Part 2
The student of psychical research is confronted at the outset by a considerable volume of reasoned and unreasoned opposition. Persons who in other directions are entirely opposed to each other’s points of view combine for a common assault: uncompromising materialists and devout evangelical Christians form a strange alliance against what they vaguely describe as “spiritualism”. An even more curious dislike comes from large masses of our population who, without any deep convictions or reasoned arguments for their hostility, are irritated by a movement which appears to upset the even tenor of their mental conservatism. Even cultured people are not proof against this prejudice: at many dinner tables any sustained reference to the alleged phenomena of mediumship would be regarded as “bad form” and thoroughly objectionable. When the writer entered the House of Commons he was informed by the chairman of his Liberal Association that his membership of the Psychical Research Society would “do him harm in the constituency”. This unintelligent aversion to spiritual novelties, which almost wrecked the Salvation Army in its infancy, secured the triumph of the Dayton “fundamentalists,” and now, though happily with diminishing force, assails the study of clairvoyance or telepathy, seems analogous to that primitive instinct which impels wild birds to combine for the destruction of an exotic parrot which has escaped from its cage.
Even as regards the more serious of his opponents, the apologist of psychical research is entitled to object at the start that comparatively few of these are adequately equipped for their task. It is lamentable that our hostile critics have for the most part scarcely taken the trouble to understand our position or furnish themselves with more than a quite superficial knowledge of the facts. What a sorry figure would be cut by most of our lay and ecclesiastical opponents were they set an examination paper on the evidences accumulated by the Psychical Research Society, to go no further! One of the best known opponents of the phenomena of mediumship has admitted that he has never made any personal investigation of the claims of any prominent medium, British or foreign, and a _brochure_ distributed to his audience exhibits an amazing ignorance of the subject matter against which his platform diatribes are directed. There is another reason for popular hostility. Much of the fraud which admittedly exists is of a peculiarly heartless character, for its exponents derive their resources largely from bereaved men and women who fly to spiritualism for tidings of their lost ones and for solace in their grief. The natural indignation felt against such traffickers in human sorrow undoubtedly predisposes many superficial critics to assume in their haste that all public mediumship is fraudulent.
Apart from the more or less unintelligent prejudices of the public generally, the scientific investigation of the phenomena of mediumship is hampered by the professional antagonisms of the Church and the Law. The menace of legal proceedings, while a terror to the fraudulent, is also a deterrent to the supply of genuine phenomena. Mediums are usually persons of a very sensitive and nervous temperament, and the fact that at any moment a Mrs Leonard is liable to the same legal procedure and the same conviction as the most insignificant fortune-teller is not conducive to the regular supply of those supernormal facts which form the subject-matter of scientific psychical research. From time to time, and apparently by concerted action, legal proceedings are set on foot by the authorities against public mediums. The requisite evidence is furnished by detectives or journalists who have secured sittings with the defendants, and the prosecution takes place under an Act of George IV, directed against “vagabonds” and “fortune-tellers”. Our magistrates usually maintain on these occasions that the essential part of the legal offence is the medium’s claim to “foretell the future”, and this is apparently accentuated and aggravated by the “intention to deceive” or the acceptance of money or reward. During an epidemic of legal medium-baiting in 1917, men and women were sentenced to heavy fines, up to £50, or imprisonment, because of their claims to foretell the future. Yet a little reflection might have caused our magistrates to remember that all the official representatives of organized religion are regularly engaged in foretelling the future and are paid――and quite rightly――for their services in this respect. The so-called “sport” of the race-course is――as many of us know to our cost――built upon an elaborate and extensive system of prophecy for payment――whether the forecasts are made in the columns of the most respectable newspapers or in the circulars of professional tipsters. Nor, indeed, can one wholly dissociate those manifold pledges which disfigure our political elections from the same suspicion; for these prophetic anticipations are made in order to win votes and so secure the social and pecuniary rewards which result from electoral success.
Some of the magistrates who tried and condemned these mediums displayed a pitiable ignorance of the whole subject of psychic phenomena. Almost anybody indeed appears to be considered competent to dogmatize about theological or psychic matters without any credentials in the shape of adequate study or experience. The following extract from the well known “Brockway” case serves to illustrate the mental equipment of a magistrate for a trial of this character:
“The Rev. G. H. St. John Mildmay stated that he had had two sittings with the defendant and was amazed that she could tell him names that he had written in a paper which was then folded up and held in her hand.... He was convinced that she was perfectly genuine.
