However much the scientific mind of the day may dislike the preternatural stand-point, yet it may be that, seeing "an absolute and derisive incredulity" is no longer regarded as the one scientific attitude, some examination of the views entertained by Catholic writers on the subject may not be without interest. Many of the acutest amongst them for ages have given great attention to the phenomena of mysticism, although mainly engaged in the consideration of their moral and ascetical bearings. Before leaving this second hypothesis, I propose to bring together such passages from the schoolmen as seem to make the largest allowance on the side of psychic force. Whilst there are, I think, sufficient indications that the scholastics generally admit psychic force as a natural basis and concurrent cause in many of the phenomena of both divine and diabolic mysticism, it must be allowed that passages dwelling at any length on this point have at least the merit of rarity.
Görres taught, reasonably enough, I conceive, in his Mystik, that there is a physical basis for the great mass of miracles wrought by Almighty God in and through his saints; that is to say, that they do not, ordinarily speaking, involve the creation of an entirely fresh power, but are rather the result of a divine excitation of a power already existing in germ. Of course, he who "of these stones can raise up children to Abraham" only subjects himself to the laws which he has made in so far as it pleases him to do so; and the scholastics were right in their insistence upon what they called the "obediential" power of things—that is, their inherent capacity of becoming anything in the hands of their Creator. Of course, too, it is often impossible to ascertain in a given case whether God is using that altum dominium which he possesses as Creator, or, on the other hand, is merely developing previously existing powers. Everything tends to persuade us that all nature, and especially the human soul, is full of rudimental powers which may be developed, 1st, by the special, immediate action of the Creator; 2d, by spiritual influences, good and bad; 3d, by certain abnormal conditions of the bodily organism. I conceive that these rudimental powers form a common natural basis for the great mass of both divine and diabolic miracles, and that sometimes they may attain to a considerable degree of development without any special influence, divine or diabolic. The existence of such a common basis would seem to be implied in the fact that the devil has been able to imitate successfully and really, as in the case of Pharao's magicians, so many of the divine miracles; for we know that he can at most develop what already exists, without having the least power to create what is not. We cannot imagine that God would ever create where he might develop, according to the scholastic principle which Sir William Hamilton has translated into the Law of Parsimony: Deus non abundat in superfluis. To take a particular example, Görres maintains that the ascetic and mystic process which the mind of the saint goes through by abstraction from earthly things, and the habit of celestial contemplation, does really co-operate in the phenomenon, so common in ecstasy, of levitation. In which case, the saint would be rather aided by God, acting upon his body through his soul, to rise in the air, than, properly speaking, lifted up by him. This levitation is common enough in the best authenticated cases of diabolical possession; and, if it does not occur in cases presumably natural, at least a wholly abnormal lightness and agility is not unfrequent in some of the movements of somnambulism. We find an example of this in the following narrative, taken from a rare treatise of the Benedictine Abbot Trithemius (sæc. 15), entitled Curiositas Regia (p. 29): "Let any one who knows nothing of nature tell me if the specific gravity of the body can be lightened by the action of the mind. I, with two witnesses to back me, will relate what I myself experienced when a boy at school. One night, we were four of us sleeping in one bed; my companion rose from beside me, as asleep as ever he was, the moon in its fifteenth night shining in upon us, and wandered all over the house as though he were awake, with his eyes shut. He climbed the walls more nimbly than a squirrel. He a second and a third time clambered up on the bed, and trampled upon all of us with his feet; but we felt no more of his weight than if he had been a little mouse. Wherever his sleeping body came, at once all the fastenings of the doors fell back of their own accord. With exceeding swiftness, he got to the top of the house, and, sparrow-fashion, clave to the roof. I am telling what I saw, not what I heard in idle talk. This would seem to be the part, not of a body, but of a spirit which freely uses its native power, so to speak, when the corporal senses are bound, and it wanders outside the mansion of the body.... We do not suppose that this will appear wonderful to the wise, who have a true conception of the power and nobility of the human mind, which in some respects is accounted the equal of the angels, being only separated from them by the interposition of the body."
After speaking of the miracles wrought, first by the invocation of faith, second by sanctity, which commands the ministration of angels, third by the assistance of demons through explicit or implicit compact, he continues: "Some persons add to these three ways a fourth, saying that the mind or spirit of the man himself can naturally work its miracles, provided only it knows how to withdraw itself from the accidental, in upon itself, above the exercise of the senses, into unity. Those who can compass this undertake to work marvels, to predict the future, to lay open the secrets of men's hearts, to dispel diseases, and suddenly to change men's counsels." Trithemius is willing to admit that some such power exists, whilst denying that it can attain to any perfect exercise without some external assistance from good or evil spirits. He gives the same account with Görres of the ecstatic volatus, viz., that the power of God co-operates with the energy of the saint's soul.
