theStech/trainer_dataset · Datasets at Fast360

source stringclasses 3 values	answer stringlengths 0 156k	extra dict
book	mere chance, Gurney instituted the ‘census of hallucinations,’ which has been continued with the result of obtaining answers from over twenty-five thousand persons, asked at random in different countries whether, when in good health and awake, they had ever heard a voice, seen a form, or felt a touch which no material presence could account for. The result seems to be, roughly speaking, that in England about one adult in te n has had such an experience at	null
book	least once in his life, and that of the experiences themselves a large number coincide with some distant event. The question is, Is the frequency of these latter cases too great to be deemed fortuitous, and must we suppose an occult connection between the two events? Mr. and Mrs. Sidgwick have worked out this problem on the basis of the English returns, seventeen thousand in number, with a care and thoroughness that leave nothing to be desired. Their conclusion is that the cases where the apparition of a person is seen on the day of his death are four hundred and forty times too numerous to be ascribed to chance. The reasoning employed to calculate this number is simple enough. If there be only a fortuitous connection between the death of an individual and the occurrence of his apparition to some one at a distance, the death is no more likely to fall on the same day as the apparition than it is to occur on the same day with any other event in nature. But the chance-probability that any individual’s death will fall on any given day marked in advance by some other event is just equal to the chance-probability that the individual will die at all on any specified day; and the national death -rate gives that probability as one in nineteen thousand. If, then, when the death	null
book	of a person coincides with an apparition of the same person, the coincidence be merely fortuitous, it ought not to occur oftener than once in nineteen thousand cases. As a matter of fact, however, it does occur (according to the census) once in forty- three cases, a number (as	null
book	aforesaid) four hundred and forty times too great. The American census, of some seven thousand answers, gives a remarkably similar result. Against this conclusion the only rational answer that I can see is that the data are still too few; that the net was not cast wide enough; and that we need, to get fair averages, far more than twenty-four thousand answers to the census question. This may, of course, be true, though it seems exceedingly unlikely; and in our own twenty-four thousand answers veridical cases may possibly have heaped themselves unduly.	null
book	The next topic worth mentioning in the Proceedings is the discussion of the physical	null
book	phenomena of mediumship (slate-writing, furniture-moving, and so forth) by Mrs. Sidgwick, Mr. Hodgson, and ‘ Mr. Davey.’ This, so far as it goes, is destructive of the claims of all the	null
book	mediums examined. ‘ Mr. Davey ’ himself produced fraudulent slate-writing of the highest	null
book	order, while Mr. Hodgson, a ‘ sitter ’ in his confidence, reviewed the written reports of the	null
book	series of his other sitters, —all of them intelligent persons, —and showed that in every case	null
book	they failed to see the essential features of what was done before their eyes. This Davey -	null
book	Hodgson contribution is probably the most damaging document concerning eye- witnesses ’	null
book	evidence that has ever been produced. Another substantial bit of work based on personal observation is Mr. Hodgson’ s report on Madame Blavatsky ’s claims to physical mediumship.	null
book	This is adverse to the lady ’s pretensions; and although some of Madame Blavatsky’ s friends	null
book	make light of it, it is a stroke from which her reputation will not recover.	null
book	135	null
book	Physical mediumship in all its phases has fared hard in the Proceedings. The latest case	null
book	reported on is that of the famous Eusapia Paladino, who being detected in fraud at Cambridge, after a brilliant career of success on the continent, has, according to the draconian rules of method which govern the Society, been ruled out from a further hearing. The case of Stainton Moses, on the other hand, concerning which Mr. Myers has brought out a mass of unpublished testimony, seems to escape from the universal condemnation, and appears to force upon us what Mr. Andrew Lang calls the choice between a moral and a physical miracle.	null
book	In the case of Mrs. Piper, not a physical but a trance medium, we seem to have no choice offered at all. Mr. Hodgson and others have made prolonged study of this lady’ s trances, and	null
book	are all convinced that super -normal powers of cognition are displayed therein. These	null
book	are primâ facie due to ‘ spirit-control.’ But the conditions are so complex that a dogmatic	null
book	decision either for or against the spirit-hypothesis must as yet be postponed.	null
book	One of the most important experimental contributions to the Proceedings is the article of Miss	null
book	X. on ‘ Crystal Vision. ’ Many persons who look fixedly into a crystal or other vaguely	null
book	luminous surface fall into a kind of daze, and see visions. Miss X. has this susceptibility in a remarkable degree, and is, moreover, an unusually intelligent critic. She reports many visions which can only be described as apparently clairvoyant, and others which beautifully fill a vacant niche incur knowledge of subconscious mental operations. For example, looking into the crystal before breakfast one morning she reads in printed characters of the death of a lady of her acquaintance, the date and other circumstances all duly appearing in type. Startled by this, she looks at the ‘ Times ’ of the previous day for verification, and there among the deaths	null
