Читать книгу Phantasms of the Living - Volume I. - Frank Podmore - Страница 11

PRELIMINARY REMARKS: GROUNDS OF CAUTION.

§ 1. WHATEVER the advances of science may do for the universe, there is one thing that they have never yet done and show no prospect of doing—namely, to make it less marvellous. Face to face with the facts of Nature, the wonderment of the modern chemist, physicist, zoologist, is far wider and deeper than that of the savage or the child; far wider and deeper even than that of the early workers in the scientific field. True it is that science explains; if it did not it would be worthless. But scientific explanation means only the reference of more and more facts to immutable laws; and, as discovery advances in every department, the orderly marvel of the comprehensive laws merely takes the place of the disorderly marvel of arbitrary occurrences. The mystery is pushed back, so to speak, from facts in isolation to facts in the aggregate; but at every stage of the process the mystery itself gathers new force and impressiveness.

What, then, is the specific relation of the man of science to the phenomena which he observes? His explanation of them does not lead him to marvel at them less than the uneducated person: what does it lead him to do for them that the uneducated person cannot do? “To predict them with certainty,” it will no doubt be replied; “which further implies, in cases where the conditions are within his control, to produce them at will.” But it is important to observe that this power of prediction, though constantly proclaimed as the authoritative test of scientific achievement, is very far indeed from being an accurate one. For it is a test which is only fulfilled with anything like completeness by a small group of sciences—those which deal with inorganic nature. The physicist can proclaim with confidence that gravitation, and heat, and electricity (as long as they act at all) will continue to act as they do now; every discovery that the chemist makes about a substance is a prophecy as to the behaviour of that class of substance for ever. But as soon as vital organisms appear on the scene, there is a change. Not only do the complexities of structure and process, and the mutual reactions of the parts and the whole, exclude all exact quantitative formulæ; not only is there an irreducible element of uncertainty in the behaviour from moment to moment of the simplest living unit; but there appear also developments, and varieties and “sports,” which present themselves to us as arbitrary—which have just to be registered, and cannot be explained. Not, of course, that they are really arbitrary; no scientifically trained mind entertains the least doubt that they are in every case the inevitable results of prior conditions. But the knowledge of the expert has not approximately penetrated to the secret of those conditions; here, therefore, his power of prediction largely fails him.

This applies to a great extent even to events of a uniform and familiar order. Biological science may predict that an animal will be of the same species as its parents; but cannot predict its sex. It may predict the general characteristics of the next generation of men; but not the special attributes of a single individual. But its power of forecast is limited in a far more striking way—by the perpetual modification of the very material with which it has to deal. It is able to predict that, given such and such variations, natural selection will foster and increase them; that given such and such organic taints, heredity will transmit them: but it is powerless to say what the next spontaneous variation, or the next development of heredity will be. It is at work, not on steadfast substances with immutable qualities, like those of the inorganic world; but on substances whose very nature is to change. The evolution of animal existence, from protoplasm upwards, involves ever fresh elaborations in the composition of the vital tissues. Science traces the issue of these changes, and learns even to some extent to foresee and so to guide their course; it can thus lay down laws of scientific breeding, laws of medicine and hygiene. But the unconquerable spontaneity of the organic world is for ever setting previous generalisations at defiance; in great things and small, from the production of a new type of national physique to the production of a new variety of tulip, it is ever presenting fresh developments, whose necessity no one could divine, and of which no one could say aught until they were actually there. And so, though science follows closely after, and keeps up the game with spirit, its position in its Wonderland is always rather like that of Alice in hers, when the croquet-hoops consisted of soldiers who moved as often as they chose. The game is one on which it will never be safe to bet for very far ahead; and it is one which will certainly never end.