_Magistrate_: You have, I suppose, seen conjurors taking cards out of people’s hair and such things? (_Laughter_).
_Witness_: There was nothing resembling that.”
A subsequent reference by one of the witnesses to the possible influence of “lying spirits” was followed by this edifying dialogue:
“_Mr. Barker_ (_prosecuting Counsel_): I object to such ridiculous questions.
_Mr. Wild_ (_for the defence_) asked the magistrate to rule whether such a question was ridiculous.
_The Magistrate_ (_with emphasis_): I certainly think it is ridiculous.
Mr. Wild then said――with justice――that it was evidently waste of time to go on, and left the Court.”
The antagonism of the Christian Churches, a _damnosa hereditas_ from the unspeakable records of past centuries, is now a waning force, chiefly confined to the ranks of what the late Dean Rashdall rather roughly called “the inferior clergy”. There are some exceptions. The distinguished Dean of St. Paul’s, a devoted student of the obsolete fantasies of Neoplatonic philosophy, seems quite unable to dissociate the serious study of psychic phenomena from the fraudulent banging of tambourines or the wearing of false wigs. He is ready to consider the unsupported assertions of Plotinus, that that third-century mystic on one occasion enjoyed some form of beatific vision in the “contemplation of the One”; but on the other hand the more recent and infinitely better supported testimony of a Lombroso, Crookes, or William James as to the occurrence of a psychical or clairvoyant phenomenon is contemptuously ignored. Now and again sincere representatives of medieval Christianity like Lord Hugh Cecil are to be found who ban the _séance_-room because they are convinced that clairvoyance is a form of necromancy and ‘controls’ like Mrs Piper’s “Phinuit” or Mrs Leonard’s “Feda” demoniacal agencies totally unfit for Christian intercourse. The more general and more enlightened attitude of at any rate the Anglican Church is embodied in the _Report_ of the bishops at the Lambeth Conference of 1920:
“We say without hesitation that we welcome scientific investigation: we recognize the patience and the skill with which members of the Psychical Research Society examine the mass of evidence of all kinds submitted to them, and above all the unmistakable desire to safeguard the inquiry against illusion or fraud, to arrive at truths, and to interpret scientific facts correctly.”
Yet side by side with this moderate and reasonable resolution we find that the Conference registered a very strong warning against “the habit of recourse to _séances_ and mediums”. Here again is revealed once more the ignorance of many well-meaning and able critics who possess a merely superficial acquaintance with the subject. How, for example, can we study scientifically the phenomena of clairvoyance without recourse to clairvoyant mediums? Such an embargo would――to go no further――have robbed us of the profoundly interesting records of Mrs Piper’s trance-mediumship, or the striking results contained in Dr Osty’s volumes. One might almost as well approve of the scientific study of anatomy and forbid recourse to the dissecting-room.
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At this point, and in view of the admitted imperfections which mark the course of our inquiry into supernormal phenomena――the fraud and credulity and malobservation which so easily beset our work――the question may fairly be asked: “Has psychical research really any future?”
To such a query I have no hesitation in giving an emphatic “Yes.” One may go further and say that at no period since the subject was seriously studied have we had better reasons for such an answer. Within the last few years a veritable revolution has occurred in the general attitude of science towards the phenomena of the universe. In the light of Einstein’s discoveries the dogmatism of the materialist has become obsolete. The old scientific outlook has been undermined and superseded by scientists themselves. Atoms and electrons are no longer regarded as ultimate realities. According to Professor Eddington, “there is nothing to prevent the assemblage of atoms forming the brain from being itself a thinking machine in virtue of that nature which physics leaves undetermined and undeterminable.” Not only the ‘laws of Nature’ but space and time and the great globe itself may conceivably be mental phenomena, themselves the creations of mind. And so it has come to pass that such an utterance as Professor Clifford’s: “The Universe is made of ether and atoms and there is no room for ghosts” remains only a fragment of an outworn scientific creed. The division of the external world into a material world and a spiritual world is now held by scientists to be superficial. No inherent impossibility rules out of court the possible manifestations of other minds than ours, functioning apart from our own brains and bodies. “We may doubt,” says Professor Eddington, “whether there is any branch of knowledge from which exact science is excluded”: there _is_ “room for ghosts,” and room for other supernormal phenomena hitherto ignored or denied by scientists in general. The fact of telepathy indicates the existence of other methods of mental communion outside the recognized channels of sense, and for that reason is rejected _a priori_ by some of the more conservative representatives of science. “Such a direct transmission of ideas from one mind to another” writes Dr Jodl, “without any perceptible physical method of communication would indicate the presence of a crack in the very foundations of all our views on nature, and, if proved, would lead us to a complete revision of fundamental principles.” Dr Henning declares that “psycho-physics, yes, even psychology, as a science, must be utterly wrecked before we have recourse to telepathy.” How different in tone is the statement of one of the most acute among our younger thinkers, Professor Broad of Cambridge[2], who not only tolerates the existence of a spiritual world but postulates the actual necessity of a “psychic factor” in order to provide a coherent explanation of the universe and ourselves.
