Occult Japan/Noumena
NOUMENA.
I.
AVING seen these spirits, the next thing is, if possible, to see through them. For after establishing first their existence, and, secondly, their identity, it becomes interesting to know their essence. In order to discover this, we may best begin by considering our own spirit or self.
The idea of self, religiously known as one's soul or spirit, presents itself to us under three aspects: as a feeling about ourselves; as a feeling about others as affecting ourselves; as a feeling about others independently of ourselves. The first we call the sense of self; the second, the personality of another; the last, simply a man's individuality.
Now, to begin with, every one has a private conviction that his sense of self is as strong as any one else's, just as he is privately persuaded that his feelings generally are as praiseworthily poignant as his neighbor's. Nevertheless, his equally infallible estimate of others may hint to him that this is possibly a pleasing personal delusion, since in those about him he perceives very clearly that in strength of selfhood man varies markedly from man. Some men affect him instantly and indescribably as of strong personality; others as of a feeble one. Scanning them critically for objective proof of this subjective feeling of his toward them, he finds in their behavior unmistakable signs that it is founded on fact. He notices that the feeble brother unconsciously plays chameleon to all he meets, while the positive person seems largely sufficient unto himself. In short, it becomes perfectly apparent that men differ as much in selfhood as they do in, say, artistic taste.
Just as men of any one community differ thus among themselves, so whole communities contrast with one another in the same way. The French and the Anglo-Saxons offer us an instance at our very elbow. What is more, both sides to the antithesis recognize the difference perfectly, and apply derogatory epithets to it in the other. Ce grand original d'Anglais heartily despises those monkeys the French, and knows not at which he stands the more aghast, the awful sansculottism of their institutions or the shocking manner in which they unbosom themselves to the first comer.
Another generic instance is even more ready to our hand. We do not have to go abroad to find it. For it is found world-wide in femininity. So universal is it, and so bound up with the question of trances, that it deserves mention here; especially as I do not recall having seen it scientifically recognized. It is this,—that self is what, psychically, peculiarly distinguishes the sexes. In woman there is a comparative absence of Ego.
With regard to a want of it in woman, doubtless there are persons who will promptly and indignantly deny the fact; certainly all those who are trying their best to-day to make of woman an inferior kind of man may be trusted to do so. But woman is altogether too valuable as she is to be thus disposed of, and it is precisely in her relative lack of self that her value lies. This it is that makes er the almost unmitigated blessing she is. For it is in her direct relations with man that this quality of hers comes out conspicuous, first as wife, and then as mother.
To how many men, I wonder, did it ever occur what an upsetting sensation it would be to change one's name at marriage. To be known by one name, to speak it, hear it, write it, read it, from the time one first remembered one's self, through all those years when habits are formed and crystallized, and then, presto! to be known by, speak, hear, write, read, another one ever after. Such metamorphosis would certainly give self-centered man a shock. Yet the fair sex take their maiden electrocution without a quiver. Nevertheless, words are very telling things. It is compliments, not good-will, that pay us the most poignant after-calls; just as it is insults, not injuries, that stick. All the more so, then, in the case of that word which of all words is most one's self. To change that would, to hardened man, seem dangerously like parting with a part of himself.
Precursor of change it actually proves to be with woman. Change of name, to which the maiden takes so kindly, turns out but exponent of the change of thought in her that follows it. To a great extent the wife merges her self in her husband's. She adopts his interests, acquires his dislikes, echoes his opinions. In the usual case, his intellectual property, in short, becomes hers. As a small offset, doubtless, to these acquisitions, her material property became his.
She shows the same self-obliteration as mother. A woman lives for and in her offspring in a way quite impossible for a man. A father may care as much for his children, but he cannot sink his own personality in theirs as a mother may and does. Her thought centres in them as naturally as his centres in himself, with a like absence of all intention in the process.
Thus in both of the two most important relations of her life a woman shows a disregard and a sacrifice of herself which finds no corresponding counterpart in man. Man praises her for it, which is tantamount to praising her for being a woman. For in her the action is neither noble nor ignoble; it simply is. It is also simply normal that man should appear a very selfish animal by comparison.
Noticeable as these differences in the self are, they are as nothing compared with the contrast that confronts an Anglo-Saxon in the Japanese race. Its indirect manifestations are so striking that they have found embodiment in aphorism. The well-worn epigram that the Japanese are the French of the far East really rests on this. So does, also, the less trite one that Japan is the feminine half of the world. For her delicacy, her daintiness, and her dignity instantly suggest to our more coarse, more direct, more original mind something of the fair sex. An etiquette of soul, I can hear some one phrase it. Certainly in emotion both go through the world gloved, but the resemblance rests on something below the surface. Very different as are femininity and far-orientallsm in most things, there is strangely enough in both a relative absence of self.
Japan is at present engaged in making the resemblance evident in an interesting if objectionable manner. When a woman once lets go her old rules of conduct, she will go pretty much any lengths in the new. Just as a fine woman will make even fine men blush, so a low one will stagger even her male associates. Impulse possesses her for its own. There is in her a capacity for self-abandonment to an idea impossible to man. Lady Macbeth, once started, outdoes my lord in crime. She knows no hindering regard for self, no ghostly shapes of other thoughts to rise and cry to this one "Halt! enough!" So Japan. Decorous as was old Japan, young Japan, inoculated of foreign fancy, will cause even the rough and ready foreigner to start. Just as politeness stood personified—one may almost say petrified—in a Japanese gentleman of the old school, so rudeness incarnate jostles you in his son. A greater contrast could scarcely be offered than that between the pageant of an oldtime Japanese setting out upon a journey and a modern Japanese arrival from one by train; the polite eternity of self-deprecatory bows of the one, the scramble for the wicket of the other, where man, woman, and child bump and hustle their neighbors with an indifferent rudeness that, in any more personal land, would cause several free fights on the spot. That it does not do so here shows that though politeness has gone, personality has not yet come. Indeed, the impersonal character of the hustle is something which may be felt; for it is as devoid of subjective sensibility as of altruistic regard. Impersonality stands patent in the very touch of it. It seems subtly to embody the distinction hinted at in the injunction of the topical refrain, "Don't push; just shove."
II.
Furthermore, this selfhood is a force. We feel other people's personality in direct effect upon ourselves, and we perceive and, in a way, even feel the effect of our personality upon others. We also notice similar inter-effects between two third persons. Like all other forces, this force acts inevitably, often quite unconsciously; and fatally produces its results when not opposed by counter forces. Married couples give us striking every-day instances of it. The happy pair grow monotonously like each other, even to the extent of acquiring a certain family resemblance. The wife becomes a replica of her husband, and the husband, to a certain extent, a duplicate of his wife, although the effect is more marked on the woman. As the world is constituted, it is fortunate for domesticity that mutual transformation is the rule, since otherwise it may be doubted if the divorce court would be the exception.