And if this is true of life in its physical manifestations, it is certainly not less true of its mental manifestations. It is to the latter, indeed, that we naturally turn for the highest examples of mobility, and the most marked exhibitions of the unexpected. An Athenian of Solon’s time, speculating on “the coming race,” might well have predicted for his countrymen the physical prowess that won Marathon, but not the peculiar intellectual vitality that culminated in the theatre of Dionysus. At the present moment, it is safer to prophesy that the next generation in Germany will include a good many hundreds of thousands of short-sighted persons than that it will include a Beethoven. Nor will it surprise us to find the “sports” and uncertainties of vital development most conspicuous on the psychical side, if we remember the nature of their physical basis. For mental facts are indissolubly linked with the very class of material facts that science can least penetrate—with the most complex sort of changes occurring in the most subtly-woven sort of matter—the molecular activities of brain-tissue.

§ 2. There exists, then, a large department of natural events where the test of prediction can be applied only in a restricted way. Whether the events be near or distant—whether the question be of intellectual developments a thousand years hence, or of the movements of an amoeba or the success of a “thought-transference” experiment in the next five minutes—there is here no voice that can speak with absolute authority. The expert gets his cosmic prophecies accepted by pointing to the perpetual fulfilment of his minor predictions in the laboratory; or he refutes adverse theories by showing that they conflict with facts that he can at any moment render patent. But as to the implications and possibilities of life—the constitution and faculties of man—he will do well to predict and refute with caution; for here he may fail even to guess the relation of what will be to what is. If his function as a prophet is not wholly abrogated, he is a prophet ever liable to correction. He is obliged to deal largely in likelihoods and tendencies; and (if I may venture on a prophecy which is perhaps as fallible as the rest) the interest in the laws that he is able to lay down will never supersede the interest in the exceptions to those laws. Indeed it is in emphasising exceptions that his own rôle will largely consist. And above all must he beware of setting up any arbitrary “scientific frontier” between the part of Nature that he knows and the part that he does not know. He can trace the great flood of evolution to the point at which he stands; but a little beyond him it loses itself in the darkness; and though he may realise its general force and direction, and roughly surmise the mode in which its bed will be shaped, he can but dimly picture the scenes through which it will flow.

But if the science of life cannot be final, there is no reason why it should not be accurate and coherent. And if the scope of definite scientific comprehension is here specially restricted, and the unexpected is specially certain to occur, that is no reason for abating one jot of care in the actual work that it remains possible to do—the work of sifting and marshalling evidence, of estimating sources of error, and of strictly adjusting theories to facts. On the contrary, the necessity for such care is only increased. If incaution may be sometimes shown in too peremptorily shutting the door on alleged phenomena which are not in clear continuity with established knowledge, it is far more often and flagrantly shown in the claim for their admission. And it is undeniable that the conditions which have been briefly described expose speculation on the possible developments of vital phenomena to peculiar dangers and difficulties. In proportion as the expert moderates his tone, and makes his forecasts in a tentative and hypothetical manner, it is certain that those who are not experts will wax bold in assertion and theory. The part of the map that science leaves blank, as terra incognita, is the very one which amateur geographers will fill in according to their fancy, or on the reports of uncritical and untrustworthy explorers. The confidence of ignorance is always pretty accurately adjusted to the confidence of knowledge. Wherever the expert can put his foot down, and assert or deny with assurance, the uninstructed instinctively bow to him. He fearlessly asserts, for instance, that the law of the conservation of energy cannot be broken; the world believes him, and the inventors of perpetual-motion-machines gradually die off. But suppose the question is of possible relations of human beings to inanimate things or to one another, new modes of influence, new forms of sensitiveness. Here responsible science can give no confident denial; here, therefore, irresponsible speculation finds its chance. It has, no doubt, modified its language under the influence of half a century of brilliant physical discovery. It takes care to shelter its hypotheses under the name of law: the loosest of philosophers now-a-days would hesitate to appeal, as the elder Humboldt appealed sixty years ago, to a “sense of yearning in the human soul,” as a proof that the course of nature may suffer exceptions.¹ But the change is often rather in name than in fact; the “natural” lends itself to free guessing quite as easily as the “supernatural”; and nowhere in Nature is this freedom so unchartered as in the domain of psychic life. Speculation here is not only easy; it is, unfortunately, also attractive. The more obscure phenomena and the more doubtful assumptions are just those on which the popular mind most readily fastens; and the popular tongue rejoices in terms of the biggest and vaguest connotation. Something also must be set down to a natural reaction. Even persons whose interest has been earnest and intelligent have found scientific moral hard to preserve, in departments surrendered by a long-standing convention to unscientific treatment. Thus, in their practice, they have come to acquiesce in that surrender, and have dispensed with habits of caution for which no one was likely to give them credit; while in their polemic they have as much resented the stringent demands for evidence, in which their opponents have been right, as the refusal to look at it when it is there, in which their opponents have been wrong.

