The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
by a number of gentlemen, foremost among whom seem to have been
Professors Sidgwick, W. F. Barrett, and Balfour Stewart, and Messrs. R.
H. Hutton, Hensleigh Wedgwood, Edmund Gurney, and F. W. H. Myers.
Their purpose was twofold,--first, to carry on systematic
experimentation with hypnotic subjects, mediums, clairvoyants, and
others; and, secondly, to collect evidence concerning apparitions,
haunted houses, and similar phenomena which are incidentally reported,
but which, from their fugitive character, admit of no deliberate
control. Professor Sidgwick, in his introductory address, insisted
that the divided state of public opinion on all these matters was a
scandal to science,--absolute disdain on _à priori_ grounds
characterizing what may be called professional opinion, while
indiscriminate credulity was too often found among those who pretended
to have a first-hand acquaintance with the facts.
As a sort of weather bureau for accumulating {305} reports of such
meteoric phenomena as apparitions, the S. P. R. has done an immense
amount of work. As an experimenting body, it cannot be said to have
completely fulfilled the hopes of its founders. The reasons for this
lie in two circumstances: first, the clairvoyant and other subjects who
will allow themselves to be experimented upon are few and far between;
and, secondly, work with them takes an immense amount of time, and has
had to be carried on at odd intervals by members engaged in other
pursuits. The Society has not yet been rich enough to control the
undivided services of skilled experimenters in this difficult field.
The loss of the lamented Edmund Gurney, who more than any one else had
leisure to devote, has been so far irreparable. But were there no
experimental work at all, and were the S. P. R. nothing but a
weather-bureau for catching sporadic apparitions, etc., in their
freshness, I am disposed to think its function indispensable in the
scientific organism. If any one of my readers, spurred by the thought
that so much smoke must needs betoken fire, has ever looked into the
existing literature of the supernatural for proof, he will know what I
mean. This literature is enormous, but it is practically worthless for
evidential purposes. Facts enough are cited, indeed; but the records
of them are so fallible and imperfect that at most they lead to the
opinion that it may be well to keep a window open upon that quarter in
one's mind.
In the S. P. R.'s Proceedings, on the contrary, a different law
prevails. Quality, and not mere quantity, is what has been mainly kept
in mind. The witnesses, where possible, have in every reported case
been cross-examined personally, the collateral facts {306} have been
looked up, and the story appears with its precise coefficient of
evidential worth stamped on it, so that all may know just what its
weight as proof may be. Outside of these Proceedings, I know of no
systematic attempt to _weigh_ the evidence for the supernatural. This
makes the value of the volumes already published unique; and I firmly
believe that as the years go on and the ground covered grows still
wider, the Proceedings will more and more tend to supersede all other
sources of information concerning phenomena traditionally deemed
occult. Collections of this sort are usually best appreciated by the
rising generation. The young anthropologists and psychologists who
will soon have full occupancy of the stage will feel how great a
scientific scandal it has been to leave a great mass of human
experience to take its chances between vague tradition and credulity on
the one hand and dogmatic denial at long range on the other, with no
body of persons extant who are willing and competent to study the
matter with both patience and rigor. If the Society lives long enough
for the public to become familiar with its presence, so that any
apparition, or house or person infested with unaccountable noises or
disturbances of material objects, will as a matter of course be
reported to its officers, we shall doubtless end by having a mass of
facts concrete enough to theorize upon. Its sustainers, therefore,
should accustom themselves to the idea that its first duty is simply to
exist from year to year and perform this recording function well,
though no conclusive results of any sort emerge at first. All our
learned societies have begun in some such modest way.
But one cannot by mere outward organization make much progress in
matters scientific. Societies can {307} back men of genius, but can
never take their place. The contrast between the parent Society and
the American Branch illustrates this. In England, a little group of
men with enthusiasm and genius for the work supplied the nucleus; in
this country, Mr. Hodgson had to be imported from Europe before any
tangible progress was made. What perhaps more than anything else has
held the Society together in England is Professor Sidgwick's
extraordinary gift of inspiring confidence in diverse sorts of people.
Such tenacity of interest in the result and such absolute impartiality
in discussing the evidence are not once in a century found in an
individual. His obstinate belief that there is something yet to be
brought to light communicates patience to the discouraged; his
constitutional inability to draw any precipitate conclusion reassures
those who are afraid of being dupes. Mrs. Sidgwick--a sister, by the
way, of the great Arthur Balfour--is a worthy ally of her husband in
this matter, showing a similarly rare power of holding her judgment in
suspense, and a keenness of observation and capacity for experimenting
with human subjects which are rare in either sex.
The _worker_ of the Society, as originally constituted, was Edmund
Gurney. Gurney was a man of the rarest sympathies and gifts.
