Scientific prediction is familiar enough; science is always either historic or prophetic (as Dr. Schuster said at Manchester in the British Association Address for 1915), "and history is only prophecy pursued in the negative direction." This thesis is worth illustrating:—That Eclipses can be calculated forwards or backwards is well known. A tide-calculating machine, again, which is used to churn out tidal detail in advance by turning a handle, could be as easily run backwards and give past tides if they were wanted; but always on the assumption that no catastrophe, no unforeseen contingency, nothing outside the limits of the data, occurs to interfere with the placid course of phenomena. There must be no dredging or harbour bar operations, for instance, if the tide machine is to be depended on. Free-will is not allowed for, in Astronomy or Physics; nor any interference by living agents.
The real truth is that, except for unforeseen contingencies, past, present, and future are welded together in a coherent whole; and to a mind with wider purview, to whom perhaps hardly anything is unforeseen, there may be possibilities of inference to an unsuspected extent. Human character, and action based upon it, may be more trustworthy and uncapricious than is usually supposed; and data depending on humanity may be included in a completer scheme of foreknowledge, without the exercise of any compulsion. "The past," says Bertrand Russell eloquently, "does not change or strive; like Duncan, after life's fitful fever it sleeps well; what was eager and grasping, what was petty and transitory, has faded away; the things that were beautiful and eternal shine out of it like stars in the night." My ignorance will not allow me to attempt to compose a similar or rather a contrasting sentence about the future.
Reference to Special Cases
It will be observed that none of those indications or intimations or intuitions which are referred to in a note on page 34, Part I, if they mean anything, raise the difficult question of prevision. In every case the impression was felt after or at the time of the event, though before reception of the news. The only question of possible prevision in the present instance arises in connexion with the 'Faunus' message quoted and discussed in Part II. But even here nothing more than kindly provision, in case anything untoward should happen, need be definitely assumed. Moreover, if the concurrence in time suggests prognostication, the fact that a formidable attempt to advance the English Front at the Ypres salient was probably in prospect in August 1915, though not known to ordinary people in England, and not fully carried out till well on in September, must have been within human knowledge; and so would have to be considered telepathically accessible, if that hypothesis is considered preferable to the admission of what Tennyson speaks of as—
"Such refraction of events
As often rises ere they rise."
Prognostication can hardly be part of the evidence for survival. The two things are not essential to each other; they hardly appear to be connected. But one knows too little about the whole thing to be sure even of this, and I decline to take the responsibility for suppressing any of the facts. I know that Mr. Myers used to express an opinion that certain kinds of prevision would constitute clear and satisfactory evidence of something supernormal, and so attract attention; though the establishment of such a possibility might tend to suggest a kind of higher knowledge, not far short of what might be popularly called omniscience, rather than of merely human survival.
CHAPTER VI
INTERACTION OF MIND AND MATTER
"Spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus
Mens agitat molem, et magno se corpore miscet."
Æneid, vi. 726
LIFE and mind and consciousness do not belong to the material region; whatever they are in themselves, they are manifestly something quite distinct from matter and energy, and yet they utilise the material and dominate it.