About the end of the twelfth century there came a change. The human mind began to awake from its long lethargy; began to writhe and struggle against the dead hand of authority which held it down. The Crusades, as Guizot shows, had much to do with the rise of the new spirit, by causing educative contact with a high Saracenic civilization. Men began to wonder and to think. Heresy inevitably appeared, and became rife. In 1208 Innocent III established the Inquisition, but failed to strangle the infant Hercules. In 1209 began the massacre of the Albigenses, which continued more or less for about fifty years, the deaths being at least scores of thousands; but the blood of the martyrs was the seed of further freedom and enlightenment. Nature began to be studied, in however rudimentary a way, by Roger Bacon and his brother alchemists. The Reformation came, weakening ecclesiastical authority still further by dividing the dogmatic forces into two hostile camps, and thus giving science its chance. Galileo appeared, and did his work, though with many waverings, for Paul V and Urban VIII kept successively a heavy hand on him; he was imprisoned at seventy, when in failing health, and, some think, tortured—though this is uncertain, and his famous e pur si muove is probably mythical. More important still, Francis Bacon, teaching with enthusiasm the method of observation and experiment. The conception of law, of rationality and regularity in nature, emerged; Kepler and Newton laid down the ground plan of the universe, evolving the formulæ which express the facts of molar motion. Uniformity in geology was shown by Lyell, while Darwin and his followers carried law into biological evolution. Then man became swelled-headed; became intoxicated with his successes. It had already been so with Hume, and it became more so with his disciples. Man treated his own limited experience as a criterion, and denied what was not represented by something similar therein. Especially was this the case when alleged facts had any connection with religion. Religion had tried to exterminate science, and it was natural enough that, in revenge, science should be hostile to anything associated with religion. Consequently, the scientific man flatly denied miracles, not only such stories as the rib of Adam and the talking serpent (concerning which even a church father like Origen had made merry in Gnostic days fifteen hundred years before), but also the healing miracles of Jesus, which to us are now beginning to look possible enough.
This negative dogmatism is as regrettable as the positive variety. It is not scientific. Science stands for a method, not for a dogma. It observes, experiments, and infers; but it makes no claim to the possession of absolute truth. A genuine science, confronted with allegations of unusual facts, neither believes nor disbelieves. It investigates. The solution of the problem is simply a question of evidence. Huxley in his little book Hume, and J. S. Mill in his Essays on Religion, made short work of the “impossibility” attitude. Says the former in Science and Christian Tradition, page 197:
“Strictly speaking, I am unaware of anything that has a right to the title of an impossibility, except a contradiction in terms. There are impossibilities logical, but none natural. A ‘round square’, a ‘present past’, ‘two parallel lines that intersect’, are impossibilities, because the ideas denoted by the predicates round, present, intersect, are contradictory of the ideas denoted by the subjects square, past, parallel. But walking on water, or turning water into wine, are plainly not impossibilities in this sense”.
No alleged occurrence can be ruled out as impossible, then, unless the statement is self-contradictory. Difficulty of belief is no reason. It was found difficult to believe in Antipodes; if there were people on the under side of the earth, “they would fall off”. But the advance of knowledge made it not only credible but quite comprehensible. People stick on, all over the earth, because the earth attracts them more powerfully than anything else does. Similarly with some miracles. They may seem much more credible and comprehensible when we have learned more. Indeed, the wonders of wireless telegraphy, radio-activity, and aviation are intrinsically as miraculous as many of the stories in the world’s sacred writings.
This is not saying, however, that we are to believe the latter en bloc. They must be taken individually, and believed or disbelieved according to the evidence and according to the antecedent probability or improbability. The standing still of the sun (Joshua, x) does not seem credible to the scientific mind which knows that the earth is spinning at the equator at the rate of one thousand miles an hour and that any sudden interference with that rotation would send it to smithereens, with all the creatures on its surface. Of course, a Being who could stop its rotation could perhaps also prevent it from flying to smithereens; but we have to extend the miracle in so many entirely hypothetical ways that the whole thing becomes too dubious for acceptance. It is simpler to look on the story as a myth.
But such things as the clairvoyance of Samuel (I Samuel, x), and even the Woman of Endor story, are quite in line with what psychical research is now establishing. And the healing miracles of Jesus are paralleled, in kind if not in degree, by innumerable “suggestive therapeutic” doctors. Shell-shock blindness and paralysis are cured at Seale Hayne Hospital and elsewhere in very “miraculous” fashion. And turning water into wine is not more wonderful than turning radium into helium, and helium into lead, which nature is now doing before our eyes. These things, therefore, have become credible, if the evidence is good enough. Whether evidence nineteen hundred years old can be good enough to take as the basis of serious belief is another matter. Scientific method insists on a high standard of evidence. We must be honest with ourselves, and not believe unless the evidence satisfies our intellectual requirements. But the modern and wise tendency is to regard religion as an attitude rather than as a belief or system of beliefs. It does not stand or fall with the miracle-stories.
THE TRUTH ABOUT TELEPATHY
The amount of nonsense that is talked, and apparently widely believed, about telepathy, is almost enough to make one wish that the phenomenon had not been discovered, or the word invented. Without any adequate basis of real knowledge, the “man in the street” seems to be accepting the idea of thought-transference as an incontrovertible fact, like wireless telegraphy—which latter is responsible for a good deal of easy credence accorded to the former, both seeming equally wonderful. But the analogy is a false one. There is a great deal of difference between the two. In wireless telegraphy we understand the process: it is a shaking of the ether into pulses or waves, which act on the coherer in a perfectly definite way and are measurable. But in spite of much loose talk about “brain-waves”, the fact is that we know of no such thing. Indeed, there is reason to believe that telepathy, if it is a fact at all—and I believe it is—may turn out to be a process of a different kind, the nature of which is at present unknown. For one thing, it does not seem to conform to physical laws. If it were an affair of ripples in the ether—like wireless telegraphy—the strength of impact would vary in inverse ratio with the square of the distance. The influence would weaken at a known rate, as more and more distance intervened between sender and recipient. And this, in many cases at least, is not found to be so, consequently Mr Gerald Balfour and other leading members of the Society for Psychical Research incline to the opinion that the transmission is not a physical process, but takes place in the spiritual world.