The Tyranny of the Dark

by Hamlin Garland

"I have had them in my own chamber." The old man's eyes twinkled. "Once, as I was dozing on my bed, one morning early, a faint cloud, like a puff of smoke, began to form above my head. It became pendulous, reaching towards me, and out of it a hand developed and extended. I said: 'It is an hallucination—very curious! I will touch it and it will vanish.' I reached—I grasped the hand—it was warm and solid! I leaped from my bed with a yell." He chuckled at his keenly remembered discomfiture.

"How do you account for it? It was an illusion, of course. You thought the illusion only ocular—it extended to the sense of touch."

Weissmann's eyes gleamed speculatively. "We will let it go so. The world of sense and the world of spirit curiously intermingle—as we know."

"But these manifestations, so far as I have any knowledge, are so foolish and childish—"

"Well, so many foolish and childish persons have gone to the other world. Death is not the beginning of wisdom. I am an old man, Serviss, and already many of my loved ones are dead. I should like to believe they are still sentient, and maybe they are. I am German. The blood of Kant is in my veins." He seemed to be speaking partly to himself. "I do not dogmatize so gladly as I once did. As I do not know the essence of matter, it would be folly for me to assume to fathom the depth of spirit. The essential hopelessness of science is coming to render me humble. Spiritualism certainly is a comfortable belief. I would gladly embrace it if I could. I suspend judgment. This desire for another life may be only a survival of a more unreasoning time, something we will outgrow."

Serviss was profoundly surprised by his chief's attitude. He had expected a large, calm, and rather contemptuous reply to his question. In place of decision he encountered a doubt, a hesitancy, which betrayed weakness. Rudolph Weissmann, great as he was, belonged to the innumerable throng of the bereaved whose judgments are clouded by passion. He, too, was growing old, his all-embracing mind had yielded to an hallucination.

The young man's respect for his chief did not diminish, but a feeling of sadness swept over him as he realized that another renowned and fearless investigator was nearing the end of his great usefulness, and that upon the clear blue steel of his intelligence the rust of age had begun to fall. Truly the power of his early training, his worship of Kant and his school was still vital.

Then he pondered his words. "If I were a young man like you I would investigate this thing," and recalled that no young man of science had ever devoted himself to it. "They all came to it late in life, after bereavement."

The bereaved! The whole stupendous delusion seemed to rest upon the overmastering desire of the bereaved for their beloved. The great and good men and women among the believers (he was willing to admit there were such) came to investigation weakened by sorrow, made illogical by loss. They put their sane judgment, their strength, their calm patience aside and grasped eagerly at the lying comfort extended to them. They were not merely deceived, they developed fraud by their blindness, by their hunger for consolation, and by their crass credulity. He was still young enough to have inexorable theories—to be of single-hearted loyalty to his creed. To him as a monist, the soul (as an entity apart from the body) did not exist. Consciousness was a physical disturbance of the higher nerve centres, and thought a secretion of the brain. He acknowledged no line of demarcation between the crystal and the monera—and no chasm (of course) between man and the animals. The universe was a unit—and all its forms and forces differentiations of one substance and that substance too mysterious to be analyzed or named. In such a philosophy as this there could be no room for any hypothesis which even so much as squinted towards dualism, or that permitted a conception so childish as the persistence of the individuality after death.

However, he did not carry his implacable principles into the homes of his friends, and seldom permitted them to interfere with his enjoyment of wines or good dinners, the theatre or the drawing-room. This fact, from a cynical point of view, proved his faith to have been as truly of his laboratory as that of a bishop, with Spencer and Darwin and Koch and Haeckel as the founders of its articles.