But such inter-affection is no monopoly of matrimony. Each one of us is continually impressing, or being impressed by, others in proportion to the strength of our respective selves. Originality marks the height of the one, imitation the depth of the other. The action is commonly unconscious at the time, and only recognized afterwards. The fact is that character is contagious. All men go through life more or less inoculated thus of others. Boswell's very acute case of Dr. Johnson, pathologic as it was, is but an aggravated instance of what is not without a parallel about us every day. Plenty of men contract effective admirations, which they carry with them more or less through life. And we none of us wholly escape contagion, both good and bad. Whence the importance of carefully choosing one's friends. For to have a sufficiently violent attack of one person insures, for the time being, practical immunity from another. To such an extent are we all chameleons in mind.
That one self has this effect on its fellows hints at a common essence pervading them all. It suggests one great impersonality of spirit underlying our several personal embodiments of it, a certain cosmic, communistic character for the soul. It is fortunate there is such mutual influence between men. Were it not so, this isolated globe would be a still more isolated spot; love would instantly fly out of the window, and friendship itself be put out of doors.
Minds differ greatly in their power of thus impregnating other minds. But it is especially a quality of the male mind as compared with the female one. The one is original and forceful; the other receptive and self-adapting. The one initiates, the other adopts.
Personality, or a man's mental force upon his fellows, is also in a way measure of the mental energy of the man.
For we meet personalities that repel us as well as ones that attract; personalities, even, that do not affect us beyond a recognition that they are, and that they do affect, our neighbors. We are, therefore, conscious of personality as such; in some sort, we even gauge its amount.
Now the faculty of being influenced by other people the Japanese possess to a marvelous degree. Fundamentally unoriginal, they have always shown a genius for self-adaptation. They are at present engaged in exemplifying their capacity upon a wholesale national scale.
It is hardly exaggeration to say that Japan at this moment is affording the rest of the world the spectacle of the most stupendous hypnotic act ever seen, nothing less than the hypnotization of a whole nation, with its eyes open. Forty million of folk there are now innocent freaks of foreign suggestion. It is not simply the imitating of foreign customs, but the instant unassimilated character of the imitation that stamps the national state of mind as kin to hypnosis, and gives to both their cousinly touch of caricature. The new idea is adopted with little or no attempt at adaptation. Such sublime disregard of congruity shows the hypnotic completeness with which it is received. In consequence, Tōkyō is now one vast public platform, in which nature is giving an exhibition of ideal force. Combinations in costume as beautifully incompatible as any the hypnotized subject can be induced to adopt are at large on its streets, worn in the two cases from the same motive, unreasoned response to stimulus from without; whence the irrationality of the result. Nor do the other subjects see anything ludicrous in it all.
The action may be said to begin, but by no means to stop, with costume. Customs, from top to toe, are undergoing the same foreign-motived transmogrification. The imitation pot-hat and accompanying aura of billycockism sit no less comically upon a kimono and cloven socks than does a modern Tōkyō court of justice upon an old-fashioned Japanese case.
Hypnotoidal imitation is no new trait of these people. They showed the same proclivity in just the same way more than a millennium ago. China was the operator then, as the western world is the operator now. Susceptibility to suggestion lies at the root of the race.
III.
Not only can one self thus sway another, but from prehistoric times men have believed that one self could actually oust another and act in its stead. The dispossessing self has been variously deemed a deity, devil, or disembodied spirit—embodied spirits being apparently less eager to leave their quarters. But whatever its moral character, it has been held to be every whit as existent as the poor devil it dispossessed. Among all peoples we have instances of persons thus possessed by gods, goblins, and others, instances cropping up all over the world, from the earliest ages down to the present day. The character of the possessing spirit has, however, varied with singular complacency to suit the opinions of the persons it possessed. In a simple society that favored the idea, the visitant has boldly proclaimed himself a god; in communities where this assumption was considered arrogant, he has contented himself with the more modest role of devil; while, finally, in these latter days, he has been fain to put up with being the spirit of an Indian brave or other worthy too insignificant to dispute.
It is scarcely surprising, perhaps, that these possessing spirits should have seemed actual beings, seeing that to common sense they are such, inasmuch as they rigorously pass all the tests by which we cognize personality and know one man from his neighbor, just as rigorously as the unfortunates they dispossess. This seemingly astounding statement is easily shown to be undeniable. Not only to the simple, superficial eye do the manifestations comport themselves like distinct personalities; they do the like when gauged by all the criteria we are wont to apply. For how do we know people about us for distinct individualities? We know them psychically by the fact that each seems conscious of himself and of his own emotions, thoughts, and memories, as being his own, and as not being anybody else's. The same is true of these spirits. Each is evidently conscious of itself, and conscious of the distinction between itself and all other selves, the man, in whose body it is, included. It has its own emotions which are not his; its own thoughts, which are not his; its own memories, which are not his. It not only denies that it is he; it really knows nothing of all those states of consciousness which alone are he. Except as an outsider, it neither knows him, nor he it.
It does not, of course, follow from the undeniable fact of its distinct psychical existence that it is either a god or a devil. To jump to this conclusion is a quite unwarrantable assumption of divinity. But the immateriality of the god does not invalidate the actuality of the so-called spirit. Because Smith may erroneously be called Jones, does not jeopardize the existence of Smith, though it may considerably imperil the existence of Jones.
The reconciliation of these two separate selves consists, as we shall see later, in a certain denial of self altogether.
Now, besides revealing so much, common to all manifestations, these Shintō ones reveal indirectly considerably more. In the first place, they disclose the fact that the Japanese race is very easily possessed. They do this, first, by their amount, and secondly, as significantly, by their character.
Their quantity we have seen to be something enormous. It is safe to say that no other nation of forty millions of people has ever produced its parallel. For not only is each form surprisingly common, but there are such a surprising number of forms. There is intentional possession, and possession unintentional; possession by the mediation of the church, and possession immediately by the devil; beneficent possession by dead men, and malevolent possession by live beasts. There is, in short, possession by pretty much every kind of creature, except by other living men.
This omission is highly significant. For it shows that no Japanese personality of itself has proved potent enough thus to affect its fellows; from which it instantly follows that the great extent possession has reached in Japan is not due to an excess of personality, but to a lack of it. As collateral evidence of this, is the fact that mesmerism, hypnotism, and the like, were unknown in Japan till introduced there by the western world; absent, not from dearth of subjects, but from dearth of hypnotizers.
Even more subtly significant is the quality of the possession. Fortuitous, of course, at first, god-possession in Japan has passed from the spontaneous into the systematic stage. From being wild, the possessing spirits have become tame. Deity has been domesticated. Originally a voluntary act of god upon involuntary man, possession has become practically an involuntary divine acquiescence to human constrainment. The lightning, in short, has been turned into serviceable electricity.
This constrainment of deity is no new thing there. It had already come about in prehistoric times, as the Kojiki and Nihonshoki show. Since then it has been more and more systematized till it has now grown into a regular business, done as a matter of course. Comment on this is needless.
The trance itself tells the same story, in the ease with which the possession is effected. For the closer the normal state lies to the abnormal one, the less the wrench in passing from the one to the other, and the more seemingly natural the latter when entered. Now compared with mediumistic trances, the Shintō possessions are decent, gentlemanly affairs. There is, indeed, the initial throe and the subsequent quiver, but the one is not an epileptic portal to a general epileptic appearance throughout, which so disgusts a looker-on in possessions by mediums. The Shintō gods may be dull, but they are at least decorous, whereas the mediumistic spirits are most undesirable company. And this in spite of the fact that in America the subjects are usually women, from whom one would expect more ladylike behavior.