[2] _The Mind and its Place in Nature_, 1925.
Since the advent, then, of a new scientific revelation the field lies open for further work and further advances in psychical research. No longer denied access to the precincts of orthodox science or received with a dubious welcome, the professed student of supernormal phenomena can claim and receive a definite status as the representative of an acknowledged branch of scientific study. But in realizing this, he must realize too the responsibilities of a position so assured. Two objects must be permanently kept in view――the accumulation of fresh facts, and the exercise of rigid control and accuracy in our experiments.
In the discovery of new material we are, of course, faced by the irritating and disappointing character of the phenomena with which we deal. They are often spasmodic, sporadic, irregular. They do not occur in any fixed sequence nor can they be predicted. Even when our experiments yield obvious success, we are ignorant of what the conditions of such success may be: no satisfactory experimental control of these wayward phenomena seems at present feasible. If they are reached through the channels of mediumship, we are again exposed to the varying and uncertain influences exercised by the physical or mental condition of the medium at the moment. It is quite clear that these ‘sensitives’ are in almost all cases persons of a definitely neurotic or hysterical temperament; indeed, if we can ever establish the actual connection between these pathological conditions and the production of supernormal phenomena we shall have gone a long way in unravelling the tangled skeins of psychical research. The discovery and classification of fresh psychic facts may mean the expenditure of long and tedious hours, but without the renewed exercise of “_recherche lente, persévérante, obstinée_” we cannot hope to convince ourselves or to speak with our enemies in the gate. In this department of research more than all others our facts soon become more or less obsolete, or at any rate lose their compelling force. No one now alludes to the careful mechanical safeguards against fraud devised by Sir William Crookes in the eighties. Our generation has almost forgotten the convincing experiments in telepathy carried out by the Sidgwicks and Professor Barrett, and no longer quotes the Stainton Moses phenomena which Myers accepted. The call is for the production of fresh data collected by our own contemporaries. Without therefore troubling ourselves unduly for the time being with explanations and theories about the facts, without intruding into the work the will to believe or disbelieve, let us devote ourselves to experiment and empirical facts. Surely among the thousand members of the Society for Psychical Research, to go no further, enough recruits could be found to supplement adequately by their own unselfish efforts the splendid work of our own pioneers in Great Britain and America.
Further, in the process of accumulating and systematizing our facts we must accept as an axiom of unquestioned validity that natural and normal causes must be eliminated before we have recourse to the supernatural or supernormal. In other words, we must regard it as _prima facie_ more probable that the medium is consciously or unconsciously fraudulent or that the sitters are the victims of credulity or malobservation than that men and women possess a capacity for acquiring knowledge or influencing matter which transcends the recognized facts of ordinary experience. Our course then as psychical researchers is clear. We must exercise such drastic and complete control over the whole course of our experiments as to render deception an unthinkable hypothesis. That such methods of control exist and can be applied is indubitable: that they are occasionally absent from _séances_ conducted by scientific and educated persons must equally be admitted.
Podmore revealed several defects in the alleged safeguards against fraud accepted in certain experiments with Florence Cook and even D. D. Home; and quotes a serious instance of careless description in the record of the famous experience of the London Dialectical Society with the latter medium: where the statement that “the room was illumined by moonlight” is shewn from the calendar (as in the parallel of Sir John Moore’s burial) to have been incorrect. In more recent times the conditions observed in Warsaw and in Paris with the mediums Kluski and Gujik have been sometimes unsatisfactory. Nor can any impartial critic, in view of the surprisingly lax conditions which prevailed, necessarily accept the widely recorded successes of Professor Gilbert Murray in thought-transference as manifestations of anything abnormal or unusual. In the case of any less distinguished performer it would have been difficult to regard such experiments, in the absence of any repetition of them under test conditions, as worth the serious consideration of a scientific body.
