Читать книгу Phantasms of the Living - Volume I. - Frank Podmore - Страница 9

κα τòν θòν τοιοτον ξπίσταμαι, σοϕος μν ανικτρα θσϕτων , σκαιος δ ϕαλον κν βραχι διδσκαλον.

SOPHOCLES

§ 1. THE subject of this book is one which a brief title is hardly sufficient to explain. For under our heading of “Phantasms of the Living,” we propose, in fact, to deal with all classes of cases where there is reason to suppose that the mind of one human being has affected the mind of another, without speech uttered, or word written, or sign made;—has affected it, that is to say, by other means than through the recognised channels of sense.

To such transmission of thoughts or feelings we have elsewhere given the name of telepathy; and the records of an experimental proof of the reality of telepathy will form a part of the present work. But, for reasons which will be made manifest as we proceed, we have included among telepathic phenomena a vast class of cases which seem at first sight to involve something widely different from a mere transference of thought.

I refer to apparitions; excluding, indeed, the alleged apparitions of the dead, but including the apparitions of all persons who are still living, as we know life, though they may be on the very brink and border of physical dissolution. And these apparitions, as will be seen, are themselves extremely various in character; including not visual phenomena alone, but auditory, tactile, or even purely ideational and emotional impressions. All these we have included under the term phantasm; a word which, though etymologically a mere variant of phantom, has been less often used, and has not become so closely identified with visual impressions alone.

Such, then, is the meaning of our title; but something more of explanation is necessary before the tone and purport of the book can be correctly apprehended. In a region so novel we could hardly be surprised at any amount of misinterpretation. Some readers, for instance, may fancy that a bulky and methodical treatise on phantoms can be but a half-serious thing. Others may suspect that its inspiration is in the love of paradox, and that a fantastic craving for originality has led the authors along a path where they cannot expect, and can hardly desire, that the sober world should follow them.

§ 2. It is necessary, therefore, to state at once that we have no wish either to mystify or to startle mankind. On the contrary, the conjoint and consultative scheme according to which this book has been compiled is thus arranged mainly with a view to correcting or neutralising individual fancies or exaggerations, of leaving as little as possible to the unchecked idiosyncrasy of any single thinker. And, again, we wish distinctly to say that so far from aiming at any paradoxical reversion of established scientific conclusions, we conceive ourselves to be working (however imperfectly) in the main track of discovery, and assailing a problem which, though strange and hard, does yet stand next in order among the new adventures on which Science must needs set forth, if her methods and her temper are to guide and control the widening curiosity, the expanding capacities of men.

We anticipate, in short, that although it may at first be said of us that we have performed with needless elaboration a foolish and futile task, the ultimate verdict on our work will rather be that we have undertaken—with all too limited a knowledge and capacity—to open an inquiry which was manifestly impending, and to lay the foundation-stone of a study which will loom large in the approaching age.

Our only paradox, then, is the assertion that we are not paradoxical; and that assertion it is the main business of this Introduction to justify.

§ 3. For this purpose two principal heads of exposition will be required. In the first place, since this book (for whose contents we are solely responsible) was undertaken by us at the request of the Council of the Society for Psychical Research, and is largely based on material which that Council has placed at our disposal, it will be necessary to say something as to the scope and object of the Society in question;—its grounds for claiming a valid scientific position, and its points of interconnection with established branches of philosophic inquiry.

And, secondly, it will be needful to indicate the precise position which the theme of this book occupies in the field of our investigations; the reason why we have isolated these special phenomena in a separate group, and have selected them for discussion at this early stage of the Society’s labours.

A reader of the programme of the Society will probably feel that although the special topics to which attention is there invited may be unfamiliar, yet its general plea is such as he has often noted in the history of science before. “To approach these various problems without prejudice or prepossession of any kind, and in the same spirit of exact and unimpassioned inquiry which has enabled Science to solve so many problems, once not less obscure nor less hotly debated;”—phrases like these have no more of novelty than there might be, for instance, in the proposal of a Finance Minister to abolish the last of a long series of protective embargoes. Free Trade and free inquiry have each of them advanced step by step, and by dint of the frequent repetition, under varying difficulties, of very similar, and very elementary, truths. The special peculiarity of our topic is that it is an article (so to say) on which the Free Traders themselves have imposed an additional duty; that it has been more sternly discountenanced by the men who appeal to experiment than by the men who appeal to authority;—that its dispassionate discussion has since the rise of modern science been tabooed more jealously than when the whole province was claimed by theology alone. There have been reasons, no doubt, for such an exclusion; and I am not asserting that either Free Trade or free inquiry is always and under all circumstances to be desired. But it is needful to point out yet once more how plausible the reasons for discouraging some novel research have often seemed to be, while yet the advance of knowledge has rapidly shown the futility and folly of such discouragement.

It was the Father of Science himself who was the first to circumscribe her activity. Socrates, in whose mind the idea of the gulf between knowledge and mere opinion attained a dominant intensity which impressed itself on all ages after him,—Socrates expressly excluded from the range of exact inquiry all such matters as the movements and nature of the sun and moon. He wished—and as he expressed his wish it seemed to have all the cogency of absolute wisdom—that men’s minds should be turned to the ethical and political problems which truly concerned them,—not wasted in speculation on things unknowable—things useless even could they be known.

In a kindred spirit, though separated from Socrates by the whole result of that physical science which Socrates had deprecated, we find a great modern systematiser of human thought again endeavouring to direct the scientific impulse towards things serviceable to man; to divert it from things remote, unknowable, and useless if known. What then, in Comte’s view, are in fact the limits of man’s actual home and business? the bounds within which he may set himself to learn all he can, assured that all will serve to inform his conscience and guide his life? It is the solar system which has become for the French philosopher what the street and market-place of Athens were for the Greek. And this enlargement (it need hardly be said) is not due to any wider grasp of mind in Comte than in Socrates, but simply to the march of science; which has shown us that the whole solar system does, in fact, minister to our practical needs, and that the Nautical Almanack demands for its construction a mapping of the paths of those ordered luminaries which in the time of Socrates seemed the very wanderers of Heaven.

I need not say that Comte’s prohibition has been altogether neglected. No frontier of scientific demarcation has been established between Neptune and Sirius, between Uranus and Aldebaran. Our knowledge of the fixed stars increases yearly; and it would be rash to maintain that human conduct is not already influenced by the conception thus gained of the unity and immensity of the heavens.

To many of the comments that have been made on our work, even by men who are not formal Comtists, the above reflections furnish a fitting reply. But it is not only, nor perhaps mainly, on account of the remoteness of our subject, or its unimportance to human progress, that objection is taken to our inquiry. The criticisms which have met us, from the side sometimes of scientific, sometimes of religious orthodoxy, have embodied, in modernised phraseology, nearly every well-worn form of timid protest, or obscurantist demurrer, with which the historians of science have been accustomed to give piquancy to their long tale of discovery and achievement. It would have been convenient had these objections been presented to us in a connected and formal manner. But this has not been the case; and, in fact, they are in their very nature too incoherent, too self-contradictory, for continuous statement. Sometimes we are told that we are inviting the old theological spirit to encroach once more on the domain of science; sometimes that we are endeavouring to lay the impious hands of Science upon the mysteries of Religion. Sometimes we are informed that competent savants have already fully explored the field which we propose for our investigation; sometimes that no respectable man of science would condescend to meddle with such a reeking mass of fraud and hysteria. Sometimes we are pitied as laborious triflers who prove some infinitely small matter with mighty trouble and pains; sometimes we are derided as attempting the solution of gigantic problems by slight and superficial means.

§ 4. The best way of meeting objections thus confused and contradictory will be to show as clearly as we can at what points our inquiries touch the recent results of science; what signs there are which indicate the need of vigorous advance along the lines which we have chosen. We shall show, perhaps, that there is a kind of convergence towards this especial need—that in several directions of research there is felt that kind of pause and hesitancy which is wont to precede the dawn of illuminating conceptions. We shall not, of course, thus prove that our own attempt has been successful, but we shall prove that it was justified; that if the problems which we set ourselves to solve are found to be insoluble, the gaps thus left in the system of thought on which man’s normal life is based will be such as can neither be ignored nor supplied, but will become increasingly palpable and increasingly dangerous.

Let us consider how far this remark can be justified with regard to some of the leading branches of human knowledge in turn. And let us take first Biology, the science which on the whole approaches the closest to our own inquiries. Biology has, during the last half-century, made an advance which, measured by the hold exercised on the mass of cultivated minds, has perhaps had no parallel since the forward stride of astronomy and physics in the days of Newton. A glance at the text-books of the last generation, in physical or mental science—Whewell’s History of the Inductive Sciences, or Mill’s Logic,—as compared, for instance, with the works of their immediate successor, Mr. Herbert Spencer, shows something which is not so much progress as revolution—the transformation of Biology from a mere special department of knowledge into the key to man’s remotest history, the only valid answer to the profoundest questions as to his present being.

