Phantasms of the Living - Volume I.. Frank Podmore

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СКАЧАТЬ the proposal to learn more of those stars by dint of the generation of fetid gases and the sedulous minuteness of spectroscopic analysis! Yet how poor, how fragmentary were Aristotle’s fancies compared with our conception, thus gained, of cosmic unity! our vibrant message from Sirius and Orion by the heraldry of the kindred flame! Those imagined gods are gone; but the spectacle of the starry heavens has become for us so moving in its immensity that philosophers, at a loss for terms of wonder, have ranked it with the Moral Law.

      If man, then, shall attempt to sound and fathom the depths that lie not without him, but within, analogy may surely warn him that the first attempts of his rude psychoscopes to give precision and actuality to thought will grope among “beggarly elements,”—will be concerned with things grotesque, or trivial, or obscure. Yet here also one handsbreadth of reality gives better footing than all the castles of our dream; here also by beginning with the least things we shall best learn how great things may remain to do.

      The insentient has awoke, we know not how, into sentiency; the sentient into the fuller consciousness of human minds. Yet even human self-consciousness remains a recent, a perfunctory, a superficial thing; and we must first reconstitute our conception of the microcosm, as of the macrocosm, before we can enter on those “high capacious powers” which, I believe, “lie folded up in man.”

      F. W. H. M.

¹ The analogy will be closer if we suppose that the second half is lit, not dimly but from within,—since in one sense consciousness gives us more information as to the psychical than as to the physical side of life, though it is information of a different quality.

¹ “Hier gilt vielmehr ein Gesetz unbegrenzter Neuschöpfung geistiger Energie, welches nur durch die sinnliche Bestimmtheit des geistigen Lebens gewisse Hemmungen erleidet.”—Wundt, Logik, II., p. 507.

² “Nicht das geistige Leben ist ein Erzeugniss der physischen Organisation, sondern diese ist in allem, was sie an zweckvollen Einrichtungen der Selbstregulirung und der Energie-verwerthung vor den Subetanzcomplexen der unorganischen Natur voraushat, eine geistige Schöpfung.”—Wundt, Logik, II., p. 471.

¹ The French Société de Psychologie Physiologique, whose President is M. Charcot, has already published several observations with an important bearing on our subject, some of which will be found in Vol. ii. of this work.

¹ “I have ventured to coin the word ‘supernormal’ to be applied to phenomena which are beyond what usually happens—beyond, that is, in the sense of suggesting unknown psychical laws. It is thus formed on the analogy of abnormal. When we speak of an abnormal phenomenon we do not mean one which contravenes natural laws, but one which exhibits them in an unusual or inexplicable form. Similarly by a supernormal phenomenon, I mean, not one which overrides natural laws, for I believe no such phenomenon to exist, but one which exhibits the action of laws higher, in a psychical aspect, than are discerned in action in every-day life. By higher (either in a psychical or in a physiological sense), I mean ‘apparently belonging to a more advanced stage of evolution.’ ”—Proceedings of the S.P.R., Vol. iii., p. 30. Throughout this treatise we naturally need a designation for phenomena which are inexplicable by recognised physiological laws, and belong to the general group into the nature of which we are inquiring. The term psychical (which is liable to misapprehension even in the title of our Society) can hardly be used without apology in this specialised sense. The occasional introduction of the word supernormal may perhaps be excused.

¹ Proceedings of the S.P.R., Vol. iii.

¹ See papers on “Automatic Writing” in Proceedings of the S.P.R., Vols. ii. and iii.

¹ See Proceedings of the S.P.R., Vols. ii. and iii.

¹ See Mrs. Sidgwick’s paper on “The Evidence, collected by the Society, for Phantasms of the Dead,” in Proceedings of the S.P.R., Vol. iii.

¹ By “supersensory” I mean “independent of therecognised channels of sense.” I do not mean to assert that telepathic perception either is or is not analogous to sensory perception of the recognised kinds.

      ADDITIONS AND CORRECTIONS.

      VOLUME I.

      Page 33, line 20. For 999,999, 98, read 999, 999, 999, 1.

      Page 34, line 6. For 1000 to 1, read “about 500 to 1.”

      Page 88. Since the note on this page was written, some additional evidence has been obtained as to the effect of concentration of the operator’s will in the process of hypnotising. See the cases quoted in the Additional Chapter, (Vol. II., pp. 680, 684, 685,) from the records of the Société de Psychologie Physiologique.

      Page 110, first note. Two further examples of this interesting type will be found on pp. lxxxi-iv, below.

      Page 118, second note. After this note had been printed off, I came across a passage from Die Christliche Mystik, by J. J. von Goerres, in which a learned bishop, Prudencio de Sandoval, is made to describe a witch’s journey through the air as though he had himself been a judicial spectator of it. A reference to Sandoval’s own account, however, in his Historia de la vida y hechos del Emperador Carlos V. (Pamplona, 1618), Vol. I., p. 830, shows that the trial of the witch in question took place in 1527. Now Sandoval died in 1621; clearly, therefore, he could not have been a first-hand witness, as represented. Nor does he even name his authority; and discredit is thrown on his sources of information by Llorente, in his Anales de la Inquisicion de España (Madrid, 1812), p. 319. As the passage from Goerres was quoted in a first-class scientific review, and, if accurate, would have told against my statements as to the absence of first-hand evidence for alleged magical occurrences, I have thought it worth while to forestall a possible objection.

The only instance that I can find, during the witch-epoch, of definite first-hand evidence for a marvel of a type which our present knowledge of abnormal bodily and mental states will not explain, is, as it happens, not part of the history of so-called magic, but is connected with the extraordinary epidemic of religious excitement which took place in the Cevennes at the beginning of the last century. As the instance seems to be a solitary one, it may be worth while to give the facts. The Théâtre Sacré des Cevennes (London, 1707) contains the depositions of two witnesses to the fact that they saw a man named Clary stand for many minutes, totally uninjured, in the midst of a huge fire of blazing wood; and that they immediately afterwards ascertained by their own senses that there was not a sign of burning on him or his clothes. This is the sort of case which, if multiplied by scores or hundreds, and if nothing were known against the character of the witnesses, would support the view that an apparently strong evidential case can be made out for phenomena—being matters of direct observation—which nevertheless for the scientific mind are impossible; and that therefore the evidential case for telepathy presented in this book may be safely neglected (see p. 115). But the character of the two deponents mentioned is seriously impugned by a third witness, the celebrated СКАЧАТЬ