For to be easily controlled abnormally is as much a characteristic of woman as to be easily influenced normally. Spirits apparently have always been perfectly aware of this. From the earliest times they have shown a pardonable preference for possessing her. The divinely inspired prophetess was a regular appurtenance of ancient religions. And that the spirits are still as partial to her as ever is shown by the present preponderance of female mediums. For that the female monopoly of the business is due to natural capacity, and not simply to surplusage of the sex, is hinted at by the host of shams which the apparently lucrative character of the business is able to support.
Hypnotism tells the same story. In spite of authoritative statements to the contrary, women are naturally more hypnotizable, than men. That the opposite has been stated to be the case would seem to be due to the not uncommon fallacy of not sufficiently simplifying the experiments. For there are two factors that enter into the result beside the skill of the operator: the natural capacity of the subject and the degree to which he is made unconsciously to cooperate to his own suppression. Indeed, just as no one may be hypnotized against his will, so in all cases the subject really hypnotizes himself. The art of the operator simply consists in getting him, more or less unwittingly, to do this. The greater the natural aptitude of the subject, the less the art necessary in the operator. To get the best experiments, therefore, we should eliminate as much as may be the latter's skill. The tyro of an hypnotist is thus the man whose experiments are really to the point; and every tyro in this art of recreating personality knows that, unlike the original creator of it, "his prentice hand" he tries on "woman," not "man," because thus he stands the greater chance of succeeding.
Woman's superior capacity for being possessed shows itself even among the Japanese. The Nichiren Buddhists, with praiseworthy astuteness, employ women as vehicles for the divine descent for this very reason, and the resulting trance is so easily entered as sometimes to pass counterfeit for a sham.
The French display a like proneness to altro-possession. Had they not been relatively easily influenced, Mesmer would not have failed of a livelihood in Vienna to become the rage in Paris; nor would Charcot and Nancy have been the pioneer names of modern hypnotism. For an art does not become the vogue among those who have no natural aptitude for it. Nature divorces such incompatibility of temper. Priority of practice is thus the best proof of fitness.
Now it is these same three classes of mind, the far-oriental, the feminine and the French, different as they otherwise are, that we saw to be relatively so impersonal. Personality, then, appears to be the opposite pole to proneness to possession. Spirits of this world and of the next would seem to have a reciprocatory action in their possession of the human body; the more man the less god. This suggests that the qualitative difference between selves is in some sort a quantitative one. Self would appear to be a something capable of more or less; inasmuch as a man who is not much himself at most finds it more facile to become some one else on occasion; an instance of the general principle that it is easier to introduce a substance into a comparative void than into space already occupied; and this in fact is what I conceive happens; not materially, but kinematically. For though we do not here introduce matter, we do, as I shall hope to show, introduce motion.
IV.
To do this we must again have recourse to ourselves, and diagnose, if we may, our own spirit.
Now on looking into ourselves to see what ourselves may be, of what are we made aware? For my part I am conscious of a kaleidoscopic series of thoughts. These successive dissolving views of mine seem to me to have about as much inter-connection as kaleidoscopic combinations generally, and I seem to have about as much influence over their appearance as I should have over those of that delightful but unpredicable instrument, if by attention I could induce it to evolve along some slightly definite line. In other words, I am conscious at first sight of what we call ideas and will, and that the latter has a certain limited effect upon the former.
My next discovery is that this power of my will is not a directly creative force at all. Not only can I acquire no new mental property by simply willing to have it; I cannot even lay my hand on what is already my own, when I would. For I can neither think a new idea by direct exercise of will, nor can I directly recall a memory when I please. All I can do is to hold on to or let go, what my stream of thought is kind enough to present me with. By choosing to attend to any particular idea that chances to come along, I allow that idea to beget others after its kind; an opportunity of which it instantly avails itself. If I pay no attention to it, it promptly goes out. And this is absolutely all I can do. In this pitifully feeble fashion I manage to live, move, and have my being in the firm belief that I could do almost anything if I pleased.
Will then, consists in the exercise of selective attention. I choose to attend to one thought rather than another, and then I do attend to it. But though will in action is thus all selective attention, all selective attention is not will. For on further scrutiny of my stream of thought I am made aware rather startlingly that will meddles with it uncommonly little. Observation shows me that the like is true of my fellows. Indeed, the greater part of all our lives is made up of will-less action, of simply thinking the act and then doing it without any exercise of will at all. Yet we are not conscious of being our own on-lookers merely. On the contrary, we feel very poignantly that we live in this pageant that unrolls itself before the mind's eye. We feel this because selective attention is busy all the while, whether we will or no, and we are quite aware that it is thus at work involuntarily.
In the case of this involuntary attention, the power behind the throne seems to be quite simply the interest the particular idea possesses for us. If the idea appeals to us, we attend to it in spite of ourselves. We can, indeed, often catch ourselves led pleased captive thus to some fascinating thought, remonstrating impotently as it drags us after it. It rivets, as we say, our attention.
In short, involuntary attention is simply the dynamic outcome of the idea. The idea results as fatalistically in turning and fastening our attention as a bright object does in rotating the fovea upon itself, or as the percussion of the cap does in the discharge of the gun.
Now voluntary attention appears to differ from the involuntary kind not the least in attent, but only in intent. We seem in the latter case to choose which idea we shall press upon, the consequent pressure proving quite similar in both.
In our search for the noumenal, then, in what we call will, we are driven back upon the act of choice alone.
Now when we search for the cause of our choice we always bring up against some determining thought. Whenever we succeed in overtaking that will-o'-the-wisp, our own will, and triumphantly clutch it, we find invariably that we have caught—an idea. Why am I willing to write these words, when as a matter of fact I am tempted to lie on the grass and gaze into the drifting islands of cloud? Because I decided yesterday that I would—an idea—or because it will be pleasurable later to have done so—an idea—or simply to prove to myself that I have a will—an idea again sarcastically bobbing up. Every time that I think to have closed upon that elusive force, the will, I find myself left grasping a palpable idea.
Yet we call ourselves conscious of the autonomy of our will. Nor will I yet say that we are not. What I will say is that we should be just as conscious of the fact were the fact not so. For that only is not free which is determined from without. Now whether the will were a noumenistic primum mobile or a mere dynamic outcome of the idea, it would in either case be determined from within and would necessarily, therefore, seem free.
But we may go further. Whatever will be, it is dependent for its existence in consciousness upon the existence of ideas. This is palpably instanced every day of our lives. For we are constantly conscious of ideas without will; we are never conscious of will without ideas. Further yet, in these willless yet conscious times, we are quite aware of ourselves as being ourselves. Will, therefore, except as included in the ideas, is not of the essence of the Ego. For a thing which only pays us visits in this manner and is distinctly recognized as doing so can be no indispensable part of that innermost something each of us calls "I."
Lastly, will appears to be quite uncomplexioned. Nobody pretends that his will differs from his neighbor's, except in strength, that is, in amount. It differs in its application, but not in itself. It works in one man on one thing; in another, on another: but that which works seems essentially the same in both. Will acts, in short, like any other impersonal force. Either, therefore, will is the I only as included in the Idea, or it is in no personal sense the I at all.
