Beckles Willson

“ AND KINDRED PHENOMENA
"Do I believe in ghosts?" asks Mr Andrew Lang. "One can only answer: 'How do you define a ghost?' I do believe, with all students of human nature, in hallucinations of one, or of several, or even of all the senses. But as to whether such hallucinations among the sane are ever caused by physical influence from the minds of others, alive or dead, not communicated through the ordinary channels of sense, my mind is in a balance of doubt. It is a question of evidence." ”

“ To hypnotism must the miracle of telepathy now be added? Has it really been ascertained, after a thousand experiments and beyond the possibility of error, that a mode of apprehension exists which has no connection with the five senses? For twenty-five years the members of the Society of Psychical Research have carried on their investigations of both sleeping and waking subjects, under every conceivable condition, and are at last fain to announce that such a mystic faculty does exist by which brain can communicate with brain without any known sensory agency. ”

“ Yet so slowly do the masses move in intellectual life, so tardily do truths, concerning not merely occult but physical and material investigation, percolate through to the workaday world, that the researches, the activities, the ascertained truths of students of psychical phenomena are as a closed book. Perhaps the attitude of apathy with which occult phenomena and occult science are regarded by the average man is not unnatural. ”

“ It is surely not a little remarkable that an occurrence of so extraordinary a nature should be testified to by three such clear-headed men as Captain Wynne and Lords Lindsay and Adare. To cross from one window to another by ordinary means was clearly impossible, and it would be a brave conjurer indeed who would essay such a feat at a distance of eighty-five feet from the ground. What then is the explanation? Mr Podmore suggests that the three witnesses were the victims of a collective hallucination; but this theory is not easy to accept, and Mr Andrew Lang has heaped it with ridicule. ”

“ In going over a mass of evidence relating to Home, the hypothesis of conjuring seems to be rather incredible; when one bears in mind Home's long career as a medium, how his private life was watched by the lynx-eyed sceptics, eager to pounce upon the evidence of trickery, and that he was never detected, it certainly seems to me, at all events, that Home's immunity [Pg 192] from exposure is strong evidence against the assumption of fraud. Home was merely the type of a large class of mediums purporting to be controlled by spirit power, whose séances are a feature of modern life. ”

“ It is this aspect of spiritualism which has of recent years commanded most attention from trained observers. The trance utterances of such well-known clairvoyants as the late Stainton Moses, Mrs Thompson, and Mrs Piper have been subjected to rigid and precise inquiry, and on the whole it is on this type of evidence that the strongest arguments of the genuineness of spiritualism really rests. It is at once the most impressive, the most interesting, and the most voluminous. ”

“ Having partially discussed the subject of phantasms projected from the brain of the agent to that of the percipient, I must now briefly describe another group for which the evidence is very abundant—that of "veridical" dreams. This is a term used to describe apparitions coinciding with other events in such a manner as to suggest a connection. Your dream or hallucination is said to be veridical when it conveys an idea which is both true and previously unknown to you.
Making every allowance for the element of chance, there is a mass of evidence which mere coincidence cannot explain away. ”

“ Hence to preserve continuity of effort it was necessary to form a society, the aim of which should be, as we stated at the outset, to bring to bear on these obscure questions 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. And such success as the society has achieved is in no small measure [Pg viii] due to the wise counsel and ungrudging expenditure both of time and means which the late Professor Henry Sidgwick gave, and which Mrs Sidgwick continues to give, to all the details of its work. ”

“ Twenty years ago this creed was laughed out of court by Huxley, Tyndall, and other leading men of science. To-day we are told by those who have witnessed the experiments of Charcot, Janet, and others that "the existence of an aura of spirit-force surrounding the body like an atmosphere, in some cases at all events, can be proved as a physical fact."
Whatever the explanation, whatever the definition of this miraculous agency, hypnotism is now universally accepted. The manifestations of its power must convince the most sceptical. ”

“ No serious inquirer into the mysteries of occultism should neglect to study the peculiar human faculty locally known as Dowsing. Science has hitherto turned a cold shoulder to the skilled wielders of the divining rod, and at first sight perhaps few subjects appear to be so little worthy of investigation. To begin with it is a matter of common geological knowledge that the mode of distribution of underground water is very different from that imagined by the professional dowser. ”

“ Tyndall's utterance also deserves to be recalled: "There are people amongst us who, it is alleged, can produce effects before which the discoveries of Newton pale. There are men of science who would sell all that they have, and give the proceeds to the poor, for a glimpse of phenomena which are mere trifles to the spiritualist." He added: "The world will have religion of some kind, even though it should fly for it to the intellectual whoredom of spiritualism." ”

“ If, unknown to a living soul, your wife or sister accidentally dropped half-a-sovereign down a deep well, and whilst she was still continuing to hug her little secret to her bosom you were present at a clairvoyant sitting where the medium in a trance informed you of the circumstances, [Pg 254] you would no doubt be astounded. Well, the manifestations of a conjurer are occasionally astounding. No matter how our reason is baffled at first, it behoves us not only to seek a natural explanation of the fact but also to ascertain and authenticate the fact itself. ”

“ I am aware that there are still sceptics on the subject of telepathy, but the testimony is overwhelming, and every year sees the ranks of scepticism growing thinner.
Not many years ago a very learned man, the late Professor von Helmholtz, although confronted with prima-facie evidence of thought transference or telepathy, declared: "I cannot believe it. Neither the testimony of all the Fellows of the Royal Society, nor even the evidence of my own senses, would [Pg 181] lead me to believe in the transmission of them from one person to another. It is clearly impossible." ”

