We must confess that the situation appears to be very grave. The control of mediums by such unprincipled and lying “spirits” is constantly becoming more and more general; and the pernicious effects of seeming diabolism constantly multiply. Some of the best mediums are abandoning the public rostrum and retiring from this influence; and the movement is drifting churchward. We venture the prediction that unless spiritualists set about the study, of ancient philosophy so as to learn to discriminate between spirits and to guard themselves against the baser sort, twenty-five years more will not elapse before they will have to fly to the Romish communion to escape these “guides” and “controls” that they have fondled so long. The signs of this catastrophe already exhibit themselves. At a recent convention at Philadelphia, it was seriously proposed to organize a sect of Christian Spiritualists! This is because, having withdrawn from the church and learned nothing of the philosophy of the phenomena, or the nature of their spirits, they are drifting about on a sea of uncertainty like a ship without compass or rudder. They cannot escape the dilemma; they must choose between Porphyry and Pio Nono.
While men of genuine science, such as Wallace, Crookes, Wagner, Butlerof, Varley, Buchanan, Hare, Reichenbach, Thury, Perty, de Morgan, Hoffmann, Goldschmidt, W. Gregory, Flammarion, Sergeant Cox and many others, firmly believe in the current phenomena, many of the above named reject the theory of departed spirits. Therefore, it seems but logical to think that if the London “Katie King,” the only materialized something which the public is obliged more or less to credit out of respect to science,—is not the spirit of an ex-mortal, then it must be the astral solidified shadow of either one of the Rosicrucian spooks—“fantasies of superstition” or of some as yet unexplained force in nature. Be it however a “spirit of health or goblin damn’d” it is of little consequence; for if it be once proved that its organism is not solid matter, then it must be and is a “spirit,” an apparition, a breath. It is an intelligence which acts outside our organisms and therefore must belong to some existing even though unseen race of beings. But what is it? What is this something which thinks and even speaks but yet is not human; that is impalpable and yet not a disembodied spirit; that simulates affection, passion, remorse, fear, joy, but yet feels neither? What is this canting creature which rejoices in cheating the truthful inquirer and mocking at sacred human feeling? For, if not Mr. Crookes’s Katie King, other similar creatures have done all these. Who can fathom the mystery? The true psychologist alone. And where should he go for his text-books but to the neglected alcoves of libraries where the works of despised hermetists and theurgists have been gathering dust these many years.
Says Henry More, the revered English Platonist, in his answer to an attack on the believers of spiritual and magic phenomena by a skeptic of that age, named Webster:[123] “As for that other opinion, that the greater part of the reformed divines hold, that it was the Devil that appeared in Samuel’s shape, it is beneath contempt; for though I do not doubt but that in many of these necromantic apparitions, they are ludicrous spirits, not the souls of the deceased that appear, yet I am clear for the appearing of the soul of Samuel, and as clear that in other necromancies, it may be such kinds of spirits, as Porphyrius above describes, ‘that change themselves into omnifarious forms and shapes, and one while act the parts of dæmons, another while of angels or gods, and another while of the souls of the departed.’ And I confess such a spirit as this might personate Samuel here, for anything Webster alleged to the contrary, for his arguments indeed are wonderfully weak and wooden.”
When such a metaphysician and philosopher as Henry More gives such testimony as this, we may well assume our point to have been well taken. Learned investigators, all very skeptical as to spirits in general and “departed human spirits” in particular, during the last twenty years have taxed their brains to invent new names for an old thing. Thus, with Mr. Crookes and Sergeant Cox, it is the “psychic force.” Professor Thury of Geneva calls it the “psychode” or ectenic force; Professor Balfour Stewart, the “electro-biological power;” Faraday, the “great master of experimental philosophy in physics,” but apparently a novice in psychology, superciliously termed it an “unconscious muscular action,” an “unconscious cerebration,” and what not? Sir William Hamilton, a “latent thought;” Dr. Carpenter, “the ideo-motor principle,” etc., etc. So many scientists—so many names.
Years ago the old German philosopher, Schopenhauer, disposed of this force and matter at the same time; and since the conversion of Mr. Wallace, the great anthropologist has evidently adopted his ideas. Schopenhauer’s doctrine is that the universe is but the manifestation of the will. Every force in nature is also an effect of will, representing a higher or lower degree of its objectiveness. It is the teaching of Plato, who stated distinctly that everything visible was created or evolved out of the invisible and eternal WILL, and after its fashion. Our Heaven—he says—was produced according to the eternal pattern of the “Ideal World,” contained, as everything else, in the dodecahedron, the geometrical model used by the Deity.[124] With Plato, the Primal Being is an emanation of the Demiurgic Mind (Nous), which contains from the eternity the “idea” of the “to be created world” within itself, and which idea he produces out of himself.[125] The laws of nature are the established relations of this idea to the forms of its manifestations; “these forms,” says Schopenhauer, “are time, space, and causality. Through time and space the idea varies in its numberless manifestations.”
These ideas are far from being new, and even with Plato they were not original. This is what we read in the Chaldean Oracles:[126] “The works of nature co-exist with the intellectual [νοέρῳ], spiritual Light of the Father. For it is the soul [ψυχη] which adorned the great heaven, and which adorns it after the Father.”
“The incorporeal world then was already completed, having its seat in the Divine Reason,” says Philo,[127] who is erroneously accused of deriving his philosophy from Plato’s.
In the Theogony of Mochus, we find Æther first, and then the air; the two principles from which Ulom, the intelligible [νοήτος] God (the visible universe of matter) is born.[128]
In the Orphic hymns, the Eros-Phanes evolves from the Spiritual Egg, which the Æthereal winds impregnate, Wind[129] being “the spirit of God,” who is said to move in Æther, “brooding over the Chaos” the Divine “Idea.” In the Hindu Katakopanisâd, Purusha, the Divine Spirit, already stands before the original matter, from whose union springs the great Soul of the World, “Maha=Atma, Brahm, the Spirit of Life;”[130] these latter appellations are identical with the Universal Soul, or Anima Mundi, and the Astral Light of the theurgists and kabalists.
Pythagoras brought his doctrines from the eastern sanctuaries, and Plato compiled them into a form more intelligible than the mysterious numerals of the sage—whose doctrines he had fully embraced—to the uninitiated mind. Thus, the Cosmos is “the Son” with Plato, having for his father and mother the Divine Thought and Matter.[131]