For, in truth, it is Biology above all other sciences which has profited by the doctrine of evolution. In evolution,—in the doctrine that the whole cosmical order is the outcome of a gradual development,—mankind have gained for the first time a working hypothesis which covers enough of the known facts of the universe to make its possible extension to all facts a matter of hopeful interest. And Biology, which even at the date of Whewell’s book could barely make good its claim to be regarded as a coherent science at all, has now acquired a co-ordinating and continuous principle of unity which renders it in some respects the best type of a true science which we possess. It traces life from the protozoon to the animal, from the brute to the man; it offers to explain the complex fabric of human thought and emotion, viewed from the physical side, as the development of the molecular movements of scarcely-differentiated fragments of protaplasm.

And along with this increased knowledge of the processes by which man has been upbuilt has come also an increased knowledge of the processes which are now going on within him. The same inquiries which have brought our organic life into intelligible relation with the whole range of animal and vegetable existence have enabled us also to conceive more definitely the neural side of our mental processes, and the relation of cerebral phenomena to their accompanying emotion or thought. And hence, in the view of some ardent physiologists, it is becoming more and more probable that we are in fact physiological automata; that our consciousness is a mere superadded phenomenon—a mere concomitant of some special intensity of cerebral action, with no basis beyond or apart from the molecular commotion of the brain.

But this view, as it would seem, depends in a great part upon something which corresponds in the mental field to a familiar optical illusion. When we see half of some body strongly illuminated, and half of it feebly illuminated, it is hard to believe that the brilliant moiety is not the larger of the two. And, similarly, it is the increased definiteness of our conception of the physical side of our mental operations which seems to increase its relative importance,—to give it a kind of priority over the psychical aspect of the same processes. Yet, of course, to the philosophic eye the central problem of the relation of the objective and subjective sides of these psycho-neural phenomena can be in no way altered by any increase of definiteness in our knowledge of the objective processes which correspond to the subjective states.

And, on the other hand, there is one singular logical corollary which seems thus far to have escaped the notice of physiologist and psychologist alike. It is this: that our increased vividness of conception of the physical side of mental life, while it cannot possibly disprove the independence of the psychical side, may quite conceivably prove it. I will again resort to the (very imperfect) analogy of a partially-illuminated body. Suppose that one hemisphere of a globe is strongly lit up, and that the other is lit up by faint and scattered rays.¹ I am trying to discern whether the two hemispheres are symmetrically marked throughout. Now no clearness of marks on the bright hemisphere can disprove the existence of corresponding marks on the dim one. But, on the other hand, it is conceivable that one of the few rays which fall on the dim hemisphere may reveal some singular mark which I can see that the bright hemisphere does not possess. And the brighter the bright hemisphere is made, the more certain do I become that this particular mark is not to be found on it.

§ 5. I will give two concrete examples of what I mean—one of them drawn from the conclusions of a great physiologist, the other from the obvious condition of a new branch of experimental inquiry. I shall not discuss either instance in detail, since I am here only endeavouring to show that with increased precision in psychophysical researches the old problems of free-will, soul and body, &c., are presenting more definite issues, and offering a far more hopeful field to the exact philosopher than their former vagueness allowed.

My first illustration, then, is from the form which the old free-will controversy has assumed in the hands of Wundt. Wundt stands, of course, among the foremost of those who have treated human thought and sensation as definite and measurable things, who have computed their rate of transit, and analysed their elements, and enounced the laws of their association. It is not from him that we need look for any lofty metaphysical view as to the infinite resources of spiritual power,—the transcendental character of psychical phenomena. But, nevertheless, Wundt believes himself able to assert that there is within us a residue—an all-important residue—of psychical action which is incommensurable with physiological law. So far, he holds, is the principle of conservation of energy from covering the psychical realm, that the facts of mental evolution proclaim that the very contrary is the case;—and that what really obtains is rather “an unlimited new creation of psychical energy.”¹ Nay, so convinced is he of the inadequacy of any system of physiological determinism to explain psychical facts, that he holds that we must directly reverse the materialistic view of the relation of the corporeal to the psychical life. “It is not the psychical life,” he says, “which is a product of the physical organisation; rather it is the physical organism which, in all those purposive adjustments which distinguish it from inorganic compounds, is itself a psychical creation.”²

I am not here expressing either agreement or disagreement with this general view. I am merely pointing out that here is an opinion which, whether right or wrong, is formed as a result not of vagueness but of distinctness of physiological conceptions. And my illustration shows at any rate that the development of physiology is tending not always to make the old psychical problems seem meaningless or sterile, but rather to give them actuality and urgency, and even to suggest new possibilities of their solution.

§ 6. But, to come to my second instance, it is perhaps from the present position of hypnotism that the strongest argument may be drawn for the need of such researches as ours, to supplement and co-ordinate the somewhat narrower explorations of technical physiology. For the actual interest of the mesmeric or hypnotic trance—I am not now dealing with the rival theories which these words connote—the central interest, let us say, of induced somnambulism, or the sleep-waking state—has hardly as yet revealed itself to any section of inquirers.

That interest lies neither in mesmerism as a curative agency, as Elliotson would have told us, nor in hypnotism as an illustration of inhibitory cerebral action, as Heidenhain would tell us now. It lies in the fact that here is a psychical experiment on a larger scale than was ever possible before; that we have at length got hold of a handle which turns the mechanism of our being; that we have found a mode of shifting the threshold of consciousness which is a dislocation as violent as madness, a submergence as pervasive as sleep, and yet is waking sanity; that we have induced a change of personality which is not per se either evolutive or dissolutive, but seems a mere allotropic modification of the very elements of man. The prime value of the hypnotic trance lies not in what it inhibits, but in what it reveals; not in the occlusion of the avenues of peripheral stimulus, but in the emergence of unnoted sensibilities, nay, perhaps even in the manifestation of new and centrally-initiated powers.

The hypnotic trance is an eclipse of the normal consciousness which can be repeated at will. Now the first observers of eclipses of the sun ascribe them to supernatural causes, and attribute to them an occult influence for good or evil. Then comes the stage at which men note their effects on the animal organism, the roosting of birds, the restlessness of cattle. Then come observations on the intensity of the darkness, the aspect of the lurid shade. But to the modern astronomer all this is trifling as compared with the knowledge which those brief moments give him of the orb itself in its obscuration. He learns from that transient darkness more than the noon of day can tell; he sees the luminary no longer as a defined and solid ball, but as the centre of the outrush of flaming energies, the focus of an effluence which coruscates untraceably through immeasurable fields of heaven.

There is more in this parallel than a mere empty metaphor. It suggests one of the primary objects which psychical experiment must seek to attain. Physical experiment aims at correcting the deliverances of man’s consciousness with regard to the external world by instruments which extend the range, and concentrate the power, and compensate the fallacies of his senses. And similarly, our object must be to correct the deliverances of man’s consciousness concerning the processes which are taking place within him by means of artificial displacements of the psycho-physical threshold; by inhibiting normal perception, obliterating normal memory, so that in this temporary freedom from preoccupation by accustomed stimuli his mind may reveal those latent and delicate capacities of which his ordinary conscious self is unaware.

§ 7. It was thus, in fact, that thought-transference, or telepathy, was first discovered. In the form of community of sensation between operator and subject, it was noted nearly a century ago as a phenomenon incident to the mesmeric trance. Its full importance was not perceived, and priceless opportunities of experiment were almost wholly neglected. In order to bring out the value and extent of the phenomenon it was necessary, we venture to think, that it should be investigated by men whose interest in the matter lay not in the direction of practical therapeutics but of psychical theory, and who were willing to seek and “test for it” under a wide range of conditions, not in sleep-waking life only, but in normal waking, and normal sleep, and, as this book will indicate, up to the very hour of death.

The difficulties of this pursuit are not physiological only. But, nevertheless, in our endeavours to establish and to elucidate telepathy, we look primarily for aid to the most recent group of physiological inquirers, to the psycho-physicists whose special work—as yet in its infancy—has only in our own day been rendered possible by the increased accuracy and grasp of experimental methods in the sciences which deal with Life.

The list of Corresponding Members of our Society will serve to show that this confidence on our part is not wholly unfounded, and to indicate that we are not alone in maintaining that whatever may be the view of these perplexing problems which ultimately prevails, the recent advances of physiology constitute in themselves a strong reason—not, as some hold, for the abandonment of all discussion of the old enigmas, but rather for their fresh discussion with scientific orderliness, and in the illumination of our modern day.¹

§ 8. From Biology we may pass, by an easy transition, to what is commonly known as Anthropology,—the comparative study of the different races of men in respect either of their physical characteristics, or of the early rudiments of what afterwards develops into civilisation.

