The arresting influence of these views when backed by honest, sincere, and eminent men of the type of Mr. Wallace, and when also supported by several prominent men of science, renders it desirable to show that modern psychism is but savage animism “writ large,” and wholly explicable on the theory of continuity. In his book on Miracles and Modern Spiritualism, of which a revised edition, with chapters on Apparitions and Phantasms, was issued in 1895, Mr. Wallace contends that “Spiritualism, if true, furnishes such proofs of the existence of ethereal beings and of their power to act upon matter, as must revolutionise philosophy. It demonstrates the actuality of forms of matter and modes of being before inconceivable; it demonstrates mind without brain, and intelligence disconnected from what we know as the material body; and it thus cuts away all presumption against our continued existence after the physical body is disorganised and dissolved. Yet more, it demonstrates, as completely as the fact can be demonstrated, that the so-called dead are still alive; that our friends are still with us, though unseen, and guide and strengthen us when, owing to absence of proper conditions, they cannot make their presence known. It thus furnishes a proof of a future life which so many crave, and for want of which so many live and die in anxious doubt, so many in positive disbelief. It substitutes a definite, real, and practical conviction for a vague, theoretical, and unsatisfying faith. It furnishes actual knowledge on a matter of vital importance to all men, and as to which the wisest men and most advanced thinkers have held, and still hold, that no knowledge was attainable.”
This claim, this tremendous claim, on behalf of the phenomena of spiritualism to supply an answer to “the question of questions; the ascertainment of man’s relation to the universe of things; whence our race has come; to what goal we are tending,” rests on the assumption with which Mr. Wallace starts, “Spiritualism, if true.”
The essay from which the above passages are quoted is preceded by references in detail to a considerable number of cases of “the appearance of preterhuman or spiritual beings,” the evidence of which “is as good and definite as it is possible for any evidence of any fact to be.” These ghost-stories, contrasted with the full-flavoured eerie tales of old, are feebly monotonous. The apparatus of the medium is limited: the phenomena are largely of the “horse-play” order. Through the whole series we vainly seek for some ennobling and exalting conception of a life beyond, some glimpses “behind the veil,” only to find that the shades are but diluted or vulgarized parodies of ourselves; or that “the filthy are filthy still,” like the departed bargee whose “communicating intelligence” (we quote from a recent book on spiritualism entitled The Great Secret) was as coarse-mouthed as when in the flesh. In considering, if it be deemed worth while, the evidence of genuineness of the occurrences, we are thrown, not on the honesty, but on the competency of the witnesses. The most eminent among these show themselves persons of undisciplined emotions. The distinguished physicist, Professor Oliver Lodge, who has been described to the writer by an intimate friend of the Professor as “longing to believe something,” argues that in dealing with psychical phenomena, a hazy, muzzy state of mind is better than a mind “keenly awake” and “on the spot” (see Address to the Society for Psychical Research, Proceedings, part xxvi, pp. 14, 15). With this may be compared a Mohammedan receipt for summoning spirits given in Klunzinger’s Upper Egypt (p. 386): “Fast seven days in a lonely place, and take incense with you. Read a chapter 1001 times from the Koran. That is the secret, and you will see indescribable wonders; drums will be beaten beside you, and flags hoisted over your head, and you will see spirits.” Thus have the dreamy Oriental Moslem and the self-hypnotized Western professor met together to elicit truth from trance.
