Part 16 (2/2)

2. The study of hypnotism and mesmerism, and an inquiry into the alleged phenomena of clairvoyance.

3. A careful investigation of any reports, resting on testimony sufficiently strong and not too remote, of apparitions coinciding with some external event (as for instance a death) or giving information previously unknown to the percipient, or being seen by two or more persons independently of each other.

4. An inquiry into various alleged phenomena apparently inexplicable by known laws of nature, and commonly referred by Spiritualists to the agency of extra-human intelligences.

5. The collection and collation of existing materials bearing on the history of these subjects.[72]

[Footnote 72: ”Spiritualism,” Hill, p. 100.]

They sought also ”to approach these various problems without prejudice or prepossession of any kind and in the same spirit of exact and unimpa.s.sioned inquiry which has enabled science to solve so many problems, once not less obscure nor less hotly debated.”

As a matter of fact the region is the most obscure which inquiry has ever been called to enter. A n.o.ble rationality pervades the whole normal material order, causes can be controlled, effects antic.i.p.ated, laws formulated and above all, the hypotheses of science are, if true, always capable of a luminous and splendid verification. The disciplined intellect moves through it all with a sense of ”at-homeness” which is itself a testimony to profound correspondences between the human mind and the order with which, during its long, long unfolding, it has been a.s.sociated in intimacies of action and reaction too close to be adequately set forth in words. But the mind does not rest easily in the region which Spiritism claims for its own.

_The Difficulties It Confronts_

Of course this is to beg the whole question. The more scientifically minded spiritualists might fairly enough answer that they are attempting to discover the laws of the occult and reduce an anarchical system to order, that our feeling of strangeness in these regions is only because of our little contact with them. There are, they claim, undeveloped aspects of personality which we have had as yet little occasion to use, but which would, once they were fully brought into action, give us the same sense of rapport with a super-sensible order that we now have in our contact with the sensible order. The crux of the whole contention is probably just here and in view of what has heretofore been accomplished in discovering and formulating the laws of the physical universe and in reducing an immense body of apparently unrelated facts to order, there is doubtless possible a very great systematization of psychical phenomena, even the most obscure. Nor may we readily set bounds to the measure of human development. But at any rate the statement with which this paragraph began is true. The region which the Society for Psychical Research set out to explore is obscure and is, as yet, so far from yielding to investigation that the investigators are not even agreed as to their facts, let alone the conclusions to be drawn from.

The proceedings of the Society literally fill volumes (thirty-two); it would require a specialist to follow them through and an a.n.a.lysis here impossible, rightly to evaluate them. When such careful investigators as Hill and Podmore, dealing with the same body of fact, differ constantly and diametrically in their conclusions, it is evident that the facts so far collected have not c.u.mulative force enough to establish in the generality of disciplined minds a substantial unanimity of conviction.

There are far too many alternatives in the interpretation of the facts and, in general, the personal equation of the investigator colours the conclusions reached. Of course this is, in a measure, true in every field of investigation, but it is outstandingly true in psychical research.

_William James Enters the Field_

For some years the Society was mainly occupied with hypnotism and thought transference, with occasional reports on ”apparitions, haunted houses, premonitions, automatic writing, crystal vision and multiple personality.” Professor William James' experiment with Mrs. Piper carried the Society over into the field of trance mediums.h.i.+p. James had a sound scientific interest in every aspect of the play of human consciousness and was earlier than any of his contemporaries awakened to the psychological value of abnormal mental states. He also loved fair play. He made his first report on Mrs. Piper in 1886. He was unable, he said, ”to resist the conviction that knowledge appeared in her trances which she had never gained by the ordinary waking use of her eyes, ears and wits.... What the source of this knowledge may be, I know not, and have not a glimmer of explanatory suggestion to make, but from admitting the fact of such knowledge I can see no escape.”

