The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
clue. Something 'fades,' 'escapes;' and the feeling of insight is
changed into an intense one of bewilderment, puzzle, confusion,
astonishment. I know no more singular sensation than this intense
bewilderment, with nothing particular left to be bewildered at save the
bewilderment itself. It seems, indeed, _a causa sui_, or 'spirit
become its own object.'
My conclusion is that the togetherness of things in a common world, the
law of sharing, of which I have said so much, may, when perceived,
engender a very powerful emotion, that Hegel was so unusually
susceptible to this emotion throughout his life that its gratification
became his supreme end, and made him tolerably unscrupulous as to the
means he employed; that _indifferentism_ is the true outcome of every
view of the world which makes infinity and continuity to be its
essence, and that pessimistic or optimistic attitudes pertain to the
mere accidental subjectivity of the moment; finally, that the
identification of contradictories, so far from being the
self-developing process which Hegel supposes, is really a
self-consuming process, passing from the less to the more abstract, and
terminating either in a laugh at the ultimate nothingness, or in a mood
of vertiginous amazement at a meaningless infinity.
[1] Reprinted from Mind, April, 1882.
[2] The seeming contradiction between the infinitude of space and the
fact that it is all finished and given and there, can be got over in
more than one way. The simplest way is by idealism, which
distinguishes between space as actual and space as potential. For
idealism, space only exists so far as it is represented; but all
actually represented spaces are finite; it is only possibly
representable spaces that are infinite.
[3] Not only for simplicity's sake do we select space as the paragon of
a rationalizing continuum. Space determines the relations of the items
that enter it in a far more intricate way than does time; in a far more
fixed way than does the ego. By this last clause I mean that if things
are in space at all, they must conform to geometry; while the being in
an ego at all need not make them conform to logic or any other manner
of rationality. Under the sheltering wings of a self the matter of
unreason can lodge itself as safely as any other kind of content. One
cannot but respect the devoutness of the ego-worship of some of our
English-writing Hegelians. But at the same time one cannot help
fearing lest the monotonous contemplation of so barren a principle as
that of the pure formal self (which, be it never so essential a
condition of the existence of a world of organized experience at all,
must notwithstanding take its own _character_ from, not give the
character to, the separate empirical data over which its mantle is
cast), one cannot but fear, I say, lest the religion of the
transcendental ego should, like all religions of the 'one thing
needful,' end by sterilizing and occluding the minds of its believers.
[4] Journal of Speculative Philosophy, viii. 37.
{299}
WHAT PSYCHICAL RESEARCH HAS ACCOMPLISHED.[1]
"The great field for new discoveries," said a scientific friend to me
the other day, "is always the unclassified residuum." Round about the
accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort
of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and
irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to
ignore than to attend to. The ideal of every science is that of a
closed and completed system of truth. The charm of most sciences to
their more passive disciples consists in their appearing, in fact, to
wear just this ideal form. Each one of our various _ologies_ seems to
offer a definite head of classification for every possible phenomenon
of the sort which it professes to cover; and so far from free is most
men's fancy, that, when a consistent and organized scheme of this sort
has once been comprehended and assimilated, a different scheme is
unimaginable. No alternative, whether to whole or parts, can any
longer be conceived as possible. Phenomena unclassifiable within the
system are therefore paradoxical {300} absurdities, and must be held
untrue. When, moreover, as so often happens, the reports of them are
vague and indirect; when they come as mere marvels and oddities rather
than as things of serious moment,--one neglects or denies them with the
best of scientific consciences. Only the born geniuses let themselves
be worried and fascinated by these outstanding exceptions, and get no
peace till they are brought within the fold. Your Galileos, Galvanis,
Fresnels, Purkinjes, and Darwins are always getting confounded and
troubled by insignificant things. Any one will renovate his science
who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena. And when the
science is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of
the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules.
