Here is another instance, from the testimony of Mr. Eyre (Rep., p. 179). This gentleman wanted the register of the baptism of a person born in England, and who had died in America a century ago. He was led to suppose that this would be found either in Yorkshire or Cambridgeshire. He hunted for it for three months, and then, in broad daylight, without saying who he is or what he wants, consults a medium. He says: "Before leaving home, I wrote out and numbered about a dozen questions. Among them was the question, 'Where can I find the register of the baptism I am searching for?' The paper with the questions I had folded and placed in a stout envelope, and closed it. When we sat down to the table, I asked, after some other questions, if the spirits would answer the questions I had written and had in my pocket. The answer by raps was, 'Yes.' I took the envelope containing the questions out of my pocket, and, without opening it, laid it on the table. I then took a piece of paper, and as the questions were answered—No. 1, 2, and so on—I wrote down the answers. When we came to the question, where I could get the register of the baptism, the table telegraphed, 'Stepney church,' and, at the same time, Mrs. Marshall, senior, in her peculiar manner, blurted out, 'Stepney.' Being at that time a stranger in London, I did not know there was such a place. I went on with the questions I had prepared, and got correct answers to all of them. A few days afterwards, I went to Stepney Church, and, after spending some days in searching, I there found the register of the baptism, as I had been told."
Here the medium had not even the light of the questions by which to read the unconscious expression of unconscious cerebration. One cannot help wondering what may be the muscular expression for "Stepney church."
The writer in the Quarterly Review, to whom I have before referred, shall give us the next example from his own experience (vol. 131, p. 331). He owns that, on one occasion, he was "strongly impressed" by a spiritualistic manifestation. "He (the medium, Mr. Foster) answered, in a variety of modes, the questions we put to him respecting the time and cause of the death of several of our departed friends and relatives, whose names we had written down on slips of paper, which had been folded up and crumpled into pellets before being placed in his hands. But he brought out names and dates correctly, in large red letters on his bare arms, the redness being produced by the turgescence of the minute vessels of the skin, and passing away after a few minutes like a blush. We must own to have been strongly impressed at the time by this performance; but, on subsequently thinking it over, we thought we could see that Mr. Foster's divining power was partly derived from his having the faculty of interpreting the movements of the top of pen or pencil, though the point and what was written by it was hid from his sight; and partly from a very keen observation of the indications unconsciously given by ourselves of the answer we expected." Indubitably in the case of two accomplices, a preconcerted system of movements of the top of the pencil might be made to indicate what was written; but, considering the enormous variety of ways of writing, that any one can acquire the art of so reading chance writing is incredible. At best this explanation only applies to the questions. The answers, which were given "correctly," in the shape of dates and causes of death, etc., in red letters on the medium's arm, must have been read in the reviewer's unconscious contortions. The force of the reviewer's admission of the accuracy of these communications is not affected by the fact that when another way of answering questions was adopted—viz., the questioner pointing successively to the letters of the alphabet, until interrupted by the rap—there were indications of his manner being read by the medium. Again, it is little to the purpose that "the trick by which the red letters were produced was discovered by the inquiries of one of our medical friends"—a most curiously vague statement, by the bye—for the mystery to be explained is not the red letters, but the correctness of the information they conveyed. There is nothing in the necessity of some sort of rapport existing between the medium and his questioner inconsistent with the spirit hypothesis; there is nothing in the subsequent experiments of the reviewer even tending to a natural explanation of what had so strongly impressed him; and yet he is able to shake off the strong impression triumphantly. One begins to appreciate the eloquent words of Professor Tyndall:[50] "The logical feebleness of science is not sufficiently borne in mind. It keeps down the weed of superstition not by logic, but by slowly rendering the mental soil unfit for its cultivation."
I recognize with gratitude, as one of the many services Dr. Carpenter has done to science, his full admission of a series of facts in connection with mesmerism and animal magnetism, until the other day looked upon with suspicion by medical men and physiologists; and, further, I am ready to admit that the influence of unconscious cerebration upon some of the phenomena of spiritualism is probable enough. But I maintain that it is distinctly inadequate as an explanation. Its main use, as applied to spiritualism, has been that of a learned label to attract the attention of scientific men—a scientific rag wherewith spiritualism may cover its nakedness, but which all the ingenuity in the world cannot convert into clothes.
II.