In a letter to Flourney dated August 9, 1908, James says of later investigations: ”It seems to me that these reports open a new chapter in the history of automatism.... Evidently automatism is a word that covers an extraordinary variety of fact.” The reports of Mrs. Piper's sittings fill a large place in the Society's records. Dr. Richard Hodgson and Professor Hyslop were finally led to accept her trance utterances and writings as spiritistic revelations. Podmore, after a most careful a.n.a.lysis, concludes that ”Mrs. Piper's trance utterances indicate the possession of some supernormal power of apprehension, at least the capacity to read the unspoken and even unconscious thoughts and emotions of other minds.”[73] He is willing to admit that if any case in the whole history of Spiritualism points at communication with the spirits of the dead, hers is that case, but he adds, ”to other students of the records, including the present writer, the evidence nevertheless appears at present insufficient to justify the spiritualistic view even of a working hypothesis.” ”I cannot point to a single instance in which a precise and unambiguous piece of information has been furnished, of a kind which could not have proceeded from the medium's own mind, working upon the materials provided in the hints let drop by the sitter.”[74]

[Footnote 73: ”Modern Spiritualism,” Podmore, Vol. II, pp. 342-343.]

[Footnote 74: ”Modern Spiritualism,” Podmore, Vol. II, p. 345.]

_The Limitations of the Scientist in Psychical Investigation_

It is impossible in this study to follow through the records of the Society. A representative group of its members, some of them men whose names carry weight in other regions, have been led by their investigations to adopt the spiritistic hypothesis. Significantly, however, it is generally the scientist and not the psychologist who commits himself most strongly to Spiritism. He is strongly impressed, as was Sir William Crookes, by phenomena of one sort or another which do not come under his laws, and he a.s.signs to them causes which lie altogether out of his field. Indeed the temper and training of the scientist handicap him in all psychical investigations. He has only one of two alternatives: to explain what he sees in terms of what his laboratories have told him, or else in terms of forces with which he is not familiar. His training in careful experimentation may fit him to test and isolate physical phenomena, but if they cannot be explained in terms of the forces and laws with which he is familiar his conclusions are no more authoritative than the conclusions of any other reasonably intelligent man. He may, therefore, lend the weight of a great name to conclusions--or conjectures--entirely outside his own province. The element of trickery in the ordinary professional seance is notorious.[75] The ordinary physical phenomena of spiritism have almost without exception been duplicated by conjurers--many of whom have mystifying tricks of their own no medium can duplicate and even the most unusual phenomena, such as Home's apparent ability to handle fire unburnt and his levitation can be paralleled in savage rites or the performance of Indian fakirs, to which no professedly spiritistic explanation is attached. In many instances a trained conjurer would be far more apt to detect fraud than a trained scientist. He would at least know where to look for a probable explanation.

[Footnote 75: Carrington, ”The Psychical Phenomena of Spiritualism,” pp.

6 and 7.]

_The Society for Psychical Research Gives Intellectual Standing to Their Investigations_

If the explanations of the whole group of phenomena is not in the known resident forces about us it is presumably in powers or aspects of personality not yet fully known. Here the psychologist is a better witness than the scientist and it is significant that psychologists have been slower to accept the spiritistic hypothesis than the scientist.

Hyslop is an exception but the extent to which Hyslop has of late gone in some of his reported utterances would seem to indicate that he has pa.s.sed far beyond the bonds of the scientific. And indeed, the whole tendency of those who let themselves go strongly with the spiritistic tide is exactly in this direction. It ought, however, to be said that even these members of the S.P.R. who have become spiritistic have generally been savingly conservative in their conclusions.

At any rate, the work of the Society for Psychical Research has given intellectual standing to what was before a sort of hole and corner affair under suspicion twice: first, because of the character of those involved, second, because of the character of what they revealed. It is difficult for one not predisposed toward the occult and even strongly prejudiced against it to deny in alleged spiritistic phenomena a challenging residuum which may in the end compel far-reaching modifications in the conclusions both of science and psychology. By one set of tests this residuum is unexpectedly small. One of the canons of the S.P.R. is to reject the work of any medium once convicted or strongly suspected of fraud. There is a vast literature in this region through whose outstanding parts the writer has for a good while now been trying to find his way, often enough ready to quote the Pope in the Ring and the Book.

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