Although, like Carlyle, he used to groan under the burden of his
labors, he yet exhibited a colossal power of dispatching business and
getting through drudgery of the most repulsive kind. His two thick
volumes on 'Phantasms of the Living,' collected and published in three
years, are a proof of this. Besides this, he had exquisite artistic
instincts, and his massive volume on 'The Power of Sound' was, when it
appeared, the most important {308} work on aesthetics in the English
language. He had also the tenderest heart and a mind of rare
metaphysical power, as his volumes of essays, 'Tertium Quid,' will
prove to any reader. Mr. Frederic Myers, already well known as one of
the most brilliant of English essayists, is the _ingenium praefervidum_
of the S. P. R. Of the value of Mr. Myers's theoretic writings I will
say a word later. Dr. Hodgson, the American secretary, is
distinguished by a balance of mind almost as rare in its way as
Sidgwick's. He is persuaded of the reality of many of the phenomena
called spiritualistic, but he also has uncommon keenness in detecting
error; and it is impossible to say in advance whether it will give him
more satisfaction to confirm or to smash a given case offered to his
examination.
It is now time to cast a brief look upon the actual contents of these
Proceedings. The first two years were largely taken up with
experiments in thought-transference. The earliest lot of these were
made with the daughters of a clergyman named Creery, and convinced
Messrs. Balfour Stewart, Barrett, Myers, and Gurney that the girls had
an inexplicable power of guessing names and objects thought of by other
persons. Two years later, Mrs. Sidgwick and Mr. Gurney, recommencing
experiments with the same girls, detected them signalling to each
other. It is true that for the most part the conditions of the earlier
series had excluded signalling, and it is also possible that the
cheating may have grafted itself on what was originally a genuine
phenomenon. Yet Gurney was wise in abandoning the entire series to the
scepticism of the reader. Many critics of the S. P. R. seem out of all
{309} its labors to have heard only of this case. But there are
experiments recorded with upwards of thirty other subjects. Three were
experimented upon at great length during the first two years: one was
Mr. G. A. Smith; the other two were young ladies in Liverpool in the
employment of Mr. Malcolm Guthrie.
It is the opinion of all who took part in these latter experiments that
sources of conscious and unconscious deception were sufficiently
excluded, and that the large percentage of correct reproductions by the
subjects of words, diagrams, and sensations occupying other persons'
consciousness were entirely inexplicable as results of chance. The
witnesses of these performances were in fact all so satisfied of the
genuineness of the phenomena, that 'telepathy' has figured freely in
the papers of the Proceedings and in Gurney's book on Phantasms as a
_vera causa_ on which additional hypotheses might be built. No mere
reader can be blamed, however, if he demand, for so revolutionary a
belief, a more overwhelming bulk of testimony than has yet been
supplied. Any day, of course, may bring in fresh experiments in
successful picture-guessing. But meanwhile, and lacking that, we can
only point out that the present data are strengthened in the flank, so
to speak, by all observations that tend to corroborate the possibility
of other kindred phenomena, such as telepathic impression,
clairvoyance, or what is called 'test-mediumship.' The wider genus
will naturally cover the narrower species with its credit.
Gurney's papers on hypnotism must be mentioned next. Some of them are
less concerned with establishing new facts than with analyzing old
ones. But omitting these, we find that in the line of pure {310}
observation Gurney claims to have ascertained in more than one subject
the following phenomenon: The subject's hands are thrust through a
blanket, which screens the operator from his eyes, and his mind is
absorbed in conversation with a third person. The operator meanwhile
points with his finger to one of the fingers of the subject, which
finger alone responds to this silent selection by becoming stiff or
anaesthetic, as the case may be. The interpretation is difficult, but
the phenomenon, which I have myself witnessed, seems authentic.
Another observation made by Gurney seems to prove the possibility of
the subject's mind being directly influenced by the operator's. The
hypnotized subject responds, or fails to respond, to questions asked by
a third party according to the operator's silent permission or refusal.
Of course, in these experiments all obvious sources of deception were
excluded. But Gurney's most important contribution to our knowledge of
hypnotism was his series of experiments on the automatic writing of
subjects who had received post-hypnotic suggestions. For example, a
subject during trance is told that he will poke the fire in six minutes
after waking. On being waked he has no memory of the order, but while
he is engaged in conversation his hand is placed on a _planchette_,
which immediately writes the sentence, "P., you will poke the fire in
six minutes." Experiments like this, which were repeated in great
variety, seem to prove that below the upper consciousness the hypnotic
consciousness persists, engrossed with the suggestion and able to
express itself through the involuntarily moving hand.
Gurney shares, therefore, with Janet and Binet, the {311} credit of
demonstrating the simultaneous existence of two different strata of
consciousness, ignorant of each other, in the same person. The
'extra-consciousness,' as one may call it, can be kept on tap, as it
were, by the method of automatic writing. This discovery marks a new
era in experimental psychology, and it is impossible to overrate its
importance. But Gurney's greatest piece of work is his laborious