I must now consider some objections in the mouth of persons who, without pretending that they have found any satisfactory solution of the question in the theories of unconscious cerebration or psychic force, are nevertheless exceedingly impressed by the strong psychic element in the phenomena of spiritualism—the apparent necessity for the presence of one or more persons of a peculiar nervous organization, for a certain harmonious mixture, or rather melodious articulation, of the company, in order to produce the desired effect. "Surely," they say, "such law, i.e., such regular alternation of cause and effect, as can be discovered is psychic. So far as we can subject the phenomena to ordinary scientific tests, everything points to their being the product of the psychic force of a certain peculiarly constituted company." This is the tone of Mr. Cox's recent letter to the Times, and Mr. Edwin Arnold's letter in the Report is quite in the same key.
My answer is that I admit all that they say. Of course, so much of law as is detected is psychic. There is no other law at work within the sphere of our discovery. The question is whether there are not indications of an influence at work which is irreducible to psychic laws, whilst using, in a partially abnormal manner, psychic force.
Mr. Lewes will urge (letter, Rep., p. 264): "I might propose as an hypothesis that the chair leaped because a kobold tilted it up; ... but you would not believe in the presence of a kobold, because his presence would enable you to explain the phenomena." Most indubitably I should, if no less an hypothesis would explain the phenomena; particularly if I had otherwise reason to believe in the existence and operation of kobolds. I should hold the likelihood of the hypothesis of his action in the particular case as steadily increasing in proportion as the other hypotheses tended to break down.
"No guess," Mr. Lewes insists, "need be rejected, if it admits of verification; no guess that cannot be verified is worth a moment's attention." The last part of this trenchant dictum is worth a moment's attention. If it simply mean that it is not worth a scientific man's while to attempt a direct scientific examination of what clearly admits of no such treatment, I can only say that, however much the scientific man may sometimes need the lesson, it is neither more nor less than a truism. If it mean that no hypothesis is to be regarded by any one as "worth a moment's attention" which science can never hope directly to verify, it is conspicuously untrue. Even a terra incognita is not without scientific interest as marking a boundary; nay, it may be scientifically proved to contain a place known to exist and proved not to exist in any known lands.
Of course, the devil, or kobold, if Mr. Lewes prefers it, cannot be verified in the sense of caught and handed over to scientific men as a specimen of spiritualistic fauna. Neither do I suppose he can be really detected, except by the standard of Catholic truth, by Catholic tests, and Catholic weapons; and even then, in the eyes of unbelievers, he will be no further identified than as an adverse intelligence in a very bad temper. But surely this is enough, where men's minds have not been reduced to mere machines for registering rigid scientific results, to secure the devil hypothesis something more than "a moment's attention."
What law we detect in spiritualistic phenomena I conceive to be the working of the conditions in subordination to which the devil is able to communicate with man. This subordination is probably owing, in part, to the nature of things which compels certain things to accost certain other things in one way and not another, in part to the merciful reservation of God. It would seem as if the spirits were, on the whole, prevented from being more irreligious than the prevailing tone of the company, or at least of the most irreligious portion of it. It may very well be that the conditions limiting diabolical intercourse are more complex and imperious, where the spirit "quasi tranquillus agit, without harassing the body." In mediæval diablerie, the demon is often represented as hindered or assisted by instruments of a purely physical character; thus Coleridge makes Christabel lift the enchantress over the threshold. A crowd, by neutralizing individual resistance, may present fewer obstacles to the devil—nay, may supply a medium of its own; just as frightened cattle huddled-together in a thunder-storm are said, by the steam-column arising from their tightly compacted bodies, to furnish a conductor for the lightning.
I have indicated in several places of these essays what I conceive to be the objects the devil has in view in lending himself to spiritualism. His main object, I can hardly doubt, is to do with religious sentiment what we are told Mr. Fisk tried to do with the gold currency of America—"corner it," get its circulation into his own hands. In the numberless cases where religion is nothing more than sentiment, he is only too likely to succeed; second-sight is so much more satisfying to the imagination, and at the same time so far more modest in its demands upon the will, than faith. The spread of spiritualism in the last few years is notorious, and there is every prospect of its continuing. Whether it will ever enter upon a new phase of existence, and become a fact publicly acknowledged by scientific men, is a question. It has never been so recognized amongst civilized nations. Whatever miracles, divine or diabolical, were meant to effect, it was not to overbalance the general sway of purely human power, of which this world is the appointed stage. As a general rule, the brilliant series of miracles by which the Christian martyr has baffled death in the presence of admiring crowds has ended in quiet decapitation at a convenient mile-stone. Many a time, doubtless, has the Roman headsman flattered himself that his good straight-down blow effectually upset that fine story made up out of a drugged lion and a fagot of green wood, which had somehow imposed upon so many stupid people. Not, of course, that I am denying that there have been miracles which imperiously asserted themselves over all obstacles, like the series which ended in Pharao's drowning; but, as a general rule, God has spoken once and again, and then prosaic obstinacy has been given its way. On these occasions, God has no doubt submitted himself to a general law which he has made for all direct spiritual interference, and which he mercifully enforces with especial strictness in the case of the devil.
Any civilized nation engaged in active pursuits will always be likely to contain, one should think, a majority among its scientific men who will be unfitted to experience, and indisposed to believe in, and still more to acknowledge, the phenomena of spiritualism. But it is impossible to say; the spiritualistic system as developed by Allan Kardec (see Miss Blackwell's communication, Rep., p 284) seems to lend itself in a remarkable way to some of the most prominent scientific tendencies of the day. If ever Darwinists should stand in need of the consolations of religious enthusiasm, they might find a congenial home in spiritualism. In the vast system of metempsychosis to which Miss Blackwell introduces us, we have all the Darwinian stages and to spare. First in order comes the "primordial fluid," "containing all the elements of derived existence," "the first substantiation of creative thought." "There are three orders or modes of substantiality"—"psychic substance," and "corporeal substance," and "dynamic substance, or force," which last is stated to partake of the nature of the two other modes, and to be the intermediary between them.
(P. 300) "Every state of the psychic element determines corresponding vibrations of the dynamic element, which, effecting corresponding aggregations of the atoms of the material element, produce the substance or body which is the material expression of that state." The soul's magnetic envelope, "perisprit," is at once its first garment and the instrument by which it aggregates to itself the elements of its body.