Joseph Rodes Buchanan

“ The usual course of Nature under our own observation—we beg pardon. Dr. Carpenter’s observation—is all of which Nature is capable, and no new laws or agencies which Dr. Carpenter does not know are to be expected or developed by investigation. Whoever asserts that any such laws or agencies exist, is to be regarded as a liar or a victim of hallucination; and, in fact, the chief phenomena of mesmerism and spiritualism have been discovered to be cheats. ”

“ The public that employs and patronizes men of science has a right to expect from them fidelity to truth and vigilance in seeking it—not cunning in evading or skill in calumniating true discoveries, followed by contemptuous neglect when their claims have been demonstrated. Such is the course pursued by some toward all discoveries in which psychic powers are involved. There is a fossilized materialism in many minds, which has become a matter of blind feeling, utterly irrespective of facts or science, against which it is vain either to reason or to offer facts. ”

“ There is not a scientific spiritualist who would not repudiate the statement as calumnious. If the laws of Nature can be violated, there is no absurdity or chimera which is not admissible; but, instead of believing this possible, spiritualists are the foremost of all men in insisting on the universal inviolability of all the laws of Nature, extending their infrangible power not only over all physical phenomena, but throughout the equally extensive psychic realm (in spite of all metaphysical speculations to the contrary) —an extension which Dr. Carpenter has not affirmed himself. ”

“ I do not mean by this that mesmerism and spiritualism combined with mechanical physiology constitute anthropology: far from it. Both mesmerism and spiritualism are rich but empirical collections of facts, in which there is a large amount of material, but very little that can be called philosophy or satisfactory science.
Anthropology is established by investigating the centre of man's existence—the seat of his conscious life—the brain, in which the spiritual comes into contact with the physical, and is subject to analogous laws. ”

“ Carpenter that all new, marvelous facts shall be treated as impossibilities, and the witnesses who, without any other motive than the love of truth, attest them at the expense of their own popularity, shall be treated as impostors (which means, made personally infamous and consigned to the mercies of antiquated laws) , embodies all the impulses of stolid ignorance and malignity which have in past ages warred against science and innovation by prisons and by death penalties. ”

“ Psychology has been prosecuted as if man never had a body (and ultra-psychologists do not admit that there is a human body or any other material existence whatever) , while physiology has been cultivated in the same ultra spirit of nescience, as if man had no soul. ”

“ Carpenter does, to be recognized as the oracle in matters of which his ignorance is both pitiable and ludicrous, having never, by his own confession, witnessed any of the innumerable facts demonstrating an extra-material agency, which, during the whole of the present century, have been accumulated and diffused in all civilized countries, and among their foremost thinkers. His position is precisely that of the principal Professor of Philosophy at Padua, who refused to look through Galileo's telescope, and continued to teach the old theories. ”

“ Man has such immeasurable powers of adaptation that a strong moral nature may exist under the gloomiest views of materialism (which naturally tend to the pessimism of Schopenhauer and Hartmann) , and sustain itself by its constitutional energy and buoyancy; but there are millions to whom materialism teaches the daily lesson that to "put money in thy purse" is the chief aim of life, and to riot in sensual pleasure on ill-gotten gain, until the candle burns out, is the best wisdom. ”

“ Nay, far worse: he not only refuses to see what is open to all men, but, as Horkey wrote against Galileo, while refusing all fair investigation, and thus furnished an example to "point a moral" for posterity—an example of the power of "dominant ideas" in a bigot—Dr. Carpenter repeats the same performance amid the higher enlightenment of the present age, with a perversity and hostility of purpose which were never surpassed by the blind votaries of Aristotle. And as Horkey detected the trick in Galileo's telescope which made stars by reflected light. ”

“ Carpenter, if he possessed the sentiments of honor and love of truth which mankind generally recognize as commendable, refuse to make the simple and brief investigation which would have determined in an hour whether his theories and his stale calumnies had any foundation or not? ”

“ Carpenter presumes that liberal thinkers must be at war with the laws of Nature, because he thinks those laws incompatible with the new phenomena. The obfuscation of his mind is the same which has characterized narrow-minded bigots in all ages. The narrow-minded man cannot conceive two widely-different truths at once, and perceive their harmonies: he adopts one with zeal, and rejects the other firmly, because he thinks them incompatible. ”

“ Carpenter assails those who see more of the truth than himself, and are equally interested in psychic and physical facts. How long shall it be before the "survival of the fittest," or the improvement of education, shall give us a generation with brains enough to entertain two ideas at once? ”

“ To the spiritualist, the universe has a deeper meaning, a nobler destiny. The wisdom of the Infinite, which is unutterably beyond his reach, is a consoling reality, and the little play upon this theatre, the life-struggle of threescore and ten years, is but the beginning, the gestation and birth of a career corresponding to our noblest aspirations and our faith in the Divine benevolence. ”

“ Worthless as this book seems as an argument, and amusing as it is to those at whom it is aimed, it has some power for mischief the 'power of a demoralizing example—the power of position and reputation in giving a quasi-respectability to that which is philosophically silly and ethically corrupt. The most demoralizing influence which proceeds from a thoroughly depraved society is the doctrine that all men are knaves or fools, to which Dr. Carpenter has given his active cooperation—saving only a few self-styled "experts" from this satanic maxim. ”

“ In the struggle between stubborn vituperative materialism and comprehensive science, the battle-ground is at the psycho-physiological junction of the two worlds. Man, belonging to both the spiritual and the material world, cannot be properly studied except as a psycho-physiological being, and those who refuse to do this simply ignore anthropology. ”