Now the method of getting into the trance state has something very apposite and important to say about all this. For the entrance to that peculiar condition lies through an abnormal use of selective attention. By keeping the attention fixed long enough on a very insipid idea, or, better yet, upon nothing at all, out go both ideas and will; that is, will can inadvertently bring about its own extinction when intent upon the extinction of something else, namely, an idea. But of this truly astounding performance on the part of the will we need not go to trances to become astonished witness. For each one of us has experience of it, as a matter of fact, whenever he falls asleep. In lapsing into our nightly unconsciousness, it is our ideas that seem to go out directly, our will only seeming indirectly compelled to go with them. Baron Munchausen lifting himself up by his pig-tail is child's play to this self-extinction of the will, if will be in any sense the self.
V.
Having thus eliminated will from any intrinsic participation in the self except as included in the idea, we have reduced self to ideas. Of what ideas, then, is it made up? Clearly not of the simple main idea of the moment. No one ever mistook his idea of a beefsteak for himself. But one's train of thought is not wholly composed of beefsteaks or philosophy, or any other chain of single thoughts. For first it is a palpable fact of consciousness that the object of consciousness is complex. Take the simplest act of discrimination, for example. The Irishman who said he could tell two brothers apart when he saw them together, unwittingly hit the psychologic bull's-eye. For the only conceivable way of telling two things apart is by thinking them together. But the momentary me is more complex than this. There are, in the first place, a host of fainter ideas or suggestions of them, which the main idea drags up, attached to it, and secondly, there are the fading forms of previous ideas and the brightening forms of coming ones, side by side with the culminating thought of the moment. For it is no less a palpable fact that ideas take time to develop into distinctness, and even more time to fade again into oblivion. Dissolving views upon our cortical screen, the last grows ghostly as the next takes shape, and lingers some seconds ere it vanishes quite. It is this corona of past, present, and nascent thought, limning the central idea of the moment that gives that idea its setting, and us our sense of self.
As a proof of this, an idea of our own which came to us unhaloed, however brilliant it may have been, is often subsequently recognized so little for our own that at times we feel conscientious scruples about claiming it. Such self-abnegation fortunately, perhaps, is rare. For an assumption of probability induces us instantly to appropriate whatever has not upon it the stamp of another. Nor is there a more poignant chagrin than to awake suddenly to the knowledge, through some casually resurrected detail, that our yesterday's self-imputed epigram had been previously told us by Jones. Another's seal consists in those, often almost indescribable, concomitant details in which the foreign idea comes to us fringed, its setting in short. This differs entirely from the setting that surrounds our own self-suggested thoughts. At the time we heard the epigram, which we subsequently so sadly mistook, we were conscious not only of hearing it, but of hearing it; afterwards this acoustic aura faded out, and therefore when the idea reappeared it bore no identifying tag, and we insensibly took it for one of our own. For though our own thoughts come to us as a rule quite differently fringed by a halo of their own, they sometimes have little or none, and the instinct of possession causes us to impute all such to ourselves—until increasing exactitude teaches us distrust.
VI.
Now of what do ideas consist? They consist, apparently, of molecular motion. An idea, in short, is a mode of motion; another form of that fundamental, seemingly protean thing.
But to see this we must first be sure just what we mean by an idea. Now we mean in ordinary parlance by an idea a conscious pulse of thought. A mere reflex action we do not associate with any idea. We even speak often of having acted from impulse as opposed to having acted from thought, and hold ourselves largely irresponsible in consequence. Now all such unconscious brain action, whether it be so-called reflex action, or so-called instinct or impulse, there is, in the present state of our knowledge, little difficulty in conceiving to be a mere mode of motion from one end of the chain to the other. Suppose, for example, I am walking along the street, and an inadvertent gnat runs full tilt into my eye. The eye instantly closes, and proceeds to weep copiously, while still remaining tenaciously, much too tenaciously, shut. Indeed, I have considerable trouble in opening the eye enough to get the insect out. Here the collision of the insect starts motion in the nerves that convey their wave of it to specialized ganglia, from which it wakes other ganglia that send word down to the eyelid to close. And the stupid eyelid obeys its immediate message to my great annoyance. Now this seems a perfectly clear case of machinery, one that works inevitably and certainly. If I can manage to induce another gnat to repeat the thoughtlessness of his predecessor, the performance of my eye will be also perfectly reproduced. I recognize this action for a bit of machinery so thoroughly that I do not identify myself with it. On the contrary, I am annoyed at the stupidity of the eye in persisting so obstinately to stay closed when, if it would but open, I could soon get the insect out. In like manner, instinct and impulse, in their turn, start trains of automatic action. Indeed, all unconscious cerebration can be thus explained on general mechanical laws. In similarly explaining other brain processes, the difficulty comes in with consciousness.
Consciousness is still held by most people to be a noumenon or noumenal phenomenon; mind being conceived by them to be something quite apart from brain, and this in face of the self-evident concomitance of the two. Now when we scan this distinction for an underlying difference, we find it to be due solely to man's desire for distinction. To put it unflatteringly, it is nothing but part and parcel of our innate human snobbery.
Darwin's doctrine was held for many years by most religious folk to be impious, and is still so held by a few of them. It was thought to deny a special creator. What it really denied were special creatures. So far as God was concerned, all it did directly was to remove him to a proper height above his handicraft; it was man whom it treated with scant respect by linking him with the brutes. Darwin committed the unpardonable sin of recognizing his own poor relations. The justice of such recognition has now nearly universally been conceded, and to-day practically nobody disputes the essential kinship of all living things. But the snobbish instinct that opposed it still survives, as it is bound to survive so long as we remain largely creatures of instinct. For under a better name this instinct is nothing but a subtler part of the instinct of self-preservation, the instinctive holding to all that makes for our individuality and the like antagonism to all that threatens it. Materially, this prejudice in favor of ourselves is now conceded to be misleading; yet it still survives immaterially, that is psychically, in our unnatural divorce between brain and mind. For not to have them two makes us one with all the rest of the universe. Whether we suppose mind to be matter or matter mind, we become in either case part and parcel of the material world; and so tenaciously, though unconsciously, do we hold to our supposed superiority to the rest of the universe, that we refuse to recognize the relationship. We are very loath to admit that we are kin to stocks and stones and other reputed senseless things. This is the gist of the whole matter. Thought we deem to be something grand, while chemical action strikes us as ignoble; although the one is every whit as inscrutably potent as the other. It is because we really know nothing about the essence of either that we dare decide so definitely between the evolutionary merits of the two.
Incidentally it is somewhat amusing to notice how thoroughly irreligious this supposed religious view is. For what warrant has man to prescribe laws to an omnipotent creator and arrogantly to regard one mode of creative action as unworthy to be used in his construction? The dualistic assumption thus carries with it, both scientifically and sentimentally, its own disproof.