§ 3. The above facts, and the peculiar obligations which they involve, should never be lost sight of by the serious student of “psychical”² phenomena. His path is one that eminently craves wary walking. On the one hand, he finds new dim vistas of study opening out, in an age whose ideal of scientific studies is formed from the most highly developed specimens of them; and the twilight which has in every class of knowledge preceded the illuminating dawn of law is made doubly dark and dubious for him by the advanced daylight of scientific conceptions from which he peers into it. He finds, moreover, that the marvellous recent extension of the area of the known through additions to its recognised departments and multiplication of their connections, has inevitably and reasonably produced a certain rigidity of scientific attitude—an increased difficulty in breaking loose from association, and admitting a new department on its own independent evidence. And on the other hand, he finds himself more or less in contact with advocates of new departments who ignore the weight of the presumption against them—who fail to see that it is from the recognised departments that the standard of evidence must be drawn, and that if speculation is to make good its right to outrun science, it will certainly not be by impatience of scientific canons. On this side the position of the psychical student is one in which the student of the recognised sciences is never placed. The physicist never finds his observations confronted or confounded with those of persons who claim familiarity with his subject while ignoring his methods: he never sees his statements and his theories classed or compared with theirs. He is marked out from his neighbours by the veryfact of dealing with subject-matter which they do not know how even to begin to talk about. The “psychicist” is not so marked out. His subject-matter is in large measure common property, of which the whole world can talk as glibly as he; and the ground which must be broken for science, if at all, by the application of precise treatment, has already been made trite in connection with quite other treatment.

§ 4. The moral is one which the authors of the present undertaking have every reason to lay to heart. For the endeavour of this book, almost throughout, is to deal with themes that are in a sense familiar, by the aid, partly, of improved evidential methods, but partly also of conceptions which have as yet no place in the recognised psychology. Not, indeed, that the reader is about to be treated to any large amount of speculation; facts will be very much more prominent than theories. Still, the facts to be adduced carry us at least one step beyond the accepted boundaries. What they prove (if we interpret them rightly) is the ability of one mind to impress or to be impressed by another mind otherwise than through the recognised channels of sense. We call the owner of the impressing mind the agent, and the owner of the impressed mind the percipient; and we describe the fact of impression shortly by the term telepathy. We began by restricting that term to cases where the distance through which the transference of impressions took place far exceeded the scope of the recognised senses; but it may be fairly extended to all cases of impressions conveyed without any affection of the percipient’s recognised senses, whatever may be his actual distance from the agent. I of course do not mean by this merely that the channel of communication is unrecognised by the person impressed—as in the drawing-room pastime where hidden pins are found through indications which the finder receives and acts on without any consciousness of guidance. By the words “otherwise than through the recognised channels of sense,” I mean that the cause or condition of the transferred impression is specifically unknown. It may sometimes be necessary or convenient to conceive it as some special supernormal or supersensuous¹ faculty; and in that case we are undoubtedly assuming a faculty which is new—or at any rate is new to science. But we can at least claim that we take this step under compulsion; not in the light-hearted fashion which formerly improvised occult forces and fluids to account for the vagaries of hysteria; or which in our own day has discovered the dawn of a new sense, or the relic of some primeval instinct, in the ordinary exhibitions of the “willing-game.” Our inference of an unrecognised mode of affection has nothing in common with such inferences as these; for it has been made only after recognised modes have been carefully excluded.