The connection of anthropology with psychical research will be evident to any reader who has acquainted himself with recent expositions of Primitive Man. He may think, indeed, that the connection is too evident, and that we can hardly bring it into notice without proving a good deal more than we desire. For as the creeds and customs of savage races become better known, the part played by sorcery, divination, apparitions becomes increasingly predominant. Mr. Tylor and Sir John Lubbock have made this abundantly clear, and Mr. Spencer has gone so far as to trace all early religion to a fear of the ghosts of the dead. In the works of these and similar authors, I need hardly say, we are led to regard all these beliefs and tendencies as due solely to the childishness of savage man—as absurdities which real progress in civilisation must render increasingly alien to the developed common-sense, the rational experience of humanity. Yet it appears to me that as we trace the process of evolution from savage to civilised man, we come to a point at which the inadequacy of this explanation is strongly forced on our attention. Certainly this was my own case when I undertook some years ago to give a sketch of the Greek oracles. It soon became evident to me that the mass of phenomena included under this title had, at any rate, a psycho-physical importance which the existing works on the subject for the most part ignored. I scarcely ventured myself to do more than indicate where the real nodi of the inquiry lay. But when a massive treatise on Ancient Divination appeared from the learned pen of M. Bouché-Leclercq, I looked eagerly to see whether his erudition had enabled him to place these problems in a new light. I found, however, that he explicitly renounced all attempt to deal with the phenomena in more than a merely external way. He would record, but he would make no endeavour to explain;—taking for granted, as it appeared, that the explanation depended on fraud alone, and on fraud whose details it would now be impossible to discover.

I cannot think that such a view can any longer satisfy persons adequately acquainted with the facts of hypnotism. Whatever else, whether of fraud or reality, there may have been on the banks of Cassotis or Castaly—unde superstitiosa primum sacra evasit vox fera,—there were at least the hypnotic trance and hystero-epilepsy. And until these and similar elements can be sifted out of the records left to us, with something of insight gained by familiarity with their modern forms, our knowledge of Pythia or of Sibyl will be shallow indeed.

Still more markedly is such insight and experience needed in anthropology proper—in the actual observation of the savage peoples who still exist. It is to be hoped that shamans and medicine-men will not vanish before the missionary until they have yielded some fuller lessons to the psycho-physicist—until the annals of the Salpêtrière and the experiments of Dean’s Yard have been invoked in explanation of the weird terrors of the Yenisei and the Congo.

§ 9. Passing on from Anthropology to history in its wider acceptation, we find these psycho-physical problems perpetually recurring, and forming a disturbing element in any theory of social or religious evolution. The contagious enthusiasms of the Middle Ages—the strange endemic maladies of witchcraft, vampirism, lycanthropy—even the individual inspiration of a Mahomet or a Joan of Arc—these are phenomena which the professed historian feels obliged to leave to the physician and the alienist, and for which the physician and the alienist, in their turn, have seldom a satisfactory explanation.

Nor do phenomena of this kind cease to appear with the advance of civilisation. In detailed modern histories, in the biographies of eminent men, we still come upon incidents which are, at any rate at first sight, of a supernormal¹ kind, and over which the narrator is forced to pass with vague or inadequate comment.

But it is, of course, in dealing with the history of religions that our lack of any complete grasp of psychical phenomena is most profoundly felt. And here, also, it is as a result of recent progress,—of the growth of the comparative study of religions,—that we are able to disengage, in a generalised form, the chief problems with which our “psychical” science, if such could be established, would be imperatively called on to deal.

For we find throughout the world’s history a series of great events which, though differing widely in detail, have a certain general resemblance both to each other and to some of those incidents both of savage and of ordinary civilised life to which reference has already been made.

The elements which are common to the great majority of religions seem to be mainly two—namely, the promulgation of some doctrine which the religious reformer claims to have received, or actually to communicate, in some supernormal manner; and the report of a concurrent manifestation of phenomena apparently inexplicable by ordinary laws.

Now, with the rise of one religion our Society has already had practically to deal. Acting through Mr. Hodgson, whose experiences in the matter have been elsewhere detailed,¹ a committee of the Society for Psychical Research has investigated the claim of the so-called “Theosophy,” of which Madame Blavatsky was the prophetess, to be an incipient world-religion, corroborated by miraculous, or at least supernormal, phenomena,—and has arrived at the conclusion that it is merely a réchauffé of ancient philosophies, decked in novel language, and supported by ingenious fraud. Had this fraud not been detected and exposed, and had the system of belief supported thereon thriven and spread, we should have witnessed what the sceptic might have cited as a typical case of the origin of religions. A Gibbon of our own day, reviewing the different motives and tendencies which prompt, or spread, revelations, might have pointed to Theosophy and Mormonism as covering between them the whole ground;—from the adroit advantage taken of mystical aspiration in the one religion, to the commonplace action of greed and lust upon helplessness and stupidity which forms the basis of the other.

But if it should be argued from these analogies that in no case of the foundation of a religion would any scientific method of psychical inquiry prove necessary or fruitful, if we knew all the facts; but that such developments might be sufficiently dealt with by ordinary common-sense, or, like Mormonism, by the criminal law, the generalisation would be hasty and premature. We need not go far back to discover two religions whose central fact is not a fact of fraud at all, but an unexplained psychical phenomenon. I allude to the vision-life of Swedenborg, and the speaking with tongues which occurred in the church of Irving,—each of which constitutes a central point of faith for a certain number of intelligent and educated persons at the present day. Of neither of these facts can Science at present offer a satisfactory explanation. The speaking with tongues seems plainly to have been for the most part (though not entirely) a genuine automatic phenomenon. But as to the origin of such automatic utterances (conveyed in speech or writing), as to the range from which their contents are drawn, or the kind of attention which they can claim, there is little or nothing to be learnt from accepted textbooks. We are groping among the first experiments, the simplest instances, on which any valid theory can be based.¹

The case of Swedenborg carries us still further beyond the limits of our assured knowledge. Of madness and its delusions, indeed, we know much; but it would be a mere abuse of language to call Swedenborg mad. His position must be decided by a much more difficult analogy. For before we can even begin to criticise his celestial visions we must be able in some degree to judge of his visions of things terrestrial; we must face, that is to say, the whole problem of so-called clairvoyance, of a faculty which claims to be not merely receptive but active,—a projection of super-sensory percipience among scenes distant and things unknown.

And the existence of such a faculty as this will assuredly never be proved by a mere study of the transcendental dicta of any single seer. This problem, too, must be approached, partly through the hypnotic trance, in which the best-attested instances of clairvoyance are alleged to have occurred, and partly through the collection of such supernormal narratives as some of those which find place in the present book.

Even a sketch like this may indicate how complex and various may be the problems which underlie that “History of Sects” in which a Bossuet might see only the heaven-sent penalty for apostasy against the Church,—a Gibbon, the mere diverting panorama of the ever-varying follies of men.

§ 10. But reflections like these lie on the outskirts of a still larger and graver question. What (it is naturally asked) is the relation of our study—not to eccentric or outlying forms of religious creed—but to central and vital conceptions; and especially to that main system of belief to which in English-speaking countries the name of religion is by popular usage almost confined?

Up till this time those who have written on behalf of the Society for Psychical Research have studiously refrained from entering on this important question. Our reason for this reticence is obvious enough when stated, but it has not been universally discerned. We wished to avoid even the semblance of attracting the public to our researches by any allurement which lay outside the scientific field. We could not take for granted that our inquiries would make for the spiritual view of things, that they would tend to establish even the independent existence, still less the immortality, of the soul. We shrank from taking advantage of men’s hopes or fears, from representing ourselves as bent on rescuing them from the materialism which forms so large a factor in modern thought, or from the pessimism which dogs its steps with unceasing persistency. We held it to be incumbent on us, in an especial degree, to maintain a neutral and expectant attitude, and to conduct our inquiries in the “dry light” of a dispassionate search for truth.

And this position we still maintain. This book, as will be seen, does not attempt to deal with the most exciting and popular topics which are included in our Society’s general scheme. And we shall be careful in the pages that follow to keep within our self-assigned limits, and to say little as to any light which our collected evidence may throw on the possibility of an existence continued after our physical death.

That master-problem of human life must be assailed by more deliberate approaches, nor must we gild our solid arguments with the radiance of an unproved surmise. But it would, nevertheless, be impossible, in a discussion of this general kind, to pass over the relation of psychical research to religion altogether in silence. And, indeed, since our inquiries began, the situation has thus far changed that we have now not anticipation merely, but a certain amount of actual achievement, to which to appeal. We hold that we have proved by direct experiment, and corroborated by the narratives contained in this book, the possibility of communications between two minds, inexplicable by any recognised physical laws, but capable (under certain rare spontaneous conditions) of taking place when the persons concerned are at an indefinite distance from each other. And we claim further that by investigations of the higher phenomena of mesmerism, and of the automatic action of the mind, we have confirmed and expanded this view in various directions, and attained a standing-point from which certain even stranger alleged phenomena begin to assume an intelligible aspect, and to suggest further discoveries to come.

