The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
'Phantasms of the Living.' As an example of the drudgery stowed away
in the volumes, it may suffice to say that in looking up the proofs for
the alleged physical phenomena of witchcraft, Gurney reports a careful
search through two hundred and sixty books on the subject, with the
result of finding no first-hand evidence recorded in the trials except
the confessions of the victims themselves; and these, of course, are
presumptively due to either torture or hallucination. This statement,
made in an unobtrusive note, is only one instance of the care displayed
throughout the volumes. In the course of these, Gurney discusses about
seven hundred cases of apparitions which he collected. A large number
of these were 'veridical,' in the sense of coinciding with some
calamity happening to the person who appeared. Gurney's explanation is
that the mind of the person undergoing the calamity was at that moment
able to impress the mind of the percipient with an hallucination.
Apparitions, on this 'telepathic' theory, may be called 'objective'
facts, although they are not 'material' facts. In order to test the
likelihood of such veridical hallucinations being due to 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 {312} 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 ten has had such an experience at 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 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, {313} however, it does occur (according to the census) once in
forty-three cases, a number (as 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.
The next topic worth mentioning in the Proceedings is the discussion of
the physical 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 mediums
examined. 'Mr. Davey' himself produced fraudulent slate-writing of the
highest order, while Mr. Hodgson, a 'sitter' in his confidence,
reviewed the written reports of the series of his other sitters,--all
of them intelligent persons,--and showed that in every case they failed
to see the essential features of what was done before their eyes. This
Davey-Hodgson contribution is probably the most damaging document
concerning eye-witnesses' 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.
This is adverse to the lady's pretensions; and although some of Madame
Blavatsky's friends make light of it, it is a stroke from which her
reputation will not recover.
{314}
Physical mediumship in all its phases has fared hard in the
Proceedings. The latest case 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.
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 are all convinced that
super-normal powers of cognition are displayed therein. These are
_primâ facie_ due to 'spirit-control.' But the conditions are so
complex that a dogmatic decision either for or against the
spirit-hypothesis must as yet be postponed.
One of the most important experimental contributions to the Proceedings
is the article of Miss X. on 'Crystal Vision.' Many persons who look
fixedly into a crystal or other vaguely 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 {315} 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 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 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.
Passing from papers based on observation to papers based on narrative,
we have a number of 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 emotional interest. As
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.
I must close my gossip about the Proceedings by naming what, after all,
seems to me the 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.
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:--
{316}
"Each of us is in reality an abiding psychical entity far more
extensive than he knows,--an 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."
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 physiological and of psychical activity, than is open to our
ordinary consciousness and memory. At the lower end we have the
_physiological_ extension, mind-cures, 'stigmatization' of ecstatics,
etc.; in the upper, the hyper-normal cognitions of the medium-trance.
Whatever the judgment of the future may be on Mr. Myers's speculations,
the credit will always remain 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-automatisms to the most startling sensory-apparition,
form. Quite apart from Mr. Myers's 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.
{317}
One's reaction on hearsay testimony is always determined by one's own
experience. Most men who have once convinced themselves, by what seems
to them a careful examination, that 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 cases and quiddling discussion of
'evidential values,' of which the Society's reports are full, 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.
Hence I think that the sort of loathing--no milder word will do--which
the very words 'psychical research' and 'psychical researcher' awaken
in so many honest scientific breasts is 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 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
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 {318} fallacious,--for so far as the order