THIS calm, judicious review of the results of organized psychical research cannot fail to be immensely valuable in clearing up the mists accumulated in twenty-eight years of earnest investigation into “the debatable phenomena designated by such terms as mesmeric, psychical, and spiritualistic.” The accumulations of evidence, and of argument based upon evidence, have been so enormous that few men busy with life have found time more than to dip into the wonderful subject and turn dismayed and reluctant away. Nothing has been so much needed by the Public Concerned with the Greater Things as a careful digestion of this subject to date, and we are fortunate in having so broad, so scientific, so many-sided a mind as Maeterlinck’s perform this service for us.
This paper is the first of many in which THE CENTURY will take account of civilization’s accomplishments in many fields for the benefit of busy men and women.—THE EDITOR.
THE THEOSOPHICAL HYPOTHESIS
I HAVE recently been studying two interesting solutions of the problem of personal survival—solutions which, although not new, have at least been lately renewed. I refer to the neotheosophical and neospiritualistic theories, which are, I think, the only ones that can be seriously discussed. The first is almost as old as man himself; but a popular movement of some magnitude in certain countries has rejuvenated the doctrine of reincarnation, or the transmigration of souls, and brought it once more into prominence.
The great argument of its adherents—the chief and, when all is said, the only argument—is only a sentimental one. Their doctrine that the soul in its successive existences is purified and exalted with more or less rapidity according to its efforts and deserts is, they maintain, the only one that satisfies the irresistible instinct of justice which we bear within us. They are right, and, from this point of view, their posthumous justice is immeasurably superior to that of the barbaric heaven and the monstrous hell of the Christians, where rewards and punishments are forever meted out to virtues and vices which are for the most part puerile, unavoidable, or accidental. But this, I repeat, is only a sentimental argument, which has only an infinitesimal value in the scale of evidence.
We may admit that certain of their theories are rather ingenious; and what they say of the part played by the “shells,” for instance, or the “elementals,” in the spiritualistic phenomena, is worth about as much as our clumsy explanations of fluidic and supersensible bodies. Perhaps, or even no doubt, they are right when they insist that everything around us is full of living, sentient forms, of diverse and innumerous types, “as different from one another as a blade of grass and a tiger, or a tiger and a man,” which are incessantly brushing against us and through which we pass unawares. If all the religions have overpopulated the world with invisible beings, we have perhaps depopulated it too completely; and it is extremely possible that we shall find one day that the mistake was not on the side which one imagined. As Sir William Crookes well puts it in a remarkable passage:
It is not improbable that other sentient beings have organs of sense which do not respond to some or any of the rays to which our eyes are sensitive, but are able to appreciate other vibrations to which we are blind. Such beings would practically be living in a different world to our own. Imagine, for instance, what idea we should form of surrounding objects were we endowed with eyes not sensitive to the ordinary rays of light but sensitive to the vibrations concerned in electric and magnetic phenomena. Glass and crystal would be among the most opaque of bodies. Metals would be more or less transparent, and a telegraph wire through the air would look like a long narrow hole drilled through an impervious solid body. A dynamo in active work would resemble a conflagration, whilst a permanent magnet would realise the dream of mediæval mystics and become an everlasting lamp with no expenditure of energy or consumption of fuel.
All this, with so many other things which they assert, would be, if not admissible, at least worthy of attention, if those suppositions were offered for what they are, very ancient hypotheses that go back to the early ages of human theology and metaphysics; but when they are transformed into categorical and dogmatic assertions, they at once become untenable. Their exponents promise us, on the other hand, that by exercising our minds, by refining our senses, by etherealizing our bodies, we shall be able to live with those whom we call dead and with the higher beings that surround us. It all seems to lead to nothing very much and rests on very frail bases, on very vague proofs derived from hypnotic sleep, presentiments, mediumism, phantasms, and so forth. We want something more than arbitrary theories about the “immortal triad,” the “three worlds,” the “astral body,” the “permanent atom,” or the “Karma-Loka.” As their sensibility is keener, their perception subtler, their spiritual intuition more penetrating, than ours, why do they not choose as a field for investigation the phenomena of prenatal memory, for instance, to take one subject at random from a multitude of others—phenomena which, although sporadic and open to question, are still admissible?
THE NEOSPIRITUALISTIC HYPOTHESIS
OUTSIDE theosophy, investigations of a purely scientific nature have been made in the baffling regions of survival and reincarnation. Neospiritualism, or psychicism, or experimental spiritualism, had its origin in America in 1870. In the following year the first strictly scientific experiments were organized by Sir William Crookes, the man of genius who opened up most of the roads at the end of which men were astounded to discover unknown properties and conditions of matter; and as early as 1873 or 1874 he obtained, with the aid of the medium Florence Cook, phenomena of materialization that have hardly been surpassed. But the real beginning of the new science dates from the foundation of the Society for Psychical Research, familiarly known as the S. P. R. This society was formed in London twenty-eight years ago, under the auspices of the most distinguished men of science in England, and, as we all know, has made a methodical and strict study of every case of supernormal psychology and sensibility. This study or investigation, originally conducted by Edmund Gurney, F. W. H. Myers, and Frank Podmore, and continued by their successors, is a masterpiece of scientific patience and conscientiousness. Not an incident is admitted that is not supported by unimpeachable testimony, by definite written records and convincing corroboration. Among the many supernormal manifestations, telepathy, previsions, and so forth, we will take cognizance only of those which relate to life beyond the grave. They can be divided into two categories: first, real, objective, and spontaneous apparitions, or direct manifestations; second, manifestations obtained by the agency of mediums, whether induced apparitions, which we will put aside for the moment because of their frequently questionable character, or communications with the dead by word of mouth or automatic writing. Those extraordinary communications have been studied at length by such men as F. W. H. Myers, Richard Hodgson, Sir Oliver Lodge, and the philosopher William James, the father of the new pragmatism. They profoundly impressed and almost convinced these men, and they therefore deserve to arrest our attention.