnificent man, honoured by all who knew him,” who
is “a great power” in the spirit world, and who now attends Sir Conan
Doyle’s lectures, directs his lecturing tours, advises in the choice of
a new house, tells him when to take a day off in bed, knows “Johanna of
Arc,” considers “the state of the churches a scandal,” and likes the
room dark, as infantile and inadmissible as the nursery belief in Santa
Claus or Old Bogey on the Stairs. “Pheneas” appears to be a new way of
spelling “Phineas,” and the learned tell us that Phineas is probably of
Egyptian origin and means negro. Racial snobbery perhaps accounts for
Pheneas claiming to be an Arab. This Pheneas, I venture to think, is an
impostor, wrought of self-deception, as pathetic as a rag doll which
some lonely child has made for its own comfort.
The men of Ur have lived and passed like the light upon the specks in
yesterday’s sunbeam that glowed upon my retina. Ur the ancient is dust
to-day, and mounds of rubbish and disused and worn-out things, and all
its individual lives are a fading memory. If ever a gentleman with the
un-Ur-like name of Pheneas enlivened its streets, he melted back into
the universal stream of being when his enlivening was done. But Ur was
a place of events and a seed of consequences that live and continue
so long as man endures. And we too live and pass, reflecting for our
moment, and in the measure of our capacity, the light and wonder of the
Eternal.
And is not that enough?
_25 December, 1927._