Numbers of intelligent persons, men distinguished in science, in literature, in the learned professions, but whose "mental soil" has not been rendered wholly unfit for the cultivation of all germs foreign to the philosophy of the day, have acknowledged that the phenomena of spiritualism are not only veritable, but inexplicable by any known law. "The absolute and even derisive incredulity which dispenses with all examination of the evidence for preternatural occurrences,"[51] of which Mr. Lecky boasts as one of the results of civilization, has certainly lost ground of late. Professor De Morgan says: "I am perfectly convinced that I have both seen and heard, in a manner which should render unbelief impossible, things called spiritual which cannot be taken by a rational being to be capable of explanation by imposture, coincidence, or mistake. So far I feel the ground firm under me."[52] Mr. Edwin Arnold (Rep., p. 258) speaks to the same effect: "I regard many of the 'manifestations' as genuine, undeniable, and inexplicable by any known law or any collusion, arrangement, or deception of the senses." And so we come very much to what S. Bonaventure said in the XIIIth century: "Some have said that witchcraft is a nonentity in the world, and has no force, save merely in the estimation of men, who, in their want of faith, attribute many natural mishaps to witchcrafts; but this position is derogatory to law, to common opinion, and, what is of more importance, to experience, and so has no foothold."[53] Law has, indeed, long ceased to have anything to say on the subject, and popular sentiment, if not converted, has at least been reduced to shamefaced silence; but once again experience claims her rights, and, in a great wave extending across two hemispheres, the experience of spiritualism breaks upon us, and the opposite opinion is found to lack foothold. Even in this XIXth century, men are beginning to admit that magic or mysticism, call it what you will, though overrun as ever with trickery and delusion, is for all that no nonentity, but a long-ignored reality, worthy, not of derision, but of patient examination. True many of those who go furthest in their recognition of the genuineness of the phenomena do not attribute them to spirits; still, however this may be, no advocate of psychic force can deny that many of the so-called marvel-mongers of the middle ages were at least no mere blind leaders of the blind, but the witnesses of phenomena none the less true because it has been for so long the fashion to ignore them.
In the middle ages, people thought that these marvels were the work of spirits good or bad, or at least the result of their co-operation with man. For such an hypothesis, modern science has an almost invincible repugnance, in which I think there is much that is excusable. It is not that the man of science necessarily disbelieves in the existence of spirits; but the idea of their possible interference in phenomena which he has to consider exercises a disturbing influence upon all his calculations. He is as irritated as though he should be called upon to submit to, and make allowance for, the tricks of mischievous children who jerk his arm or clog his machinery. Again, he is haunted with the notion that, by admitting the spirit hypothesis, he is contributing to the inauguration of an era of disastrous reaction. To the eye of his imagination, the bright, open platform, the familiar instruments, each a concrete realization, in honest metal, of a known law, the intelligent modern audience, his own classical tail-coat and white neckcloth, melt away, and he sees himself propitiating fickle spirits with uncouth spells, at the bottom of a mediæval grotto:
"A shape with amice wrapped around,
With a wrought Spanish baldric bound,
Like a pilgrim from beyond the sea."
Not that the evil dream could ever be realized in its integrity; but still, when once a spiritualist reaction has set in, who will venture to fix its limits? And so, forgetting that the spirit hypothesis in nowise excludes the operation of psychic conditions, he insists upon every indication of such conditions, as though they were the key to everything, and there were no indications of any other agency. His "mental soil," perhaps, does not permit him to deny the reality of the phenomena of spiritualism, or to talk of unconscious cerebration as a sufficient explanation; and so he is contented to raise his altar to an unknown god, provided only he may baptize him into the dynasty of science by the name of "Psychic Force."
Psychic force has still to be defined. It is the unknown cause of certain effects, taking its color from them only. With reference to independent physical manifestations, it is the power to produce "the movement of heavy substances without contact or material connection." In this sense, Arago "is stated" to have reported to the Academy of Science, "that, under peculiar conditions, the human organization gives forth a physical power which, without visible instruments, lifts heavy bodies, attracts or repels them, according to a law of polarity, overturns them, and produces the phenomena of sound."[54] When considered in relation to the whole mass of spiritualistic phenomena, its vague, unsatisfactory character becomes still more apparent. The nearest approach to a definition of psychic force, in its larger sense, that I have met with occurs in Mr. Atkinson's communication (Rep., p. 105): "It is nothing more than the ordinary and normal power of our complex nature acting without impediment" (consciousness being one of the impediments), "and diverted from its usual relations, though in some cases abnormal conditions clearly favor the development." It is hardly possible to mistake the pantheistic character of this passage; for this unconditioned nature, underlying personal consciousness, which, in virtue of its being unconditioned, knows all and can do all, what else can it be but a common nature, an anima mundi, a world-god? according to the pantheistic conception of Averrhoes, "an intelligence which, without multiplication of itself, animates all the individuals of the human species, in respect to their exercising the functions of a rational soul."[55] I am convinced that psychic force, if drawn out as the one solution of spiritualism, can end in nothing short of this; but, on the other hand, I readily admit that the "anima mundi" or rather, "spirit of nature," as advocated by Dr. H. More, Glanvil, and, if he is not misrepresented, the famous Carmente doctor, John Bacon,[56] is not pantheistic. More, formally rejecting the doctrine of Averrhoes as "atheism," insists that the "spirit of nature" is substantially distinct from, though in intimate relations with, individual souls. He defines it to be "a substance incorporeal," how far possessing "sense and animadversion" he may not determine, but certainly "devoid of reason and free-will," "pervading the whole matter of the universe, and exercising a plastical power therein, according to the sundry predispositions and occasions in the parts it works upon, raising such phenomena in the world, by directing the parts of matter and their motion, as cannot be resolved into mere mechanical powers."[57]