Concerning the competence of Mr. Wallace himself to weigh, unbiassed, the evidence which comes before him, it suffices to cite the case of Eusapia Paladino, a Neapolitan “medium,” who, in the words of one of her most ardent dupes, became “the unexpected instrument of driving conviction as to the reality of psychical manifestations by the invisible into the minds of many scientists.” A number of distinguished savants testified to the genuineness of the woman’s performances in Professor Richet’s cottage on the Ile Roubant in the autumn of 1893. It was the serious and complete conviction of all of them (Lodge, Richet, Ochorowicz, and others) that “on no single occasion during the occurrence of an event recorded by them was a hand of Eusapia’s free to execute any trick whatever.” Mr. Maskelyne, such testimony notwithstanding, declared that the whole business was “the sorriest of trickeries,” and, to the credit of the Society for Psychical Research, it undertook the expense of bringing Eusapia to England for the purpose of testing the genuineness of her doings. She was taken to a house in Cambridge, and detected as a vulgar impostor. Yet Mr. Wallace, in the new edition of his Miracles and Modern Spiritualism, describes all the phenomena occurring at Professor Richet’s house as “not explicable as the result of any known physical causes,” and, in a subsequent explanatory letter to the Daily Chronicle of 24th of January, 1896, expresses the opinion that “the Cambridge experiments, so far as they are recorded, only prove that Eusapia might have deceived, not that she actually and consciously did so.” The integrity of Mr. Wallace is not to be doubted, but what becomes of his competence to judge when prejudice blinds itself to facts? Spiritualism, if true, demonstrates this and that about the unseen; but spiritualism, proved to be untrue, lacks half the dexterity of an astute conjurer, and the whole of his honesty. Every scientific man recognises the doctrine of the Conservation of Energy as a fundamental canon. But with those who regard the phenomena of Spiritualism as “not explicable” except by supernatural causes, it would seem that that doctrine, as also the not unimportant conditions of Time and Space, count for nothing. When we read their reports of the behaviour of mediums who project (of course, in the dark) “abnormal temporary prolongations” like pseudopodia, we should feel alike depressed and confounded were there not abundant proofs what wholly untrustworthy observers scientific specialists can be outside their own domain. As the writer has remarked elsewhere, minds of this type must be built in water-tight compartments. They show how, even in the higher culture, the force of a dominant idea may suspend or narcotize the reason and judgment, and contribute to the rise and spread of another of the epidemic delusions of which history supplies warning examples.
They also show that man’s senses have been his arch-deceivers, and his preconceptions their abettors, throughout human history; that advance has been possible only as he has escaped through the discipline of the intellect from the illusive impressions about phenomena which the senses convey. Upon this matter the words of the late Dr. Carpenter may be quoted, words the more weighty because they are the utterance of a man whose philosophy was influenced by deep religious convictions: “With every disposition to accept facts when I could once clearly satisfy myself that they were facts, I have had to come to the conclusion that whenever I have been permitted to employ such tests as I should employ in any scientific investigation, there was either intentional deception on the part of interested persons, or else self-deception on the part of persons who were very sober-minded and rational upon all ordinary affairs of life.” He adds further: “It has been my business lately to inquire into the mental condition of some of the individuals who have reported the most remarkable occurrences. I cannot—it would not be fair—say all I could with regard to that mental condition; but I can only say this, that it all fits in perfectly well with the result of my previous studies upon the subject, viz., that there is nothing too strange to be believed by those who have once surrendered their judgment to the extent of accepting as credible things which common sense tells us are entirely incredible.”
The fact abides that the great mass of supernatural beliefs which have persisted from the lower culture till now, and which are still held by an overwhelming majority of civilized mankind, are referable to causes concomitant with man’s mental development: causes operative throughout his history. The low intellectual environment of his barbaric past was constant for thousands of years, and his adaptation thereto was complete. The intrusion of the scientific method in its application to man disturbed that equilibrium. But this, as yet, only superficially. Like the foraminifera that persist in the ocean depths, the great majority of mankind have remained, but slightly, if at all, modified; thus illustrating the truth of the doctrine of evolution in their psychical history. (For that doctrine does not imply all-round continuous advance. “Let us never forget,” Mr. Spencer says in Social Statics, “that the law is—adaptation to circumstances, be they what they may.”) Therefore the superstitions that still dominate the life of man, even in so-called civilized centres, are no stumbling-blocks to us. They are supports along the path of inquiry, because we account for their persistence. Thought and feeling have a common base, because man is a unit, not a duality. But the exercise of the one has been active from the beginnings of his history—indeed we know not at what point backward we can classify it as human or quasi-human—while the other, speaking comparatively, has but recently been called into play. So far as its influence on the modern World goes, may we not say that it began at least in the domain of scientific naturalism with the Ionian philosophers? Emotionally, we are hundreds of thousands of years old; rationally, we are embryos.