The truth is that the only logical explanation of matter and mind is that the two are one; and that the life-principle of the whole is some mode of motion. When we have, as we say, an idea, what happens inside us is probably something like this: the neural current of molecular change passes up the nerves, and through the ganglia reaches at last the cortical cells and excites a change there. Now the nerve-cells have been so often thrown into this particular form of wave-motion that they vibrate with great ease. The nerves, in short, are good conductors, and the current passes swiftly along them, but when it reaches the cortical cells, it finds a set of molecules which are not so accustomed to this special change. The current encounters resistance, and in overcoming this resistance it causes the cells to glow. This white-heating of the cells we call consciousness. Consciousness, in short, is probably nerve-glow.
Now we know by experiment that the heat of the hemispheres rises while conscious processes are going on, and does not rise to the same degree when processes of more reflex action are taking place in them. Furthermore, we have reason to think that the molecular action of the cortical cells must be of the same nature as that which takes place in the nerves, since by mere repetition of the action the one develops into something indistinguishable from the other. For at each repetition of any brain action, consciousness of it grows less, till finally we cease to be conscious of it at all; that is to say, the molecular change occurs with ever-increasing ease till at last it comes to be performed quite automatically and quite unconsciously.
Phenomena of both normal and abnormal states of consciousness hint that this theory is correct, as I shall now try to make evident.
That an idea is a force that shows itself as a mode of motion is borne out, to begin with, by the fact that its action conforms to that of all the other forces we know, in being, first, inevitable, and secondly, impersonal. This, so long as we regard ideas only in bundles, as my mind or your mind, is not apparent, but becomes evident so soon as we analyze mind into its successive simple parts, ideas, and consider them.
Some years ago, Carpenter came across what he regarded as an astonishing abnormal mental phenomenon. It was this: that at times the mere thought of a bodily movement was able of its own instance actually to bring that movement about. Lotze improved upon this by showing that the phenomenon occurred with much more commonness than was supposed. Finally the discovery was made, scarcely second to any in this age of discoveries, that this startling phenomenon was no abnormality at all, but the normal function in all its primitive nudity; that every motor-idea, that is, every idea of a bodily movement, instantly produces that movement when not inhibited by other ideas.
William James tells us that the instance that first convinced him of this general law was the way in which he eventually got up of a morning. In due course after waking, the thought came to him, "I must get up."
But this idea instantly suggested the inadvisability of doing so. The bed was too cosy, the world too cold. So he lay where he was. How, then, did he ever get up? Consciously, he never got up at all; the first thing he knew, he was up. He had fallen into a revery upon the day's doings, when suddenly the idea that he must lie there no longer popped up again, and at that lucky instant, before it could start objection, had started him.
Introspection will soon yield any one countless instances of the same thing; but it is introspection of the second order of difficulty. One cannot simply stalk out into his thought preserves and pot his instance; the fugitive character of the action obliges him to take it on the wing. For to catch it stationary, is, by its very nature, impossible. So soon as one thinks about his thinking, he is, ipso facto, engaged upon a different thought, namely, the thought of thinking, a very different thing from simply thinking the thought; and the second idea inhibits the action of the first. The only way to become aware of what one seeks is, by a process akin to the optical trick of detecting a very faint star, to look a little off it with the mind's eye. One has to play detective on one's self; by sly show of inattention, to fool one's self, as one would fool another into being unsuspiciously natural. He will then detect instances by the gross. All his impulsive actions will give him more or less complete examples of it. The expression "to go off at half cock" is nothing but an unappreciated recognition of these very things.
After thus recognizing it in one's self, he will perceive it in others. Any nervous man is a perfect museum of specimens. While he is listening to you, or even talking himself, his eye will fall upon a paper-cutter upon the table, and out goes his hand to play with it; or, a book strikes him as being misplaced, and he must needs set it right; or, he sees his pipe, and forthwith proceeds to fill it; and so forth and so on. Each new idea instantly produces in him its fatalistic effect.
The reason we are not directly conscious of this force of our ideas is that one idea rarely has free play. A second idea starts before the first is well under way and more or less inhibits the first's action, thus complicating the problem. If motions generally were not complex, no science would be needed to unravel them.
So much for motor-ideas. But beside motor-ideas, there are other ideas not concerned with action at all, but with thoughts as such; ideo-ideas, we may call them. In James's matutinal experience, the idea of rising, instead of rousing him, roused first the idea of not doing so, by spontaneously calling up the consciousness of his cosiness, and this, doubtless, prompted the happy thought of a like snug inclosing of his last psychic find in some pithy phrase, and that brought up the subject of embalming generally, which reminded him that life was fleeting, whereupon it flashed upon him that he would better be up and doing, and up he got.
If thoughts did not thus run their own trains, we should be simple automata, void of memory, and incapable of reasoning; nature's puppets at sensation's string.
As one ideo-idea thus gives rise to another, so it may rouse a motor-idea which generates bodily movement, and the circle be complete. Some motion happens inevitably in every case, were it only the inevitable dissipation of its energy in the form of fatigue or general bodily excitement.
VII.
So much for the inevitable character of the action. The impersonality of it is, on scrutiny, no less apparent. For, personal as an idea seems to be in its manifestation, such association turns out to be purely fortuitous. Not only is an idea competent quite alone to institute another idea or a bodily movement in the man himself,—it will do precisely the same in another person. There are all degrees of such inter-individual action, from the most partial persuasion to the most complete control. Its most startling examples are afforded by hypnotic subjects, who, at a word from the operator, act with even more than normal energy. But the same effect, less extravagantly accomplished, may be witnessed in every-day life. In certain heavy or preoccupied states of mind, a person will obey, automatically, a word from another, to be astonished the next instant at having done so.
A like effect, in a partial form, is taking place between all of us all the time. The so-called personality of a man is nothing but the inter-individual action of his ideas upon other people. In its least complicated forms we are quite aware that it is merely the idea that acts, while the action is as often unconscious as conscious. Insensibly a man finds himself reproducing the ideas of those about him. Especially is this the case where fundamental sympathy exists between him and his causative, and preeminently so when that person is the woman he loves. At times he startles himself by tones and gestures which he recognizes as hers, and then glows all over at the reflection. With corresponding annoyance will he catch himself reproducing the tricks of manner of some one he cordially despises. In the one case, the background ideas help as a mordant to set the dye; in the other, the ideas themselves prove catching enough.
The fact is, that ideas are as catching as scarlet fever. We can no more escape having them enter our minds than we can escape having material germs enter our bodies. And the only preventive against instant and indiscriminate imitation is constitutional mental energy. For, in normal states, the mind lies open to any action from without; any foreign idea finds instant access through the usual sensational channels, and at once proceeds to work, the possibly baleful effects to the host of such indiscriminate hospitality being tempered by the simple choking upon the premises of disagreeable outsiders after admission. The measure of success which the intruder achieves is determined by the amount of opposition it arouses. The more vacuous the host, the more the stranger has his own sweet way. In hypnotic subjects, where the mind is otherwise blank, any idea, if once introduced, receives actually more honor than it is accustomed to at home. A consideration, this, of the proverbial prophet kind, paralleled by the greater respect a policeman inspires in small boys who are unacquainted with him, or by the way in which a newspaper's editorials impress a simple public for their apparent impersonality. For the idea of another's personality instinctively rouses opposition; while, contrariwise, that of one's own inspires one's self with distrust, so essentially modest is man. But with the hypnotized, personality in both phases lies dormant. For, in the hypnotized mind, when abandoned to its own devices, activity is nil. Hypnotic subjects, when left to themselves, and asked of what they are thinking, usually reply: "Of nothing."