Thus far the authors of this book, and also the main group of their fellow-workers, are substantially agreed. But their agreement as to the facts actually proved does not extend,—it is not even to be desired that it should extend,—to the speculations which in one direction or another such facts must inevitably suggest. They are facts which go too deep to find in any two minds a precisely similar lodgment, or to adjust themselves in the same way to the complex of pre-existent conceptions. The following paragraphs, therefore, must be taken merely as reflecting the opinions provisionally held by a single inquirer.

I may say, then, at once that I consider it improbable that telepathy will ever receive a purely physical explanation,—an explanation, that is to say, wholly referable to the properties of matter, as molecular matter is at present known to us. I admit, of course, that such an explanation is logically conceivable; that we can imagine that undulations should be propagated, or particles emitted, from one living organism to another, which should excite the percipient organism in a great variety of ways. But it seems to me,—and I imagine that in this view at any rate the majority of Materialists will concur,—that if the narratives in this book are to be taken as, on the whole, trustworthy, the physical analogies are too faint, and the physical difficulties too serious, to allow of our intruding among the forces of material Nature a force which—unlike any other—would seem (in some cases at least) neither to be diminished by any distance nor to be impeded by any obstacle whatsoever.

I lay aside, for the purposes of the present argument, the possibility of a monistic scheme of the universe,—of a consentiens conspirans continuata cognatio rerum which may present in an unbroken sequence both what we know as Matter and what we know as Mind. Such a view,—though to higher intelligences it may perhaps be an intuitive certainty,—can for us be nothing more than a philosophic opinion. Our scientific arguments must needs be based on the dualism which our intellects, as at present constituted, are in fact unable to transcend.

I maintain, therefore, that if the general fact of telepathic communication between mind and mind be admitted, it must also be admitted that an element is thus introduced into our conception of the aggregate of empirically known facts which constitutes a serious obstacle to the materialistic synthesis of human experience. The psychical element in man, I repeat, must henceforth almost inevitably be conceived as having relations which cannot be expressed in terms of matter.

Now this dogma, though wholly new to experimental science, is, of course, familiar and central in all the higher forms of religions. Relations inexpressible in terms of matter, and subsisting between spirit and Spirit,—the human and the Divine,—are implied in the very notion of the interchange of sacred love and love, of grace and worship. I need hardly add that the reality of any such communion is rigidly excluded by the materialistic view. The Materialist, indeed, may regard prayer and aspiration with indulgence, or even with approval, but he must necessarily conceive them as forming merely the psychical side of certain molecular movements of the particles of human organisms, and he must necessarily regard the notion of Divine response to prayer as an illusion generated by subsequent molecular movements of the same organisms,—the mere recoil and reflux of the wave which the worshipper himself has created.

It would, of course, be mere offensive presumption to draw a parallel between our telepathic experiments and such a relation between a human and Divine spirit as the devout soul believes itself to realise in prayer. One side of that communion must ex hypothesi transcend the measurement or analysis of finite minds. But, confining our view wholly to the part played by the human organism, it seems to me incontestable that our experiments suggest possibilities of influence, modes of operation, which throw an entirely fresh light on this ancient controversy between Science and Faith. I claim at least that any presumption which science had established against the possibility of spiritual communion is now rebutted; and that inasmuch as it can no longer be affirmed that our minds are closed to all influences save such as reach them through sensory avenues, the Materialist must admit that it is no longer an unsupported dream but a serious scientific possibility, that if any intelligences do in fact exist other than those of living men, influences from those intelligences may be conveyed to our own mind, and may either remain below the threshold of consciousness, or rise into definite consciousness, according as the presence or absence of competing stimuli, or other causes as yet unknown to us, may determine.

§ 11. I shall leave this proposition expressed thus in its most abstract and general form. And I may add—it is a reflection which I must ask the reader to keep steadily in mind,—that any support or illumination which religious creeds may gain from psychical inquiry is likely to affect not their clauses but their preamble; is likely to come, not as a sudden discovery bearing directly on some specific dogma, but as the gradual discernment of laws which may fundamentally modify the attitude of thoughtful minds.

Now, in what I have called the preamble of all revelations two theses are generally involved, quite apart from the subject-matter, or the Divine sanction, of the revelation itself. We have to assume, first, that human testimony to supernormal facts may be trustworthy; and secondly, that there is something in the nature of man which is capable of responding to—I may say of participating in—these supernormal occurrences. That is to say, revelations are not proved merely by large external facts, perceptible to every one who possesses the ordinary senses, nor again are they proved solely by what are avowedly mere subjective impressions, but they are largely supported by a class of phenomena which comes between these two extremes; by powers inherent in certain individuals of beholding spiritual visions or personages unseen by common eyes, of receiving information or guidance by interior channels, of uttering truths not consciously acquired, of healing sick persons by the imposition of hands, with other faculties of a similarly supernormal kind.

And I hope that I shall not be thought presumptuous or irreverent if (while carefully abstaining from direct comment on any Revelation) I indicate what, in my view, would be the inevitable effect on the attitude of purely scientific minds towards these preliminary theses,—this preamble, as I have said, of definite religions,—were the continued prosecution of our inquiry to lead us after all to entirely negative conclusions, were all our evidence to prove untrustworthy, and all our experiments unsound.

For in the first place it is plain that this new science of which we are endeavouring to lay the foundations stands towards religion in a very different position from that occupied by the rising sciences, such as geology or biology, whose conflict or agreement with natural or revealed religion has furnished matter for so much debate. The discoveries of those sciences can scarcely in themselves add support to a doctrine of man’s soul and immortality, though they may conceivably come into collision with particular forms which that doctrine has assumed. Religion, in short, may be able to assimilate them, but it would in no way have suffered had they proved altogether abortive.

But with our study the case is very different. For, to take the first of the two preliminary theses of religion already referred to, the question whether human evidence as to supernormal occurrences can ever be trusted has been raised by our inquiries in a much more crucial form than when Hume and Paley debated it with reference to historical incidents only. We discuss it with reference to alleged contemporary incidents; we endeavour to evaluate by actual inspection and cross-examination the part which is played in supernormal narratives by the mere love of wonder, “the mythopœic faculty,” the habitual negligence and ignorance of mankind. And if all the evidence offered to us should crumble away on exact investigation—as, for instance, the loudly-vaunted evidence for the marvels connected with Theosophy has crumbled—it will no doubt be questioned whether the narratives on which the historic religions depend for their acceptance could have stood the test of a contemporaneous inquiry of a similarly searching kind.

And more than this, it will not only be maintained that the collapse of our modern evidence to supernormal phenomena discredits all earlier records of the same kind by showing the ease with which such marvels are feigned or imagined, but also that it further discredits those records by making them even more antecedently improbable than they were before. Not only will it be said that the proved fallibility of the modern witnesses illustrates the probable fallibility of the ancient ones, but the failure of the inquiry to elicit any indication that supernormal faculties do now exist in man will pro tanto throw a retrospective improbability on the second of the preliminary theses of religion, which assumes that some such supernormal faculty did at any rate exist in man at a given epoch. It may indeed be urged that such faculties were given for a time, and for a purpose, and were then withdrawn. But the instinct of scientific continuity, which even in the shaping of the solid continents is fain to substitute for deluge and cataclysm the tideway and the ripple and the rain, will rebel against the hypothesis of a bygone age of inward miracles,—a catastrophic interference with the intimate nature of man.

I will illustrate my meaning by a concrete example, which does not involve any actual article of Protestant faith. The ecstacy and the stigmata of St. Francis are an important element in Roman Catholic tradition. They are to some extent paralleled in the present day by the ecstacy and the stigmata of Louise Lateau. And Catholic instinct has discerned that if this modern case be decided to be merely morbid, and in no true sense supernormal, a retrospective discredit will be cast on the earlier legend. The old reluctance of the Catholic Church to submit her phenomena to scientific assessors has therefore to some extent been overcome; and Catholic physicians, under ecclesiastical authority, have discussed Louise Lateau’s case in the forms of an ordinary medical report.

Enough will have been said to indicate the reality of the connection between our inquiries and the preliminary theses of religion. And so far as our positive results go in this direction, they will perhaps carry the more weight in that they are independently obtained, and intended to subserve scientific rather than religious ends;—coming, indeed, from men who have no developed theory of their own to offer, and are merely following the observed facts wherever they may seem to lead. I see no probability, I may add, that our results can ever supply a convincing proof to any specialised form of religion. The utmost that I anticipate is, that they may afford a solid basis of general evidence to the independence of man’s spiritual nature, and its persistence after death, on which basis, at any rate, religions in their specialised forms may be at one with science, and on which the structure of definite revelation (which must be up-built by historical or moral arguments) may conceivably be planted with a firmness which is at present necessarily lacking.