The collection of fresh facts is, to a large extent, conditioned by the supply of sensitives and by the provision of adequate funds for such research. Apart from the existing opportunities provided by University chairs of Mental Science, Mental Philosophy and the like, which have already contributed largely to this study when held by men like McDougall, James, Schiller, and Broad in Great Britain and America, private generosity will always apparently be ready to assist in some measure the experimental work of psychical research. The most serious obstacle arises not from the absence of monetary assistance but from the fact that the feelings entertained towards one another by the warring sects of religion are reflected in the rivalries and disputes of the societies engaged in the study of psychic phenomena. That regular supply of sensitives which is required for an adequate collection of empirical facts is seriously hindered by the violent animosities of leaders who fight over the bodies of well-known mediums and sometimes tempt them, like football professionals, by the dangerous offer of a higher fee.
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If we accept the view that psychical research holds ample promise of a useful future, we may next consider the various lines of our advance.
Any serious study of psychical research demands as its first essential a knowledge of the results secured from a careful consideration of telepathic phenomena. Many researchers would, indeed, maintain that their investigations need not extend beyond these limits. They regard telepathy, once scientifically established, as a working hypothesis which will cover the whole field of those abnormal phenomena which form our subject-matter. From this point of view, apparitions, clairvoyance, crystal-visions, even the physical phenomena of the _séance_-room――these and other abnormal happenings can be explained by the exercise in one shape or another of the transference of human thought and volition outside the ordinary channels of sense.
Those who hold that thought-transference is the solvent of all our perplexities in psychical research may point to the fact that down the centuries one marvel after another appears to have been directly attributable to this cause. A useful monograph might be written on this fascinating theme. To go no farther, it is easy to see how the miracles recorded in Biblical and ecclesiastical literature, and the amazing records of witchcraft and sorcery, may to a large extent be brought within the compass of the telepathic solution.
No serious attempts to investigate the conditions or results of thought-transference appear to have been undertaken before the middle of last century. It was not indeed until 1876 that Sir William Barrett really initiated the careful and scientific study of telepathic phenomena which has been continued by the Society for Psychical Research in England and on the Continent by Boirac, Osty, Tischner, and many other distinguished savants. The results obtained have been, it is true, questioned and criticized at every turn by certain scientists who deny that telepathy is either proven or indeed possible. Professor Jodl (quoted by Tischner) goes so far as to say: “Such a direct transmission of ideas from one mind to another, without any perceptible physical method of communication, would indicate the presence of a crack in the very foundations of all our views on Nature.” “Psycho-physics”, writes Dr Henning, “yes, even psychology as a science must be utterly wrecked before we have recourse to telepathy.” It is, however, useless to indulge in mere _a priori_ refutations or, in the case of telepathic experiments, to concentrate on the failures and ignore the successes. It is of course impossible within the very narrow space-limits of this little book to furnish any detailed reference of such experiments. Suffice it to say that evidence varied, cumulative and irresistible now exists which has established telepathy as a scientific fact.
The study of telepathic phenomena suggests the interesting question whether telepathy is a psychic factor of permanent and regular character or whether it represents merely the dying embers of a once more active force. Can the transference of human thought apart from physical media be developed and systematized on such a scale as to suggest immense possibilities in the human relationships of the future? Or will such development be inevitably retarded by the fact that telepathy is a dying sense to be classed with various obscure eccentricities of the human body which serve merely as vestigial landmarks in the long history of the race? Despite the alluring possibilities of the first suggestion, indications certainly exist which lend colour to the pathetic belief that research has only discovered this force in the evening of its existence.
This view of telepathy as a “rudimentary survival” seems to be strengthened by the admitted fact that manifestations of telepathy are far more certain and more striking when the percipient is under hypnotic suggestion; for, if it be the subliminal self which rises above the threshold in hypnotic slumber and obeys the suggestion of the agent’s mind, this is itself in all probability a manifestation of race-experience rather than that of the individual. The everyday self, the product of normal experience, is influenced to a much slighter degree by hypnotic suggestion than that mysterious entity, the secondary self, trailing its clouds of precarnate existence.
In the dim recesses of our race-history our pithecoid ancestors in default of language may well have possessed telepathic powers for the communication of their simple ideas, which powers have gradually been rendered less necessary as language developed, and may ultimately, unless stimulated and exercised, finally perish from atrophy. Such a theory would be illustrated by those stories which are furnished by reliable travellers and missionaries with reference to the amazing transmission of news which at times appears to take place amongst native races of a low level of civilization under circumstances which preclude any opportunity for normal methods of communication.