book	are the identical words which she has seen. On the same page of the Times are other items which she remembers reading the day before; and the only explanation seems to be that her eyes then inattentively observed, so to speak, the death- item, which forthwith fell into a	null
book	special corner of her memory, and came out as a visual hallucination when the peculiar modification of consciousness induced by the crystal-gazing set in.	null
book	Passing from papers based on observation to papers based on narrative, we have a number of	null
book	ghost stories, etc., sifted by Mrs. Sidgwick and discussed by Messrs. Myers and Podmore. They form the best ghost literature I know of from the point of view of emot ional interest. As	null
book	to the conclusions drawn, Mrs. Sidgwick is rigorously non-committal, while Mr. Myers and Mr. Podmore show themselves respectively hospitable and inhospitable to the notion that such stories have a basis of objectivity dependent on the continued existence of the dead.	null
book	I must close my gossip about the Proceedings by naming what, after all, seems to me the	null
book	most important part of its contents. This is the long series of articles by Mr. Myers on what he now calls the ‘ subliminal self, ’ or what one might designate as ultra-marginal consciousness.	null
book	The result of Myers’s learned and ingenious studies in hypnotism, hallucinations, automatic writing, mediumship, and the whole series of allied phenomena is a conviction which he expresses in the following terms:—	null
book	“Each of us is in reality an abiding psychical entity far more extensive than he knows,—an	null
book	individuality which can never express itself completely through any corporeal manifestation. The self manifests itself through the organism; but there is always some part of the self unmanifested, and always, as it seems, some power of organic expression in abeyance or reserve. ”	null
book	The ordinary consciousness Mr. Myers likens to the visible part of the solar spectrum; the total consciousness is like that spectrum prolonged by the inclusion of the ultra-red and ultra-violet rays. In the psychic spectrum the ‘ ultra’ parts may embrace a far wider range, both of	null
book	136	null
book	physiological and of psychical activity, than is open to our ordinary consciousness and	null
book	memory. At the lower end we have the physiological extension, mind-cures, ‘ stigmatization ’	null
book	of ecstatics, etc.; in the upper, the hyper-normal cognitions of the medium- trance. Whatever	null
book	the judgment of the future may be on Mr. Myers’ s speculations, the credit will always remain	null
book	to them of being the first attempt in any language to consider the phenomena of hallucination, hypnotism, automatism, double personality, and mediumship as connected parts of one whole subject. All constructions in this field must be provisional, and it is as something provisional that Mr. Myers offers us his formulations. But, thanks to him, we begin to see for the first time what a vast interlocked and graded system these phenomena, from the rudest motor-autom atisms to the most startling sensory -apparition, form. Quite apart from Mr. Myers’ s	null
book	conclusions, his methodical treatment of them by classes and series is the first great step toward overcoming the distaste of orthodox science to look at them at all.	null
book	One’s reaction on hearsay testimony is always determined by one’s own experience. Most	null
book	men who have once convinced themselves, by what seems to them a careful examination, that	null
book	any one species of the supernatural exists, begin to relax their vigilance as to evidence, and throw the doors of their minds more or less wide open to the supernatural along its whole extent. To a mind that has thus made its salto mortale , the minute work over insignificant	null
book	cases and quiddling discussion of ‘ evidential values, ’ of which the Society ’s reports are full,	null
book	seems insufferably tedious. And it is so; few species of literature are more truly dull than reports of phantasms. Taken simply by themselves, as separate facts to stare at, they appear so devoid of meaning and sweep, that, even were they certainly true, one would be tempted to leave them out of one’s universe for being so idiotic. Every other sort of fact has some context and continuity with the rest of nature. These alone are contextless and discontinuous.	null
book	Hence I think that the sort of loathing—no milder word will do—which the very words	null
book	‘psychical research ’ and ‘ psychical researcher ’ awaken in so many honest scientific breasts is	null
book	not only natural, but in a sense praiseworthy. A man who is unable himself to conceive of any orbit for these mental meteors can only suppose that Messrs. Gurney, Myers, & Co.’ s	null
book	mood in dealing with them must be that of silly marvelling at so many detached prodigies. And such prodigies! So science simply falls back on her general non-possumus ; and most of	null
book	the would-be critics of the Proceedings have been contented to oppose to the phenomena recorded the simple presumption that in some way or other the reports must be fallacious, —	null