§ 5. It is not, however, with the ultimate conditions of the phenomena that the study of them can begin: our first business is with the reality, rather than with the rationale, of their occurrence. Telepathy as a system of facts is what we have to examine. Discussion of the nature of the novel faculty in itself, and apart from particular results, will be as far as possible avoided. That, if it exists, it has important relations to various very fundamental problems—metaphysical, psychological, possibly even physical—can scarcely be doubted. So far from the scientific study of man being a region whose boundaries are pretty well mapped out, and which only requires to be filled in with further detail by physiologists and psychologists, we may come to perceive that we are standing only on the threshold of a vast terra incognita, which must be humbly explored before we can even guess at its true extent, or appreciate its relation to the more familiar realms of knowledge. But such distant visions had better not be lingered over. Before the philosophical aspects of the subject can be profitably discussed, its position as a real department of knowledge must be amply vindicated. This can only be done by a wide survey of evidence; the character of the present treatise will therefore be mainly evidential.

In demonstrating the reality of impressions communicated otherwise than through the known sensory channels, we rely on two distinct branches of evidence, each of which demands a special sort of caution. The larger portion of this work will deal with cases of spontaneous occurrence. Here the evidence will consist of records of experiences which we have received from a variety of sources—for the most part from living persons more or less known to us. Narratives of the same kind have from time to time appeared in other collections. These, however, have not been treated with any reference to a theory of telepathy such as is here set forth; nor have their editors fulfilled conditions which, for reasons to be subsequently explained (Chap. IV.), we have felt bound to observe; and we have found them of almost no assistance. In scarcely a single instance has a case been brought up to the standard which really commands attention.¹ The prime essentials of testimony in such matters—authorities, names, dates, corroboration, the ipsissima verba of the witnesses—have one or all been lacking; and there seems to have been no appreciation of the strength of the à priori objections which the evidence has to overmaster, nor of the possible sources of error in the evidence itself. It is in analysing and estimating these sources of error, and in fixing the evidential standard which may fairly be applied, that the most difficult part of the present task will be seen to consist.

But though the records here presented will be more numerous, and on the whole better attested, than those of previous collections, the majority of them will be of a tolerably well-known type. The peculiarity of the present treatment will come out rather in the connection of this branch of our evidence with the other branch. For our conviction that the supposed faculty of supersensuous impression is a genuine one is greatly fortified by a body of evidence of an experimental kind—where the conditions could be arranged in such a way as to exclude the chances of error that beset the spontaneous cases. In considering this experimental branch of our subject, I shall of course, after what has been said, be specially bound to make clear the distinction between what we hold to be genuine cases and the spurious “thought-reading” exhibitions which are so much better known. This will be easy enough, and will be done in the next chapter.

¹ Briefe an eine Freundin, p. 61.

² The specific sense which we have given to this word needs apology. But we could find no other convenient term, under which to embrace a group of subjects that lie on or outside the boundaries of recognised science, while seeming to present certain points of connection among themselves. For instance, this book will contain evidences of the relation of telepathy—its main theme—both to mesmerism and to certain phenomena which are often, without adequate evidence, attributed to minds apart from material organisms.

¹ It seems impossible to avoid these terms; yet each needs to be guarded from a probable misunderstanding. Supernormal is very liable to be confounded with supernatural; while supersensuous suggests a dogmatic denial of a physical side to the effect.

¹ An exception should perhaps be made in favour of a few of the late Mr. R. Dale Owen’s narratives. The Rev. B. Wrey-Savile’s book on Apparitions contains some careful work, but it deals chiefly with remote cases. Dr. Mayo, in his Truths contained in Popular Superstitions, adduces very inadequate evidence; but he has given (p. 67) what is perhaps the first suggestion of a psychical explanation.