Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic/Chapter 14

by Signe Toksvig

 

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Psychical Research

SWEDENBORG once sighed over the kind of people "who deny everything and yet refuse to apply their minds to anything."

To understand him it is unfortunately necessary to ask the reader to do a little work, since the only practical clue to a comprehension of the last third of his life is to be found in the science of psychical research. That is not primarily a feast of ghosts and haunted houses. It is a feast of statistics based on the results of experimental methods seemingly as careful as scientific ingenuity can make them. These results are so upsetting to the old mechanistic conceptions of the laws of nature that they have been fiercely questioned by statisticians—only to be validated by as good or better statisticians.¹

The Society for Psychical Research was founded in England in 1882 by a group of scholars, largely from Cambridge University. Among its presidents (not all English) have been such men as the American psychologist William James (who helped to found the American Society for Psychical Research); the physicists Sir William Crookes, Sir William Barrett, Sir Oliver Lodge; the French philosopher Henri Bergson; Gilbert Murray; the psychologist William McDougall; the biology professor Hans Driesch; professor of logic at Cambridge, C. D. Broad; Professor H. H. Price, Oxford; Dr. Robert Thouless, head of the Department of Education, Cambridge University; while among the Society's membership, past and present, have been a number of well-known scholars such as Sir I. I. Thomson, Julian Huxley, and others.

In 1885, the American Society for Psychical Research was founded, Professor Simon Newcomb being its first President. Among its other officers have been Professor G. Stanley Hall, Professor E. C. Pickering, William James, while, in our day, research is being done under the direction of the psychologist Professor Gardner Murphy.

These men, and women such as Mrs. Henry Sidgwick, so far from being credulous, were rather specialists in incredulity. A great deal of the work of the Societies consisted in, and still consists in, unmasking fraud or tracking down self-deception. Some of their members even learned professional "conjuring" in order to find out if certain alleged mediumistic phenomena, such as slate-writing, could not be duplicated by normal means. This negative part of their work² has been so effective that the positive contributions are perhaps not equally well known.

Yet precisely because these researchers had studied fraud and self-deception, they have been able to work out methods that seem to prove the existence of telepathy and kindred "psychic" abilities, and to prove it by strictly scientific experimentalism.

No one can or should be convinced by mere assertions of this kind, but neither should anyone air his opinion on the matter without having studied the large technical literature now existing.³

Of the facts that seem to have been established by this kind of research, two are especially relevant to an understanding of Swedenborg—telepathy, or, more broadly speaking "extrasensory perception," and precognition, defined as "a noninferential knowledge of the future."

So far the studies made of Swedenborg (aside from those made by members of the sect started in England after his death) appear to take it for granted that the stories of his telepathy and precognition are either false reports or else signs of his supposed madness. Things would look different if any one of them could have been true. There is no doubt that Swedenborg began very early to puzzle over such phenomena. In 1733 or 1734 he was interested in precognitive dreams, and, as previously mentioned, he later made a list of passages he found in the classics concerning prophetic dreams. In his dream diary of 1744 he says, without giving details, that in a dream he had warning of two mortal dangers which enabled him to escape them. In another dream he says he saw the Moravian church in London and the curious way in which the congregation was dressed three months before he actually saw them. His very casualness in noting this makes one fancy he must have had similar dreams before.

Precognition seems to have played a part only in the early period of his supernormal experiences; after that they consisted mainly of telepathy and/or clairvoyance. Now, these were things which he felt he could verify. Is it not extremely likely that when, mixed with these, he experienced the unverifiable, such as visions and apparent "other-world" phenomena, he concluded that they also were "real," since, as will be seen, he felt he had other reasons for thinking so?

Let the psychical research color be put over this puzzle, and something new may emerge.

To find out if extrasensory perception and precognition must at least provisionally be considered facts, it is necessary, as has been said, to make a careful study of the technical literature. Here only brief hints can be given of a couple of the objective methods which have been worked out by individuals or by groups, some working at colleges and universities.⁴

G. N. M. Tyrrell⁵ had five small boxes made, completely light-proof, and fitted with tiny electric lamps. A mechanical device selected at random which of the boxes was to be lit up when Mr. Tyrrell (the experimenter) from behind a screen pressed a noiseless key. At a given signal the subject of the experiment, or "sensitive," opened the lid of the box which she guessed to be the one lit up, another device automatically recording her choice and whether it was or was not correct. About seventy trials a minute were made. By another mechanism, which the experimenter could use without the knowledge of the subject, the lamp of the box opened by the subject was not actually lit until she lifted the cover.