§ 12. I have been speaking thus far of religion in its full sense, as a body of doctrine containing some kind of definite assurance as to an unseen world. But the form of religious thought which specially characterises our own day is somewhat different from this. We are accustomed rather to varying attempts to retain the spirit, the aroma of religion, even if its solid substratum of facts previously supposed provable should have to be abandoned. The discoursers on things spiritual who have been most listened to in our own day—as Carlyle, Emerson, Mazzini, Renan, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Ruskin, &c.,—have been to a very small extent dogmatic on the old lines. They have expressed vague, though lofty, beliefs and aspirations, in which the eye of science may perhaps see little substance or validity, but which nevertheless have been in a certain sense more independent, more spontaneous, than of old, since they are less often prompted by any faith instilled from without, and resemble rather the awakening into fuller consciousness of some inherited and instinctive need.

And this brings us by an easy transition to the next topic, on which I wish to dwell. For I wish to point out that the emotional creed of educated men is becoming divorced from their scientific creed; that just as the old orthodoxy of religion was too narrow to contain men’s knowledge, so now the new orthodoxy of materialistic science is too narrow to contain their feelings and aspirations; and consequently that just as the fabric of religious orthodoxy used to be strained in order to admit the discoveries of geology or astronomy, so now also the obvious deductions of materialistic science are strained or overpassed in order to give sanction to feelings and aspirations which it is found impossible to ignore. My inference will, of course, be that in this vaguer realm of thought, as well as in the more distinctly-defined branches of knowledge which we have already discussed, the time is ripe for some such extension of scientific knowledge as we claim that we are offering here—an extension which, in my view, lifts us above the materialistic standpoint altogether, and which gives at least a possible reality to those subtle intercommunications between spirit and spirit, and even between visible and invisible things, of which Art and Literature are still as full as in any “Age of Faith” which preceded us.

I point, then, to the obvious fact that the spread of Materialism has not called into being Materialists only of those simple types which were commonly anticipated a century since as likely to fill a world of complete secularity.

Materialists, indeed, of that old unflinching temper do exist, and form a powerful and influential body. It would have been strange, indeed, if recent advances in physiology had not evoked new theories of human life, and a new ideal. For the accepted commonplaces of the old-fashioned moralist are being scattered with a ruthless hand. Our free will, over great portions at least of its once supposed extent, is declared to be an illusion. Our highest and most complex emotions are traced to their rudimentary beginnings in the instincts of self-preservation and reproduction. Our vaunted personality itself is seen to depend on a shifting and unstable synergy of a number of nervous centres, the defect of a portion of which centres may alter our character altogether. And meantime Death, on the other hand, has lost none of its invincible terrors. The easy way in which our forefathers would speak of “our mortal and immortal parts” is hard to imitate in face of the accumulating testimony to the existence of the one element in us, and the evanescence of the other. And since the decay and dissolution of man seem now to many minds to be so much more capable of being truly known than his survival or his further evolution, it is natural that much of the weight which once belonged to the prophets of what man hoped should pass to those who can speak with authority on what man needs must fear. Thus “mad-doctors” tend to supplant theologians, and the lives of lunatics are found to have more lessons for us than the lives of saints. For these thinkers know well that man can fall below himself; but that he can rise above himself they can believe no more. A corresponding ideal is gradually created; an ideal of mere sanity and normality, which gets to look on any excessive emotion or fixed idea, any departure from a balanced practicality, with distrust or disfavour, and sometimes rising to a kind of fervour of Philistinism, classes genius itself as a neurosis.

The alienists who have taken this extreme view have usually, perhaps, been of opinion that in thus discrediting the higher flights of imagination or sentiment we are not losing much; that these things are in any case a mere surplusage, and that the ends which life is really capable of attaining can be compassed as well without them. But if the materialistic theory be the true one, these limitations of ideal might well be adopted even by men who would deeply regret what they were thus renouncing. It might well seem that, in abandoning the belief in any spiritual or permanent element in man, it were wise to abandon also that intensity of the affections which is ill-adapted to bonds so perishable and insecure, that reach of imagination which befitted only the illusory dignity which was once attached to human fates.

But in fact, as I have already implied, the characteristic movement of our own country, at any rate, at the present day, is hardly in this direction. Our prevalent temper is not so much materialistic as agnostic; and although this renouncement of all knowledge of invisible things does in a sense leave visible things in sole possession of the field, yet the Agnostic is as far as anyone from being “a hog from Epicurus’ sty.” Rather, instead of sinking into the materialistic ideal of plain sense and physical well-being, the rising schools of thought are transcending that ideal more and more. Altruism in morals, idealism in art, nay, even the sentiment of piety itself, as a decorative grace of life,—all these, it is urged, are consistent with a complete and contented ignorance as to aught beyond the material world.

I need not here embark on the controversy as to how far this aspiration towards “the things of the spirit” is logically consistent with a creed that stops short with the things of sense. It is quite enough for my present purpose to point out that here also, as in the case of more definite religions, we have a system of beliefs and emotions which may indeed be able to accommodate themselves to modern science, but which are in no sense supported thereby; rather which science must regard as, at best, a kind of phosphorescence which plays harmlessly about minds that Nature has developed by other processes and for other ends than these.

For my argument is that here again, as in the case of religion, telepathy, as we affirm it in this book, would be the first indication of a possible scientific basis for much that now lacks not only experimental confirmation, but even plausible analogy. We have seen how much support the preliminary theses of religion may acquire from an assured conviction that the human mind is at least capable of receiving supernormal influences,—is not closed, by its very structure, as the Materialists would tell us, to any “inbreathings of the spirit” which do not appeal to outward eye or ear. And somewhat similar is the added reality which the discovery of telepathy gives to the higher flights, the subtler shades, of mere earthly emotion.

“Star to star vibrates light; may soul to soul

Strike thro’ some finer element of her own?”

The lover, the poet, the enthusiast in any generous cause, has in every age unconsciously answered Lord Tennyson’s question for himself. To some men, as to Goethe, the assurance of this subtle intercommunication has come with vivid distinctness in some passion-shaken hour. Others, as Bacon, have seemed to gather it from the imperceptible indicia of a lifelong contemplation of man. But the step which actual experimentation, the actual collection and collation of evidence, has now, as we believe, effected, is a greater one than could have been achieved by any individual intuition of bard or sage. For we have for the first time a firm foothold in this impalpable realm; we know that these unuttered messages do truly travel, that these emotions mix and spread; and though we refrain as yet from further dwelling on the corollaries of this far-reaching law, it is not because such speculations need any longer be baseless, but because we desire to set forth the proof of our theorem in full detail before we do more than hint at the new fields which it opens to human thought.

§ 13. Pausing, therefore, on the threshold of these vaguer promises, I may indicate another direction, in which few will deny that a systematic investigation like ours ought to produce results eminently salutary. It ought to be as much our business to check the growth of error as to promote the discovery of truth. And there is plenty of evidence to show that so long as we omit to subject all alleged supernormal phenomena to a thorough comparative scrutiny, we are not merely postponing a possible gain, but permitting an unquestioned evil.

It should surely be needless in the present day to point out that no attempt to discourage inquiry into any given subject which strongly interests mankind, will in reality divert attention from the topic thus tabooed. The savant or the preacher may influence the readers of scientific hand-books, or the members of church congregations, but outside that circle the subject will be pursued with the more excited eagerness because regulating knowledge and experienced guidance are withdrawn.

And thus it has been with our supernormal phenomena. The men who claim to have experienced them have not been content to dismiss them as unseasonable or unimportant. They have not relegated them into the background of their lives as readily as the physiologist has relegated them into a few paragraphs at the end of a chapter. On the contrary, they have brooded over them, distorted them, misinterpreted them. Where savants have minimised, they have magnified, and the perplexing modes of marvel which the textbooks ignore, have become, as it were, the ganglia from which all kinds of strange opinions ramify and spread.

The number of persons whose minds have been actually upset either by genuine psychical phenomena, or by their fraudulent imitation, is perhaps not large. But the mischief done is by no means confined to these extreme cases. It is mischievous, surely—it clashes roughly with our respect for human reason, and our belief in human progress—that religions should spring up, forms of worship be established, which in effect do but perpetuate a mistake and consecrate a misapprehension, which carry men not forward, but backward in their conception of unseen things.