“ Thus far I have devoted myself to an investigation of phenomena for which the theory of telepathy is not inapplicable. It is, however, when we come to discuss hallucinations from which the idea of a living agent is apparently excluded that I feel myself entering on even more delicate and mysterious territory. Having dealt with phantasms of persons at the point of death, I now propose to deal with phantasms of persons already dead. ”

“ But I carefully guarded myself from conviction until I had read the evidence—even to a résumé of this medium's utterances last year in London under the auspices of the Society for Psychical Research—and I assert with confidence that no metaphysical theory has ever been formulated that will account for these manifestations save one—the survival of the human personality after death. ”

“ However strange new and unknown facts may be, we need not fear they are going to destroy the truth of the old ones. Would the science of physics be overthrown if, for example, we admit the phenomenon of "raps"—i.e. audible vibrations in wood and other substances—is a real phenomenon, and that in certain cases there may be blows which cannot be explained by any mechanical force known to us? It would be a new force exercised on matter, but none the less would the old forces preserve their activity. ”

“ So momentous a conclusion, if capable of such complete verification as to be universally accepted by science, would obviously throw all other discoveries into the background. I say if capable of being verified by scientific methods, but, although the weight of opinion will, in my opinion, ultimately lead to a very wide acceptance of this conclusion, yet it seems to me highly probable that the experimental discovery of the survival of human personality after death will always elude conclusive scientific demonstration. ”

“ I must here mention that, not expecting you at home, I had in my pocket a brace of pistols, determining in my mind to let one of them drop before the miller, as if by accident, for fear he should presume to play tricks upon me; but after my interview with you, I felt there was no occasion for weapons, and did not load them, after you had allowed us to inspect as minutely as we pleased every portion of the house. I sat down on the third storey landing, fully expecting to account for any noises that I might hear, in a philosophical manner. ”

“ Thus, is it unreasonable to suppose that the vague, nebulous lights seen at dark séances would furnish the raw material, so to speak, for sense deception?
Thus, we have the basis and beginning, from one point of view, of modern spiritualism. But before we examine the question of clairvoyance or trance utterances of spiritualistic mediums we must first of all go into the subject of physical phenomena.
So-called physical phenomena are a comparatively modern excrescence on the main growth. It is only within the last half-century that they have attained any considerable development. ”

“ On the one hand are, let us say, half-a-million people, often highly intelligent, cultured, sane people, firmly protesting that they have witnessed certain astonishing occult manifestations, and on the other hand the Royal Society and the British Association, and other organised scientific bodies established for the investigation of truth, absolutely refusing to admit such evidence or to regard it seriously. ”

“ It may be so: if the phenomena appertaining to those in their best and most convincing quality were always to appear on a casual summons and if I were confided in by the public at large as a sane, unprejudiced witness.
Granted that I have seen no ghosts, I have at least done this: I have met the men—better men—who have. That at the beginning was the real purpose of my brief itinerary. I designed less a tour into the occult itself than an examination of witnesses for the occult whom [Pg 290] I met on the literary bypaths of occultism. ”

“ Just as experimental physics has shown that each pencil of sunlight embraces an almost endless succession of invisible rays as well as the visible radiation [Pg xiv] we perceive, so experimental psychology has shown that each human personality embraces an unconscious as well as a conscious self. Mr Myers, using Du Perl's conception of a threshold, has termed the former our subliminal self. And just as the invisible radiation of the sun can only be rendered perceptible by some agency outside our vision, so this subliminal self reveals itself only by some agency outside our own volition. ”

“ The swish of a silk dress and the slamming of doors were among the least important of the phenomena from a psychical point of view, though the sound of someone coming through a skylight and dropping on to the landing was certainly calculated to terrify the ladies, who "came up from the drawing-room screaming and shouting, expecting to find some dreadful tragedy being enacted." ”

“ What we have to remember is that by far the greater part of the physical phenomena which is said to occur at a séance is really nothing extraordinary. All physical occurrences are normal that are capable of being produced by a clever conjurer; and there is no doubt that with due preparation such a one could achieve table rapping, introduce flowers and move furniture. But the problem is, how, under the stringent conditions imposed, and in the face of the close scrutiny, to which these manifestations are subjected, they can be done. ”

“ We have to depend on the recollection of the observer's passing glimpse of spirit lights, of the hearing of the rustle of spirit garments, the touch, in the dark, of unknown bodies. Exquisite scents, strange draperies, human forms have appeared seemingly out of nothing, and have returned whence they came unrecorded by photography, unweighed, unanalysed. ”

“ On these grounds alone I should be inclined to take the legendary evidence for haunting seriously, just as every man who investigates its astonishing history now perceives that witchcraft is not to be dismissed as a mere groundless superstition. ”

“ Not least of the wonders of modern psychical research is the discovery that nothing in all the phenomena is new—that under other names and by other races every sort of manifestation was familiar to the most remote peoples. This would certainly seem to meet the argument of the physicist—it is not necessary to refer again to Professor Tyndall's uncomplimentary phraseology—who declares that all this popular occultism is a product of the last generation or two. Take hypnotism. Hypnotism (or mesmerism) was formerly alleged to be an emanation from the body—an effluence of intense will-power. ”

“ Certainly the everyday processes of the development, nutrition, and repair of our body and brain, which go on automatically and unconsciously within us, are far beyond the powers of our conscious personality. All life shares with us this miraculous automatism. No chemist, with all his appliances, can turn breadstuff into brainstuff or hay into milk. Further, the subliminal self seems to have faculties which can be emancipated from the limitations of our ordinary life. Glimpses of [Pg xv] this we get when the conscious self is in abeyance, as in sleep, hypnosis, and trance. ”