Part 31 (1/2)

A devil is not a creature whose existence is independently known to science; and from the accounts the behaviour of the invading devils seems due to mere self-suggestion. With uncivilised races, even more than among our own friends, we are bound to insist on the rule that there must be some supernormal knowledge shown before we may a.s.sume an external influence. It may of course be replied that the character shown by the ”devils” was fiendish and actually _hostile_ to the possessed person. Can we suppose that the tormentor was actually a fraction of the tormented?

I reply that such a supposition, so far from being absurd, is supported by well-known phenomena both in insanity and in mere hysteria.

Especially in the Middle Ages,--amid powerful self-suggestions of evil and terror,--did these quasi-possessions reach an intensity and violence which the calm and sceptical atmosphere of the modern hospital checks and discredits. The devils with terrifying names which possessed Sur Angelique of Loudun[195] would at the Salpetriere under Charcot in our days have figured merely as stages of ”clounisme” and ”att.i.tudes pa.s.sionelles.”

And even now these splits of personality seem occasionally to destroy all sympathy between the normal individual and a divergent fraction. No great sympathy was felt by Leonie II. for Leonie I.[196] And Dr. Morton Prince's case[197] shows us the deepest and ablest of the personalities of his ”Miss Beauchamp” positively spiteful in its relation to her main ident.i.ty.

Bizarre though a house thus divided against itself may seem, the moral dissidence is merely an exaggeration of the moral discontinuity observable in the typical case of Mrs. Newnham.[198] _There_ the secondary intelligence was merely tricky, not malevolent. But its trickiness was wholly alien from Mrs. Newnham's character,--was something, indeed, which she would have energetically repudiated.

It seems, therefore,--and the a.n.a.logy of dreams points in this direction also,--that our moral nature is as easily split up as our intellectual nature, and that we cannot be any more certain that the minor current of personality which is diverted into some new channel will retain _moral_ than that it will retain _intellectual_ coherence.

To return once more to the Chinese devil-possessions. Dr. Nevius a.s.serts, though without adducing definite proof, that the possessing devils sometimes showed supernormal knowledge. This is a better argument for their separate existence than their fiendish temper is; but it is not in itself enough. The knowledge does not seem to have been specially appropriate to the supposed informing spirit. It seems as though it may have depended upon heightened memory, with possibly some slight telepathic or telaesthetic perception. Heightened memory is thoroughly characteristic of some hysterical phases; and even the possible traces of telepathy (although far the most important feature of the phenomena, if they really occurred) are, as we have seen, not unknown in trance states (like Leonie's) where there is no indication of an invading spirit.

Temporary control of the organism by a widely divergent fragment of the personality, self-suggested in some dream-like manner into hostility to the main ma.s.s of the personality, and perhaps better able than that normal personality to reach and manipulate certain stored impressions,--or even certain supernormal influences,--such will be the formula to which we shall reduce the invading Chinese devil, as described by Dr. Nevius,--and _probably_ the great majority of supposed devil-possessions of similar type.

The great majority, no doubt, but perhaps not _all_. It would indeed be matter for surprise if such trance-phenomena as those of Mrs. Piper and other modern cases had appeared in the world without previous parallel.

Much more probable is it that similar phenomena have occurred sporadically from the earliest times,--although men have not had enough of training to a.n.a.lyse them.

And, in fact, among the endless descriptions of trance-phenomena with which travellers furnish us, there are many which include points so concordant with our recent observations that we cannot but attach some weight to coincidences so wholly undesigned.[199] But although this may be admitted, I still maintain that the only invaders of the organism who have as yet made good their t.i.tle have been human, and have been friendly; and with this clearance should, I think, vanish the somewhat grim a.s.sociations which have gathered around the word _possession_.

a.s.suming, then, as I think we at present may a.s.sume, that we have to deal only with spirits who have been men like ourselves, and who are still animated by much the same motives as those which influence us, we may briefly consider, on similar a.n.a.logical grounds, what range of spirits are likely to be able to affect us, and what difficulties they are likely to find in doing so. Of course, actual experience alone can decide this; but nevertheless our expectations may be usefully modified if we reflect beforehand how far such changes of personality as we already know can suggest to us the limits of these profounder subst.i.tutions.

What, to begin with, do we find to be the case as to addition of faculty in alternating states? How far do such changes bring with them unfamiliar powers?

Reference to the recorded cases will show us that existing faculty may be greatly quickened and exalted. There may be an increase both in actual perception and in power of remembering or reproducing what has once been perceived. There may be increased control over muscular action,--as shown, for instance, in improved billiard-playing,--in the secondary state. But there is little evidence of the acquisition--telepathy apart--of any actual ma.s.s of fresh knowledge,--such as a new language, or a stage of mathematical knowledge unreached before. We shall not therefore be justified by a.n.a.logy in expecting that an external spirit controlling an organism will be able easily to modify it in such a way as to produce speech in a language previously unknown. The brain is used as something between a typewriter and a calculating machine. German words, for instance, are not mere combinations of letters, but specific formulae; they can only seldom and with great difficulty be got out of a machine which has not been previously fas.h.i.+oned for their production.

Consider, again, the a.n.a.logies as to _memory_. In the case of alternations of personality, memory fails and changes in what seems a quite capricious way. The gaps which then occur recall (as I have said) the _ecmnesia_ or blank unrecollected s.p.a.ces which follow upon accidents to the head, or upon crises of fever, when all memories that belong to a particular person or to a particular period of life are clean wiped out, other memories remaining intact. Compare, again, the memory of waking life which we retain in _dream_. This too is absolutely capricious;--I may forget my own name in a dream, and yet remember perfectly the kind of chairs in my dining-room. Or I may remember the chairs, but locate them in some one else's house. No one can predict the kind of confusion which may occur.