book	for so far as the order of nature has been subjected to really scientific scrutiny, it always has been proved to run the other way. But the oftener one is forced to reject an alleged sort of fact by the use of this mere presumption, the weaker does the presumption itself get to be; and one might in course of time use up one’s presumptive privileges in this way, even though one started (as our anti -telepathists do) with as good a case as the great induction of psychology	null
book	that all our knowledge comes by the use of our eyes and ears and other senses. And we must remember also th at this undermining of the strength of a presumption by reiterated report of	null
book	facts to the contrary does not logically require that the facts in question should all be well proved. A lot of rumors in the air against a business man’s credit, though they might all be vague, and no one of them amount to proof that he is unsound, would certainly weaken the presumption of his soundness. And all the more would they have this effect if they formed what Gurney called a fagot and not a chain,—that is, if they were independent of one another, and came from different quarters. Now, the evidence for telepathy, weak and strong, taken just as it comes, forms a fagot and not a chain. No one item cites the content of another item as part of its own proof. But taken together the items have a certain general consistency; there is a method in their madness, so to speak. So each of them adds presumptive value to the lot; and cumulatively, as no candid mind can fail to see, they subtract presumptive force	null
book	137	null
book	from the orthodox belief that there can be nothing in any one’ s intellect that has not come in	null
book	through ordinary experiences of sense.	null
book	But it is a miserable thing for a question of truth to be confined to mere presumption and	null
book	counter-presumption, with no decisive thunderbolt of fact to clear the baffling darkness. And,	null
book	sooth to say, in talking so much of the merely presumption-weakening value of our records, I have myself been wilfully taking the point of view of the so- called ‘ rigorously scientific ’	null
book	disbeliever, and making an ad hominem plea. My own point of view is different. For me the	null
book	thunderbolt has fallen, and the orthodox belief has not merely had its presumption weakened,	null
book	but the truth itself of the belief is decisively overthrown. If I may employ the language of the professional logic-shop, a universal proposition can be made untrue by a particul ar instance.	null
book	If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you must not seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white. My own white crow is Mrs. Piper. In the trances of this medium, I cannot resist the conviction that knowledge appears which she has never gained by the ordinary waking use of her eyes and ears and wits. What the source of this knowledge may be I know not, and have not the glimmer of an explanatory suggestion to make; but from admitting the fact of such knowledge I can see no escape. So when I turn to the rest of the evidence, ghosts and all, I cannot carry with me the irreversibly negative bias of the ‘ rigorously scientific ’ mind, with its presumption as to what the true	null
book	order of nature ought to be. I feel as if, though the evidence be flimsy in spots, it may nevertheless collectively carry heavy weight. The rigorously scientific mind may, in truth, easily overshoot the mark. Science means, first of all, a certain dispassionate method. To suppose that it means a certain set of results that one should pin one’s faith upon and hug	null
book	forever is sadly to mistake its genius, and degrades the scientific body to the status of a sect.	null
book	We all, scientists and non -scientists, live on some inclined plane of credulity. The plane tips	null
book	one way in one man, another way in another; and may he whose plane tips in no way be the	null
book	first to cast a stone! As a matter of fact, the trances I speak of have broken down for my own mind the limits of the admitted order of nature. Science, so far as science denies such exceptional occurrences, lies prostrate in the dust for me; and the most urgent intellectual need which I feel at present is that science be bui lt up again in a form in which such things	null
book	may have a positive place. Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law.	null
book	And here is the real instructiveness of Messrs. Myers and Gurney’s work. They are trying	null
book	with the utmost conscientiousness to find a reconciling conception which shall subject the old laws of nature to the smallest possible strain. Mr. Myers uses that method of gradual approach which has performed such wonders in Darwin’ s hands. When Darwin met a fact	null
book	which seemed a poser to his theory, his regular custom, as I have heard an able colleague say, was to fill in all round it with smaller facts, as a wagoner might heap dirt round a big rock in the road, and thus get his team over without upsetting. So Mr. Myers, starting from the most ordinary facts of inattentive consciousness, follows this clue through a long series which terminates in ghosts, and seeks to show that these are but extreme manifestations of a common truth,—the truth that the invisible segments of our minds are susceptible, under rarely realized conditions, of acting and being acted upon by the invisible segments of other conscious lives. This may not be ultimately true (for the theosophists, wi th their astral bodies	null
book	and the like, may, for aught I now know, prove to be on the correcter trail), but no one can deny that it is in good scientific form,—for science always takes a known kind of phenomenon, and tries to extend its range.	null
book	I have myself, as American agent for the census, collected hundreds of cases of hallucination	null