The time has not yet come for an attempt to trace in detail the perversion which each branch of these supernormal phenomena has undergone in ardent minds;—the claims to sanctity, revelation, prophecy, which a series of enthusiasts, and of charlatans, have based on each class of marvels in turn. But two forms of creed already mentioned may again be cited as convenient examples—the Irvingite faith of the misinterpretation of automatism, the Swedenborgian of the misinterpretation of (so-called) clairvoyance. Still more singular have been the resultant beliefs when to the assemblage of purely psychical marvels a physical ingredient has been added, of a more disputable kind. For linked in various ways with records of automatic cerebration, of apparitions, of vision and revelation, come accounts of objective sounds, of measurable movements, which may well seem an unwarrantable intrusion into the steady order of the ponderable world. And in the year 1848 certain events, whose precise nature is still in dispute, occurred in America, in consequence of which many persons were led to believe that under appropriate circumstances these sounds, these movements, these tangible apparitions, could be evoked or reproduced at will. On this basis the creed of “Modern Spiritualism” has been upbuilt. And here arises the pressing question—notoriously still undecided, difficult and complex beyond any anticipation—as to whether supernormal phenomena of this physical kind do in fact occur at all; or whether they are in all cases—as they undoubtedly have been in many cases—the product of mere fraud or delusion. This question, as it seems to us, is one to which we are bound to give our most careful attention; and if we have as yet failed to attain a decisive view, it is not for want of laborious observation, continued by several of us throughout many years. But we are unwilling to pronounce until we have had ample opportunities—opportunities which so far we have for the most part sought in vain—of investigating phenomena obtained through private sources, and free, at any rate, from the specific suspicion to which the presence of a “paid medium” inevitably gives rise.

I need not add further illustrations of the cautionary, the critical attitude which befits such a Society as ours at the present juncture. This attitude is in one way unavoidably ungracious; for it has sometimes precluded us from availing ourselves of the labours of predecessors whose zeal and industry we should have been glad to praise. The time, we hope, will come when enough of daylight shall shine upon our path to make possible a discriminating survey of the tracks which scattered seekers have struck out for themselves in the confusion and dimness of dawn. At present we have mainly to take heed that our own groping course shall at least avoid the pitfalls into which others have fallen. Anything like a distribution of awards of merit would be obviously premature on the part of men whose best hope must be that they may conduct the inquiry into a road firm enough to enable others rapidly to outstrip them.

II.

§ 14. Enough, however, has now been said to indicate the general tenor of the task which the Society for Psychical Research has undertaken. It remains to indicate the place which the present work occupies in the allotted field, and the reasons for offering it to public consideration at this early stage of our inquiry.

We could not, of course, predict or pre-arrange the order in which opportunities of successful investigation might occur to the searchers in this labyrinth of the unknown. Among the groping experiments which seemed to have only too often led to mere mistake and confusion,—the “thousand pathways”

“qua signa sequendi Falleret indeprensus et inremeabilis error,”—

it was not easy to choose with confidence our adit of exploration. The approach which proved most quickly productive was one from which it might have seemed that there was little indeed to hope. A kind of drawing-room game sprang up—it is hard to say whence—a method of directing a subject to perform a desired act by a contact so slight that no conscious impulsion was either received or given. Careful observers soon ranked the “willing-game” as an illustration of involuntary muscular action on the willer’s part, affording a guidance to which the subject yielded sometimes without being aware of it. But while the modus operandi of public exhibitions of this misnamed “thought-reading” was not difficult to detect, Professor Barrett was one of the first who—while recognising all these sources of error—urged the duty of persistent watching for any residuum of true thought-transference which might from time to time appear. As will be seen from Chap. II. of this book it was not till after some six years of inquiry and experiment (1876-82) that definite proof of thought-transference in the normal state could be placed before the world. This was done in an article in the Nineteenth Century for June, 1882, signed by Professor Barrett, Mr. Gurney, and myself. The phenomenon of transmission of thought or sensation without the agency of the recognised organs of sense had been previously recorded in connection with the mesmeric state, but, so far as we know, its occasional occurrence in the normal state was now for the first time maintained on the strength of definite experiment. And the four years 1882-1886 have witnessed a great extension of those experiments, which no longer rest on the integrity and capacity of the earliest group of observers alone.

§ 15. The foundation of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882 gave an opportunity to Mr. Gurney and myself, as Hon. Secs. of a Literary Committee, to invite from the general public records of apparitions at or after death, and other abnormal occurrences. On reviewing the evidence thus obtained we were struck with the great predominance of alleged apparitions at or near the moment of death. And a new light seemed to be thrown on these phenomena by the unexpected frequency of accounts of apparitions of living persons, coincident with moments of danger or crisis. We were led to infer a strong analogy between our experimental cases of thought-transference and some of these spontaneous cases of what we call telepathy, or transference of a shock or impulse from one living person to another person at such a distance or under such conditions as to negative the possibility of any ordinary mode of transmission. An article, signed by Mr. Gurney and myself, in the Fortnightly Review for March, 1883, gave a first expression to the analogy thus suggested. The task of collection and scrutiny grew on our hands; Mr. Podmore undertook to share our labours; and the Council of the Society for Psychical Research requested us to embody the evidence received in a substantive work.

It will be seen, then, that the theory of Telepathy, experimental and spontaneous, which forms the main topic of this book, was not chosen as our theme by any arbitrary process of selection, but was irresistibly suggested by the abundance and the convergence of evidence tending to prove that special thesis. We were, and are, equally anxious to inquire into many other alleged marvels—clairvoyance, haunted houses, Spiritualistic phenomena, &c.—but telepathy is the subject which has first shown itself capable of investigation appearing to lead to a positive result; and it seemed well to arrange its evidence with sufficient fulness to afford at least a solid groundwork for further inquiry.

And having been led to this choice by the nature of the actual evidence before us, we may recognise that there is some propriety in dealing first with an issue which, complex though it is, is yet simple as compared to other articles of our programme. For the fact, if it be one, of the direct action of mind upon mind has at least a generality which makes it possible that, like the law of atomic combination in chemistry, it may be a generalisation which, though grasped at first in a very simplified and imperfect fashion, may prove to have been the essential pre-requisite of future progress.

§ 16. In a certain sense it may be said that this hidden action of one mind on another comes next in order of psychical discovery to the hidden action of the mind within itself. It will be remembered that the earliest scientific attempts to explain the phenomena of so-called Spiritualism referred them mainly to “unconscious cerebration,” (Carpenter,) or to what was virtually the same thing, “unconscious muscular action” (Faraday).

Now these theories, in my view, were, so far as they went, not only legitimate, but the most logical which could have been suggested to explain the scanty evidence with which alone Faraday and Carpenter attempted to deal. This unconscious action of the mind was in reality the first thing which it was needful to take into account in approaching supernormal phenomena. I believe, indeed, that our knowledge of those hidden processes of mentation is still in its infancy, and I have elsewhere endeavoured to assign a wider range than orthodox science has yet admitted to the mind’s unconscious operation.¹ But the result of this further analysis has been (as I hold) not to show that ordinary physiological considerations will suffice (as Dr. Carpenter seems to suppose) to explain all the psychical problems involved, but rather to reveal the fact that these unconscious operations of the mind do not follow the familiar channels alone, but are themselves the facilitation or the starting-point of operations which to science are wholly new.

To state the matter broadly, so as to include in a common formula the unremembered utterances of the hypnotic subject, and the involuntary writings of the waking automatist, I would maintain that when the horizon of consciousness is altered, the opening field of view is not always or wholly filled by a mere mirage or refraction of objects already familiar, but does, on rare occasions, include new objects, as real as the old. And amongst the novel energies thus liberated, the power of entering into direct communication with other intelligences seems to stand plainly forth. Among the objects in the new prospect are fragments of the thoughts and feelings of distant minds. It seems, at any rate, that some element of telepathy is perpetually meeting us throughout the whole range of these inquiries. In the first place, thought-transference is the only supernormal phenomenon which we have as yet acquired the power of inducing, even occasionally, in the normal state. It meets us also in the hypnotic trance, under the various forms of “community of sensation,” “silent willing,” and the like. Among the alleged cases of “mesmeric clairvoyance” the communication of pictures of places from operator to subject seems the least uncertain ground. And again, among phenomena commonly attributed to “spirits,” (but many of which may perhaps be more safely ascribed to the automatic agency of the sensitive himself,) communication of thought still furnishes our best clue to “trance-speaking,” “clairvoyant vision,” answers to mental questions and the like. It need not, therefore, surprise us if, even in a field so apparently remote from all ordinary analogies as that of apparitions and death-wraiths, we still find that telepathy affords our most satisfactory clue.

§ 17. And here would seem to be the fitting place to explain why we have given the title of “Phantasms of the Living” to a group of records most of which will present themselves to the ordinary reader as narratives of apparitions of the dead.

When we began, in a manner to be presently described, to collect accounts of experiences which our informants regarded as inexplicable by ordinary laws, we were of course ignorant as to what forms these experiences would mainly take. But after printing and considering over two thousand depositions which seemed primâ facie to deserve attention, we find that more than half of them are narratives of appearances or other impressions coincident either with the death of the person seen or with some critical moment in his life-history.