VIII.
Ideo-ideal activity is a higher and later stage in the progress of mind evolution than motor-ideal action; response to objective stimuli preceding the subjective action of the mind upon itself, as the development from amœba to man testifies. Although the protozoön doubtless has consciousness of a rudimentary sort, by which he differentiates his own absorbing person from his no less engrossing food, his brain is his belly, and his one idea a kind of conscious digestion. His mind is a process of nervous pepsia, which, thanks to evolution, has unfortunately become nervous dyspepsia in such men as let their thoughts follow the same line; so true is it that what is one creature's meat proves another's poison. As we rise in the scale of animal life we find more and more complicated reaction upon stimuli from without; then, finally, rudimentary reasoning. But even animals gifted with this last capacity usually prefer to keep their minds as empty as possible. The idyllic stupefaction of the cow in the stall, or of the dog upon the hearth-rug, betrays the vacuity which is theirs so much of the time, and into which they contentedly fall when not pricked to action by sensational spur. This beatific inanity of the brutes is close of kin to the Buddhist height of holiness,—Nirvana.
When we come to man we find that even that so-called reasoning animal thinks as little as he may until pretty well up in the line of development. He is for the most part content to let circumstances pull the sensational trigger and make snap-shots at life. Even when he takes to thinking, it is thinking for things' sake that he usually indulges in. Thinking for thinking's sake is the employment of the highest few.
As a side light upon this we notice how, when a person becomes weak from some drain upon the system, he grows less and less self-controlled and more and more automatic to both sensations and foreign suggestions.
Now clearly the amount of inly initiated activity measures the individuality of the man. For chance of change is greatly increased if, in addition to outer impressive diversity, inner diversity have a hand in the matter. The more individual a man already, the more individual is he bound to become, and as the rate of change depends on the change already effected, individuals must grow ever logarithmically apart. Marriage may retard this, but it may also accelerate it; and the last is undoubtedly its normal result. Otherwise, why has nature departed, in the propagation of the species, from the good old protoplasmic practice of identical fission.
Less self and greater facility in becoming another, impersonality and proneness to possession, should therefore be found together. And it is to be noticed that as development proceeds, nature gives with the gift of selfhood the means of guarding it. For the same increase of mental activity that constitutes the increased individuality enables the individual to maintain that individuality from disastrous attack and destruction.
IX.
Before applying these principles to an explanation of the trance, let us see whether they explain that seeming inexplicability, the uncommon impersonality of the Japanese mind. If a lesser mental activity be the cause of a less differentiated individuality, signs of that lesser activity should otherwise be patent. Now when we look for them we find such signs to be numerous.
As a friend of mine once put it epigrammatically in the heat of the moment, a Japanese does not think. Allowing for pardonable exaggeration, the negation not inaptly sums up their state of mind. Specific evidence of the fact confronts one at every turn.
One may, if he will, begin at the top, with lack of originality leading off the list, but instead of beginning at the top, he may as well begin at the bottom and mark the absence of reasoning there.
If in any western land you hail a cab and jump in without a word, the cab-driver before setting out will ask you where you wish to be taken. Indeed, this seems so self-evident a preliminary to driving you anywhere at all, that it sounds supererogatory to chronicle it. But attempt the same thing in Japan. At any of the treaty ports jump into a jinrikisha as if in a hurry, and say nothing. Five to two off goes your man at a dog-trot for a couple of hundred yards; then he suddenly slackens, stops, turns, and to his surprise, though not yours, inquires where you wish to be taken. Not till then did the idea strike him that he did not know his destination. He had at first acted on the impulse your jumping into the jinrikisha had given him, to go; the afterthought of whither had not occurred to him. His first idea had instantly translated itself into action before it could wake a second thought.
Instances of this in more complicated form are to be met with, of course, the world over. Witness the adventure of the shop-girl to whom darts in through the door an urchin with the announcement: "Marm! your little boy has just been run over in the street!" The poor shop-girl drops everything, rushes from behind the counter, bolts out of the door, and gets a couple of steps down the sidewalk, when she suddenly stops, throws back her head, and with a laugh blurts out: "What a fool I am! I haven't any little boy! I'm not even married!" The rascally urchin had sprung his mischievously explosive idea by hinging it upon the great instinct of maternity latent in every woman, and the idea had passed into the act before the rest of the brain was roused to inhibit the impulse.
The next occasion afforded the stranger of remarking the Japanese want of reasoning will wait upon him the moment he gets his eyes open to the numberless opportunities he offers the natives to cheat him; opportunities of which they naturally avail themselves, a kind Providence having provided strangers for that special purpose. But he will find some slight compensation for all he may be eased of by noting the inadequate manner in which Providence, doubtless with an eye to humor, has fitted these folk to such god-given avocation. For the essence of successful deceit lies in the apparent truthfulness of the false. The one should be a good counterfeit presentment of the other; otherwise it is useless. To carry conviction, a story must be above conviction itself. For the art of lying consists in consistency. The Autocrat's dictum, "Be not consistent, but be simply true," if reversed, would make a good motto for lying, "Be not true, but be simply consistent." Inasmuch, therefore, as facts conspire against the liar, it is the part of a long-headed man to think out his whole story in advance. But this these brachycephalic people never do. When caught and arraigned, a non-committal "Don't know" keeps their counsel, and lack of self-consciousness keeps their face. But so soon as ever they adventure themselves upon a story, which sooner or later is bound to happen, they are gone. Their tale never holds together, because never carefully concocted beforehand to do so. It is suggested piecemeal on the spur of the moment, and consequently comes apart as easily as it was put together. One's facile satisfaction at thus exposing the culprit is marred only by the culprit's entire lack of discomfiture upon exposure.
But daily intercourse with these people will furnish many pleasanter instances of the same artistic thoughtlessness. Servants will follow with most exemplary fidelity any routine set them, and then become hopelessly lost when occasion arises that calls for reasoning; occasion consequent not upon foreign semi-domesticated ideas, but upon ones of broadly human intent. For that European customs should be taken topsy-turvy is matter of course. For your untutored "boy" to put the buttons in your shirt regularly outside-in every morning, or to hand you your waistcoat invariably inside-out, is simply the inevitable, if sad, consequence of generally antipodal habits. But pure forgetfulness of a duty and subsequent instant unassumed contrition at sight of its object, a not uncommon episode in far-eastern housekeeping, knows no particular country, and yet seems peculiarly at home in Japan; the pathetic repentance turning the tragedy of your wrath into its own farce.
Now when we rise from these daily discoveries to a more bird's-eye view of the Japanese character, we observe the same quality of mind otherwise patent. In the first place, the lack of originality of the Japanese is very striking after one has got over one's first dazzle at strange antipodal sights. The student finds that what he at first took without question for the product of home construction, in truth came originally from abroad. They were adopted, and then adapted, these delightful ways of doing things. Modification of foreign motif, modification always artistic, and at times delightfully ingenious, marks the extent of Japanese originality. Now absence of originality is but another term for absence of innate activity of mind. For the one is father to the other. But when energy to coruscate is lacking, action continues in the easier round of routine. Only in more evolved minds do ideas bud in profusion, and they do so just in proportion to the degree of development of the mind. So that a superior mind is not only ahead in the race, but is advancing at a proportionally rapid rate; a fact which offers small consolation to those who happen already to be behindhand.