book	in healthy persons. The result is to make me feel that we all have potentially a ‘ subliminal’	null
book	138	null
book	self, which may make at any time irruption into our ordinary lives. At its lowest, it is only the	null
book	depository of our forgotten memories; at its highest, we do not know what it is at all. Take, for instance, a series of cases. During sleep, many persons have something in them which measures the flight of time better than the waking self does. It wakes them at a preappointed hour; it acquaints them with the moment when they first awake. It may produce an hallucination,—as in a lady who informs me that at the instant of waking she has a vision of her watch -face with the hands pointing (as she has often verified) to the exact time. It may be	null
book	the feeling that some physiological period has elapsed; but, whatever it is, it is subconscious.	null
book	A subconscious something may also preserve experiences to which we do not openly attend.	null
book	A lady taking her lunch in town finds herself without her purse. Instantly a sense comes over her of rising from the breakfast -table and hearing her purse drop upon the floor. On reaching	null
book	home she finds nothing under the table, but summons the servant to say where she has put the purse. The servant produces it, saying; “How did you know where it was? You rose and left the room as if you did n’t know you ‘d dropped it.” The same subconscious something may recollect what we have forgotten. A lady accustomed to taking salicylate of soda for muscular rheumatism wakes one early winter morning with an aching neck. In the twilight she takes what she supposes to be her customary powder from a drawer, dissolves it in a glass of water, and is about to drink it down, when she feels a sharp slap on her shoulder and hears a voice in her ear saying, “ Taste it! ” On examination, she finds she has got a morphine powder by	null
book	mistake. The natural interpretation is that a sleeping memory of the morphine powders awoke in this quasi-explosive way. A like explanation offers itself as most plausible for the following case: A lady, with little time to catch the train, and the expressman about to call, is excitedly looking for the lost key of a packed trunk. Hurrying upstairs with a bunch of keys, proved useless, in her hand, she hears an ‘objective’ voice distinctly say, “Try the key of the cake-box.” Being tried, it fits. This also may well have been the effect of forgotten experience.	null
book	Now, the effect is doubtless due to the same hallucinatory mechanism; but the source is less easily assigned as we ascend the scale of cases. A lady, for instance, goes after breakfast to see about one of her servants who has become ill over night. She is startled at distinctly reading over the bedroom door in gilt letters the word ‘ small-pox.’ The doctor is sent for, and	null
book	ere long pronounces small-pox to be the disease, although the lady says, “The thought of the girl’s having small-pox never entered my mind till I saw the apparent inscription.” Then	null
book	come other cases of warning; for example, that of a youth sitting in a wagon under a shed, who suddenly hears his dead mother’s voice say, “Stephen, get away from here quick!” and jumps out just in time to see the shed -roof fall.	null
book	After this come the experiences of persons appearing to distant friends at or near the hour of death. Then, too, we have the trance-visions and utterances, which may appear astonishingly profuse and continuous, and maintain a fairly high intellectual level. For all these higher phenomena, it seems to me that while the proximate mechanism is that of ‘hallucination,’ it is straining an hypothesis unduly to name any ordinary subconscious mental operation—such as expectation, recollection, or inference from inattentive perception —as the ultimate cause that	null
book	starts it up. It is far better tactics, if you wish to get rid o f mystery, to brand the narratives	null
book	themselves as unworthy of trust. The trustworthiness of most of them is to my own mind far from proved. And yet in the light of the medium-trance, which is proved, it seems as if they might well all be members of a natura l kind of fact of which we do not yet know the full	null
book	extent.	null
book	Thousands of sensitive organizations in the United States to-day live as steadily in the light of these experiences, and are as indifferent to modern science, as if they lived in Bohemia in the	null
book	139	null
book	twelfth century. They are indifferent to science, because science is so callously indifferent to	null
book	their experiences. Although in its essence science only stands for a method and for no fixed belief, yet as habitually taken, both by its votaries and outsider s, it is identified with a certain	null
book	fixed belief, —the belief that the hidden order of nature is mechanical exclusively, and that	null
book	non-mechanical categories are irrational ways of conceiving and explaining even such things as human life. Now, this mechanical rationali sm, as one may call it, makes, if it becomes	null
book	one’s only way of thinking, a violent breach with the ways of thinking that have played the greatest part in human history. Religious thinking, ethical thinking, poetical thinking, teleological, emotional, sentimental thinking, what one might call the personal view of life to distinguish it from the impersonal and mechanical, and the romantic view of life to distinguish it from the rationalistic view, have been, and even still are, outside of well- drilled	null
book	scientific circles, the dominant forms of thought. But f or mechanical rationalism, personality	null

