Part 17 (1/2)
”I have worn through this sombre wintry day With winter in my soul ...
Over these dismalest of doc.u.ments”
The reports of sittings cover weary pages of murky statement; the descriptions of the discarnate life are monotonously uniform and governed almost without exception by old, old conceptions of planes and spheres. There is always a preponderance of the trivial--though the advocates of spiritism claim, and the justice of this claim must be allowed, that this is inevitable and that only through the veridical character of the inconsequential can the consequential be established.
Moreover, the impartial student working over the records should at least recognize the pathetic importance which those, believing themselves to be in touch with their own dead, naturally attach to even the most trivial instances. This sense of really being in touch, itself entirely subjective, probably carries over ninety-nine out of every hundred who finally become spiritists. It would be foolish to ignore the contributive force of this sense. In one form or another it is the last element in our recognition of our friends, and it never can be judged externally. But on the other hand a recognition of the unwarranted lengths to which--with lonely longing behind it--it may carry even the best poised minds, must give us pause in accepting any conclusion thus reached.
_The Very Small Number of Dependable Mediums_
Spiritistic literature is endlessly diffuse, but on the other hand the more dispa.s.sionate students rest their case on an unexpectedly small body of undiscredited evidence. Mrs. Piper, Home and Stainton Moses are the mediums with whom the case of the S.P.R. really stands or falls.
Home was never detected in fraud and was non-professional. Sir William Crookes' experiments in these physical phenomena were carried on with him as medium. His work, however, was generally done for a small group of already convinced followers and their testimony, while sincere and generally consistent, may often have been influenced in ways of which they themselves were not conscious. Podmore thinks them to have been unduly suggestible and offers hallucinations as an alternative hypothesis. Stainton Moses was respected in his private life, a teacher, a clergyman and a private tutor. His specialties were the introduction of a great variety of articles--apports as they are called--at his sittings, levitation, table-tipping and automatic writing and the direct voice. His control was known as ”Imperator” and this ghostly commander fills a large place in the S.P.R. literature. ”Imperator” had a strong homiletic instinct (remember that Moses was a clergyman) and communicated first and last through automatic writing, a considerable exposition of the spiritualistic creed, the larger part of which could have been preached from any liberal pulpit with no other effect on the hearers than to win their a.s.sent to blameless commonplaces--or, possibly, put them to sleep.
Mrs. Piper affords the strongest evidence of what Podmore calls ”Some supernormal power of apprehension” in the entire history of trance mediums.h.i.+p. She was for years under the constant observation of a capable group by no means unanimously sympathetic with the spiritistic hypothesis, and has never been detected in fraud. She contributed a very great amount of information to her sitters which she apparently could not and did not obtain from known sources. There are no physical phenomena in connection with her work. The records of her seances fill a large place in the proceedings of the S.P.R. and the case for spiritism could be more safely rested with her than any other medium.
But the point here is that these three--Home, Moses and Mrs.
Piper--supply the larger part of material which the really trained investigators of the last forty years are at all willing to take seriously. If there have been only three mediums in forty years who have commanded the general confidence--and Podmore does not feel absolutely sure of Home--of the group whose judgment the rest of us have to depend upon, we have a situation in which the average untrained seeker dealing with the average medium can have no sound confidence at all. The whole region is shot through and through with uncertainties, deceits and alternative hypotheses.
_Spiritism a Question of Testimony and Interpretation_
It is all fundamentally a matter of testimony. We have, or we have not, a body of fact for which we are in debt to observation. The observation may be first hand--as in Sir Oliver Lodge's sittings where he reports what he saw and heard. It may be second hand as the cases reported in the larger part of the authoritative literature of psychic phenomena.
(Second hand, that is, for the authors and those who depend upon them.) Trustworthy observation is probably more difficult here than in any region of investigation. The whole situation is unfavourable; low lights and high emotion, the instinctive tendency to read into the facts a desired content even in watching them, the possibility of hallucinations and forms of hypnosis, all combine to render human testimony unreliable and introduce errors of observation. Nowhere can we be less sure of our facts and even when the facts are admitted the interpretation of them still remains, and here the room for difference is equally great. At best we are dealing with forces not yet subdued to law, phenomena for which normal experience supplies no parallel. It is all a region of intimations and possible permissions, but never for a moment of inevitable conclusions. One must go slow enough in offering any opinion at all. The writer recognizes and accepts, to begin with, a preponderance of dependable testimony for physical phenomena not to be explained in terms of any force with which science is now familiar.
