A REMARKABLE CONVERSATION
"Who will absolve you bad Christians? 'Study,' I replied, 'and Knowledge.'"
Conrade Muth in a letter to Peter Eberdach, 1510.
Sempre di verita non è convinto
Chi di parole è vinto
Guarini (Il Pastor Fido, Act v., Sc. v.)
"I do not doubt the probability of a future life even for a moment. This life is too sad, too incomplete to satisfy our highest aspirations and desires. It is meant to be a struggle to ennoble us. Can that struggle be in vain? I think not! Final perfection, I believe in; a perfection which God has in the end in store for us."—Bismarck.
Conversations with Prince Bismarck,
by W.B. Richmond, North American Review, Sept., 1914.
"At last, gentlemen," said Villebois to his three guests, "we can take our coffee in peace. By the way, professor, I want you to explain why it is that the vast majority of mankind pooh-pooh all spiritualistic phenomena, and declare them to be either fraudulent or impossible?"
"If you will listen to me, gentlemen, I think I can give you an answer, but I warn you it will be a long one.
"In the first place there are very few men in the world who will accept, or even admit a new or unexplained fact. People will only believe in phenomena which are in strict accordance with what they have been accustomed to see or hear. In other words, they have a sort of mental antipathy against believing anything which is not in perfect harmony with known and universally accepted laws. They follow one another like a flock of sheep.
"As a teacher of physics I have rarely found a single one among all my students who possessed an absolutely independent judgment. Nay, I will go further, I have met with only one or two men during the whole course of my career who were capable of recording a new observation or impression without any preconceived notions, or with even a tithe of the accuracy of a photographic camera. People even equipped with all the acumen that a scientific training can give them, absolutely refuse to believe their senses when they see a phenomenon which appears to run contrary to any of the laws of physics which have been instilled into them by their teachers. Even if the phenomena are in accordance with established laws, unless they can be explained, they doubt, or even reject them, and will much sooner believe that they are mistaken, or that their judgment is at fault, than accept the phenomena they have witnessed.
"Take a familiar instance: In the eighteenth century a savant brought a large stone to the Academy of Sciences in France which he declared he had seen fall from the sky. The Academy set him down as a lunatic, and Laplace, one of the members, declared it to be impossible. They all pooh-poohed the fact as ridiculous. There were no stones in the sky—therefore none could tumble down from it. Meteorites, which are merely stones which once belonged to some other planet, rush along through space until they fall into the sphere of the earth's attraction and down they tumble. You will find specimens (some of them a ton or more in weight) in every geological museum in Europe. Now everyone believes in them. I remember well when it was first declared by Röntgen that objects wrapped round with several layers of black paper and enclosed in a thick cardboard or wooden box could be accurately photographed. Scientists laughed at the idea and declared it to be impossible. 'How could light penetrate opaque screens?' they asked. But to-day every hospital in Europe is equipped with an X-ray photographic outfit. If a jar be filled with equal volumes of chlorine and hydrogen gases, so long as it is left in the dark nothing happens, but the moment a beam of light is directed on to it, the contents will explode with a loud report, and hydrochloric acid gas is formed. How? We do not know. Therefore, they say it is impossible. A lump of sugar is dropped into a glass of water. It dissolves. How? We cannot tell you. Hence they say it cannot occur, and we ought to reject these facts as impossible. A human being is formed in a pitch-dark cavity from an egg almost too small to be seen by the naked eye. How? We cannot explain it. Therefore they say we should dismiss the statement as a chimera. Hypnotism, or mesmerism as it is called, was first publicly practised in England seventy years ago by Dr. Braid. His medical brethren not only jeered at him but positively ostracised him, and so persecuted the poor man for what they in their ignorance called quackery and charlatanism, that he became socially and financially ruined. And yet to-day it is practised by hundreds of medical men, and schools of hypnotism have been established both at Nancy and here in Paris which are recognised by all the medical colleges, and yet it lies on the borderland, as it were, of spiritualism and the occult sciences. Spiritualistic phenomena are rejected on precisely the same lines of reasoning. A medium lays his hands on a heavy table. It rises bodily from the ground, or raps in answer to questions, or rocks. It appears to be endowed with life since it acts contrary to the laws of inertia. Therefore it is said that the medium is a fraud, and the phenomenon a mere piece of deception or conjuring. Another medium goes into a trance, and hands are seen to project from his body which we can feel and handle; or a cloud appears which rapidly condenses into a perfect human form identical in all respects with a real person. We can feel and handle it. It walks about the room. Often it can converse with the people in the room. It has ears and eyes and teeth just as we have. If we prick this materialised body, blood flows. We can even photograph it. It is clothed in a garment which we are able to handle with our fingers. We can even cut pieces out of it and examine the texture under the microscope. It is entirely contrary to our experience, therefore it must be due to trickery, or else our senses have deceived us and we have been hypnotised into believing it. Nevertheless these phenomena are attested by hundreds of the most clear-headed and sober-minded observers in the world—members of the academy or royal societies of Europe, physicists, doctors, chemists, astronomers, etc., etc. A fully developed human being takes twenty years to form—a fully developed psychic being only twenty seconds. If the one can be formed in twenty years, why not the other in twenty seconds? It is merely a question of time.
"Until a few years ago, the indestructibility of matter was taught in every university and college as one of the most solidly established of all facts. I remember when I was a student of chemistry," said Delapine, "that the professor carefully weighed a small candle and then burnt it away. He collected the products of combustion and demonstrated that the elements of which the candle was composed were only separated, and recombined again with the oxygen of the air. They weighed exactly the same as the candle (after deducting the oxygen which had united with them during combustion), nothing was lost. Nothing could be destroyed. We were further taught as an indisputable fact that all substances, solid, liquid or gaseous consisted of atoms—the smallest particles of matter which exist, which were indestructible and indivisible—and that there were just as many different kinds of atoms as there were elementary bodies, about eighty kinds in all. The discovery of Radium has swept all these 'facts' to the winds. So far from atoms being the smallest things in existence, they are found to contain, or perhaps consist of 'corpuscles' or 'electrons' as they are now called, which are a hundred million times smaller, and these are merely electrified vortex rings, or forms of energy. Hence matter is merely a form of electricity, and electricity, magnetism, light and heat are only varieties of energy in the form of minute waves induced by electrons which agitate the ether. The world is merely a mass of stored-up Force (energy), and this is derived from the Mind of the Eternal. We always come back to the same thought of Virgil's:—'Mens agitat molem.' Only the two thousand two hundred millionth part of the heat and light which issue from the sun—in other words an inconceivably small fraction of the whole of its energy—ever reaches our earth; and only the one hundred millionth part ever reaches the planets of our solar system. What then becomes of the remaining stupendous energy? Is it dissipated into illimitable space and lost for ever? Not at all. The Eternal Mind makes use of everything, and loses nothing. All this vast amount of heat, light, and electricity which emerges from the sun collects in different parts of the universe, and acts on prodigious swarms of cosmic dust and meteoric matter, converting them into vast nebulous accretions filled with potential energy. These mighty forces ultimately form the parents of fresh solar systems, which in their turn team with life."