book

mere chance, Gurney instituted the ‘census of hallucinations,’ which has been continued with the result of obtaining answers from over twenty-five thousand persons, asked at random in different countries whether, when in good health and awake, they had ever heard a voice, seen a form, or felt a touch which no material presence could account for. The result seems to be, roughly speaking, that in England about one adult in te n has had such an experience at

null

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least once in his life, and that of the experiences themselves a large number coincide with some distant event. The question is, Is the frequency of these latter cases too great to be deemed fortuitous, and must we suppose an occult connection between the two events? Mr. and Mrs. Sidgwick have worked out this problem on the basis of the English returns, seventeen thousand in number, with a care and thoroughness that leave nothing to be desired. Their conclusion is that the cases where the apparition of a person is seen on the day of his death are four hundred and forty times too numerous to be ascribed to chance. The reasoning employed to calculate this number is simple enough. If there be only a fortuitous connection between the death of an individual and the occurrence of his apparition to some one at a distance, the death is no more likely to fall on the same day as the apparition than it is to occur on the same day with any other event in nature. But the chance-probability that any individual’s death will fall on any given day marked in advance by some other event is just equal to the chance-probability that the individual will die at all on any specified day; and the national death -rate gives that probability as one in nineteen thousand. If, then, when the death

null

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of a person coincides with an apparition of the same person, the coincidence be merely fortuitous, it ought not to occur oftener than once in nineteen thousand cases. As a matter of fact, however, it does occur (according to the census) once in forty- three cases, a number (as

null

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aforesaid) four hundred and forty times too great. The American census, of some seven thousand answers, gives a remarkably similar result. Against this conclusion the only rational answer that I can see is that the data are still too few; that the net was not cast wide enough; and that we need, to get fair averages, far more than twenty-four thousand answers to the census question. This may, of course, be true, though it seems exceedingly unlikely; and in our own twenty-four thousand answers veridical cases may possibly have heaped themselves unduly.

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The next topic worth mentioning in the Proceedings is the discussion of the physical

null

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phenomena of mediumship (slate-writing, furniture-moving, and so forth) by Mrs. Sidgwick, Mr. Hodgson, and ‘ Mr. Davey.’ This, so far as it goes, is destructive of the claims of all the

null

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mediums examined. ‘ Mr. Davey ’ himself produced fraudulent slate-writing of the highest

null

book

order, while Mr. Hodgson, a ‘ sitter ’ in his confidence, reviewed the written reports of the

null

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series of his other sitters, —all of them intelligent persons, —and showed that in every case

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they failed to see the essential features of what was done before their eyes. This Davey -

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Hodgson contribution is probably the most damaging document concerning eye- witnesses ’

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evidence that has ever been produced. Another substantial bit of work based on personal observation is Mr. Hodgson’ s report on Madame Blavatsky ’s claims to physical mediumship.

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This is adverse to the lady ’s pretensions; and although some of Madame Blavatsky’ s friends

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make light of it, it is a stroke from which her reputation will not recover.

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135

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Physical mediumship in all its phases has fared hard in the Proceedings. The latest case

null

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reported on is that of the famous Eusapia Paladino, who being detected in fraud at Cambridge, after a brilliant career of success on the continent, has, according to the draconian rules of method which govern the Society, been ruled out from a further hearing. The case of Stainton Moses, on the other hand, concerning which Mr. Myers has brought out a mass of unpublished testimony, seems to escape from the universal condemnation, and appears to force upon us what Mr. Andrew Lang calls the choice between a moral and a physical miracle.

null

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In the case of Mrs. Piper, not a physical but a trance medium, we seem to have no choice offered at all. Mr. Hodgson and others have made prolonged study of this lady’ s trances, and

null

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are all convinced that super -normal powers of cognition are displayed therein. These

null

book

are primâ facie due to ‘ spirit-control.’ But the conditions are so complex that a dogmatic

null

book

decision either for or against the spirit-hypothesis must as yet be postponed.