A general incapacity for abstract ideas is another marked trait of the Japanese mind. This, joined to a limited reasoning power, has made would-be far-eastern science as funny as far-eastern art is fine. Before the nation went to Dame Europe's school, its criticism was comic. Far-oriental treatises read excellently well in spots, from such antipodal point of view; the very dry desert of thought being occasionally relieved by unintentional oases of humor. The commentators give us admirable instances of this: one of them gravely explaining Shintō's lack of a moral code by the conclusive statement that only immoral people need moral laws; while another in all seriousness derives neko, a cat, by a kind of protoplasmic fission and subsequent amalgamation from the first syllables of nezumi konomo words which translated, signify "fond of rats," which is much as if one should assert "poet" to have been evolved by a sort of shorthand from "potential etymology."
Indirect evidence of the same lack of ideal activity is shown by the uncommon imitativeness of the race. For to have a foreign idea act with the imperative instancy observable in Japan argues a dearth of native incumbents to dispute it possession. You shall soon be given plenty of instances of this proclivity, of a personal nature. Indeed, this sincerest kind of flattery eventually grows just a trifle flat from mere excess of expression. It begins at home and spreads out into the farthest suburbs of your polite acquaintance. You begin to be aware that you are setting the fashion in things below as well as upon the surface. Not only do hats, the facsimile of your own last purchase, suddenly make their appearance upon the heads of your friends, but even your momentary tastes wake instant echo in the crania underneath. "It is very odd," one of my very nicest far-eastern familiars was never tired of saying to me as he suited the action to the word, "how I like whatever you like."
This will sound of course like the simple quintescence of exquisite far-oriental politeness. But observation will show you that it is in truth something deeper. You will be convinced of the genuineness of the appreciation after you have been sufficiently its victim.
As for your household, your peculiarities diffuse themselves subtly through it to be reproduced some fine morning in surprisingly incongruous settings. Your "boy," so soon as ever he contrives to get into the coveted foreign garb, appears before you strangely appareled, not simply in reprodcutions of your habiliments, but clothed upon with your mannerisms and fitted with your very gait; his evident innocence of intent alone convincing you that this is not all some put-up caricature. Never had you full conception of how peculiar your peculiarities were till you saw them donned by another. Indeed, the reproduction of yourself is carried so far that from being putative father of your whole household by patriarchal custom, you begin to question whether in some antipodally ex post facto fashion you have not become its father in fact.
Lastly, the decorous demeanor of the whole nation betrays the lack of mental activity beneath. For it is not rules that make the character, but character that makes the rules. No energetic mind could be bound by so exquisitely exacting an etiquette. It must inevitably kick over the traces now and then till little or nothing of them were left. This a Japanese not only does not do, save as motived to foreign ways, but left to himself would have no desire to do. The stately quietism of all classes of old Japan is due, not to forms that make for tranquillity, but to that innate tranquillity of mind that fashioned the forms. Among this stately people there is less activity of mind needing constantly to be curbed, It shows itself before long-continued habit can have set its seal upon the man himself. He inherits it with the rest of his constitution. In Japan the very babies are unconscionably good.
X.
We now come to a consideration of the trance. To this sleep and dreams may make a fitting word of introduction. For the phenomenon of sleep and dreams are kin enough to those of the trance state to entitle this night side of our nature to be called the normal trance.
There is a curious rhythm in our conscious life of which both the occasion and the cause is cosmic. Our spiritual life, in contradistinction to our bodily existence, is made up of disconnected bits, whose conditioning is emphatically of the earth, earthy. It is indeed worth noting, that our minds should thus in a sense be more mortal than our bodies. For once during every rotation of the earth consciousness is snuffed out like the candle we extinguish to help us to the act; and though some men be so strong that they can sit up all night occasionally, they cannot continue to do so for many nights together.
This nightly good-by to self and surroundings would certainly prove startling were it a thought more rare. As it is, so little are we disturbed at the idea of it that we actually assist at our own apparent annihilation. We not only put ourselves to bed, but usually to sleep every night. We help nature close our eyes, and compose what is left of our minds to absolute inaction. To a certain extent we thus hypnotize ourselves nightly. Indeed, as our minds grow less active with years, some of us find no difficulty in performing this feat in the daytime.
All of which shows that the force which runs the brain machinery is regularly exhausted by action, and has to be as regularly recruited by rest. For that the force has the power to store itself up again is proved by the fact that we ever wake.
So soon as mental activity has thus been reduced to a minimum, and we are sound asleep, the potential begins to rise. Debarred from flowing, the stream of thought proceeds to accumulate a head for the next day. And in this manner the potential continues to rise till it has reached so high a point that a tap from some sensational stimulus suffices to start action once more, and we wake. Doubtless we should eventually wake of our own motion if we lay in a sensational vacuum. Practically this event rarely happens, because sensations of some sort or other are always knocking at our mind's door. But a less and less obstreperous one suffices to call us as time wears on. A knock that would have passed unnoticed in the middle of the night easily rouses us in the morning. Once started, the machinery is not long in getting into full swing.
At least this is what happens in the perfectly balanced mind, that character so comfortable to himself, and so disappointing to his more enthusiastic fellows. In ideal equipoise the whole mental energy, potential or actual, ceases approximately together, and starts again together. All of us, however, have probably been abnormal enough at times to have dreamed dreams. Now dreams are interesting things; interesting not only for what they show us, but far more interesting for what they intrinsically are. For they are twilights of thought, the dawn glimmerings of inner light before that be risen above the horizon of full sensibility. This half-way state of mind throws not a little light on clearer states of consciousness by comparison.
Dreams betray a midway condition of mental activity, where action has reached the point of conscious internal, but not yet of conscious external, discharge. Our dream-life takes place in an ideal world within, upon which any outer sensation is permitted to enter only under some disguise. Whence the visitant came we are not aware, for we only take cognizance of it after it has donned a transformation to suit the mental scene it finds there. Our body may perchance turn over in bed, but in consequence we gracefully float from the top of a precipice to the bottom, and find ourselves unharmed.
The next peculiarity idiosyncratic of dreams consists in their seemingly rational irrationality. In our dreams the most unlikely people do the most impossible things, in the most easy, credible manner. A thread of apparent causation connects one act with the next; and the phantasmagoria rolls cheerfully on, breaking all the dramatic unities in its passage, in the most natural way in the world. In our deeper dream states the whole seems real; it is only in our less dense ones that wonder begins to mingle with the show, as a looker-on, who doubts without exactly disbelieving. We have a dim sense that all is not right without quite realizing that anything is wrong.
Now the explanation of this seems to be that in dreams our thread of thought is comparatively fringeless. Motion in the mind is confined largely to one line, a very crooked line, but a simple one. As the current passes along, each idea starts the next, the one most easily associated with it at the moment, without rousing much in the way of side ideas to play critic to its creations and throw unpleasant doubts upon its credibility.
