Without Prejudice

by Israel Zangwill

Well, the slightest exercise of the finger or wrist muscles is sufficient to move the small, light round table which is usually the subject of experiment; and when once the slightest movement is established—by the involuntary contraction of a single muscle—all the other persons' muscles, in accommodating themselves to the movement of the table, cannot help helping it, either by pulling or pushing in the direction in which it is going. It is, in fact, almost impossible to follow the movement of a moving table and yet keep your superimposed hands perfectly passive; and with ninety-nine persons out of a hundred the startled interest in the movement even begets an unconscious desire to help it, which at times almost rises to a curious semi-conscious self-deception, a voluntary exaggeration of the marvellous. Yet nothing makes the ordinary sitter angrier than to be told he has helped to move the table. It is as though he were accused of cheating at whist, or worse, of playing a foolish card. Take half a dozen persons at random, and there are sure to be one or two so impressionable and emotional that they cannot help contributing the slight initial impulse which gathers force as it goes. These nervous subjects cannot sit a quarter of an hour perfectly still without a twitching of the muscles, while the tense state of expectation which subtly transforms itself into a wish to see the table move and not have the experiment in vain, finally compels them, despite themselves, to start the "manifestations." Indeed, to think of a thing is half to do it. Every idea has a tendency to project itself in action. If you think strongly, for instance, of lifting your hand, it is difficult not to do it, for the idea of motion is motion in embryo. The wish is father to the thought, and the thought to the deed. The wish to see the table move is the grandfather of its motion. Even with the most sceptical, when the table is requested to go in a particular direction the muscles involuntarily tend thither. All the deepest analyses of scientific psychology are involved in this wretched little episode of table-turning, and it is not marvellous that the ordinary observer should perceive only the marvellous.

So much for the movements. But how about the raps? How about those mysterious tappings which come from the very heart of the table, as eloquent of the preternatural as those immortal taps heard by Poe ere the raven stepped into his chamber? I should be more impressed by these taps if I were not capable of manufacturing them myself ad lib. without detection, by secretly manipulating the ball of my thumb. One is therefore justified in assuming that, where these raps are not produced by conscious fraud, they are the involuntary result of the same motions that produced them voluntarily. Even wood has a certain elasticity, and an imperceptible increase followed by an imperceptible relaxation of pressure on the surface of the table will alter the tension of the wood, the molecules of which in springing back to their prior position will emit a creak or a tap, just as a piece of extended elastic will when let go again. Both the raps and the movements, then, are in essence phenomena of the same order: simple results of muscular pressure, conscious, sub-conscious, or unconscious.

It now only remains to explain the answers themselves, to account not only for their almost invariably logical form, but also for their occasionally astonishing content. For the table is not infrequently wiser than anybody in the room; also it knows the past and is ready to predict the future.

The whole thing is really an excellent object-lesson in Psychology. For the solution is obvious. The table being unconscious, you answer yourself—you not only produce the raps and movements, but you regulate them.

The connection between mind and body is, it seems to me, admirably illustrated by table-turning. According to the latest philosophic view, the connection itself defies human comprehension. It is simply a case of non possumus intelligere. But the connection itself may be expressed thus: No idea or feeling without physical disturbance, no physical disturbance without feeling or idea. Mind and body are as related as the tune to the violin-string. Every state of mind tends to set up nervous vibration, and every nervous vibration tends to set up a state of mind. In either case the tendency may be, and usually is, counteracted. The average member of a spiritualistic circle cannot prevent the thought in his brain taking on bodily expression to the extent of a muscular contraction stimulating the very sensitive tips of the fingers. You cannot think of a joke or see the humour of anything without wanting to smile, though you may suppress your smile in obedience to other considerations. Nor can you put your features into smiling position, without experiencing a latent sense of amusement, though you would not know what you were smiling at. But if six cool scientific intellects, acquainted with the tricks of their own organisms and determined to dissever thought from motion, were to sit round a table, they might sit till doomsday without the "spirit" turning up. This is what the spiritualists mean by unsympathetic persons, persons obnoxious to the spirits, persons with antipathetic auras, and all the rest of the jargon. But six intellects taken at random, being anything but cool and scientific, are not able to prevent their ideas passing over into action in the shape of muscular twitches; though if even the unscientific were to look up at the ceiling and forget all about the table, the table would probably forget to move. Now the majority of the replies of the table deal with matters actively present to the consciousness of at least one of the six owners of the superimposed hands. When the table raps out something known only to this one person, and the startled person admits that the table is right, an uncanny feeling is produced; the table seems at least to be a thought-reader, and on this wave of astonishment the hypothesis of "spirits" rides up triumphantly. When the topic is one of which nobody knows anything—e.g., whether the supposed spirit is a man or woman—chance, or a vague idea floating up in the mind of one of the party, determines the reply.