null

book

One of the most important experimental contributions to the Proceedings is the article of Miss

null

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X. on ‘ Crystal Vision. ’ Many persons who look fixedly into a crystal or other vaguely

null

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luminous surface fall into a kind of daze, and see visions. Miss X. has this susceptibility in a remarkable degree, and is, moreover, an unusually intelligent critic. She reports many visions which can only be described as apparently clairvoyant, and others which beautifully fill a vacant niche incur knowledge of subconscious mental operations. For example, looking into the crystal before breakfast one morning she reads in printed characters of the death of a lady of her acquaintance, the date and other circumstances all duly appearing in type. Startled by this, she looks at the ‘ Times ’ of the previous day for verification, and there among the deaths

null

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are the identical words which she has seen. On the same page of the Times are other items which she remembers reading the day before; and the only explanation seems to be that her eyes then inattentively observed, so to speak, the death- item, which forthwith fell into a

null

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special corner of her memory, and came out as a visual hallucination when the peculiar modification of consciousness induced by the crystal-gazing set in.

null

book

Passing from papers based on observation to papers based on narrative, we have a number of

null

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ghost stories, etc., sifted by Mrs. Sidgwick and discussed by Messrs. Myers and Podmore. They form the best ghost literature I know of from the point of view of emot ional interest. As

null

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to the conclusions drawn, Mrs. Sidgwick is rigorously non-committal, while Mr. Myers and Mr. Podmore show themselves respectively hospitable and inhospitable to the notion that such stories have a basis of objectivity dependent on the continued existence of the dead.

null

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I must close my gossip about the Proceedings by naming what, after all, seems to me the

null

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most important part of its contents. This is the long series of articles by Mr. Myers on what he now calls the ‘ subliminal self, ’ or what one might designate as ultra-marginal consciousness.

null

book

The result of Myers’s learned and ingenious studies in hypnotism, hallucinations, automatic writing, mediumship, and the whole series of allied phenomena is a conviction which he expresses in the following terms:—

null

book

“Each of us is in reality an abiding psychical entity far more extensive than he knows,—an

null

book

individuality which can never express itself completely through any corporeal manifestation. The self manifests itself through the organism; but there is always some part of the self unmanifested, and always, as it seems, some power of organic expression in abeyance or reserve. ”

null

book

The ordinary consciousness Mr. Myers likens to the visible part of the solar spectrum; the total consciousness is like that spectrum prolonged by the inclusion of the ultra-red and ultra-violet rays. In the psychic spectrum the ‘ ultra’ parts may embrace a far wider range, both of

null

book

136

null

book

physiological and of psychical activity, than is open to our ordinary consciousness and

null

book

memory. At the lower end we have the physiological extension, mind-cures, ‘ stigmatization ’

null

book

of ecstatics, etc.; in the upper, the hyper-normal cognitions of the medium- trance. Whatever

null

book

the judgment of the future may be on Mr. Myers’ s speculations, the credit will always remain

null

book

to them of being the first attempt in any language to consider the phenomena of hallucination, hypnotism, automatism, double personality, and mediumship as connected parts of one whole subject. All constructions in this field must be provisional, and it is as something provisional that Mr. Myers offers us his formulations. But, thanks to him, we begin to see for the first time what a vast interlocked and graded system these phenomena, from the rudest motor-autom atisms to the most startling sensory -apparition, form. Quite apart from Mr. Myers’ s

null

book

conclusions, his methodical treatment of them by classes and series is the first great step toward overcoming the distaste of orthodox science to look at them at all.

null

book

One’s reaction on hearsay testimony is always determined by one’s own experience. Most

null

book

men who have once convinced themselves, by what seems to them a careful examination, that

null

book

any one species of the supernatural exists, begin to relax their vigilance as to evidence, and throw the doors of their minds more or less wide open to the supernatural along its whole extent. To a mind that has thus made its salto mortale , the minute work over insignificant

null

book

cases and quiddling discussion of ‘ evidential values, ’ of which the Society ’s reports are full,

null

book

seems insufferably tedious. And it is so; few species of literature are more truly dull than reports of phantasms. Taken simply by themselves, as separate facts to stare at, they appear so devoid of meaning and sweep, that, even were they certainly true, one would be tempted to leave them out of one’s universe for being so idiotic. Every other sort of fact has some context and continuity with the rest of nature. These alone are contextless and discontinuous.

