J. Arthur Hill

“ When it succeeds in the complete reconciliation; when the era of universal peace and brotherhood shall dawn; when it reaches its huge equivalent of the ripe, calm, contented wisdom of human age—ah, then will come a state of things which we can but dimly prefigure. But it will come. The age of gold is in the future, not the past. It is our duty and our privilege to hasten the coming of this millennium. ”

“ And that earth-spirit is part of the universe-spirit or God, as the human spirit is part of the earth-spirit.
It is perhaps difficult, at first, to think of the earth as having a life and consciousness of its own, for we are located at little points, and do not see it whole, nor do we see from the inside. We are like an eye which looks at the body of which it forms a part, and finds it difficult to believe in auditory, tactile, olfactory experience; more difficult still to conceive of pure thought, emotion, will. If the earth seems a dead lump, however, think of the human brain. ”

“ There is more than one way of receiving truth. Science is apt to overlook the intuitional way.
On this conscience-side or moral aspect, the Fechnerian idea is particularly fruitful and illuminating. [108] The analogy of our own mind is once more the key—the mirror wherewith to view the greater landscape, the village wherefrom to draw inferences about nations. In childhood, the world is, as James said, a big, blooming, buzzing confusion: sensations pour in quite unconnected; the baby sees the moon, and stretches out an arm to grab it, thus learning that it is not grabable. ”

“ Take the beginnings of any one science—say, Chemistry, dating it somewhat arbitrarily from Priestley or Dalton—and note what a little way discovery had gone in a like period. With increased numbers of workers the pace increases; but in every science the progress at first must be slow. In psychical research a good start has been made, and the investigators seem to be certainly on the track of something, whether their inferences are right in every detail or not. And every advance in science has extended our conceptions of this wonderful universe. ”

“ Some people have objected that psychical research will substitute knowledge for faith. This is surely a curious objection, and few will advance it. The earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof, and my belief is that He wants us to learn all we can about His handiwork. Nature is a book given to us by our Father, for our good; study of it is a duty, neglect of it is unfilial and wrong. Psychical research studies its own particular facts in nature, and is thus trying to learn a little more of God’s mind. It is not we, but those who oppose us, who are irreligious. ”

“ If you got angry with my obstinacy, and knocked me down, I should experience painful sensations, but the existence of a mind external to me—and an angry one—would still be a matter of inference only. But we find that the inference is justified. We find that it “works,” and social life is possible. For the purposes, then, both of science and of ordinary life, we do reason from phenomenon to noumenon, from appearance to reality, from attribute to substance; and our reasoning justifies itself. ”

“ The teaching of religion on this point is admittedly either rather vague, or, if definite—as with the Augustinian theology—no longer credible. We have progressed in sensitiveness and humanity, and can no longer believe that a good God will inflict everlasting torment in a lake which burneth with fire and brimstone, even on the most wicked of His creatures. Still less can we believe in such punishment being inflicted for the “sin of unbelief”, for we now know well enough that “belief”, being the net outcome of our total experience and character, is not under the control of the will. ”

“ If a man tries to be good merely in order to avoid hell and gain heaven—in other words, because it will pay—his goodness is not much of a credit to him. It is only selfishness of a far-sighted kind. Religion, on the other hand, when at its best, seeks to influence character, not by threats and promises, but by encouraging moods and attitudes and habits of thought from which good actions will flow spontaneously, without any profit-and-loss calculations. ”

“ But for my part I can say that I know—in the same way that I know the truth of Mendeleef’s law, or Avogadro’s law, or Dalton’s atomic theory—that human beings do not become extinct when they die, that they are often able to communicate with us after that event, and that they are not in any orthodox heaven or hell. My knowledge is based partly on a lengthy and carefully-conducted series of sittings which some intimate friends of mine have had with a medium known to me; partly on my own results over a period of several years of systematic investigation ”

“ Public opinion has not yet fully accepted it—nor is it well that opinion should change too rapidly—for it was well drenched in materialism during the heyday of physical science and its astonishing applications in the latter part of the nineteenth century, but the leaders of thought in almost all branches—scientific, legal, literary, and what not—are now admitting that the evidence is at least surprising, and those who have studied it most are one by one announcing that it is convincing. ”

“ Some writers, like Miss Dougall in a recent volume of essays called Immortality, invent a complicated hypothesis according to which my mind photographs the mind of a visitor and the medium on his next visit develops and reads off the photograph; but I confess that my credulity does not stand the strain put upon it by such a hypothesis. Besides, I have lately had—as if to get round even such tortured theories as this—evidence giving details which have not been known to any person I have ever met. I was told to write to a certain friend of mine, father of the ostensible communicator. ”

“ The survival of human personality is a fact. And the indications, so far as we have got, suggest that the next stage is a life of opportunity, work, progress, even more than the present one. There is much to be thankful for in even this only incipient revelation. It is salvation great and joyous, to those reared amid unacceptable theories of a blank materialism or the much more dreadful hell-doctrines of the theologians. ”

