Phantasms of the Living - Volume I.. Frank Podmore

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SOPHOCLES

§ 1. THE subject of this book is one which a brief title is hardly sufficient to explain. For under our heading of “Phantasms of the Living,” we propose, in fact, to deal with all classes of cases where there is reason to suppose that the mind of one human being has affected the mind of another, without speech uttered, or word written, or sign made;—has affected it, that is to say, by other means than through the recognised channels of sense.

      To such transmission of thoughts or feelings we have elsewhere given the name of telepathy; and the records of an experimental proof of the reality of telepathy will form a part of the present work. But, for reasons which will be made manifest as we proceed, we have included among telepathic phenomena a vast class of cases which seem at first sight to involve something widely different from a mere transference of thought.

      I refer to apparitions; excluding, indeed, the alleged apparitions of the dead, but including the apparitions of all persons who are still living, as we know life, though they may be on the very brink and border of physical dissolution. And these apparitions, as will be seen, are themselves extremely various in character; including not visual phenomena alone, but auditory, tactile, or even purely ideational and emotional impressions. All these we have included under the term phantasm; a word which, though etymologically a mere variant of phantom, has been less often used, and has not become so closely identified with visual impressions alone.

      Such, then, is the meaning of our title; but something more of explanation is necessary before the tone and purport of the book can be correctly apprehended. In a region so novel we could hardly be surprised at any amount of misinterpretation. Some readers, for instance, may fancy that a bulky and methodical treatise on phantoms can be but a half-serious thing. Others may suspect that its inspiration is in the love of paradox, and that a fantastic craving for originality has led the authors along a path where they cannot expect, and can hardly desire, that the sober world should follow them.

§ 2. It is necessary, therefore, to state at once that we have no wish either to mystify or to startle mankind. On the contrary, the conjoint and consultative scheme according to which this book has been compiled is thus arranged mainly with a view to correcting or neutralising individual fancies or exaggerations, of leaving as little as possible to the unchecked idiosyncrasy of any single thinker. And, again, we wish distinctly to say that so far from aiming at any paradoxical reversion of established scientific conclusions, we conceive ourselves to be working (however imperfectly) in the main track of discovery, and assailing a problem which, though strange and hard, does yet stand next in order among the new adventures on which Science must needs set forth, if her methods and her temper are to guide and control the widening curiosity, the expanding capacities of men.

      We anticipate, in short, that although it may at first be said of us that we have performed with needless elaboration a foolish and futile task, the ultimate verdict on our work will rather be that we have undertaken—with all too limited a knowledge and capacity—to open an inquiry which was manifestly impending, and to lay the foundation-stone of a study which will loom large in the approaching age.

      Our only paradox, then, is the assertion that we are not paradoxical; and that assertion it is the main business of this Introduction to justify.

§ 3. For this purpose two principal heads of exposition will be required. In the first place, since this book (for whose contents we are solely responsible) was undertaken by us at the request of the Council of the Society for Psychical Research, and is largely based on material which that Council has placed at our disposal, it will be necessary to say something as to the scope and object of the Society in question;—its grounds for claiming a valid scientific position, and its points of interconnection with established branches of philosophic inquiry.

      And, secondly, it will be needful to indicate the precise position which the theme of this book occupies in the field of our investigations; the reason why we have isolated these special phenomena in a separate group, and have selected them for discussion at this early stage of the Society’s labours.

      A reader of the programme of the Society will probably feel that although the special topics to which attention is there invited may be unfamiliar, yet its general plea is such as he has often noted in the history of science before. “To approach these various problems without prejudice or prepossession of any kind, and in the same spirit of exact and unimpassioned inquiry which has enabled Science to solve so many problems, once not less obscure nor less hotly debated;”—phrases like these have no more of novelty than there might be, for instance, in the proposal of a Finance Minister to abolish the last of a long series of protective embargoes. Free Trade and free inquiry have each of them advanced step by step, and by dint of the frequent repetition, under varying difficulties, of very similar, and very elementary, truths. The special peculiarity of our topic is that it is an article (so to say) on which the Free Traders themselves have imposed an additional duty; that it has been more sternly discountenanced by the men who appeal to experiment than by the men who appeal to authority;—that its dispassionate discussion has since the rise of modern science been tabooed more jealously than when the whole province was claimed by theology alone. There have been reasons, no doubt, for such an exclusion; and I am not asserting that either Free Trade or free inquiry is always and under all circumstances to be desired. But it is needful to point out yet once more how plausible the reasons for discouraging some novel research have often seemed to be, while yet the advance of knowledge has rapidly shown the futility and folly of such discouragement.

      It was the Father of Science himself who was the first to circumscribe her activity. Socrates, in whose mind the idea of the gulf between knowledge and mere opinion attained a dominant intensity which impressed itself on all ages after him,—Socrates expressly excluded from the range of exact inquiry all such matters as the movements and nature of the sun and moon. He wished—and as he expressed his wish it seemed to have all the cogency of absolute wisdom—that men’s minds should be turned to the ethical and political problems which truly concerned them,—not wasted in speculation on things unknowable—things useless even could they be known.

      In a kindred spirit, though separated from Socrates by the whole result of that physical science which Socrates had deprecated, we find a great modern systematiser of human thought again endeavouring to direct the scientific impulse towards things serviceable to man; to divert it from things remote, unknowable, and useless if known. What then, in Comte’s view, are in fact the limits of man’s actual home and business? the bounds within which he may set himself to learn all he can, assured that all will serve to inform his conscience and guide his life? It is the solar system which has become for the French philosopher what the street and market-place of Athens were for the Greek. And this enlargement (it need hardly be said) is not due to any wider grasp of mind in Comte than in Socrates, but simply to the march of science; which has shown us that the whole solar system does, in fact, minister to our practical needs, and that the Nautical Almanack demands for its construction a mapping of the paths of those ordered luminaries which in the time of Socrates seemed the very wanderers of Heaven.

      I need not say that Comte’s prohibition has been altogether neglected. No frontier of scientific demarcation has been established between Neptune and Sirius, between Uranus and Aldebaran. Our knowledge of the fixed stars increases yearly; СКАЧАТЬ