The opinion of savants, who, ill acquainted with the facts, inform us that mediums are hysterics and victims of nervous disorders, is therefore erroneous; unfortunately the consequences of such an opinion are lamentable. I know many remarkable subjects who absolutely refuse to experiment outside a tested and restricted group, because they fear to be regarded as neurotics; they are afraid of being stigmatised as insane, they are afraid of compromising their commercial position or their professional interests. I will never succeed in convincing them that they are above the average; doubtless I will succeed still less in inducing others to believe it: though in many respects it be true. If the relative perfection of their nervous system renders these persons more sensitive than the average, it would be wrong to conclude thereupon, that they were degenerate specimens of humanity. This argument is lacking in common-sense; we might just as reasonably insist that Europeans are in degeneration, because they are more emotional and more sensitive to pain than certain savage tribes. How ignorant, tactless, and incautious we are! The attitude of certain learned centres—it is with intention that I do not say the most cultured—is, to me, similar to that of ecclesiastical authorities in the middle ages. The novelty of a thing frightens them. They treat independent scientific thought as the inquisitors treated free thought in days gone by. Like their prototypes of other times, they have the same intolerance, the same hate for schism and heresy. Their accumulated errors ought to make them cautious: but, no! If they no longer make a pariah of the arch-heretic or schismatic, if they no longer deliver him up to the executioner, they treat him with the same relative vigour. They excommunicate him, in their fashion, and cast him out of sane healthy humanity as a degenerate, a mystic, an exalté. The future will have the same opinion of them as we have, to-day, of their predecessors. Their attitude prevents the most cultured, the most capable mediums from allowing their psychic faculties to become known. If these mediums spoke of visions, a douche would be recommended! If they caused a table to move without contact, the words hysteria and fraud would be heard. Is it surprising they should hide their gifts?
We ought to consider mediums as precious beings, as forerunners of the future type of our race. Why should we only see degeneracy around us? Why should we not see superior beings ahead of us, beacons, as it were, on the route we have to follow? Does not simple common-sense suggest that humanity has not yet arrived at perfection—that it is evolving to-day just as it has always been doing? All men have not attained the same degree of evolution. As there are types representing the average state of former days, so there are advanced types representing to-day the average state of the future. The progress of the race seems to make for perfection along the lines of the nervous system, in the acquisition of more delicate senses, of greater nervous sensibility, and of vaster means of information. If the discovery of implements, new instruments of investigation, such as the telescope and microscope, for example, aid in the progress of the race, they are of no use for the evolution of the individual himself. Now, veritable progress is individual; it is the improvement of the individual which assures the evolution of the race, and this progress should be determined by heredity. Do what we will, we shall never be born with a microscope at the eyes, and a telephone at the ears. Progress of this kind is not transmissible; only physiological acquisitions are transmissible. The sensibility of the nervous system of mediums is a progress on our relative obtuseness; it is not the same thing with the bad sight of him who makes an improper use of the microscope. If Virchow were still alive, there would be many disagreeable things to be said to him, concerning the inaptitude of the ordinary type of savant to personify the desirable progress of the race towards health, force, sensibility, and the perfect form.
The intolerance of certain savants is equalled by that of certain dogmas. To take an example, Catholicism considers psychical phenomena as the work of the devil! Is it worth while at this hour to discuss so obsolete a theory? I think not. However, superior ecclesiastical authorities, with the tact and sentiment of opportunism which they often show, permit many Catholics to undertake the experimental study of psychical facts. I cannot blame them for recommending prudent abstention to the mass of the faithful; spiritism appears to me to be an adversary with which they will have to reckon very seriously some day. The simplicity of its doctrines ensures it the clientèle of simple souls enamoured of justice, that is to say, of the immense majority of mankind.
But this question is foreign to psychical facts themselves. As far as my experience permits me to judge of them, these phenomena contain nothing but what is natural. The devil does not show his hoof here, timorous souls may feel reassured; if the tables claim to be Satan himself, they need not be believed; summoned to prove his power, this grandiloquent Satan will be a sorry thaumaturgist. Religious prejudice, which proscribes these experiments as being supernatural, is just as little justified as scientific prejudice, which sees therein nothing but fraud and imposture. Here, again, the old adage of Aristotle finds its application: Justice lies midway.
May my book determine a few experimenters of goodwill to try to observe in their turn. May it help to dispel from the mind of gifted mediums their fears of being ranked with insane and disordered intelligences, or looked upon as being in partnership with the devil. May it especially contribute to make metapsychic phenomena come to be considered as natural facts, worthy of being usefully observed, and capable of enabling us to penetrate more deeply than any other phenomena into a real knowledge of the laws which govern Nature.
APPENDIX A
An Appreciation on Certain Documents published on the subject of Fraud.
The question of fraud is so important that I feel I should not only give the results of my own observations, but also my appreciation of some of the principal documents published on the subject.
With the exception of Richet and a few others, representatives of science in France are very ill informed on this question, as I have endeavoured to show. They overlook the immense work which has been done in the United States and in England; consequently it is very difficult to discuss the question with these savants, they are either ignorant or feign to be ignorant of what others have done. I have shown that their experiments are defective and their methods open to criticism.
If all serious discussion be impossible with certain savants, it is not so with those who have taken the trouble to verify psychic phenomena for themselves. This is the case with the principal members of the Society for Psychical Research, Crookes, Lodge, Barrett, Myers, Sidgwick, Gurney, Podmore, Hodgson, Hyslop, and others. The first three are persuaded of the reality of the facts observed by them. The others have a tendency to attribute to fraud all physical phenomena; they admit, on the other hand, intellectual phenomena, and explain them either by telepathy as Mr. Podmore does, or by the intervention of spirits as spiritists themselves do, though they were at one time the latter’s adversaries; this is notably the case with Myers, Hodgson, and Hyslop. The great respect I have for the remarkable men who direct the Society for Psychical Research, obliges me to examine their experiments very carefully, for their judgment has a great value in my eyes; at the same time, I have too much regard for the research of truth to conceal from them the errors of experimentation, which they appear to me to have committed.