The value of the accounts of apparitions after death is lessened, moreover, by a consideration which is obvious enough as soon as these narratives come to be critically considered. The difficulty in dealing with all these hallucinations—with all appearances to which no persistent three-dimensional reality corresponds—is to determine whether they are veridical, or truth-telling—whether, that is, they do in fact correspond to some action which is going on in some other place or on some other plane of being;—or whether, on the other hand, they are merely morbid or casual—the random and meaningless fictions of an over-stimulated eye or brain. Now, in the case of apparitions at the moment of death or crisis, we have at any rate an objective fact to look to. If we can prove that a great number of apparitions coincide with the death of the person seen, we may fairly say, as we do say, that chance alone cannot explain this coincidence, and that there is a causal connection between the two events. But if I have a vision of a friend recently dead, and on whom my thoughts have been dwelling, we cannot be sure that this may not be a merely delusive hallucination—the mere offspring of my own brooding sorrow. In order to get at all nearly the same degree of evidence for a dead person’s appearance that we can get for a dying person’s appearance, it seems necessary that the apparition should either communicate some fact known only to the deceased, or should be noted independently by more than one person at once or successively. And our evidence of this kind is at present scarcely sufficient to support any assured conclusion.¹

When, therefore, we are considering whether the phantasms of dying persons may most fitly be considered as phantasms of the dead or of the living, we find little support from analogy on the side of posthumous apparitions. And on the other hand, as already hinted, we have many cases where the apparition has coincided with violent shocks,—carriage accidents, fainting fits, epileptic fits, &c., which nevertheless left the agent,—as we call the person whose semblance is seen,—as much alive as before. In some cases the accident is almost a fatal one; as when a man’s phantom is seen at the moment when he is half-drowned and insensible. In such a case it would seem illogical to allow the mere fact of his restoration or non-restoration to life to rank his phantom as that of a living person in the one case, of a dead person in the other. It seems simpler to suppose that if two men fall overboard to-day and their respective phantoms are seen by their friends at the moment,—then, though one man should be restored to life and the other not,—yet if the first phantom was that of a living man, so also was the second.

Nay more, even if the apparition be seen some hours later than the moment of apparent death, there are still reasons which prevent us from decisively classing it as the apparition of a dead man. In the first place, the moment of actual death is a very uncertain thing. When the heart’s action stops the organism continues for some time in a state very different from that of ordinary inanimate matter. In such an inquiry as ours it is safer to speak, not of death, but of “the process of dissolution,” and to allow for the possible prolongation of some form of psychical energy even when, for instance, the attempt to restore respiration to a drowned man has definitely failed. And in the second place, we find in the case of phantasms corresponding to some accident or crisis which befalls a living friend, that there seems often to be a latent period before the phantasm becomes definite or externalised to the percipient’s eye or ear. Sometimes a vague malaise seems first to be generated, and then when other stimuli are deadened,—as at night or in some period of repose,—the indefinite grief or uneasiness takes shape in the voice or figure of the friend who in fact passed through his moment of peril some hours before. It is quite possible that a deferment of this kind may sometimes intervene between the moment of death and the phantasmal announcement thereof to a distant friend.

These, then, are reasons, suggested by actual experience, for ascribing our phantasms at death to living rather than to dead men. And there is another consideration, of a more general order, which points in the same direction. We must not rashly multiply the problems involved in this difficult inquiry. Now Science, it is needless to say, offers no assurance that man survives the tomb; and although in Christian countries our survival is an established doctrine, this does not carry with it any dogma as to the possibility that communications should reach us from departed spirits. The hypothesis, then, that apparitions are ever directly caused by dead persons is one which ordinary scientific caution bids us to be very slow in introducing. Should it afterwards be established that departed spirits can communicate with us, the interpretation placed upon various cases contained in these volumes may need revision. But for the present it is certainly safer to inquire how far they can be explained by the influences or impressions which, as we know by actual experiment, living persons can under certain circumstances exert or effect on one another, in those obscure supersensory modes which we have provisionally massed together under the title of Telepathy.

§ 18. The main theses of this book, then, are now capable of being stated in a very simple form.

I. Experiment proves that telepathy—the supersensory ¹ transference of thoughts and feelings from one mind to another,—is a fact in Nature.

II. Testimony proves that phantasms (impressions, voices, or figures) of persons undergoing some crisis,—especially death,—are perceived by their friends and relatives with a frequency which mere chance cannot explain.

III. These phantasms then, whatever else they may be, are instances of the supersensory action of one mind on another. The second thesis therefore confirms, and is confirmed by, the first. For if telepathy exists, we should anticipate that it would exhibit some spontaneous manifestations, on a scale more striking than our experimental ones. And, on the other hand, apparitions are rendered more credible and comprehensible by an analogy which for the first time links them with the results of actual experiment.

Such are the central theses of this work,—theses on which its authors, and the friends whom they have mainly consulted, are in entire agreement. The first thesis may, of course, be impugned by urging that our experiments are fallacious. The second thesis may be impugned by urging that our testimony is insufficient. The third thesis, as I have here worded it, is hardly open to separate attack; being a corollary which readily follows if the first two theses are taken as proved.

This, however, is only the case so long as the third thesis, which asserts the analogy between thought-transference and apparitions—between experimental and spontaneous telepathy—is stated in a vague and general form. So soon as we attempt to give more precision to this analogy—to discuss how far the unknown agency at work can be supposed to be the same in both cases—or how far the apparitions may be referable to quite other, though cognate, laws,—we enter on a field where even those who have accepted the analogy in general terms are likely to find the evidence leading them to somewhat divergent conclusions. Of two men independently studying our records of apparitions, the one will almost inevitably press their analogy to simple telepathy further than the other. And each will be able to plead that he has been guided as far as possible by an instinct of scientific caution in thus judging of matters strange and new. The first will say that “causes are not to be multiplied without necessity,” and that we have now in telepathy a vera causa whose furthest possibilities we ought to exhaust before invoking still stranger, still remoter agencies, whose very existence we are not in a position to prove. He will feel bound therefore to dwell on the noints on which our knowledge either of telepathy, or of the mechanism of hallucinations in general, throws some light; and he will set aside as at present inexplicable such peculiarities of our evidence as cannot well be brought within this scheme.

The second inquirer, on the other hand, will perhaps feel strongly that telepathy, as we now know it, is probably little more than a mere preliminary conception, a simplified mode of representing to ourselves a group of phenomena which, as involving relations between minds, may probably be more complex than those which involve even the highest known forms of matter. He will feel that, while we hold one clue alone, we must be careful not to overrate its efficacy; we must be on the watch for other approaches, for hints of inter-relation between disparate and scattered phenomena.

It is to the first of these two attitudes of mind,—the attitude which deprecates extraneous theorising,—that Mr. Gurney and Mr. Podmore have inclined; and the committal of the bulk of this work to Mr. Gurney’s execution indicates not only that he has been able to devote the greatest amount of time and energy to the task, but also that his view is on the whole the most nearly central among the opinions which we have felt it incumbent on us to consult. We have no wish, however, to affect a closer agreement than actually exists; and in a “Note on a Suggested Mode of Psychical Interaction,” which will be found in Vol. II., I shall submit a view which differs from Mr. Gurney’s on some theoretical points.

§ 19. The theories contained in this book, however, bear a small proportion to the mass of collected facts. A few words as to our method of collection may here precede Mr. Gurney’s full discussion (Chapter IV.) of the peculiar difficulties to which our evidence is exposed.

It soon became evident that if our collection was to be satisfactory it must consist mainly of cases collected by ourselves, and of a great number of such cases. The apparitions at death, &c., recorded by previous writers, are enough, indeed, to show that scattered incidents of the kind have obtained credence in many ages and countries. But they have never been collected and sifted with any systematic care; and few of them reach an evidential standard which could justify us in laying them before our readers. And even had the existing stock of testimony been large and well-assured, it would still have been needful for us to collect our own specimens in situ,—to see, talk with, and correspond with the persons to whose strange experiences so much weight was to be given. This task of personal inquiry,—whose traces will, we hope, be sufficiently apparent throughout the present work,—has stretched itself out beyond expectation, but has also enabled us to speak with a confidence which could not have been otherwise acquired. One of its advantages is the security thus gained as to the bona fides of the witnesses concerned. They have practically placed themselves upon their honour; nor need we doubt that the experiences have been, as a rule, recounted in all sincerity. As to unintentional errors of observation and memory, Mr. Gurney’s discussion will at least show that we have had abundant opportunities of learning how wide a margin must be left for human carelessness, forgetfulness, credulity. “God forbid,” said the flute-player to Philip of Macedon, “that your Majesty should know these things as well as I!”

It must not, however, be inferred from what has been said that our informants as a body have shown themselves less shrewd or less accurate than the generality of mankind. On the contrary, we have observed with pleasure that our somewhat persistent and probing method of inquiry has usually repelled the sentimental or crazy wonder-mongers who hang about the outskirts of such a subject as this; while it has met with cordial response from an unexpected number of persons who feel with reason that the very mystery which surrounds these incidents makes it additionally important that they should be recounted with sobriety and care. The straightforward style in which most of our informants have couched their narratives, as well as the honoured names which some of them bear, may enable the reader to share something of the confidence which a closer contact with the facts has inspired in our own minds.

