[33] Memoirs of the Reign of King George the Third, by Horace Walpole. From the MSS. Edited, with Notes, by Sir D. La Marchant, Bart. London: Bentley.
A FEW PASSAGES CONCERNING OMENS, DREAMS, APPEARANCES, &c.
In a Letter to Eusebius.
No. II.
It is somewhat late, my dear, Eusebius, to refer me to my letter of August 1840, and to enquire, in your bantering way, if I have shaken hands with a ghost recently, or dreamed a dream worth telling. You have evidently been thinking upon this subject ever since I wrote to you; and I suspect you are more of a convert than you will admit. You only wish to provoke me to further evidence; but I see—through the flimsy veil of your seeming denials, and through your put-on audacity—the nervous workings of your countenance, when your imagination is kindled by the mysterious subject. Your wit and your banter are but the whistle of the clown in the dark, to keep down his rising fears. However good your story[34] may be, there have been dreams even of the numbers of lottery-tickets that have been verified. We call things coincidences and chances, because we have no name to give them, whereas they are phenomena that want a better settlement. You speak, too, of the "doctrine of chances." If chance have a doctrine, it is subject to a rule, is under calculation, arithmetic, and loses all trace at once of our idea of absolute chance. If there be chance, there is also a power over chance. The very hairs of our head, which seem to be but a chance-confusion, are yet, we are assured, all numbered—and is it less credible that their every movement is noted also? One age is the type of another; and every age, from the beginning of the world, hath had its own symbols; and not poetically only, but literally true is it, that "coming events cast their shadows before." If the "vox populi" be the "vox Dei," it has pronounced continually, in a space of above five thousand years, that there is communication between the material and immaterial worlds. So rare are the exceptions, that, speaking of mankind, we may assert that there is a universal belief amongst them of that connexion by signs, omens, dreams, visions, or ghostly presences. Many professed sceptics, who have been sceptics only in the pride of understanding, have in secret bowed down to one form or other of the superstition. Take not the word in a bad sense. It is at least the germ, the
natural germ, of religion in the human mind. It is the consciousness of a superiority not his own, of some power so immeasurably above man, that his mind cannot take it in, but accepts, as inconsiderable glimpses of it, the phenomena of nature, and the fears and misgivings of his own mind, spreading out from himself into the infinite and invisible. I am not certain, Eusebius, if it be not the spiritual part of conscience, and is to it what life is to organized matter—the mystery which gives it all its motion and beauty.
It is not my intention to repeat the substance of my former letter—I therefore pass on. You ask me if the mesmeric phenomena—which you ridicule, yet of which I believe you covet a closer investigation—are not part and parcel of the same incomprehensible farrago? I cannot answer you. It would be easy to do so were I a disciple. If the mesmerists can establish clairvoyance, it will certainly be upon a par with the ancient oracles. But what the philosopher La Place says, in his Essay on Probabilities, may be worth your consideration—that "any case, however apparently incredible, if it is a recurrent case, is as much entitled to a fair valuation under the laws of induction, as if it had been more probable beforehand." If the mesmerized can project, and that apparently without effort, their minds into the minds of others—read their thoughts; if they can see and tell what is going on hundreds of miles off, on the sea and on distant lands alike; if they can at remote distances influence others with a sense of their presence—they possess a power so very similar to that ascribed, in some extraordinary cases, to persons who, in a dying state, have declared that they have been absent and conversed with individuals dear to them in distant countries, and whose presence has been recognised at those very times by the persons so said to be visited, that I do not see how they can be referable to different original phenomena. Yet with this fact before them, supposing the facts of mesmerism, of the mind's separation from, and independence of its organic frame, is it not extraordinary that so many of this new school are, or profess themselves by their writings, materialists? I would, however, use the argument of mesmerism thus:—Mesmerism, if true, confirms the ghost and vision power, though I cannot admit that dreams, ghosts, and visions are any confirmation of mesmerism; for if mesmerism be a delusion and cheat, it may have arisen from speculating upon the other known power—as true miracles have been known to give rise to false. In cases of mesmerism, however, this shock is felt—the facts, as facts in the ordinary sense, are incredible; but then I see persons who have examined the matter very nicely, whom I have known, some intimately, for many years, of whose good sense, judgement, and veracity I will not allow myself to doubt—indeed to doubt whose veracity would be more incredible to me than the mesmeric facts themselves. Here is a conflict—a shock. Two contradictory impossibilities come together. I do not weigh in the scale at all the discovery of some cheats and pretenders; this was from the first to have been expected. In truth, the discoveries of trick and collusion are, after all, few. Not only has mesmerism been examined into by persons I respect, but practised likewise; and by one, a physician, whom I have known intimately many years, who, to his own detriment, has pursued it, and whom I have ever considered one of the most truthful persons living, and incapable of collusion, or knowingly in any way deceiving. Now, Eusebius, we cannot go into society, and pronounce persons whom we have ever respected all at once to be cheats and liars. Yet there may be some among them who will tell you that they themselves were entirely sceptical until they tried mesmerism, and found they had the power in themselves. We must then, in fairness, either acknowledge mesmerism as a power, or believe that these persons whom we respect and esteem are practised upon and deluded by others. And such would, I confess, be the solution of the difficulty, were it not that there are cases where this is next to an impossibility.
But I do not mean now, Eusebius,
to discuss mesmerism, [35] further than as it does seem "a part and parcel" of that mysterious power which has been manifested in omens, dreams, and appearances. I say seem—for if it be proved altogether false, the other mystery stands untouched by the failure—for in fact it was, thousands of years before either the discovery or practice—at least as far as we know; for some will not quite admit this, but, in their mesmeric dreaming, attribute to it the ancient oracles, and other wonders. And there are who somewhat inconsistently do this, having ridiculed and contemned as utterly false those phenomena, until they have found them hitch on to, and give a credit to, their new Mesmeric science.