But what of those replies in which some striking truth is told of which none of the party was conscious, as for instance in the examples I gave in my last, when the table informed us that Mr. Jones's "Bauble Shop" was then playing at Eastbourne, or that "The Road to Fortune" had been playing in the town in which we were the week before we arrived? To clear up this most remarkable aspect of the whole matter we must go still deeper into Psychology.

What we are pleased to call our Mind is made up of two parts—our Consciousness and—what I shall call loosely yet sufficingly and without prejudice to Metaphysics—our Sub-Consciousness. The latter is immeasurably the vaster portion. It is a tossing ocean of thoughts which feeds the narrow little fountain of Consciousness. It holds all our memories. We cannot be conscious of all ourselves and all our past at once—that way madness lies, or divinity. We may know ten languages, but we can only think in the mould of one at a time. Our thoughts and memories can only come up into clear Consciousness by ones or twos—to be dealt with and then dismissed. They spirit from the great deep of Sub-Consciousness into the thin fountain-stream of Consciousness, and fall back again into the great deep. And this great deep is never still, though we know nothing of its churning save by its tossing up through the fountain some new mental combination of which it had received only the elements—as when the mathematician has the solution of a problem flashed upon him at the moment of waking, or as the author has the development of his plot thrust upon him when he is playing billiards, or as the wit finds repartees invented for him by his brilliant but unknown collaborator. This is what the crowd calls "inspiration," the late Mr. Stevenson "Brownies," and the scientist "unconscious cerebration." A man of talent has a good Working Consciousness, a man of genius a good Working Sub-Consciousness. Hence the frequent mental instability of genius. The Infant Prodigy's feats are done by his Sub-Consciousness. Instinct is Racial Genius, Genius is Individual Instinct. The highest Genius is sane. A Shakespeare or a Goethe has both a good Working Consciousness and a good Working Sub-Consciousness, with the former so self-balanced that it regulates the products of the latter. The cultivation of the Working Consciousness may either improve or impair the products of its bigger brother. Education, the cultivation of the critical faculty, would be fatal to some writers, actors, painters, and musicians; it would but spoil the Working Sub-Consciousness. Others—more sanely balanced—would gain in art more than they lost in nature.

Now, what are the elements with which our Sub-Consciousness works?—what does this ocean contain? It would be easier to discover what it does not contain. Wrecks and argosies and dead faces, mermaidens and subterranean palaces, and the traces of vanished generations; these are but a millionth part of its treasures: the Sub-Consciousness were perhaps better likened to the property-room and scene-dock of the Great Cosmic Theatre, holding infinite wardrobes and scenes ready-painted, parks and seas and libraries, and ruined cottages and whitewashed attics, to say naught of an army of supers ready to put on all the faces we have ever seen. In our Sub-Consciousness, moreover, are stored up all the voices and sounds and scents we have ever perceived, and to all these reminiscences of our own sensations are perhaps added the shadows of our ancestors' sensations—episodes that perchance we re-experience only in dreamland—so that part of the vivid vision of genius, of the poet's eye bodying forth the shapes of things unknown, may be inherited Memory. And thus Imagination, when it is not a mere fresh combination of elements experienced, may be only a peculiar variety of atavism.

From this boundless reservoir, then, which holds our heredity and our experience, go forth the battalions of dreams—the infinitely possible permutations and combinations of its elements, wrought by the Working Sub-Consciousness when the poor Working Consciousness cannot get sound asleep, but must watch perforce with half an eye the procession of thoughts and images over which it has lost control. For it is the duty of Consciousness to control the stream sent up by Sub-Consciousness. When it is awake but unable to do this, we have Insanity; when asleep, Dreams. In Somnambulism the Working Sub-Consciousness is seen in an accentuated phase. It does all the work of its little brother, even to exercising its owner's muscles. To be "possessed" by a popular song is a species of insanity—Consciousness ridden by a singing Sub-Consciousness.

Between our Consciousness and our Sub-Consciousness there is more or less easy communication. It is not perfect. You cannot draw up what you will from the ocean: you cannot always directly remember a name or a date that you know—you can only set an indirect train of thought at work. Per contra, it is not easy to transfer certain conscious states to the storehouse of Sub-Consciousness—to learn a page of prose, or deposit the memory of a piece of music, which you are forced to play slowly and thoughtfully before the digital dexterity is added to the treasures of your Sub-Consciousness. Under exceptional conditions, exceptional flotsam and jetsam is tossed up into Consciousness, as in the case of that servant girl who spoke Latin, Greek, and Hebrew in her delirium, having unconsciously absorbed the same from overhearing the studies of her learned master many years before.