The Tyrrell experiments were in fact safeguarded and tested in far greater detail than sketched here. Results achieved were far beyond chance, whether the lamp was lit before the cover was lifted, or simultaneously with the lifting. In a series of 7,809 trials, made with mechanically selected numbers, the odds against the results being due to chance were many millions to one.⁶ And, in a series of trials testing precognition by the subject of which box was going to be lit up, the odds against chance were likewise many million to one.

In the Soal and Goldney experiments⁷ carried on in England from 1941 to 1943, a specially gifted subject was tested for "precognitive telepathy" under the most elaborate precautions. In one room the subject, under observation by one experimenter, wrote his guess of what the card was which an "agent" in another room was looking at. The agent was also under observation by an experimenter, the number of the card he was to look at being chosen by the experimenter's drawing counters of various colors from a bag.

The results showed that the subject had a marked tendency to guess not the target card but the one following it; that is, he knew what the card was going to be two and a half seconds before it was turned up and looked at by the "agent." Tests showed that there were "good agents" and poor ones, successful procedures and unsuccessful ones, but, pooling all conditions, good and bad, the results could not have been due to chance more than once in 10 ³⁵ times.⁸ Independent and eminent witnesses were frequently present at the experiments.

The experiments in "extrasensory perception" at Duke University by Dr. J. B. Rhine and his students (such as the Pratt-Woodruff experiments) are by now so well known as hardly to need description; while the University of Colorado study by Martin and Stribic, the University of Groningen (Holland) study⁹ and many others show that by the same or similar objective techniques similar results can be arrived at.

As relevant to Swedenborg, however, Whately Carington's distance experiments in telepathy¹⁰ are most interesting, as are Carington's theories to account for these phenomena.

Here the experimenter looks at a picture, say a hedgehog, and draws it at 8 P.M. of a certain day; a fixed time later he draws another picture, and so on. The persons to be tested, who may be seas or continents away, try to draw the picture they think it is at the same time (previously arranged) and, before midnight, they must put their guesses in the mail for the experimenter. The postal date on the envelope is a check.

Instead of a few cards the whole pictorial universe is now the target of guessing, so far as the person tested knows, but correct guesses, some fantastically above chance, have even so been made. The results are conscientiously tabulated. For example, in one of Mr. Carington's experiments the drawing of a bow-tie was "sent," and in the answers there were a number of hourglasses (very similar in shape), but they were rejected.

It is usually a picture that is transmitted. A hedgehog appears before one's mind, or inner sight, but the word may also appear, either visually or as if "heard." Yet, generally speaking, telepathy is in a picture language. Many complex questions are raised in regard to the manner in which the faculty of extrasensory perception (also called the "psi" ability) functions, or doesn't, but innumerable tests scrupulously made and analyzed prove that it exists.

Swedenborg knew the fact if not the name, and he had his own theories to account for it, but before examining these it is best to consult modern experimental psychical research.

Telepathy, so the experts agree, is not "something like radio." It differs in fundamental respects. The distance between the experimenter and the subject or percipient makes no difference in the quality of the reception, as it does in radiative phenomena. A radio has to have at least a condenser and an inductance coil.¹¹ Such instruments have not been found in the human body, dissected as it now is down to its last millimeter.

Even more important, researchers have pointed out, is the question of code—acoustic disturbances, dots, dashes, etc.

"Are we to suppose that the ever-industrious 'subconscious' . . . translates into Morse (say) at one end and interprets at the other, without anyone being aware of the process or knowing what code is used?"

Whately Carington, who asks the question, prefers to suppose that telepathy can take place because mankind possesses a common subconscious. He does not claim this as an original idea (Jung's collective unconscious links into it, for instance), but he asks a searching question. Why if Mr. Smith thinks of Cat and draws a cat, sending it per telepathy to Mr. B, should the latter tend to think of Cat and not of Dog or Razor-blade or Pyramid?