No part of the unclassified residuum has usually been treated with a
more contemptuous scientific disregard than the mass of phenomena
generally called _mystical_. Physiology will have nothing to do with
them. Orthodox psychology turns its back upon them. Medicine sweeps
them out; or, at most, when in an anecdotal vein, records a few of them
as 'effects of the imagination,'--a phrase of mere dismissal, whose
meaning, in this connection, it is impossible to make precise. All the
while, however, the phenomena are there, lying broadcast over the
surface of history. No matter where you open its pages, you find
things recorded under the name of divinations, inspirations, demoniacal
possessions, apparitions, trances, ecstasies, miraculous healings and
productions of disease, and occult powers possessed by peculiar
individuals over persons and things in their neighborhood. We suppose
that 'mediumship' {301} originated in Rochester, N. Y., and animal
magnetism with Mesmer; but once look behind the pages of official
history, in personal memoirs, legal documents, and popular narratives
and books of anecdote, and you will find that there never was a time
when these things were not reported just as abundantly as now. We
college-bred gentry, who follow the stream of cosmopolitan culture
exclusively, not infrequently stumble upon some old-established
journal, or some voluminous native author, whose names are never heard
of in _our_ circle, but who number their readers by the
quarter-million. It always gives us a little shock to find this mass
of human beings not only living and ignoring us and all our gods, but
actually reading and writing and cogitating without ever a thought of
our canons and authorities. Well, a public no less large keeps and
transmits from generation to generation the traditions and practices of
the occult; but academic science cares as little for its beliefs and
opinions as you, gentle reader, care for those of the readers of the
Waverley and the Fireside Companion. To no one type of mind is it
given to discern the totality of truth. Something escapes the best of
us,--not accidentally, but systematically, and because we have a twist.
The scientific-academic mind and the feminine-mystical mind shy from
each other's facts, just as they fly from each other's temper and
spirit. Facts are there only for those who have a mental affinity with
them. When once they are indisputably ascertained and admitted, the
academic and critical minds are by far the best fitted ones to
interpret and discuss them,--for surely to pass from mystical to
scientific speculations is like passing from lunacy to sanity; but on
the other hand if there is {302} anything which human history
demonstrates, it is the extreme slowness with which the ordinary
academic and critical mind acknowledges facts to exist which present
themselves as wild facts, with no stall or pigeon-hole, or as facts
which threaten to break up the accepted system. In psychology,
physiology, and medicine, wherever a debate between the mystics and the
scientifics has been once for all decided, it is the mystics who have
usually proved to be right about the _facts_, while the scientifics had
the better of it in respect to the theories. The most recent and
flagrant example of this is 'animal magnetism,' whose facts were
stoutly dismissed as a pack of lies by academic medical science the
world over, until the non-mystical theory of 'hypnotic suggestion' was
found for them,--when they were admitted to be so excessively and
dangerously common that special penal laws, forsooth, must be passed to
keep all persons unequipped with medical diplomas from taking part in
their production. Just so stigmatizations, invulnerabilities,
instantaneous cures, inspired discourses, and demoniacal possessions,
the records of which were shelved in our libraries but yesterday in the
alcove headed 'superstitions,' now, under the brand-new title of 'cases
of hystero-epilepsy,' are republished, reobserved, and reported with an
even too credulous avidity.
Repugnant as the mystical style of philosophizing maybe (especially
when self-complacent), there is no sort of doubt that it goes with a
gift for meeting with certain kinds of phenomenal experience. The
writer of these pages has been forced in the past few years to this
admission; and he now believes that he who will pay attention to facts
of the sort dear to mystics, {303} while reflecting upon them in
academic-scientific ways, will be in the best possible position to help
philosophy. It is a circumstance of good augury that certain
scientifically trained minds in all countries seem drifting to the same
conclusion. The Society for Psychical Research has been one means of
bringing science and the occult together in England and America; and
believing that this Society fulfils a function which, though limited,
is destined to be not unimportant in the organization of human
knowledge, I am glad to give a brief account of it to the uninstructed
reader.
According to the newspaper and drawing-room myth, soft-headedness and
idiotic credulity are the bond of sympathy in this Society, and general
wonder-sickness its dynamic principle. A glance at the membership
fails, however, to corroborate this view. The president is Prof. Henry
Sidgwick,[2] known by his other deeds as the most incorrigibly and
exasperatingly critical and sceptical mind in England. The hard-headed
Arthur Balfour is one vice-president, and the hard-headed Prof. J. P.
Langley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, is another. Such
men as Professor Lodge, the eminent English physicist, and Professor
Richet, the eminent French physiologist, are among the most active
contributors to the Society's Proceedings; and through the catalogue of
membership are sprinkled names honored throughout the world for their
scientific capacity. In fact, were I asked to point to a scientific
journal where hard-headedness and never-sleeping suspicion of sources
of error might be seen in their full bloom, {304} I think I should have
to fall back on the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research.
The common run of papers, say on physiological subjects, which one
finds in other professional organs, are apt to show a far lower level
of critical consciousness. Indeed, the rigorous canons of evidence
applied a few years ago to testimony in the case of certain 'mediums'
led to the secession from the Society of a number of spiritualists.
Messrs. Stainton Moses and A. R. Wallace, among others, thought that no
experiences based on mere eyesight could ever have a chance to be
admitted as true, if such an impossibly exacting standard of proof were
insisted on in every case.
The S. P. R., as I shall call it for convenience, was founded in 1882