Part 13

Many professors are discouraged because, while the same tendency towards autocratic government has been seen in the political world, the reaction against it is already noted. The power of the speaker of the House of Representatives that gained the title of “czar” for one incumbent, has already been modified by the rules of the House. But the college professor sees nothing on the educational horizon that portends a change for the better. Every week he reads somewhere the well-known account of the first official meeting between a president of Harvard University and his faculty. When changes were proposed, and some of the faculty reasoned why these things must be, the president replied, “Because, gentlemen, you have a new president.” The professor always wonders if anything like it ever happens when a university acquires a new member of the faculty; he wonders why this vivid description of professors rubbing their eyes in amazement at the statement of their new master, should give such pleasure to the press and to the public; and he wonders if the spirit of it has not blossomed in the most recent authoritative statement of the place of the university president as it is understood by the president himself.[23]

The professor is discouraged because, although, in the present organization of the educational system, a president is considered necessary, the supply of presidents never equals the demand. So varied and numerous are the qualifications insisted upon, that when a person is found approaching the desired standard, he is sought for every vacancy. Several well-known professors have for a number of years been “mentioned” in connection with every presidency vacant, and as a society belle is said to boast of the number of desirable offers of marriage she has refused, so the professor, or more often his wife, makes known the number of presidencies that he has declined. The professor wonders why one or more of our great universities, in this age of vocational training, does not establish a training school for presidents. But this in its turn leads to the query how the supply of students in such a school could be maintained.

The professor is discouraged because of the difficulty of “getting at things.” The question of college government involves the relation of the boards of control to the president and the faculty, the relation of the president to the faculty, on the one hand, and to the student body on the other, with the result that the president becomes the official medium of communication between the governing body and the faculty. This triangular arrangement can but be productive of lack of harmony, and of constant misunderstandings; and its evils fall upon trustees, president, faculty, students, and alumni. The trustees nominally exercise an authority that is virtually given over to the president, the office of president is overweighted, the faculty are left without responsibility, as are the students in their turn, and the alumni are often in ignorance of what the policy of the college is, while everybody is exhorted to be “loyal to the college” without any clear understanding of what loyalty to the college means, or even indeed just what “the college” means. He sometimes wonders if the Duke of York’s gardener was anticipating present academic conditions in America, when he instructed his servants,

“Go, bind thou up yond dangling apricocks, Which, like unruly children, make their sire Stoop with oppression of their prodigal weight; Give some supportance to the bending twigs. Go thou, and like an executioner Cut off the heads of too-fast growing sprays, That look too lofty in our commonwealth; All must be even in our government.”

Yet after all ’tis a good world, my masters! The professor is not wholly downcast. If he does not know by name, without consulting the catalogue, a third of the members of the board of trustees that controls his academic destiny; if he does not know by sight a fourth of them, and if he has never exchanged comments on the weather with more than a fifth of them, he at least hopes that the sixth of the board who may chance, through the college catalogue, to know of his connection with the institution, may not feel unkindly toward him. He can only plead in extenuation of his rashness in suggesting a more democratic form of academic government, his strong conviction that only as _all_ parts of the educational structure are strengthened, can the structure approach perfection, and serve the end for which it has been erected.

FOOTNOTES:

[20] The only important exception to this statement is the University of Virginia. The feeling of college faculties evoked by its change from democratic to monarchical organization is probably expressed by a contemporaneous editorial. “The thirteenth of June is to be an important date in the history of the American college. On that day the democratic system of government by the entire body of professors, which has marked out the University of Virginia from almost all other institutions of learning in the country, is to come to an end. This system, in spite of all that can properly be said on the other side, has good features which it is a pity to see extinguished.”--_The Nation_, June 11, 1903.

It is evidently the college president who speaks in an editorial some weeks later in the same publication. “We believe that the president should be something of an autocrat in his proper domain and that faculty government would be bad government.”--_The Nation_, Sept. 24, 1903.

[21] J. McKeen Cattell, _University Control_, Science Press, 1913.

[22] _The Schoolmaster’s Year Book_, 1904, p. 4.

[23] Charles W. Eliot, “The University President in the American Commonwealth,” _Educational Review_, December, 1911.

OUR DEBT TO PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

I

Early in the history of the Society for Psychical Research, Von Helmholtz speaking to Professor Barrett, of telepathy, said, “Neither the testimony of all the Fellows of the Royal Society, nor even the evidence of my own senses, could lead me to believe in the transmission of thought from one person to another independently of the recognized channels of sensation. It is clearly impossible.” Many have followed the example of the psychologist Wundt, in holding that “no man of science, truly independent and without _parti pris_, could be interested in occult phenomena.” Stranger still, as reported by William James, “An illustrious biologist told me one day that even if telepathy were proved to be true, the savants ought to band together to suppress and conceal it, because such facts would upset the uniformity of nature, and all sorts of other things without which the scientists cannot carry on their pursuits.” Dogmatic skepticism, veiled or overt contempt, and an unreasoning aversion--such was the attitude of the scientific world in general toward the men who, in the early eighties of last century, first seriously grappled with the problems of the weird and the uncanny; while the great majority of educated laymen, almost equally under the spell of the preponderating materialism of the age, heartily endorsed the verdict of the scientists.

Things have not much changed in the years that have passed. It is true that there have been numerous accessions to the ranks of the “psychical researchers” from the scientific world itself. Many men of science--some among them even eminent men of science--have scandalized their fellows by adopting Newton’s ridiculous point of view--“To myself I seem to have been as a child playing on the seashore, while the immense ocean of Truth lay unexplored before me”--and by deeming psychical research not unworthy their personal participation. Crookes, Lodge, James, Richet, Flammarion, Flournoy, Bergson, Lombroso, Morselli, are a few names that instantly flash into mind. And from some great thinkers of non-scientific training, but justly esteemed for their intellectual powers, has come an endorsement of Gladstone’s appreciation: “Psychical research is the most important work which is being done in the world--by far the most important.” But scientists and laymen, so far as concerns the great mass, are still over-eager to deride and belittle the delvers into the occult--who, so their critics say, have been laboring all these years to no purpose whatever, and whose labors, no matter how long continued, can have only futile or mischievous results.

This widespread conviction of the futility of psychical research is evinced in many ways. It is seen in the jesting or scornful comments of writers in the periodical press; it is continually cropping out in the half-contemptuous, half-pitying smile that greets any sympathetic reference to “ghosts” or “telepathy”; it manifests in petulant outbursts from “orthodox” scientists, akin to the outburst of Von Helmholtz, as when our genial friend, the excellent Professor Münsterberg, heatedly proclaims, “As to spirit communications, there are none, and there never will be any.” Perhaps most striking of all is the almost complete indifference with which the published reports of the various psychical research organizations now in existence are regarded by instructors and students alike in many, if not all, institutions for higher education. In one great American university, to the writer’s personal knowledge, the many volumes of the _Proceedings_ and _Journal_ of the English Society for Psychical Research, and of the younger American Society for Psychical Research, are seldom removed from the library shelves except to be dusted. Truth-seekers in this university, it would seem, have no time to waste on the “bosh,” “rot,” and “rubbish” which these silly publications contain.

Now, it may be true--though a number of really learned men believe otherwise--that those engaged in psychical research have not as yet demonstrated scientifically either telepathy or survival; and it may be true that they have set themselves a hopeless task in endeavoring to establish communication between this world and the next. But it decidedly is not true that their investigations have been entirely fruitless. On the contrary, it is safe to say that no other scientific movement ever set on foot has, in the same length of time, contributed so much toward the advancement of knowledge as has psychical research.

Few will dispute that psychology today is the most conspicuous and most promising of the “recognized” sciences. Its marvellous growth during the past quarter of a century is quite generally attributed to the increasing application of the laboratory methods devised by Wundt and his pupils. In reality a large part of the credit--perhaps the larger part--must be given to those “dabblers in the occult,” who, like Sidgwick, Myers, and Gurney, in England, and Janet and Richet in France, thought it not beneath their dignity to study table-tipping, alleged telepathy, and the disputed phenomena of the hypnotic trance. To them, incontrovertibly, we owe the foundation-laying of abnormal psychology, with its manifold practical implications to the physician, the criminologist, and the educator; to them, as will hereinafter be shown, we chiefly owe the opening up of vistas of progress undreamed in the days before scientific psychical research began.

The men who enrolled under Sidgwick in 1882 to form the English Society for Psychical Research, were not the fanatical, credulous “ghost-hunters” they are commonly supposed to have been. Their first task, they saw clearly, was to determine whether the alleged facts adduced in support of the soul doctrine were really facts; and, if facts, whether they were not susceptible of adequate explanation on a wholly naturalistic basis. In the words of Frank Podmore, one of the earliest and most active members of the Society (_The Naturalization of the Supernatural_, p. 2):

The title which I have chosen for the present book, _The Naturalization of the Supernatural_, describes in popular language the object aimed at. The facts which the Society proposed to investigate stood, and some still stand, as aliens, outside the realm of organized knowledge. It proposed to examine their claim to be admitted within the pale. And it is important to recognize that whether we found ourselves able to accept the credentials of these postulants for recognition, or whether we felt ourselves compelled to reject them as undesirables, the aim which the Society set before itself would equally be fulfilled. In undertaking the inquiry we did not assume to express any opinion beforehand on the value of the evidence to be examined. Whatever the present bias of individual members toward belief or disbelief, it will not, I think, be charged against us, by any one who dispassionately studies the results ... that any private prepossessions were allowed to pervert the methods of the inquiry. To ascertain the facts of the case, at whatever cost to established opinions and prejudices, has been the consistent aim of the Society and its workers.

In this spirit the Society for Psychical Research attacked the whole strange medley of occult phenomena, from hypnotism to premonitions and hauntings. To most readers of these pages it may seem almost incredible that so short a time ago hypnotism was still outside the pale of science, and was pretty generally regarded as imaginary or supernatural, according to one’s temperament and training. But, prior to the founding of the Society for Psychical Research, only a few inquirers of established reputation--such as Esdaile, Braid, Liébeault, and Charcot--had deemed it a proper and desirable subject of investigation; the scientific brotherhood would have none of it, and frowned on its exponents as self-deluded simpletons or impudent charlatans. As late as 1875 a writer in the _Grand Dictionnaire Encyclopédique des Sciences Medicales_, summing up in a few words all that was to be said about hypnotism, brushed it aside as non-existent. It was because they questioned dogmatic utterances like this, and because they hoped through hypnotism to gain fresh light on the problem of the soul, that the members of the English Society for Psychical Research listed the study of hypnotism among their principal activities.

The result was not merely the confirmation and correction of much that Esdaile and other earlier inquirers had noted, but also an impressive, and in some respects startling, extension of knowledge concerning the processes of the human mind. Bearing out these discoveries, moreover, came the findings of sundry French savants--Janet, Binet, Féré, etc.--who, about the same time as the English investigators, and in the same spirit of open-minded research, sought to ascertain the true inwardness of hypnotism. On the one hand, the work of the Englishmen and the Frenchmen, between the years 1882 and 1890, made it certain that in hypnotism psychology possessed a wonderful instrument for experimentation. And, on the other hand, their own experiments with hypnotism revealed the various mental faculties--perception, attention, memory, and the rest--in entirely new aspects; paved the way to a correct understanding of hitherto obscure and baffling maladies; nay, even made necessary a radical readjustment of the scientific concept of human personality itself.

In this productive study of the phenomena of hypnotism two names stand supreme--the names of Pierre Janet and Edmund Gurney. Janet, who still is with us, deservedly enjoys today a worldwide fame for the part he has played in the inception and development of psychopathology, or medical psychology. Gurney to most people is not even a name. Yet in the brief period of experimentation that preceded his untimely death, he achieved so much as to suggest that had he lived he would probably have won a place in contemporary science fully as high as that held by Janet. More than one medical psychologist, in all likelihood, has been inspired by Gurney’s researches to specialize in that fascinating and important branch of the healing art--as was Morton Prince, on his own statement to the writer. It was not for medical purposes, however, that Gurney himself experimented with hypnotism: medical psychology was then in embryo, and Gurney was only secondarily interested in its possibilities. His great aim was to ascertain the nature of the hypnotic state, and the condition of the mind during hypnosis.

To review adequately the ingenious methods he adopted and the results he obtained, would delay us unduly. Enough to stress the salient fact that, through a brilliant series of experiments full of interest to modern psychology, he demonstrated the existence of a great undercurrent of mental life, in which the most complex processes are carried on without the individual’s conscious knowledge. Already, to be sure, several students of personality--Hamilton and Carpenter, for instance--had recognized the necessity of postulating something of the sort as the only means of rationally explaining certain anomalies and mysteries of human behavior. But to take it for granted was one thing, to demonstrate it was obviously quite another. And it remained for Gurney’s experiments--together with the concurrent experiments of Janet and his French colleagues--to effect the work of demonstration, and, still more, to trace the operations of this mental undercurrent in channels, and with consequences, formerly unsuspected.

Not until Gurney’s and Janet’s time, to be more explicit, had experimental proof been forthcoming of the far-reaching influence of “subconscious ideas” in affecting human conduct, and of the possibility of initiating trains of thought completely cut off, or “dissociated,” from the field of conscious mentation. This was first convincingly revealed by experiments based on the discovery of the fact that commands “suggested” to a hypnotized person would be faithfully executed at a stated moment after the awakening from hypnosis, and this despite the absence, in the normal waking state, of any conscious recollection of the commands in question. That this actually involved mentation beneath the threshold of consciousness was shown by Gurney in a number of experiments made possible by the further discovery that there are some people who can write “automatically”--that is, without conscious control of the words they put on paper, and even without knowing that they are writing anything. Thus Gurney records, in the course of his detailed record of these experiments (_Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research_, vol. iv, pp. 268-323):

On April 20 [P--ll] was told [while hypnotized] that half an hour after his next arrival he was to wind up a ball of string, and to let me know how the time was going. He arrived next evening at 8.30, and was set to the planchette [an instrument then often used to obtain automatic writing] at 8.43. He wrote, “13 minett has passed, and 17 more minetts to pass.” Some more experiments followed, and it so happened that at 9, the exact time when the fulfillment was due, he was in the trance. He suddenly said “Oh!” as if recollecting something, but did not move; he was then woke, and at 9.2 he walked across the room to where some string was lying, and wound it up....

Another day the same “subject” was told that when I coughed for the sixth time he was to look out of the window. He was woke, and I gave at intervals five coughs--one of which, however, was a failure, owing to its obvious artificiality. He was set to the planchette, and the words produced were, “When Mr. Gurney cough 6 times I am to look out.” At this point I read his writing and stopped it. I asked if he had noticed my coughing, and he said, “No, sir”; but this, of course, showed no more than [that] he had heard without attending. He was now hypnotized, told that I wanted to know how often I had coughed, and at once woke. The writing recommenced, “4 times he has cough, and 2 times more he has to cough.” I coughed twice more, and he went to the window, drew aside the blind, and looked out. Two minutes afterward I asked him what sort of a night it was. He said, “Fine when I came in.” I said I thought I had seen him looking out just now, but he absolutely denied it.

Any doubt that the memory oblivion in the waking state was genuine was removed by the interesting circumstance that though the “subjects”--men to whom even small sums of money meant much--were repeatedly offered substantial rewards if they could state what had been said to them during hypnosis, they were invariably unable to do so. Stranger still, Gurney demonstrated that it was entirely possible to develop, in the hypnotic state itself, different sets of memories, each completely independent of the others; so that, so far as concerned the contents of his consciousness, the hypnotized “subject” seemed to possess two or more personalities, each with its own distinct set of memory-images (_Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research_, vol. iv, pp. 515-521). This may be made clearer by giving a sample of the many curious conversations between one of the “subjects” and G. A. Smith (known in the published reports as S.), a hypnotist often employed by Gurney to assist him in his experiments:

A young man named S--t ... after being hypnotized was told in state A that the pier-head had been washed away, and in state B that an engine-boiler had burst at Brighton station and killed several people. He was then roused to state A, when he proved to recollect about the accident to the pier; after which a few passes brought him again to state B.

S. “But I suppose they’ll soon be able to build a new one.”

Had the pier been now present in S--t’s mind, this remark would have been naturally understood to refer to it, as it had formed the subject of conversation a few seconds before. But he at once replied, “Oh, there are plenty on the line”--meaning plenty of engines.

S. “The pile-driving takes time, though.”

S--t. “Pile-driving? Well, I don’t know anything about engines myself.”

A few upward passes were now made, and it at once became clear that the memory had shifted.

S. “If they have plenty more, it doesn’t matter much.”

S--t. “Oh, they can’t put it on in a day; it was a splendid place.”

S. “Why, I’m talking about the engine.”

S--t. “Engine! What, on the pier? I never noticed one there.”

Again, the same “subject” was told in state A that a balloon had been seen passing over the King’s-road. Some passes were made which carried him into state B, when S. said, “But I didn’t see it myself.”

S--t. “What was that?”

He was now told that two large dogs had been having a fight in the Western-road; and a few upward passes roused him to state A.

S. “But it was a good long time in sight.”

S--t. “The balloon?”

S. “No, the dog.”

S--t. “Dog? Why, was there one on it? A dog on a balloon!”

The “subject” is brought down again to state B.

S. “But it didn’t remain in sight long; it soon went up.”

S--t. “What didn’t? What went up?”

S. “Weren’t we talking about balloons?”

S--t. “No; but one of them dogs looked like a busted balloon when he was down.”

A few upward passes, and S. says, “Which one?”

S--t. “Why, there was only one.”

S. “One what?”

S--t. “Balloon.”

S. “I was talking about dogs.”

S--t. “I don’t know nothing of dogs.”

Three days afterward S--t was again hypnotized, and S. said, “What was that you said about the pier?”

S--t. “Oh, about the head being washed away.”

This, it will be seen, was the memory appropriate to state A. Some downward passes were made, and S. said, “A good thing that things don’t often happen like that.”

S--t. “No, they don’t at Brighton; they do on the Northern lines.”