Again, it seemed necessary that the collection offered to the public should be a very large one, even at the cost of including in a Supplement some remote or second-hand cases besides the first-hand cases which alone are admitted into the chapters of this book. If, indeed, our object had been simply to make out a case for the connection of deaths with apparitions, we might have offered a less assailable front, and should certainly have spared ourselves much trouble, had we confined ourselves to giving in detail a few of the best-attested instances. But what we desired was not precisely this. We hope, no doubt, that most of our readers may ultimately be led to conclusions resembling our own. But before our conclusions can expect to gain general acceptance, many other hypotheses will doubtless be advanced, and coincidence, superstition, fraud, hysteria, will be invoked in various combinations to explain the evidence given here. We think, therefore, that it is our duty in so new a subject to afford full material for hypotheses discordant with our own; to set forth cases drawn from so wide a range of society, and embracing such a variety of circumstances, as to afford scope for every mode of origination or development of these narratives which the critic may suggest.

Furthermore, the whole subject of hallucinations of the sane—which hitherto has received very scanty treatment—seems fairly to belong to our subject, and has been treated by Mr. Gurney in Chap. XI. We have throughout contended that a knowledge of abnormal or merely morbid phenomena is an indispensable pre-requisite for the treating of any supernormal operations which may be found to exist under somewhat similar forms of manifestation.

Once more, it was plainly desirable to inquire whether hypotheses, now admitted to be erroneous, had ever been based in past times on evidence in any way comparable to that which we have adduced. The belief in witchcraft, from its wide extent and its nearness to our own times, is the most plausible instance of such a parallelism. And Mr. Gurney, in his Note on Chapter IV., has given the results of an analysis of witch-literature more laborious than previous authors had thought it worth while to undertake. The result is remarkable; for it appears that the only marvels for which respectable testimony was adduced consist obviously of ignorant descriptions of hypnotic and epileptiform phenomena now becoming familiar to science; while as to the monstrous stories—copied from one uncritical writer into another—which have given to this confused record of hypnotic and hysterical illusions the special aromas (so to say) of witchcraft or lycanthropy,—these prodigies have scarcely ever the slightest claim to be founded on any first-hand evidence at all.

§ 20. But while the material here offered for forming an opinion on all these points is, no doubt, much larger than previous writers have been at the pains to amass, we are anxious, nevertheless, to state explicitly that we regard this present collection of facts as merely preliminary; this present work as merely opening out a novel subject; these researches of a few persons during a few years as the mere first instalment of inquiries which will need repetition and reinforcement to an extent which none of us can as yet foresee.

A change in the scientific outlook so considerable as that to which these volumes point must needs take time to accomplish. Time is needed not only to spread the knowledge of new facts, but also to acclimatise new conceptions in the individual mind. Such, at least, has been our own experience; and since the evidence which has come to us slowly and piecemeal is here presented to other minds suddenly and in a mass, we must needs expect that its acceptance by them will be a partial and gradual thing. What we hope for first is an increase in the number of those who are willing to aid us in our labours; we trust that the fellow-workers in many lands to whom we already owe so much may be encouraged to further collection of testimony, renewed experiment, when they see these experiments confirming one another in London, Paris, Berlin,—this testimony vouching for cognate incidents from New York to New Zealand, and from Manchester to Calcutta.

With each year of experiment and registration we may hope that our results will assume a more definite shape—that there will be less of the vagueness and confusion inevitable at the beginning of a novel line of research, but naturally distasteful to the savant accustomed to proceed by measurable increments of knowledge from experimental bases already assured. Such an one, if he reads this book, may feel as though he had been called away from an ordnance survey, conducted with a competent staff and familiar instruments, to plough slowly with inexperienced mariners through some strange ocean where beds of entangling seaweed cumber the trackless way. We accept the analogy; but we would remind him that even floating weeds of novel genera may foreshow a land unknown; and that it was not without ultimate gain to men that the straining keels of Columbus first pressed through the Sargasso Sea.

§ 21. Yet one word more. This book is not addressed to savants alone, and it may repel many readers on quite other than scientific grounds. Attempting as we do to carry the reign of Law into a sanctuary of belief and emotion which has never thus been invaded in detail,—lying in wait, as it were; to catch the last impulse of the dying, and to question the serenity of the dead,—we may seem to be incurring the poet’s curse on the man “who would peep and botanize upon his mother’s grave,”—to be touching the Ark of sacred mysteries with hands stained with labour in the profane and common field.

How often have men thus feared that Nature’s wonders would be degraded by being closelier looked into! How often, again, have they learnt that the truth was higher than their imagination; and that it is man’s work, but never Nature’s, which to be magnificent must remain unknown! How would a disciple of Aristotle,—fresh from his master’s conception of the fixed stars as types of godhead,—of an inhabitance by pure existences of a supernal world of their own,—how would he have scorned the proposal to learn more of those stars by dint of the generation of fetid gases and the sedulous minuteness of spectroscopic analysis! Yet how poor, how fragmentary were Aristotle’s fancies compared with our conception, thus gained, of cosmic unity! our vibrant message from Sirius and Orion by the heraldry of the kindred flame! Those imagined gods are gone; but the spectacle of the starry heavens has become for us so moving in its immensity that philosophers, at a loss for terms of wonder, have ranked it with the Moral Law.

If man, then, shall attempt to sound and fathom the depths that lie not without him, but within, analogy may surely warn him that the first attempts of his rude psychoscopes to give precision and actuality to thought will grope among “beggarly elements,”—will be concerned with things grotesque, or trivial, or obscure. Yet here also one handsbreadth of reality gives better footing than all the castles of our dream; here also by beginning with the least things we shall best learn how great things may remain to do.

The insentient has awoke, we know not how, into sentiency; the sentient into the fuller consciousness of human minds. Yet even human self-consciousness remains a recent, a perfunctory, a superficial thing; and we must first reconstitute our conception of the microcosm, as of the macrocosm, before we can enter on those “high capacious powers” which, I believe, “lie folded up in man.”

F. W. H. M.

¹ The analogy will be closer if we suppose that the second half is lit, not dimly but from within,—since in one sense consciousness gives us more information as to the psychical than as to the physical side of life, though it is information of a different quality.

¹ “Hier gilt vielmehr ein Gesetz unbegrenzter Neuschöpfung geistiger Energie, welches nur durch die sinnliche Bestimmtheit des geistigen Lebens gewisse Hemmungen erleidet.”—Wundt, Logik, II., p. 507.

² “Nicht das geistige Leben ist ein Erzeugniss der physischen Organisation, sondern diese ist in allem, was sie an zweckvollen Einrichtungen der Selbstregulirung und der Energie-verwerthung vor den Subetanzcomplexen der unorganischen Natur voraushat, eine geistige Schöpfung.”—Wundt, Logik, II., p. 471.

¹ The French Société de Psychologie Physiologique, whose President is M. Charcot, has already published several observations with an important bearing on our subject, some of which will be found in Vol. ii. of this work.

¹ “I have ventured to coin the word ‘supernormal’ to be applied to phenomena which are beyond what usually happens—beyond, that is, in the sense of suggesting unknown psychical laws. It is thus formed on the analogy of abnormal. When we speak of an abnormal phenomenon we do not mean one which contravenes natural laws, but one which exhibits them in an unusual or inexplicable form. Similarly by a supernormal phenomenon, I mean, not one which overrides natural laws, for I believe no such phenomenon to exist, but one which exhibits the action of laws higher, in a psychical aspect, than are discerned in action in every-day life. By higher (either in a psychical or in a physiological sense), I mean ‘apparently belonging to a more advanced stage of evolution.’ ”—Proceedings of the S.P.R., Vol. iii., p. 30. Throughout this treatise we naturally need a designation for phenomena which are inexplicable by recognised physiological laws, and belong to the general group into the nature of which we are inquiring. The term psychical (which is liable to misapprehension even in the title of our Society) can hardly be used without apology in this specialised sense. The occasional introduction of the word supernormal may perhaps be excused.

¹ Proceedings of the S.P.R., Vol. iii.

¹ See papers on “Automatic Writing” in Proceedings of the S.P.R., Vols. ii. and iii.

¹ See Proceedings of the S.P.R., Vols. ii. and iii.

¹ See Mrs. Sidgwick’s paper on “The Evidence, collected by the Society, for Phantasms of the Dead,” in Proceedings of the S.P.R., Vol. iii.

¹ By “supersensory” I mean “independent of therecognised channels of sense.” I do not mean to assert that telepathic perception either is or is not analogous to sensory perception of the recognised kinds.