“ Death, then, is to be welcomed when it comes. We must not run to meet it, or run from it; but we should welcome it when God thinks fit to send it, His messenger. The beautiful eternal right hand beckons, and the soul gladly arises and departs, to “that imperial palace whence it came”, or to fare forth on some “adventure brave and new”. ”

“ I keep an open mind. If I come across enough evidence, I will believe that it can cure tuberculosis of the lungs and other diseases, as claimed, whether I can understand how it does it or not. At present, like Dr Myers, I am not convinced; but I have seen enough of Christian Science results among my own friends to prevent me from denying anything. I merely suspend judgment. But I do believe that the power of the mind over the body is so great that almost anything is possible ”

“ It would be the easiest thing in the world for an imitation medium to learn enough about me to give what would seem on the face of it a fairly “good” sitting. But this is never the case. Either the medium fails or he is so successful that normal knowledge is ruled out. On Mr Clodd’s theory, I ought to have neither of these extremes; I ought to have no failures, and no results going beyond what inquiry could produce. But I need not labour this point, for Mr Clodd has recently confessed his almost absurd innocence of any first-hand experience. ”

“ And when we reach the conception of the whole physical universe, we get quite out of our depth. We do not know whether it is finite or infinite; we know only that it is inconceivably greater than we are.
So with the spirit which energises through it. Beginning with what we know best, we find ourselves acquainted with a world of mental phenomena bound together in and by what we call our self. ”

“ It is the only method that a scientific generation will tolerate. Its results may be disputed, but so can the results of science. Even mathematics gives us no certainties, for something must always be taken for granted. In philosophising by analogy, we do at least keep in close touch with experience; we do not evaporate the world into an “unearthly ballet of bloodless categories”. And if the analogies point mostly one way, with only weak ones pointing the other, the result may be at least acceptable as a working hypothesis, even if not “demonstrable”. ”

“ And we know so little, really, about disease, that I am not at all prepared to deny the Christian Science claims, even with regard to organic disease. The distinction between organic and functional is in our own inabilities, not in the nature of the case; we call a disease “organic” when we find definite tissue-change, and “functional” when we do not; but in the latter case there must be some [87] organic basis, though too small perhaps to be discoverable—say a lesion in a tiny nerve. Consequently I regard the question of Christian Science cures as entirely one of evidence. ”

“ So with the earth-spirit. Being far greater than the human subsidiary spirits, it is longer in coming to maturity. Its elements are still largely at loggerheads with each other. The nations war against each other, and universal peace seems a long time in coming. But steadily, steadily works the earth-spirit, and the nations almost unconsciously—like somnambulists—carry out its will. They are working, consciously or unconsciously, towards universal at-one-ment. A League of Nations has arisen, and the Federation of the World is in sight. Union is the political watch-word. ”

“ Whatever we think of Hume’s argument that a mass of experiences do not involve a soul that has them, it is reasonable and useful to have a name for the active thing which perceives and thinks and acts and feels, whether we call it soul or spirit or mind or self or x. ”

“ If you can make a sick person stop brooding over his ailments and worrying over things in general, you have achieved something which enormously increases his chance of recovery; and if you can make him turn all his thoughts and energies in the direction of recovery, and all his emotional powers in the direction of love and goodwill to his fellow-men and towards God, there is no limit to the powers which may be put in operation. In spite of all our achievements in science—and they have been great—we are only, as Newton said, picking up pebbles on the sea-shore. Nature is boundless ”

“ Human duty, done sincerely according to our lights, is furthering the purposes of the higher Being in whom we live and move. This faith is our highest wisdom concerning our relation to the earth-spirit. We see, then, that there is a good deal of sense in faith and intuition. They are rationally justified. By them we are dimly in touch with the over-soul on our inner side: not really dimly, for the connection is close and real, but dimly to our normal consciousness. The connection via intellect is an external, round-about affair, necessary and useful, but different. ”

“ The innumerable miracles in the Little Flowers and Life of St Francis are repeated in countless other lives; saints are lifted across rivers by angels, they preach to the fishes, who swarm to the shore to listen, they are visited by the Virgin, are lifted up in the air and suspended there for twelve hours while in ecstasy they perceive the inner mystery of the Most Blessed Trinity. Almost every town in Europe could produce its relic which has produced its miraculous cures, or its image that had opened or shut its eyes, or bowed its head to a worshipper. ”

“ After death, experience is different, for we no longer have the same bodily senses—eyes, ears, etc.: consequently no explanation of the nature of spiritual existence can be more than approximately true; yet such expressions as living in houses, going to lectures, and the like, may be as near the truth as earth-language can get. If a bird tried to describe air-life to a fish, the best it could do would be to say it is something like water-life, but there is more light, more ease of movement, more detail, more things of interest and beauty. ”

“ Man has experiences of an order different from the material one. You cannot express joy and sorrow by chemical equations or number of foot-pounds. Even if there is a material equivalent or necessary concomitant, of electrical or chemical change in cerebral tissue or what not, the fact of the non-material experience remains a reality. To indicate this side of human life, we call it the spiritual side. We say that man is matter and spirit, body and soul. ”