“ But, in laboring for these ennobling truths, he encounters a strong resistance in the animal nature of man, in the selfish and depressing character of our daily toils, and in the too great concentration of attention upon physical sciences, to the exclusion of those in which a psychic element is found. The study of physical science alone is no better preparation for psychic studies, which employ different faculties, than the study of the counting-house ledger or the supervision of a pork-house would be for the service of Parnassus. ”

“ Every great discoverer introduces something to human knowledge different from the usual understanding of Nature, and is, therefore, by the Carpenterian rule, a fit subject for persecution. The rigorous application of this principle would check progress by a war upon the greatest benefactors of mankind—those who lead them into essentially new ideas of Nature. ”

“ Carpenter himself has expressly excluded the soul from the pale of science, which is the next thing to excluding it from cognition, and one of the most recent voluminous and learned American works on physiology excludes it entirely, and substitutes the physical action of the brain, as follows: "The brain is not, strictly speaking, the organ of the mind, for this statement would imply that the mind exists as a force, independently of the brain ”

“ She felt like a great leader to whom multitudes were looking up—a man of commanding stature, of immovable firmness and strength of character, and the loftiest philanthropy. She could hardly refrain from rising up and striding over the floor, from intense excitement. ”

“ The malignity of the attacks is sufficient proof that they do not originate in the love of science or of truth, even if they were not often distinguished by mendacity, the mildest example of which is the late assertion of Dr. Forbes Winslow, of London, that "this form of delusion" (spiritualism) "is very prevalent in America, and the asylums contain many of its victims; nearly 10,000 persons having gone insane on the subject are confined in the public asylums of the United States." ”

“ The supposition of materialism has always been, that when medicines affect the body from contact with the exterior, an appreciable quantity of the substance must have been absorbed into the circulation. Against this theory I guarded by placing the medicines in an envelope of paper, which prevented contact with the cuticle, and concealed the nature of the substance from the knowledge of the subject of the experiment. ”

“ But when a simple experiment is proposed which cannot be intermeddled with, and which is completely and forever decisive, such as the levitation of a table or a man to the ceiling, no one being in contact with the lifted object, or the production of writing upon the interior of two clean slates which the inquirer brings himself, firmly secured together, the pretentious dogmatist is very careful to keep out of reach, no matter how he may be importuned or challenged. ”

“ A manuscript from any source retains in itself a subtle psycho-physiological emanation characteristic of its writer; and an impressible person with a fair endowment of the psychometric faculty, to such an extent as we would find in perhaps one person in twenty, or, in some southern communities, one person in five, is capable of feeling the entire mental and physical influence of that person as perfectly as if in contact with himself, and describing the individual as he was at the time of writing—his entire mental and physical condition. ”

“ To the materialist, who finds in matter "the promise and potency" of all things, there is no higher object of reverence and love than the examples of men and women within his reach; there is no future life to compensate for the wrongs and sufferings of this, the triumph of fraud, or the unmerited agonies of disease and poverty ”

“ Carpenter and all other narrow-minded people lies in the poverty of their conceptions. They have no idea that it is possible for Nature to show her powers in any new way to which they are unaccustomed. ”

“ As for himself, he affirms that he has "no other theory to support than that of the well-ascertained laws of Nature;" and further, that "it is quite legitimate for the inquirer to enter upon this study with that 'prepossession' in favor of the ascertained and universally-admitted laws of Nature which believers in spiritualism make it a reproach against men of science that they entertain."
If this be a true and honest statement of the case, there is no case in court for discussion: Dr. Carpenter is a philosopher, and the spiritualists are hopeless fools. ”

“ Carpenter in his assumption that the superstitious tales of an ignorant age are as worthy of credence as the elaborate investigations of the most distinguished scientists—men whose testimony would be decisive in any court of justice where life was at stake—it is not worth while to reason with them. ”

“ By an exact parity of reasoning we may say certain individuals in every community have committed, or might commit, murder: therefore, whenever we find any one dead, and do not know how he died, we may assume that the men or women who were in his vicinity murdered him. ”

“ Carpenter, embodying two lectures on psychic subjects (mesmerism, spiritualism, etc.) , presents, in the most offensively exaggerated form, the pragmatic pretension of certain physical scientists to take charge of psychic investigations with an air of more than papal infallibility, and an emphatic notice to all the rest of mankind, not only that they are incapable of such investigations, but that their opinions, their testimony, and even their oaths are not entitled to claim a feather's weight before the self-created tribunal of which Dr. Carpenter is the authoritative mouth-piece. ”

“ In my first interview with a medium, over twenty-five years ago, loud sounds—not raps, but sounds like the creaking of a wooden mill—were freely produced at request in a small uncovered table in our parlor, when no person was in contact with it or within three feet of it. ”

“ Carpenter is entirely in harmony with other materialists.
Men of scientific culture, who have spent a considerable portion of their lives in practical investigation and familiarity with the facts of mesmerism, spiritualism, and other psycho-physiological sciences, are experts in the highest sense of that term, and can but smile at the insolence of those who, never having made a successful experiment on those joint operations of the soul and body which constitute mesmeric, spiritual, and other sciences, nevertheless claim, as Dr. ”

“ Carpenter and men of his character care mainly for their own personal infallibility: they seek only the vindication of their own theories, per fas et nefas, and do not approach an experimental test unless they are permitted to interfere and dictate some method of conducting experiments to hinder or delay their progress. ”

“ Passing by his ludicrous claims to a boundless superiority over contemporary scientists who do not follow his lead, we may ask whether he has any claims whatever to be recognized as an expert, whose opinions on these subjects have any especial value. Eminence as a physiologist does not imply eminence or capacity as a psychologist. It is true, physiology and psychology are coterminous sciences ”

“ The effort of ultra-bigoted materialists is to exclude all agencies not thoroughly material—all that is intermediate between the psychic and the physiological—to crush its students and teachers by personal or professional ostracism and accusations of lying knavery and hallucination. ”