In this he goes beyond Podmore who would eliminate all physical phenomena from the problem, and fully as far as Carrington. But Sir William Crookes never admitted entire error in this region,[76] and the conclusions of Geley (though he cites in part Eusapia Palladino, who is more or less discredited) point in the same direction. His studies of materialization are so vivid as to be uncanny and his photographs a series of doc.u.ments which still await explanation.[77] There would seem to be a possible exercise of personal force not dependent upon muscular pull or pressure, bodily movements operating against known laws and even the building of this mysterious force into complete or fragmentary body-like forms.
[Footnote 76: See Carrington, ”The Physical Phenomena of Spiritualism,”
p. 377.]
[Footnote 77: Geley, ”From the Unconscious to the Conscious.”]
On the psychical side there is dependable evidence for information conveyed by supernormal means across considerable s.p.a.ces--possibly long distances and the power to secure and report information not gained in any normal way. These are bare statements capable of great amplification. But they cover the ground.
_Three Possible Explanations of So-Called Spiritistic Phenomena_
Admitting the facts, there are three possible explanations. First, the Daimonistic. There are, according to this theory, in the unseen world--wherever and whatever that may be--an order of beings akin to ourselves, either less or more highly developed, mischievous or benign.
This is an old, old belief; it has pervaded animistic religions, fathered witchcraft, persisted in the belief of demoniac control, enriched folk lore, filled the friendly silences of the night with terror and haunted humanity. Now it has found its renaissance in the full blaze of Twentieth Century Science.
”It seems not improbable,” says Sir William Barrett, ”that many of the _physical_ manifestations witnessed in a spiritualistic seance are the product of human-like but not really human intelligence--good or bad daimonia they may be, _elementals_ some have called them, which aggregate round the medium; drawn from that particular plane of mental and moral development in the unseen which corresponds to the mental and moral plane of the medium.”[78] This is, with little enough alteration, the very point from which we set out in the remote dawn of our endeavour to interpret the mystery of the world about us. The only difference is that Sir William has his daimon for a tipping table and the savage had his for a flowing spring. Sir William may be right but primitive man was wrong. The whole trend of science heretofore has been to eliminate capricious and isolated elements from observed phenomena and include them in a sweep of law for whose operation the resident forces in the universe and human personality are seen to be sufficient. The daimonistic hypothesis has always up to this time been proved not only unnecessary but positively misleading. It belongs to a region where proof and disproof are equally impossible, but the weight of experience and especially all our truer understandings of ourselves and our world, dearly bought through the intellectual travail of our race, are against it. To accept it is really to turn back the clock and populate the unseen again with the creation of our fears or our fancies. It is at the best the too easy solution of a challenging problem, at the worst an aspect of that renaissance of superst.i.tion which is one of the strangest characteristics of our own time.
[Footnote 78: ”On the Threshold of the Unseen,” p. 113.]
The second explanation is spiritistic. There are unseen presences but they are the discarnate who seek in the more trivial phenomena to bring themselves to our attention and in the more important to a.s.sure us of their continued existence and satisfy their longing and ours in renewed personal contacts. Given a faith in immortality, this explanation is natural enough--even inevitable. If the discarnate still live they must remember and desire. Death does not end affection on our side. It should not end affection on their side. There must be, moreover, what one may call a discarnate status--an order, that is, of relations.h.i.+ps and activities in which discarnate personality realizes and expresses itself. Our racial curiosities about the state of the dead are quenchless. Every religion has its creeds, its dreams, its a.s.surances.
From the Nirvana of the Buddhist to the ardent paradise of the Mohammedan, faith and longing have built their structure and peopled it with their dead. Great ranges of literature are coloured by such speculations. Christian hymnology is instinct with them and not a little of our n.o.blest poetry. We have set our h.e.l.ls over against our heavens and opposed their terror to celestial splendours. Modern Spiritualism has to head it the whole drive of such speculations as these. For if the generality have been content to leave the solution of the very great difficulties which any faith in immortality involves, to the demonstrations of eventual experience, and rest in what is really the poetry of their faith, others either more curious or more credulous seek the testimony of the senses. Such as these naturally find what they seek in the phenomena of trance mediums.h.i.+p. They believe that the discarnate are constantly seeking to penetrate the veil between their order and ours and avail themselves of every opportunity to recall themselves to the memory of the incarnate.
_Myers' Theory of Mediums.h.i.+p_