His answer is that if minds have "underground" access to each other, making them in certain respects one mind, then the same psychological laws must apply to "it" as apply to the individual mind. With the individual mind, should two ideas be presented to it at the same time, there is a consequence when one of these ideas is presented to the mind again; the other is apt to accompany it. In a series of brilliant experiments, Mr. Carington has demonstrated that this "law of the association of ideas" with its sublaws, applies also to telepathy between minds.

Go back to the experimenter drawing a picture and to the subject or percipient waiting to guess what it is. Both have the idea of this experiment in common. Therefore if one of them thinks of Cat and draws Cat, the experiment-idea is, as it were, drawing the cat-idea to it in the mind of the other person. Instead of trying to guess one object out of all creation, it comes to him by force of the ordinary process of association, barring of course emotional inhibitions that might prevent it.

Any idea which is shared by two or more people can, if it is associated with another idea in one of these minds, cause the latter idea to rise into the consciousness of the others. This linking idea Mr. Carington calls the "K" idea, for brevity (key idea).

But what is an "idea"? And what is a "mind"? Is it a box which holds things? Swedenborg pondered the same problems; distant as all this discussion may seem from him, it is really bringing us closer to him, as will appear eventually.

Mr. Carington adds to his association theory of telepathy his "psychon" theory of mind. (These curious terms are a legitimate attempt to get away from words that are shabby with too much use.)

Like Swedenborg, psychical researchers are interested in what a sense impression "really" is. It is a common fallacy, Swedenborg often lamented, when people think that the organ of the eye sees, or that the organ of the ear hears. Knock out the optic area of the brain and the most perfect eye can't see. Without the brain cells in whose company the sense impressions are changed into consciousness of them, the sense organ is nothing.

But neither can you depend on what the mind tells you about the sense reports. For instance, Swedenborg said, the sun, stars, and planets are not little molecules, the earth is not at rest, the antipodeans do not fall off into space, etc.; "if we have faith in our senses only we shall be more like animals than rational beings." ¹²

Mr. Carington would largely agree, yet he insists that these sense reports are all that one can know directly in perception. Your physical sight presents a white patch to you; then something takes place in the right brain cells, and you say, It is an egg!

But it may not be an egg. All you really know is the sense report that there is a white patch. How that is changed into the idea of an egg is still a mystery.

Swedenborg calls this a "material idea" and says, as does of course Mr. Carington, that memory helps to classify the sense report. "There is as much memory as there is experience of the senses," ¹³ Swedenborg said, not the whole story by far according to him; he meant the kind of memory he called "external," but this is what Mr. Carington comes to write about when he develops his "psychon" theory of mind.

All ideas, sense reports, and images he proposes to call "psychons." The mind, for him, is a system of these units or psychons, held together by associative links, as a material system of particles may be held together by the force of gravitation. And, for him, "consciousness" is that system of forces which unites the psychons, and it is no more a "stuff" than is gravitation. For him there is no "ego" or its equivalent, no boxlike container, which is conscious of them.

The "self" is the semipermanent mass or nucleus of psychons which has its origin in sense reports, plus the images and ideas which have gathered round them, plus "events of our earlier life." Our "self" is our psychon-system. "Wherever there are two or more associated psychons there will be some sort or degree of 'consciousness' between them."

These may be strange words and stranger ideas to many people, yet it is absolutely necessary to think a little about what a mind is or is not before beginning the attempt to understand the extraordinary mind of Emanuel Swedenborg, and, if only as a hypothesis, one must try to think in the terms that have proved useful for the elucidation of psychic phenomena.

Now, if, in Mr. Carington's words, there can be some degree of consciousness among associated psychons in the same mind (or psychon-system) it follows that there can be subsystems within it—moods, sentiments, repressed complexes, "full-blown secondary personality." But, not only that, the individual psychon-system is capable of "entering as a component into super-systems."

The common subconscious of mankind would be such a supersystem, in which, according to Mr. Carington, the individual would really only be a kind of condensation, but some individuals—about one in five—would have greater ability to connect with the supersystem than others. These have "true" dreams, or see visions or apparitions, sometimes acquiring correct information in this way, which they could not otherwise have received.

