The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
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 that all our knowledge comes by the use
of our eyes and ears and other senses. And we must remember also that
this undermining of the strength of a presumption by reiterated report
of 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 from the orthodox belief that there can be
nothing in any one's intellect that has not come in through ordinary
experiences of sense.
But it is a miserable thing for a question of truth {319} to be
confined to mere presumption and counter-presumption, with no decisive
thunderbolt of fact to clear the baffling darkness. And, 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' disbeliever, and making an _ad
hominem_ plea. My own point of view is different. For me the
thunderbolt _has_ fallen, and the orthodox belief has not merely had
its presumption weakened, 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 particular instance. 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 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 {320} results that one should
pin one's faith upon and hug forever is sadly to mistake its genius,
and degrades the scientific body to the status of a sect.
We all, scientists and non-scientists, live on some inclined plane of
credulity. The plane tips one way in one man, another way in another;
and may he whose plane tips in no way be the 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 built up again in a form in which such things 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.
And here is the real instructiveness of Messrs. Myers and Gurney's
work. They are trying 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 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 {321}
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, with their astral
bodies 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.
I have myself, as American agent for the census, collected hundreds of
cases of hallucination in healthy persons. The result is to make me
feel that we all have potentially a 'subliminal' self, which may make
at any time irruption into our ordinary lives. At its lowest, it is
only the 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 the feeling that some physiological period has elapsed; but,
whatever it is, it is subconscious.
A subconscious something may also preserve experiences to which we do
not openly attend. 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
home she finds {322} 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 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.
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 ere long pronounces small-pox to be the
disease, although the lady says, "The thought of {323} the girl's
having small-pox never entered my mind till I saw the apparent
inscription." Then 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.
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 starts it up. It is far better tactics, if you wish to get
rid of mystery, to brand the narratives 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 natural kind of fact of
which we do not yet know the full extent.
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 twelfth century.
They are indifferent to science, because science is so callously
indifferent to 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 outsiders, it is {324} identified with a
certain fixed belief,--the belief that the hidden order of nature is
mechanical exclusively, and that non-mechanical categories are
irrational ways of conceiving and explaining even such things as human
life. Now, this mechanical rationalism, as one may call it, makes, if
it becomes 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 scientific
circles, the dominant forms of thought. But for mechanical
rationalism, personality is an insubstantial illusion. The chronic
belief of mankind, that events may happen for the sake of their
personal significance, is an abomination; and the notions of our
grandfathers about oracles and omens, divinations and apparitions,
miraculous changes of heart and wonders worked by inspired persons,
answers to prayer and providential leadings, are a fabric absolutely
baseless, a mass of sheer _un_truth.
Now, of course, we must all admit that the excesses to which the