Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death

by F. W. H. Myers

Our inquiry into the nature of what is thus alleged to be seen in sleep and cognate states has proved instructive. Sometimes known earthly scenes appear to be revisited—with only such alteration as may have taken place since the sleeper last visited them in waking hours. But sometimes also there is an admixture of an apparently symbolical element. The earthly scene includes some element of human action, which is presented in a selected or abbreviated fashion, as though some mind had been concerned to bring out a special significance from the complex story. Sometimes this element becomes quite dominant; phantasmal figures are seen; or there may be a prolonged symbolical representation of an entry into the spiritual world.

Cases like these do of course apparently support that primitive doctrine of the spirit's actual wandering in space. On the other hand, this notion has become unwelcome to modern thought, which is less unwilling to believe in some telepathic intercourse between mind and mind in which space is not involved. For my own part, I have already explained that I think that the evidence to an at least apparent movement of some kind in space must outweigh any mere speculative presumption against it. And I hold that these new experiences of possession fall on this controversy with decisive force. It is so strongly claimed, in every instance of possession, that the sensitive's own spirit must in some sense vacate the organism, in order to allow another spirit to enter,—and the evidence for the reality of possession is at the same time so strong,—that I think that we must argue back from this spatial change as a relatively certain fact, and must place a corresponding interpretation on earlier phenomena. Such an interpretation, if once admitted, does certainly meet the phenomena in the way most accordant with the subjective impressions of the various percipients.

As we have already repeatedly found, it is the bold evolutionary hypothesis which best fixes and colligates the scattered facts. We encounter in these studies phenomena of degeneration and phenomena of evolution. The degenerative phenomena are explicable singly and in detail as declensions in divergent directions from an existing level. The evolutive phenomena point, on the other hand, to new generalisations;—to powers previously unrecognised towards which our evidence converges along constantly multiplying lines.

This matter of psychical excursion from the organism ultimately involves the extremest claim to novel faculty which has ever been advanced for men. For it involves, as we shall see, the claim to ecstasy:—to a wandering vision which is not confined to this earth or this material world alone, but introduces the seer into the spiritual world and among communities higher than any which this planet knows. The discussion of this transportation, however, will be better deferred until after the evidence for possession has been laid before the reader at some length.

Continuing, then, for the present our analysis of the idea of possession, we come now to its specific feature,—the occupation by a spiritual agency of the entranced and partially vacated organism. Here it is that our previous studies will do most to clear our conceptions. Instead of at once leaping to the question of what spirits in their essence are,—of what they can do and cannot do,—of the antecedent possibility of their re-entry into matter, and the like,—we must begin by simply carrying the idea of telepathy to its furthest point. We must imagine telepathy becoming as central and as intense as possible;—and we shall find that of two diverging types of telepathic intercourse which will thus present themselves, the one will gradually correspond to possession, and the other to ecstasy.

But here let us pause, and consider what is the truest conception which we are by this time able to form of telepathy. The word has been a convenient one; the central notion—of communication beyond this range of sense—can at any rate thus be expressed in simple terms. But nevertheless there has been nothing to assure us that our real comprehension of telepathic processes has got much deeper than that verbal definition. Our conception of telepathy, indeed, to say nothing of telæsthesia, has needed to be broadened with each fresh stage of our evidence. That evidence at first revealed to us certain transmissions of thoughts and images which suggested the passage of actual etherial vibrations from brain to brain. Nor indeed can any one say at any point of our evidence that etherial vibrations are demonstrably not concerned in the phenomena. We cannot tell how far from the material world (to use a crude phrase) some etherial agency may possibly extend. But telepathic phenomena are in fact soon seen to overpass any development which imaginative analogy can give to the conception of etherial radiation from one material point to another.

For from the mere transmission of isolated ideas or pictures there is, as my readers know, a continuous progression to impressions and apparitions far more persistent and complex. We encounter an influence which suggests no mere impact of etherial waves, but an intelligent and responsive presence, resembling nothing so much as the ordinary human intercourse of persons in bodily nearness. Such visions or auditions, inward or externalised, are indeed sometimes felt to involve an even closer contact of spirits than the common intercourse of earth allows. One could hardly assign etherial undulations as their cause without assigning that same mechanism to all our emotions felt towards each other, or even to our control over our own organisms.

Nay, more. There is—as I have striven to show—a further progression from these telepathic intercommunications between living men to intercommunications between living men and discarnate spirits. And this new thesis,—in every way of vital importance,—while practically solving one problem on which I have already dwelt, opens also a possibility of the determination of another problem, nowise accessible until now. In the first place, we may now rest assured that telepathic communication is not necessarily propagated by vibrations proceeding from an ordinary material brain. For the discarnate spirit at any rate has no such brain from which to start them.

So much, in the first place, for the agent's end of the communication.

And in the second place, we now discern a possibility of getting at the percipient's end; of determining whether the telepathic impact is received by the brain or by the spirit of the living man, or by both inseparably, or sometimes by one and sometimes by the other.