null

book

Hence I think that the sort of loathing—no milder word will do—which the very words

null

book

‘psychical research ’ and ‘ psychical researcher ’ awaken in so many honest scientific breasts is

null

book

not only natural, but in a sense praiseworthy. A man who is unable himself to conceive of any orbit for these mental meteors can only suppose that Messrs. Gurney, Myers, & Co.’ s

null

book

mood in dealing with them must be that of silly marvelling at so many detached prodigies. And such prodigies! So science simply falls back on her general non-possumus ; and most of

null

book

the would-be critics of the Proceedings have been contented to oppose to the phenomena recorded the simple presumption that in some way or other the reports must be fallacious, —

null

book

for so far as the order of nature has been subjected to really scientific scrutiny, it always has been proved to run the other way. But the oftener one is forced to reject an alleged sort of fact by the use of this mere presumption, the weaker does the presumption itself get to be; and one might in course of time use up one’s presumptive privileges in this way, even though one started (as our anti -telepathists do) with as good a case as the great induction of psychology

null

book

that all our knowledge comes by the use of our eyes and ears and other senses. And we must remember also th at this undermining of the strength of a presumption by reiterated report of

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facts to the contrary does not logically require that the facts in question should all be well proved. A lot of rumors in the air against a business man’s credit, though they might all be vague, and no one of them amount to proof that he is unsound, would certainly weaken the presumption of his soundness. And all the more would they have this effect if they formed what Gurney called a fagot and not a chain,—that is, if they were independent of one another, and came from different quarters. Now, the evidence for telepathy, weak and strong, taken just as it comes, forms a fagot and not a chain. No one item cites the content of another item as part of its own proof. But taken together the items have a certain general consistency; there is a method in their madness, so to speak. So each of them adds presumptive value to the lot; and cumulatively, as no candid mind can fail to see, they subtract presumptive force

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from the orthodox belief that there can be nothing in any one’ s intellect that has not come in

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through ordinary experiences of sense.

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But it is a miserable thing for a question of truth to be confined to mere presumption and

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counter-presumption, with no decisive thunderbolt of fact to clear the baffling darkness. And,

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sooth to say, in talking so much of the merely presumption-weakening value of our records, I have myself been wilfully taking the point of view of the so- called ‘ rigorously scientific ’

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disbeliever, and making an ad hominem plea. My own point of view is different. For me the

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thunderbolt has fallen, and the orthodox belief has not merely had its presumption weakened,

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but the truth itself of the belief is decisively overthrown. If I may employ the language of the professional logic-shop, a universal proposition can be made untrue by a particul ar instance.

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If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you must not seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white. My own white crow is Mrs. Piper. In the trances of this medium, I cannot resist the conviction that knowledge appears which she has never gained by the ordinary waking use of her eyes and ears and wits. What the source of this knowledge may be I know not, and have not the glimmer of an explanatory suggestion to make; but from admitting the fact of such knowledge I can see no escape. So when I turn to the rest of the evidence, ghosts and all, I cannot carry with me the irreversibly negative bias of the ‘ rigorously scientific ’ mind, with its presumption as to what the true

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order of nature ought to be. I feel as if, though the evidence be flimsy in spots, it may nevertheless collectively carry heavy weight. The rigorously scientific mind may, in truth, easily overshoot the mark. Science means, first of all, a certain dispassionate method. To suppose that it means a certain set of results that one should pin one’s faith upon and hug

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forever is sadly to mistake its genius, and degrades the scientific body to the status of a sect.

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We all, scientists and non -scientists, live on some inclined plane of credulity. The plane tips

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one way in one man, another way in another; and may he whose plane tips in no way be the

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first to cast a stone! As a matter of fact, the trances I speak of have broken down for my own mind the limits of the admitted order of nature. Science, so far as science denies such exceptional occurrences, lies prostrate in the dust for me; and the most urgent intellectual need which I feel at present is that science be bui lt up again in a form in which such things

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may have a positive place. Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law.

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And here is the real instructiveness of Messrs. Myers and Gurney’s work. They are trying

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with the utmost conscientiousness to find a reconciling conception which shall subject the old laws of nature to the smallest possible strain. Mr. Myers uses that method of gradual approach which has performed such wonders in Darwin’ s hands. When Darwin met a fact

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which seemed a poser to his theory, his regular custom, as I have heard an able colleague say, was to fill in all round it with smaller facts, as a wagoner might heap dirt round a big rock in the road, and thus get his team over without upsetting. So Mr. Myers, starting from the most ordinary facts of inattentive consciousness, follows this clue through a long series which terminates in ghosts, and seeks to show that these are but extreme manifestations of a common truth,—the truth that the invisible segments of our minds are susceptible, under rarely realized conditions, of acting and being acted upon by the invisible segments of other conscious lives. This may not be ultimately true (for the theosophists, wi th their astral bodies

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and the like, may, for aught I now know, prove to be on the correcter trail), but no one can deny that it is in good scientific form,—for science always takes a known kind of phenomenon, and tries to extend its range.

