Phantasms of the Living - Volume I.. Frank Podmore

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СКАЧАТЬ need not here embark on the controversy as to how far this aspiration towards “the things of the spirit” is logically consistent with a creed that stops short with the things of sense. It is quite enough for my present purpose to point out that here also, as in the case of more definite religions, we have a system of beliefs and emotions which may indeed be able to accommodate themselves to modern science, but which are in no sense supported thereby; rather which science must regard as, at best, a kind of phosphorescence which plays harmlessly about minds that Nature has developed by other processes and for other ends than these.

      For my argument is that here again, as in the case of religion, telepathy, as we affirm it in this book, would be the first indication of a possible scientific basis for much that now lacks not only experimental confirmation, but even plausible analogy. We have seen how much support the preliminary theses of religion may acquire from an assured conviction that the human mind is at least capable of receiving supernormal influences,—is not closed, by its very structure, as the Materialists would tell us, to any “inbreathings of the spirit” which do not appeal to outward eye or ear. And somewhat similar is the added reality which the discovery of telepathy gives to the higher flights, the subtler shades, of mere earthly emotion.

      “Star to star vibrates light; may soul to soul

       Strike thro’ some finer element of her own?”

      The lover, the poet, the enthusiast in any generous cause, has in every age unconsciously answered Lord Tennyson’s question for himself. To some men, as to Goethe, the assurance of this subtle intercommunication has come with vivid distinctness in some passion-shaken hour. Others, as Bacon, have seemed to gather it from the imperceptible indicia of a lifelong contemplation of man. But the step which actual experimentation, the actual collection and collation of evidence, has now, as we believe, effected, is a greater one than could have been achieved by any individual intuition of bard or sage. For we have for the first time a firm foothold in this impalpable realm; we know that these unuttered messages do truly travel, that these emotions mix and spread; and though we refrain as yet from further dwelling on the corollaries of this far-reaching law, it is not because such speculations need any longer be baseless, but because we desire to set forth the proof of our theorem in full detail before we do more than hint at the new fields which it opens to human thought.

§ 13. Pausing, therefore, on the threshold of these vaguer promises, I may indicate another direction, in which few will deny that a systematic investigation like ours ought to produce results eminently salutary. It ought to be as much our business to check the growth of error as to promote the discovery of truth. And there is plenty of evidence to show that so long as we omit to subject all alleged supernormal phenomena to a thorough comparative scrutiny, we are not merely postponing a possible gain, but permitting an unquestioned evil.

      It should surely be needless in the present day to point out that no attempt to discourage inquiry into any given subject which strongly interests mankind, will in reality divert attention from the topic thus tabooed. The savant or the preacher may influence the readers of scientific hand-books, or the members of church congregations, but outside that circle the subject will be pursued with the more excited eagerness because regulating knowledge and experienced guidance are withdrawn.

      And thus it has been with our supernormal phenomena. The men who claim to have experienced them have not been content to dismiss them as unseasonable or unimportant. They have not relegated them into the background of their lives as readily as the physiologist has relegated them into a few paragraphs at the end of a chapter. On the contrary, they have brooded over them, distorted them, misinterpreted them. Where savants have minimised, they have magnified, and the perplexing modes of marvel which the textbooks ignore, have become, as it were, the ganglia from which all kinds of strange opinions ramify and spread.

      The number of persons whose minds have been actually upset either by genuine psychical phenomena, or by their fraudulent imitation, is perhaps not large. But the mischief done is by no means confined to these extreme cases. It is mischievous, surely—it clashes roughly with our respect for human reason, and our belief in human progress—that religions should spring up, forms of worship be established, which in effect do but perpetuate a mistake and consecrate a misapprehension, which carry men not forward, but backward in their conception of unseen things.

      The time has not yet come for an attempt to trace in detail the perversion which each branch of these supernormal phenomena has undergone in ardent minds;—the claims to sanctity, revelation, prophecy, which a series of enthusiasts, and of charlatans, have based on each class of marvels in turn. But two forms of creed already mentioned may again be cited as convenient examples—the Irvingite faith of the misinterpretation of automatism, the Swedenborgian of the misinterpretation of (so-called) clairvoyance. Still more singular have been the resultant beliefs when to the assemblage of purely psychical marvels a physical ingredient has been added, of a more disputable kind. For linked in various ways with records of automatic cerebration, of apparitions, of vision and revelation, come accounts of objective sounds, of measurable movements, which may well seem an unwarrantable intrusion into the steady order of the ponderable world. And in the year 1848 certain events, whose precise nature is still in dispute, occurred in America, in consequence of which many persons were led to believe that under appropriate circumstances these sounds, these movements, these tangible apparitions, could be evoked or reproduced at will. On this basis the creed of “Modern Spiritualism” has been upbuilt. And here arises the pressing question—notoriously still undecided, difficult and complex beyond any anticipation—as to whether supernormal phenomena of this physical kind do in fact occur at all; or whether they are in all cases—as they undoubtedly have been in many cases—the product of mere fraud or delusion. This question, as it seems to us, is one to which we are bound to give our most careful attention; and if we have as yet failed to attain a decisive view, it is not for want of laborious observation, continued by several of us throughout many years. But we are unwilling to pronounce until we have had ample opportunities—opportunities which so far we have for the most part sought in vain—of investigating phenomena obtained through private sources, and free, at any rate, from the specific suspicion to which the presence of a “paid medium” inevitably gives rise.

      I need not add further illustrations of the cautionary, the critical attitude which befits such a Society as ours at the present juncture. This attitude is in one way unavoidably ungracious; for it has sometimes precluded us from availing ourselves of the labours of predecessors whose zeal and industry we should have been glad to praise. The time, we hope, will come when enough of daylight shall shine upon our path to make possible a discriminating survey of the tracks which scattered seekers have struck out for themselves in the confusion and dimness of dawn. At present we have mainly to take heed that our own groping course shall at least avoid the pitfalls into which others have fallen. Anything like a distribution of awards of merit would be obviously premature on the part of men whose best hope must be that they may conduct the inquiry into a road firm enough to enable others rapidly to outstrip them.

II.

§ 14. Enough, however, has now been said to indicate the general tenor of the task which the Society for Psychical Research has undertaken. It remains to indicate the place which the present work occupies in the allotted field, and the reasons for offering it to public consideration at this early stage of our inquiry.

      We could not, of course, predict or pre-arrange the order in which opportunities of successful investigation might occur to the searchers in this labyrinth of the unknown. Among the groping experiments which seemed to have only too often led to mere mistake and confusion,—the “thousand pathways”

      “qua signa sequendi Falleret indeprensus et inremeabilis error,”—

      it was not easy to choose with confidence our adit of exploration. The approach which proved most quickly productive was one from which it might have seemed that СКАЧАТЬ