The reason for this as Carington would explain it would be that in their individual psychonsystem a subsystem can be split off and take the control away, temporarily, from the central system whose job it is to keep the organism alive in the struggle for existence. If this subsystem is in almost complete control, the condition of the person is said to be that of "trance," more or less deep, in which the subsystem sometimes announces itself to be another personality (see studies in multiple personality) ¹⁴ or even declares it is a spirit "control," a declaration which it is sometimes hard to disprove.

Within the individual psychon-system such a subsystem may communicate telepathically with the central system or with other subsystems, in which case the "normal" consciousness may be aware of symbolic visions or hear voices, usually much to its distress. They would usually be a demonstration by frustrated emotion psychons, or they might be an attempt to convey an extrasensory perception. That would have to be tested. Some Jungian psychiatrists are beginning to do so.¹⁵

Continuing for a little while longer to use the psychon terms, it can be said that there seems to be a subsystem which is capable of manufacturing "real" sense impressions. Take dreams. As Swedenborg had noted, one can have "sensations" in dreams with an extraordinary "reality" about them, with details so vivid that one could never supply them from the best memory while awake.

The ordinary theory is, of course, that it is from "memory traces" that such dreams are built up. But a good hypnotist can persuade a good subject that the lemon he is holding is a sweet pear and the subject will eat it with every sign of sweet-pear enjoyment. He may even be persuaded that a pear is there when it is not, or he may be told that he feels no pain when a pin is stuck into him, and he will feel no pain. Or, as Pierre Janet proved, the hypnotist can taste, say, salt, out of sight of the hypnotized subject, and the latter also "tastes" it.^15a

There is evidently something in the "mind" which fabricates these "real" sensations, or which inhibits them, and this something has been especially studied by G. N. M. Tyrrell.¹⁶ For the understanding of Swedenborg it is important to try to follow Mr. Tyrrell.

The latter's theories dovetail nicely with those of Mr. Carington. Mr. Tyrrell, however, deals with more advanced combinations of the psychon-systems that may exist within the individual mind. To the subsystem that is able to fabricate sense impressions so real that they are called hallucinations he gives the name of the "producer," and to the subsystem which provides the producer with an infinite richness of (often symbolic) data he gives the name of the stage-carpenter.

Mr. Tyrrell's point is that there are hallucinations and hallucinations. Those which interest the psychical researcher are the ones which can be proved to have contained correct information that could not have been obtained by any other means—the others he leaves to the psychiatrist, generally speaking.

These "veridical" hallucinations—or "spontaneous cases"—most often have to do with news of danger or of death. There is a great abundance of verified cases of this kind in which "apparitions" have brought such news to people who could not normally have known or inferred it. Such people sometimes have made a note of the event before it was verified. Mr. Tyrrell tells of such a case:

A lady opens her eyes, still half awake, yet she sees on the pillow a slip of paper on which she reads the words: "Elsie was dying last night." Rousing herself fully, she sees that there is no slip, it was an hallucination. But—"Elsie" had died last night, as she later found out.

In Mr. Tyrrell's opinion, this and many similar cases are also telepathic in nature, but cooperative. That is, the agent, "Elsie," consciously or subconsciously thinks of the lady whom she wants to know of her plight. Some link exists between them ("K" idea) which makes it possible for the news to come to the attention of the "producer" in the lady's mind (psychon-system), and the news comes in dramatized form during that half-awake morning period known to favor hallucinations, because the central government is not yet entirely in control.

The producer has rigged up the device of the slip on the pillow, but this is rather unusually polite. More often it would be a telepathized apparition of Elsie herself, perhaps with an added auditory hallucination "I am dying," or "Good-by," or with a sad expression, or with dripping clothes, if the death were by drowning. If it were not possible to manage this as an externalized hallucination, it might appear as an extraordinarily vivid dream.

In the many cases where bits of the circumstances are shown (such as a part of the ship or building where the accident or whatever happened), circumstances which the percipient could not have known, it must be supposed that the two producers have pooled their information through the intercommunicating subconscious.

We are still, however, dealing only with what goes on in one person's mind. There are cases of several normal, fully awake people having the same hallucination. Mr. Tyrrell deals with this significant "collective percipience of apparitions," of which a number of attested cases exist.