In other words, man wondered countless ages before he reasoned; because feeling travels along the line of least resistance, while thought, or the challenge by inquiry—therefore the assumption that there may be two sides to a question—must pursue a path obstructed by the dominance of custom, the force of imitation, and the strength of prejudice and fear. It is here that anthropology, notably that psychical branch of it comprehended under folk-lore, takes up the cue from the momentous doctrine of heredity; explains the persistence of the primitive; and the causes of man’s tardy escape from the illusions of the senses, and the general conservatism of human nature. “Born into life! in vain, Opinions, those or these, unalter’d to retain the obstinate mind decrees,” as in the striking illustration cited in Heine’s Travel-Pictures. “A few years ago Bullock dug up an ancient stone idol in Mexico, and the next day he found that it had been crowned during the night with flowers. And yet the Spaniard had exterminated the old Mexican religion with fire and sword, and for three centuries had been engaged in ploughing and harrowing their minds and implanting the seed of Christianity.” The causes of error and delusion, and of the spiritual nightmares of olden time, being made clear, there is begotten a generous sympathy with that which empirical notions of human nature attributed to wilfulness or to man’s fall from a high estate. Superstitions which are the outcome of ignorance can only awaken pity. Where the corrective of knowledge is absent, we see that it could not be otherwise. Where that corrective is present, but either perverted or not exercised, pity is supplanted by blame. In either case, we learn that the art of life largely consists in that control of the emotions and that diversion of them into wholesome channels, which the intellect, braced with the latest knowledge, can alone effect.
Therefore, discarding theories of revelation, spiritual illumination, and other assumed supra-mundane sources of knowledge, sufficing causes of abnormal mental phenomena are found in abnormal working of the mental apparatus. The investigation of hallucinations (Lat. alucinor, to wander in mind) leaves no doubt that they are the effect of a morbid condition of that intricate, delicately poised structure, the nervous system, under which objects are seen and sensations felt when no corresponding impression has been made through the medium of the senses. When the nervous system is out of gear, voices, whether divine or of the dead, may be heard; and actual figures may be seen. A mental image becomes a visual image; an imagined pain a real pain, as the great physiologist, John Hunter, testified when he said, “I am confident that I can fix my attention to any part until I have a sensation in that part.” Shakespere portrays the like condition when Macbeth attempts to clutch the dagger wherewith to stab Duncan:
There’s no such thing;
It is the bloody business which informs
Thus to mine eyes.
This abnormal state, which sees things having no existence outside the “mind’s eye,” is no respecter of persons; the savage and the civilized are alike its victims. It may be organic or functional. Organic, when disease is present; functional, through excessive fatigue, lack of food or sleep, or derangement of the digestive system, causing the patient, as Hood says, “to think he’s pious when he’s only bilious.” Under such conditions, hallucinations of all sorts possess the mind; hallucinations from which the true peptic, who, as Carlyle says, “has no system,” is delivered. Only the mentally anæmic, the emotionally overwrought, the unbalanced, and the epileptic, are the victims, whether of the lofty illusions of august visions such as carried Saint Paul, Saint Theresa, and Joan of Arc, into the presence of the holiest; or hallucination of drowned cat, thin and “dripping with water,” born of the disordered nerves of Mrs. Gordon Jones. To quote from Dr. Gower’s Bowman Lecture (Nature, 4th July, 1895) on Subjective Visual Sensations, such as accompany fits, when, e. g., sensations of sight occur without the retina being stimulated: