Part 16

Full though this world is of problems--moral, social, intellectual, artistic--weighty problems, the treatment of which must redound to the credit of any writer, shedding reflected lustre on his name and reaping him the praises of a grateful public; yet I here venture to approach you with a theme which even I myself cannot do otherwise than regard as preposterous, and, indeed, suspect. Surprise and contempt, I know, will be my portion from the general at my choice of it. But do people choose their subjects, I ask? No, they write and they talk of what they are ridden by, and nothing else; and that though the themes a man neglects may lay claim to pre-eminent importance, and the one which has taken his reason captive be actually mischievous. And all my good, respectable ideas have been vitiated by personal contacts and observations, which are at once so puerile, and yet to such a degree unexplainable (if I may talk about degrees of unexplainableness), that I cannot get away from them, and find myself, for the moment at least, spoilt for the contemplation of those more unsullied, those saner, chaster realms of thought where I could move with so much honour and credit to myself. I say spoilt. And truly it is a sort of corruption which breathes from the region I have in mind: that probably not deep, yet subterraneous region, that turbid and equivocal plane of existence, with which, in my folly, I have put myself in touch; it lures me astray from my lawful concerns to those which I know full well are none of mine, though they exercise upon my fancy and my brain a pungent attraction, like the fumes of wood-alcohol (by contrast with the bouquet from the pure wine of the spirit of civilization). Well do I comprehend how a man may fall victim to them as to a vice, and through that monomaniac, vain-foolish preoccupation be lost for ever to the moral upper world.

My case is no other than this: I have fallen into the hands of the occultists. Not precisely the spiritualists--though there were some of them too in the gathering I lately visited. But we must distinguish. The spiritualistic dogma is by no means obligatory, among the group of international scholars--not such a very small group now--whose members call themselves occultists because they are given to the study of phenomena which at present seem to us to contradict the natural order as we know it. The whole spirit-theory, as a method of explaining certain puzzles, is even, by many investigators, rejected with a gesture of stern scientific probity. And yet in fairness it must be said that in the production of occult events these scientific gentlemen do take advantage of the supra-normal, or at all events anormal disposition of certain persons who do not weigh very heavy in the intellectual scale; and that this technique (I refer, of course, to the somnambulistic state of the so-called mediums) constantly passes over into the transcendental and metaphysical. But metaphysics, of course, is not spiritualism; even less is spiritualism metaphysics. The difference in degree is so great as to become a difference in kind; and it is surely quite comprehensible that philosophical metaphysics should aim to keep spiritualism at arm’s length. For spiritualism--the belief in spirits, ghosts, _revenants_, spook intelligences with whom one gets into touch by interrogating a table and getting the most utter banalities by way of reply--spiritualism is in fact a kind of backstairs metaphysics, a blind credulity which is on the one hand not up to the conception of idealistic speculation, and on the other hand quite incapable of metaphysical orgies of emotion. A good example of the first alternative is Schopenhauer’s masterpiece _The World as Will and Idea_; while in Wagner’s _Tristan und Isolde_ we possess the classic _opus metaphysicum_. And one only needs to mention these lofty flights of intuition to feel at once the lamentable triviality of the whole of that which calls itself spiritualism--though what it is is not so much metaphysics as it is a Sunday afternoon diversion for the servants’ hall.

But is human dignity a criterion of truth? Yes, in a way it is. There is a man, Herr Krall of Elberfeld, well known for his famous calculating horses, a man whose trade and activities hover on the borders of the occult. I heard Herr Krall say: “If there are ghosts, then there is every reason why a man should pray for a long life; for there could not possibly be anything more insipid, childish, futile, confused, and pathetic than the existence of these creatures, to judge from their supposed manifestations.” One is reminded of the famous utterance of the shade of Achilles on the Cimmerian shore, the time that Odysseus held a seance there. Vain and senseless, the son of Peleus calls the existence of the dead; and, after all, the pagan world might so conceive the life after death, without making any mistake about this one as truth, fact, or dogma. On the other hand, it would go very much against the grain for a Christian to conceive another world in which things were even paltrier, stupider, and more futile than they are in this our earthly sphere; and when, as indeed it may easily happen, an intelligence knocks on a table and introduces itself to society as the spirit of Aristotle or Napoleon Bonaparte, only to belie the statement by a hundred blunders, gaucheries, and obviously intentional shufflings, then I think we are justified, on grounds of taste, in the conclusion that this is not only not Aristotle or Napoleon, it is nobody at all, but only acting as though it were; and that any complaisance toward such goings-on is beneath all human dignity.

Now, this would all be well and good if only there did not linger a doubt whether dignity and good taste are absolute criteria in the field of science, in the search for truth, in that process, in short, whereby nature explores herself through the mind of man. Dignity there is only in the province of pure spirit; and metaphysics, in the sense of transcendental speculation in the theory of knowledge, belongs to that province. But when metaphysics becomes empirical; when it condescends, or begins to feel the obligation, or yields to the temptation, to track out the riddle of the universe _experimentally_--and that is what it does in occultism, which is nothing but empirical, experimental metaphysics--then it must not count on keeping its hands clean or its bearing stately. The only dignity it has left is the irreducible remnant that must cleave to all honourable service in the cause of truth; and it must make up its mind that it will have to deal with a great deal of filth and foolishness. For mediumism and somnambulism, the sources of occult phenomena, are a mixing of suprasensual mysteries with the mystery of organic life; and the result is turbid. There is no longer any talk of taste, of mental or spiritual _niveau_, or of the beauty of rashness. For here nature takes the field; and nature is an equivocal element: impure, obscene, spiteful, dæmonic; while man, proud man, in his very essence opposed to her, loves to put on an aristocratic air and find his own peculiar dignity in forgetting that he is a child of nature just as much as he is a child of spirit. And yet, if one were seriously, on humane grounds, to forbid metaphysics to become experimental--that is, to practise occultism--that would be to deny to natural research, to knowledge of nature in general, every human value and importance, as did the Middle Ages and the Church. As though the exact natural sciences themselves stop at the point where an encounter with metaphysics becomes unavoidable! The fact that I know and understand very little of the famous doctrines of Einstein (except that, more or less, things have a fourth dimension--namely, time) prevents me as little as it does every other intelligent layman from seeing that in this doctrine of relativity the border-line between mathematical physics and metaphysics has become fluid. Is it still “physics,” or what is it, when they tell us--and they are telling us today--that matter is ultimately and inmostly not material, it is just one manifestation of energy, and its smallest parts, which are neither small nor large, are, though surrounded indeed by time-spatial fields of power, themselves timeless and spaceless?

But enough of theorizing. Let us get on to my experiences. They begin at my acquaintance with a man about whom opinions have been of late strongly divided, some finding him a charlatan and traitor betrayed, others respecting him as a genuine and meritorious investigator, and one of the initiators of a new science. He is Dr. Albert Freiherr von Schrenck-Notzing. A practising physician, from a family of physicians, specialist in nervous diseases, sexual pathologist, he more than thirty years ago arrived at the study of the occult by the route of hypnotism and somnambulism. It appears that for a time he leaned toward spiritualism; but today he rejects it, and refers all the unexplainable phenomena he evokes and observes to the operation of unknown but natural forces, which will in time be recognized as such.

The appearance of his book _Phenomena of Materialization_, a few years before the war, produced a full-grown public scandal. From the official and learned world came a perfect hail of protests against such a combination of credulity, confused thinking, and fraud. The public, in so far as it came to hear about it at all, held its sides with laughter; and really the book was a severe trial of our seriousness, as to both text and illustrations--photographs which struck one as at once silly and grotesque. Evidence was not lacking that Dr. Schrenck-Notzing had been bamboozled--and this was probably true in more than one case. Most unfortunately, the mediumistic faculty, however genuine, is no guarantee of good character. On the contrary, it even seems to have a perfect flair for mystification. Anyhow, it looked for years as though Schrenck-Notzing had irretrievably damaged his good name as a scholar.

The years passed. The war came and with it undreamed-of chances and changes. When the second volume of _Phenomena of Materialization_ came out, it was in an entirely altered atmosphere. Not that the second volume was less crazy than the first, or that the official world of science, the press, or the public welcomed it more cordially than before. No, there was no stinting of scorn and contumely. But both seemed to lack conviction, to be less fortified than before by comfortable self-assurance. There was a mild resignation, a fatalistic _laissez-faire_ in the air. People had borne so much they never dreamed of bearing, such outrageous experiences had been their lot, that even their honest indignation lacked the right ring; it betrayed an unmistakable tendency to compound.

In politics there is always a right and a left wing. So in the scientific world there is, with reference to the occult, a strongly conservative and a radical-revolutionist position, together with all sorts of shadings and gradings between, on the one hand, obstinate denial of all rationally unexplainable but persistently reported manifestations like telepathy, true-dreaming, and second sight, and, on the other, a fanatical and uncritical credulity, based, this last, less on a solid reverence for the mystery than an inhuman prejudice against all reason and science. And the intransigent conservative position has a good deal on its side--as, after all, it has in politics too. For between the right and the left lies an inclined plane where it is only too easy to slip; to concede belief in one single case of the occult is to reach your little finger to a devil who almost infallibly ends by taking the whole hand and therewith the whole man. _Principiis obsta!_ There is beginning to prevail in Germany today a dangerous liberalism in the camp of orthodox science--in Germany, which might hitherto have been regarded as the stronghold of conservatism in this respect. Abroad--in England, in France--there had always been a more yielding temper, and more often displayed. (I will not speak of America, where an unnecessary amount of humbug seems to have got mixed up with occult studies.) Perhaps we Germans were influenced by the fact that Schrenck-Notzing’s book was translated into English; that the Society for Psychical Research two years ago summoned to London his principal medium, a person named Eva C., and published a very serious report of the sittings with her; that French savants like Richet, Flammarion, Gustave Geley, Dr. Bourbon, and others supported this report in its boldness, tested its experiments, confirmed its results. All in all, a slight shakiness is evident, a certain demoralization of our conservative and sceptical front. There are traitors, and the traitors are secret before they become public. There are university professors, and not only philosophers and psychologists, but natural scientists, physicists, physiologists, and physicians, who take advantage of the bad street-lighting in Munich to steal like conspirators to the evening sittings of Herr von Schrenck-Notzing to see what it does not profit them to see. For they must know, and they do, that the only way of remaining intact is to shut their eyes and not see. They are lost, or as good as lost, it is all up with their scepticism--or, rather, their scepticism _begins_--when they see. There are instances. A much-sought-after Munich oculist openly confessed that after what he had seen at Schrenck-Notzing’s he had grown “very cautious in his scepticism.” A charming phrase--the most equivocal phrases are usually the charmingest. For I aver that that can be no true scepticism which is not sceptical of itself; and a sceptic, in my humble view, is not merely one who believes the prescribed things and averts his eyes from everything that might imperil his virtue. Rather your true sceptic will, in ordinary language, find all sorts of things possible, and he will not, for the sake of convention, deny the evidence of his sound senses.

As for me, I have always stood, theoretically, rather far left in this business of the occult; holding, in the sense of the thoroughgoing scepticism I just defined, that all sorts of things are quite possible; but not boasting any personal or practical experience in suprasensual realms. I have rested in a theoretical benevolence. I have felt, and may have even casually expressed, a desire to attend a sitting, but nothing came of it, and that nothing came of it was probably my own doing.

And now? At the present moment? Just lately? You must let me tell the tale as it fell out. I had a visitor, an artist man from a comic paper, with an order to make a caricature of me. Very good. He drew me a crooked nose, and one thing led up to another. God knows how we came to speak of Herr von Schrenck-Notzing. Had I heard that he was working with a new medium, my guest asked, as he went on cracking jokes with his pencil. It was a youth, hardly a man yet, named Willy S., a dentist by profession and a devil of a fellow in the psychical line. Schrenck got perfectly crazy manifestations through him. He had discovered him, brought him to Munich, found him lodgings and a job, besides paying a deposit to ensure Willy’s exclusive services. He had been working with him a year now, and had him so well trained, psychically speaking, that Willy, unlike most mediums, could endure an almost constant change of audience, with the rarest disappointments. That was important for Schrenck-Notzing for the sake of the propaganda.--“Might one get to see a sitting?” I asked. The artist man thought it quite possible. He knew Schrenck-Notzing, and he would like to go to one himself. Leave it to him, he would arrange an invitation.

So it came about. There followed an appointment by telephone; and one winter evening at eight o’clock, toward Christmas-time, I found myself on the tram with my caricaturist, bound for the seance. Both of us were in high spirits, exhilarated, curious, in a mood between bluster and funk, something like the feelings of a young man going for the first time to a girl.

The palatial residence of Baron von Schrenck-Notzing is near the Karolinenplatz, in an exclusive quarter. We arrived, and a servant led us through a marble vestibule and up some steps to an antechamber. As we took off our things we were greeted by our host, with cool, aristocratic politeness, and ushered into a good-sized library, where the other participants in the coming seance were already gathered. Only one of them was known to me. I addressed him, expressing my surprise at finding him here. This was Professor G., the zoologist, an enthusiastic sportsman, ski-runner, yachtsman, and Alpinist, a beardless, young-looking man, though certainly in the middle forties; distinctly out-of-doorish and nature-loving--I should never have taxed him with any hankerings after the occult. Introductions followed. I was delighted to meet Emanuel Reicher, celebrated actor and hyphenated American, just then living in Germany. Then there was the medium’s housekeeper and foster-mother, a widow in middle life, named Frau P. Likewise a Polish artist, blond and clean-shaven, full of friendly talk in a gruff, hearty voice. Then this and that member of the Schwabing intelligentsia. But the intellectual laity were outnumbered, on this occasion at least, by the medical men and natural scientists. There was another professor of zoology, a typical _Gelehrter_, mild and shy; a young doctor from Switzerland; a still youthful German physician, assistant at a Munich hospital, who had brought along an apparatus to measure blood-pressure; a jolly, fair-haired lady specialist in nerve massage.... Many of those present were novices, Reicher for one. He seemed to have no affiliations with the occult, but merely with the social circle represented.

The medium, Willy S., kept rather in the background. The Baron introduced me to him among others. “Here,” he said, “is our star performer.” He repeated the phrase more than once, obviously with the idea of stimulating the young man’s sense of importance, but also by way of prepossessing me in favour of this precious and delicately organic instrument of his experiments. In my case, his concern was quite unnecessary. My sympathies were boundless, and I took pains to let our artist feel that I was no hostile onlooker, present with the sole idea of pouncing and unmasking, with a bellow of triumph. I was a sceptic on the positive side, who would rejoice at his success--I wished him to know that. Deception? Between deception and reality there were many degrees, and at some point they were one. Perhaps there was a sort of natural deception, which might be just as good to talk to as reality! I had come hither, not humbugging myself in the least, to see what there was to be seen, just that, no more and no less. I exchanged a few words with Willy S. and tried to get an idea of his personality. I found a dark-haired youth of some eighteen or nineteen, not unattractive, certainly with nothing striking about him. His origins were plainly simple; his speech a South-German-Austrian dialect, and his manner decent and friendly, with no signs of wanting to curry favour by over-politeness. His answers to my matter-of-fact questions were monosyllabic; and he seemed, quite excusably, in a sort of stage-fright, a state of suppressed excitement united with the shyness natural to his youth.

The young clinician summoned Master Willy to have his blood-pressure measured, and I turned away and followed our host’s invitation to have a look round in the laboratory adjoining. It was a large room, filled with a confusion of photographic apparatus and arrangements for a magnesium flash-light. There were tables and chairs upon which stood or lay a variety of objects: a music-box, a little table-bell with a handle, a typewriter, several white felt rings, and so on--objects uninteresting in themselves, which yet would be employed by young Willy to accomplish strange matters. We shall come back to them. There was a sort of cage made of fine wire in which they had confined the youth during a severely scientific and critical sitting. It had not prevented him from doing what they could not explain. Lastly there was the so-called “black cabinet,” about which so much had been said and so much more whispered. Some of Willy’s predecessors had been sorely in need of it. I looked within. There was nothing special about it. Indifferent lumber stood behind the ceiling-high curtain which shut off one corner of the room from the rest. “We shall not require the cabinet,” said Dr. von Schrenck-Notzing. Willy did not need it. He was strong. He sat right out in the room in his operations. So much the better. My positive scepticism had swallowed the cabinet too--but if Willy was strong, why, so much the better. We returned to the library. Beyond it lay a study with a writing-table, where Willy made his toilet for the sitting.

He did not make it by himself. By no means. He made it under the argus-eyed control of three persons: the master of the house and two assistants. This time Dr. von Schrenck appointed as assistants the lively nerve-specialist and myself. And we obliged him--though privately I doubted my fitness for the office. I felt lax and benevolent, and inclined to regard the supervision as a formality. I am not at home in the rôle of misdoubting observer; it embarrasses me, it is repugnant to my humanity. You cannot expect a man to turn you his good side when you take his bad one for granted. This youth now girding up his loins to perform marvels--why should I dash his spirits by showing him I suspected him of preparing to take me in? I am a sceptic, but I want something to happen. Yet might not that be the most fundamental and extreme form of scepticism? Perhaps I, in my laxity and benevolence, was the most unbelieving of all?--But no more, for the moment. Make your toilet, young man, I will watch you.

The Baron showed us the black, one-piece tricot affair in which Willy was to cover himself from neck to ankle. He urged us to subject it to a careful scrutiny, to feel it all over. He laid great stress on a critical attitude. A garment, of cotton tricot. Very good. No sign of deception about that; and Willy drew it on over his tanned, boyish body. As he did so I caught a shy and solemn look he cast at my colleague, the blonde lady nerve-specialist, who blithely regarded the ceiling. But in nothing but the tricot the chap would freeze, that was humanly plain; so they gave him a dressing-gown besides, a comfortable old wadded kimono of the Baron’s, which likewise we conscientiously examined, pockets, lining, and all. A good-natured old dressing-gown. Good. But it had one curious feature: the Baron explained it to us. It was trimmed all over with ribbons, on the sleeves, the seams, the hem, sewed on everywhere. And these ribbons had been treated with a luminous preparation so that you would be able to see the outline of Willy’s figure even by a dim light and easily keep it in your eye. That seemed a sensible precaution. More luminous ribbon went like a diadem about his head; he stuck his feet into an old pair of Turkish slippers. They completed the preparations. Or no. For when he stood arrayed he opened his jaws very wide, like a lion, as though to swallow us. I gasped; until it was explained to me that this was a matter of controlling the mouth cavity. The deuce! And I had been within an ace of forgetting the mouth cavity. He already had one gold tooth in it, to the honour of his trade. For the rest, it was an irreproachable mouth cavity. We saw it as far down as the glottis. In God’s name, enough. We returned to the other room.