They may be telepathic "infection" from one to the other percipient, but in some of the cases quoted by Mr. Tyrrell where several people have seen the same "apparition," they have seen it as it would have looked from their different points of viewing it if it had been "real"; that is, the person in back of the apparition sees its back, the one at the side sees the side, etc., though it also happens that one or two of the persons present either see nothing at all or else get only a confused perception. Or, if the apparition "speaks," they may hear and not see it, or vice versa.

Mr. Tyrrell's theory, backed by much evidence, is that the "producer" levels of the different personalities, who are necessary for the "reality" of the apparition, are all acted upon by the agent and perhaps by the chief percipient. According to the capacity of each, all the producer levels then get to work and produce in each the view of the apparition which that person in fact would have seen if something physically "real" had been there. (Incidentally, Mr. Tyrrell asks, how, if the various aspects of the same apparition seen simultaneously by several people are caused by physical traces in the brain, do the brain traces in the various brains get into a state of exact correlation with each other?)

The cases collected by the English Society over a long period of time (more than sixty years) and from many different localities, so Mr. Tyrrell points out, all agree on certain features that apparitions have in common and on certain features that they never have, usually those dear to fiction-writers. "Ghosts" do not perform physical actions. The one thing, according to Mr. Tyrrell, which the perfect apparition is not—be it of the living, dying, or alleged dead—is physical. Literally "nothing" is there, even if you should feel the touch of a hand, for a sensation of touch can be hallucinated by the producer as well as any other sensation. You might even, he says, feel the hand of an apparition, while your own passed right through it.

Mr. Tyrrell catalogues the nineteen points of the Perfect Apparition with the conscientiousness of a judge at a fox—terrier show, and he convinces us that nearly all the apparitions of fiction show how "their authors have not even dimly conceived the idea of a visible, audible, and tangible, yet non-physical ghost."

But, "I have seen, I have heard, I have felt," Swedenborg said in solemnly asserting that his experiences in and of "the other world" were real. No well-meaning friend could budge him from that attitude.

Here it is extremely pertinent to ask what he meant by "real." In his diary he notes a "dream," which, however, was like a "wakeful persuasion of being awake," and in this state he saw a being "who appeared in all respects as a man," yet Swedenborg proved to him that he, the man, was a spirit, "by the fact that when he would touch me with his hand and arms, he actually passed through my body, though subsequently the experiment was made with a different result, as he did not pass through, and the sensation of touch was felt just as in the waking state." ¹⁷

Throughout his nearly thirty years of familiarity with "spirits," Swedenborg constantly insists that although "newly arrived" spirits only think they have physical bodies, still as long as they think it they have the same sensations as if they were actually in the flesh. In fact, according to Swedenborg, he spent much of his time in that world doing a kind of missionary work by explaining to its denizens something very similar to the modern theories of sense data. He tried to make them understand that, although they did feel the same old sensations, this did not mean that they weren't "dead," only that they had been wrong in supposing that their perception of sense data had been exclusively linked to their grosser physical mechanisms.

He did not always succeed in convincing them. Skeptics seemed to be numerous even "there," and determined ones, for Swedenborg also noted in his diary that one day when he wanted to "represent" a microscope in order to aid an argument, "the spirits resisted, and did not wish to allow it, saying they do not wish to admit those things which convince, for they fear to be convinced." ¹⁸

Absorbing from any point of view as is his account of that spirit world in and out of which he dropped with such ease, there is so far no way of proving that it was not entirely a subjective hallucination put on by a producer-level-of-genius in his personality, leaving him, as some worthy people of his time thought, brilliantly sane except in this respect.

There may never be any way of proving what his experience really was, but it is relevantly interesting to try to find out whether he had any of the abilities of the "gifted subjects" with whom psychical researchers get their star results; whether there is any evidence that he showed extrasensory perception in spontaneous cases; and whether he had the kind of "splittable" psychic constitution known to facilitate such states.

The last question would seem to bring us into the territory reserved, apparently, for psychiatry. Part of the object of this study is to show that in reality it also belongs to another and a different province, that of psychical research. The two may be contiguous, but they are not the same. For instance, a question that never could be asked of psychiatry can be asked of modern psychical research: How far can it bear out Swedenborg's stubborn claim that man survives the death of the body?