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I have myself, as American agent for the census, collected hundreds of cases of hallucination

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in healthy persons. The result is to make me feel that we all have potentially a ‘ subliminal’

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self, which may make at any time irruption into our ordinary lives. At its lowest, it is only the

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depository of our forgotten memories; at its highest, we do not know what it is at all. Take, for instance, a series of cases. During sleep, many persons have something in them which measures the flight of time better than the waking self does. It wakes them at a preappointed hour; it acquaints them with the moment when they first awake. It may produce an hallucination,—as in a lady who informs me that at the instant of waking she has a vision of her watch -face with the hands pointing (as she has often verified) to the exact time. It may be

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the feeling that some physiological period has elapsed; but, whatever it is, it is subconscious.

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A subconscious something may also preserve experiences to which we do not openly attend.

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A lady taking her lunch in town finds herself without her purse. Instantly a sense comes over her of rising from the breakfast -table and hearing her purse drop upon the floor. On reaching

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home she finds nothing under the table, but summons the servant to say where she has put the purse. The servant produces it, saying; “How did you know where it was? You rose and left the room as if you did n’t know you ‘d dropped it.” The same subconscious something may recollect what we have forgotten. A lady accustomed to taking salicylate of soda for muscular rheumatism wakes one early winter morning with an aching neck. In the twilight she takes what she supposes to be her customary powder from a drawer, dissolves it in a glass of water, and is about to drink it down, when she feels a sharp slap on her shoulder and hears a voice in her ear saying, “ Taste it! ” On examination, she finds she has got a morphine powder by

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mistake. The natural interpretation is that a sleeping memory of the morphine powders awoke in this quasi-explosive way. A like explanation offers itself as most plausible for the following case: A lady, with little time to catch the train, and the expressman about to call, is excitedly looking for the lost key of a packed trunk. Hurrying upstairs with a bunch of keys, proved useless, in her hand, she hears an ‘objective’ voice distinctly say, “Try the key of the cake-box.” Being tried, it fits. This also may well have been the effect of forgotten experience.

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Now, the effect is doubtless due to the same hallucinatory mechanism; but the source is less easily assigned as we ascend the scale of cases. A lady, for instance, goes after breakfast to see about one of her servants who has become ill over night. She is startled at distinctly reading over the bedroom door in gilt letters the word ‘ small-pox.’ The doctor is sent for, and

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ere long pronounces small-pox to be the disease, although the lady says, “The thought of the girl’s having small-pox never entered my mind till I saw the apparent inscription.” Then

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come other cases of warning; for example, that of a youth sitting in a wagon under a shed, who suddenly hears his dead mother’s voice say, “Stephen, get away from here quick!” and jumps out just in time to see the shed -roof fall.

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After this come the experiences of persons appearing to distant friends at or near the hour of death. Then, too, we have the trance-visions and utterances, which may appear astonishingly profuse and continuous, and maintain a fairly high intellectual level. For all these higher phenomena, it seems to me that while the proximate mechanism is that of ‘hallucination,’ it is straining an hypothesis unduly to name any ordinary subconscious mental operation—such as expectation, recollection, or inference from inattentive perception —as the ultimate cause that

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starts it up. It is far better tactics, if you wish to get rid o f mystery, to brand the narratives

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themselves as unworthy of trust. The trustworthiness of most of them is to my own mind far from proved. And yet in the light of the medium-trance, which is proved, it seems as if they might well all be members of a natura l kind of fact of which we do not yet know the full

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extent.

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Thousands of sensitive organizations in the United States to-day live as steadily in the light of these experiences, and are as indifferent to modern science, as if they lived in Bohemia in the

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twelfth century. They are indifferent to science, because science is so callously indifferent to

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their experiences. Although in its essence science only stands for a method and for no fixed belief, yet as habitually taken, both by its votaries and outsider s, it is identified with a certain

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fixed belief, —the belief that the hidden order of nature is mechanical exclusively, and that

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non-mechanical categories are irrational ways of conceiving and explaining even such things as human life. Now, this mechanical rationali sm, as one may call it, makes, if it becomes

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one’s only way of thinking, a violent breach with the ways of thinking that have played the greatest part in human history. Religious thinking, ethical thinking, poetical thinking, teleological, emotional, sentimental thinking, what one might call the personal view of life to distinguish it from the impersonal and mechanical, and the romantic view of life to distinguish it from the rationalistic view, have been, and even still are, outside of well- drilled

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scientific circles, the dominant forms of thought. But f or mechanical rationalism, personality

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