We have also the parallel of _somnambulic utterance_. In talking with a somnambulist, be the somnambulism natural or induced, we find it hard to get into continuous colloquy on our own subjects. To begin with, he probably will not speak continuously for long together. He drops back into a state in which he cannot express himself at all. And when he does talk, he is apt to talk only on his own subjects;--to follow out his own train of ideas,--interrupted rather than influenced by what _we_ say to _him_. The difference of _state_ between waking and sleep is in many ways hard to bridge over.

We have thus three parallelisms which may guide and limit our expectations. From the parallelism of possession with split personalities we may infer that a possessing spirit is not likely to be able to inspire into the recipient brain ideas or words of very unfamiliar type. From the parallelism of possession with dream we may infer that the memory of the possessing spirit may be subject to strange omissions and confusions. From the parallelism with somnambulism we may infer that colloquy between a human observer and the possessing spirit is not likely to be full or free, but rather to be hampered by difference of state, and abbreviated by the difficulty of maintaining psychical contact for long together.

These remarks will, I hope, prepare the reader to consider the problems of possession with the same open-mindedness which has been needed for the study of previous problems attacked in the present work.

But before we can proceed to the actual evidence there is another aspect of possession which must be explained. A group of phenomena are involved which have in various ways done much to confuse and even to r.e.t.a.r.d our main inquiry, but which, when properly placed and understood, are seen to form an inevitable part of any scheme which strives to discover the influence of unseen agencies in the world we know.

In our discussion of all telepathic and other supernormal influence I have thus far regarded it mainly from the psychological and not from the physical side. I have spoken as though the field of supernormal action has been always the metetherial world. Yet true as this dictum may be in its deepest sense, it cannot represent the _whole_ truth ”for beings such as we are, in a world like the present.” For us every psychological fact has (so far as we know) a physical side; and metetherial events, to be perceptible to us, must somehow affect the world of matter.

In sensory and motor automatisms, then, we see effects, supernormally initiated, upon the world of matter.

_Imprimis_, of course, and in ordinary life our own spirits (their existence once granted) affect our own bodies and are our standing examples of spirit affecting matter. Next, if a man receives a telepathic impact from another incarnate spirit which causes him to see a phantasmal figure, that man's brain has, we may suppose, been directly affected by his own spirit rather than by the spirit of the distant friend. But it may not always be true even in the case of sensory automatisms that the distant spirit has made a suggestion merely to the percipient's spirit which the percipient's own spirit carries out; and in motor automatisms, as they develop into _possession_, there are indications, as I have already pointed out, that the influence of the agent's spirit is _telergic_ rather than telepathic, and that we have extraneous spirits influencing the human brain or organism. That is to say, they are producing movements in matter;--even though that matter be organised matter and those movements molecular.

So soon as this fact is grasped,--and it has not always been grasped by those who have striven to establish a fundamental difference between spiritual influence on our spirits and spiritual influence on the material world,--we shall naturally be prompted to inquire whether inorganic matter as well as organic ever shows the agency of extraneous spirits upon it. The reply which first suggests itself is, of course, in the negative. We are constantly dealing with inorganic matter, and no hypothesis of spiritual influence exerted on such matter is needed to explain our experiments. But this is a rough general statement, hardly likely to cover phenomena so rare and fugitive as many of those with which in this inquiry we deal. Let us begin, so to say, at the other end; not with the broad experience of life, but with the delicate and exceptional cases of _possession_ of which we have lately been speaking.

Suppose that a discarnate spirit, in temporary possession of a living organism, is impelling it to motor automatisms. Can we say _a priori_ what the limits of such automatic movements of that organism are likely to be, in the same way as we can say what the limits of any of its voluntary movements are likely to be? May not this extraneous spirit get more motor power out of the organism than the waking man himself can get out of it? It would not surprise us, for example, if the movements in trance showed increased _concentration_; if a dynamometer (for instance) was more forcibly squeezed by the spirit acting through the man than by the man himself. Is there any other way in which one would imagine that a spirit possessing me could use my vital force more skilfully than I could use it myself?

I do not know how my will moves my arm; but I know by experience that my will generally moves only my arm and what my arm can touch;--whatever objects are actually in contact with the ”protoplasmic skeleton” which represents the life of my organism. Yet I can sometimes move objects not in actual contact, as by melting them with the heat or (in the dry air of Colorado) kindling them with the electricity, which my fingers emit.

I see no very definite limit to this power. I do not know all the forms of energy which my fingers might, under suitable training, emit.

And now suppose that a possessing spirit can use my organism more skilfully than I can. May he not manage to emit from that organism some energy which can visibly move ponderable objects not actually in contact with my flesh? That would be a phenomenon of possession not very unlike its other phenomena;--and it would be _telekinesis_.

By that word (due to M. Aksakoff) it is convenient to describe what have been called ”the physical phenomena of spiritualism,” as to whose existence as a reality, and not as a system of fraudulent pretences, fierce controversy has raged for half a century, and is still raging.

The interest excited in the ordinary public by these phenomena has, as is well known, fostered much fraud, to expose and guard against which has been one of the main tasks of the S.P.R.[200]