William of Auvergne, Bishop of Paris, in the beginning of the XIIIth century, recognizes the reality of several of the phenomena of spiritualism, and indicates a natural basis. Thus, speaking of the mirrors upon which magicians make their patients look, he says that no images are seen in the glass, but that what takes place is "a bending back of the mind's edge upon itself—of his mind, I say, who looks upon such an instrument; for its brightness forbids the mind's vision exteriorating and directing itself, and flings it back and reflects it in such sort that it cannot but look into itself."[63] Within the mind, he says, all sorts of wonders may be read, for therein abides the light "to which our souls in respect to their noble powers are most closely united; and one of the wisest Christians saith that 'this light is the Creator ever blessed,' meaning by these words that betwixt our minds and the interior light, which is God, there is no intermediary, according to the prophet's word, which, addressing the Creator, saith, 'The light of thy countenance is sealed upon us, O Lord'; that is, thy lightsome countenance, which is naught else but thyself." Whilst acknowledging that this light is "sealed," and that its rays do but break out like lightning flashes in a dark night, and confessing that he has long been cured of that error of his youth, the notion that the purification and abstraction necessary for such inward vision could be profitably achieved without the "grace of the Creator," he yet maintains that this light is, up to a certain point, communicated according to a natural law, analogous, it would seem, to that of the infusion of life. He considers that a melancholy temperament favors this abstraction, and insists that melancholy madmen, in virtue of their abstraction, do receive true irradiations of this divine light, although indefinitely fragmentary (particulatas et obtruncatas), "wherefore naturally they begin to discourse like prophets of divine things, yet continue not to talk so, save for a little while, but lapse into words of accustomed folly." He attributes this relapse to their shattered condition and the excess of the melancholy fumes which overpower them.
Whatever may be thought of the theory, few can have seen much of mad persons without noticing the noble fragments with which their disjointed talk is not unfrequently interspersed. The present writer has often heard one of the persons concerned relate the following story of a madman's prophecy:
The narrator, with two lady friends, had just been received from Anglicanism into the Catholic Church in Italy, and they were anxiously looking forward to the new phase of life awaiting them in England. They were all three going over a lunatic asylum at Palermo, when suddenly one of the inmates strode up to them, and with great solemnity, touching each of them in turn, said to one of the ladies, "Il Paradiso"; to the other, "La Madalena"; and to the gentleman, "Molto, molto d'Argento." Of the two ladies, the first died a holy death on the threshold of her Catholic life, whilst the other entered an order devoted to the reformation of fallen women. The third part only remains unfulfilled, and may possibly mark the relapse into our author's desipientia consueta.
William of Auvergne extends these natural divine irradiations even to the minds of animals, for which he entertains a most unscholastic-like respect: "Yea, this light (splendor) is given to dogs to hunt out the most secret thieves; ... for the dog perceives not the thief himself, and the sense of smell represents him not; for a thief, as such, has no odor."
Trithemius and William of Auvergne may be regarded as authors who lay an exceptional stress upon the natural basis of the supernatural. The former indicates the possibility of the alteration of the specific gravity of the body by the action of the soul within it; the latter suggests a system of natural revelation akin, it would seem, to what one meets with in the mesmeric or somnambulistic trance.
The somnambulistic and mesmeric states would seem to be substantially identical, although the latter involves a relation of subjection to the will of another which is not necessary, though possible, at least in some degree, to the former. Somnambulism very frequently produces the phenomenon of the exaltation of the natural powers; for instance, when in a somnambulistic state, the singer sings more sweetly, the dancer dances more gracefully, than in their normal condition. The same exaltation of natural power has been stated sometimes to take place in deranged persons, as Lamb indicates was the case with himself, in his letter to Coleridge: "Dream not, Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of fancy till you have gone mad. All seems to me now vapid, comparatively so." I remember being told by an intelligent person very fond of singing, who was subject to occasional fits of derangement, that, when mad, his voice gained in compass a good octave; even if this proves to be nothing but a lunatic's delusion, it is sufficiently curious that somnambulism should effect in reality what madness vainly imagines.
From time to time, somnambulism seems to open a door in the soul to a source of natural revelation, such as William of Auvergne speaks of. The following authentic instance is particularly noteworthy, because the possibility of expectation, having produced, as it often does, what was expected, is precluded. At a school at Thorp Arch, in Yorkshire, at the beginning of the present century, a boy was known to be a somnambulist. One night, the usher saw him rise from his bed and wander down-stairs into the school-room. He followed, and saw the boy go to his desk, take out his slate, and write. On looking over his shoulder, he read: "On such a day of such a month next I shall die." The boy almost directly after went up to bed, and the usher took the slate to the head-master. They agreed to say nothing about it, and another slate was substituted. The boy went on with his routine life, apparently quite unconscious that anything was impending; and, indeed, it is on all hands admitted that somnambulists in their waking state recollect nothing of their somnambulism. When the day came, the boy died.