Such action as this shows that the whole brain is not yet roused to that pitch of potential where motion takes place with normal ease. The current encounters inertia in its passage, and in place of spreading into side tracts is confined to the easiest path of discharge. But that there should be any current at all proves that some part of the brain has risen to the necessary pitch of possibility before the rest of it. Now what part has done so, and why?
If we consider the motifs of our dreams we shall find them, when not directly traceable to boiled lobster, to be due to the play either of very habitual ideas or of ideas that had last preoccupied us before we fell asleep. The lover dreams of his mistress, the merchant of his transactions, the scientist of his discoveries. Each dreams after his kind, because the habitual idea is in action so much of the time that its train of cells has become specially permeable to the current and vibrates upon slight provocation. For the same reason, the idea that preoccupied us before we fell asleep is the one which, from having just been in action, is easiest set in action again.
The motion once started passes out along those associated channels which, under the then conditions, offer least resistance to its passage. But as the brain, as a whole, is still sluggishly inert, the current rouses no side motion to speak of in the process The result is rather a lightning-like zigzag through the mind than a general illumination. This accounts for what we call inconsequently enough the inconsequence of dreams. For dream inconsequence really means too absolute ideal consequence. Each idea fires the next, and only the next. That we believe everything that comes along, and see nothing odd in so doing, shows that side considerations are not roused. For it is our side-thoughts that cause us to comment upon our leading ones. In dreams we are for the moment men of one idea, with the usual monomaniacal result. Purely sensational starting-points, à la lobster, rouse in the same way such simple dream trains that, destitute of their accustomed fringe, we fail to recognize them for the sensations they are.
In our deeper dreams we have not even those adumbrations of other thoughts which so commonly give us ghostly warnings in our waking state. This makes us fall easy dupes to the deception. For where only one idea exists it must inevitably seem true for want of possible contradiction. It simply is till it is contradicted. As we get nearer the waking point, the inertia grows less till side motion starts and summons obscure shapes of thoughts to hint dimly our delusion.
This theory as to what consciousness is affords explanation of another peculiarity about dreams which seems at first to defy comprehension, and certainly is inexplicable on the ordinary dualistic theories of the thing—their vividness. It is matter of every-day notoriety that dreams are often extremely vivid, and commonly exceed in vividness like events of waking life. That they quickly fade out does not detract from the fact of their vividness at the time of their occurrence. Now the dualistic theories that consciousness is a thing apart from brain processes, its directing power, according to the spiritualists, and its complaisant handmaid, according to the materialists, neither of them can account for this. For if consciousness be, as William James would have it, a loader of dice in the game of life, she shows herself here to be an utterly unprincipled gambler; inasmuch as in dreams she actively abets delusions in the most seemingly ingenuous manner, and pro tanto makes us go mad. Nor, on the other hand, can consciousness be mere concomitant of brain processes, for if we have here simply a case of increased current, why is not the rest of the brain roused, and if we have not a case of it, why are the ideas that are roused more vivid? That the dream current might occasionally be stronger than a waking one is possible, but that our dreams should usually seem more vivid than our every-day waking experiences, which is certainly the case, is to credit nature with a strange lack of economy in the running of our psychic affairs.
But there is a worse dilemma yet for the dualists. They stand confronted by this question: Why should consciousness be present as markedly both when we have reason to suspect the current to be strong, in times of passionate excitement, as when we have reason to believe it weak, in times of torpor? For of both these phenomena we have instances. In times of excitement, we strangely recall forgotten things; and so we do in times the opposite of excited. Extremes here emphatically meet.
But if consciousness be the effect of brain friction, the heat, as it were, evolved by partial stoppage of the current, we see at once that this should develop both when the current is increased, the resistance remaining the same, and when the resistance is increased, the current continuing as before. We ought, therefore, in dreams, to find great vividness of impression side by side with no impression at all; which is just what we do find. Though the stream of thought in dream-states has probably less head to it, the increased resistance enables it to produce as much commotion. We may parallel the action by that of an electric current, which, when great, will make even a conductor of slight resistance glow, and when feeble, will make one of great resistance do the same. At present, this is merely a suggestive analogy; but it may turn out truer than we imagine.
The theory here advanced explains, therefore, the at first strange anomaly, that both an unusually strong current and an usually feeble one may alike produce an unusually vivid consciousness. For vividness follows either an increase in the current or an increase in the resistance.
Conditions of brain torpor other than dream-states display similar phenomena. For a general tiring of the brain is not the only way, as we know, of bringing brain torpor about. Many drugs will do it, probably by directly numbing the molecules of the cortical cells. Chloroform, laughing-gas, flowers at a funeral, will all temporarily take a man out of the world—to say nothing of the every-day effect of wine. But side by side with the general torpor these things induce, goes a heightened consciousness along particular lines, if it be no more than a consciousness of one's emotions. This chiaroscuro of consciousness has all the unreal reality of the lights and shadows thrown by a carbon point. Opium, for example, is delectable, not more for the peculiar ideas it gives a man than for the poignancy of them. And we all know, by observation, at least, how loving or quarrelsome men grow in proportion as they grow unreasonable, under the influence of wine.
Some dreams we remember after waking. If we did not do so, to a minimal extent at least, we should not know that we had ever had them. Possibly, therefore, some vanish with the fashioning, or if afterward partially recalled, pass unrecognized for strange, inexplicable impressions. Those that we do remember we shall find are hinged on to our waking life by the continuance of an outer sensation common in part to both states. Were it not for such link, it would be mere haphazard if we struck them again. For their train of association is not one likely to recur under normal conditions.
XI.
But besides the daily running down of the whole brain machinery to sleep, due to the using up of the potential energy of the cells, or its slowing down artificially through the effect of certain drugs, it is possible to bring brain action to a dead point by a simple exercise of will. By shutting one's bodily eyes, or by keeping them fixed upon some uninteresting thing, while at the same time shutting one's mind's eye, or keeping it similarly fixed upon some insipid thought, brain activity may be brought to a strangely sudden stand-still. It is by this portal that the subject passes into the trance state.
Of trances, we may distinguish two kinds: the hypnotic trance, and the possession trance. The two differ markedly, both in their physical and in their psychic symptoms; while at the same time bearing a strong family resemblance to each other. To an unsympathetic bystander, the subject of the one seems an idiotic automaton, while the subject of the other appears raving mad. We will take up the hypnotic variety first.
To an outsider nothing marks that critical point when the subject's statuesque immovability passes from the voluntary into the involuntary state. It simply was the one and is the other; a passing over as indistinguishable as the traveler's crossing the line, known only by the change of pole round which all things seem to turn.
If left alone the subject remains in his mummified state till at last he comes to of himself. If, however, while in the midst of it he be addressed by the operator, instantly certain striking phenomena follow. Out of a lethargy seemingly too deep for any stimulus to stir, he suddenly responds to the operator's word with the instantaneity of mechanism. He not only wakes to life again, but as soon appears to a most peculiar phase of it. For though he responds to the hypnotist as if he had been simply waiting to do so, his immediate response made, he sinks back once more into passivity. His action would seem merely the effect of momentum impressed from without; as if the hypnotist had given his mental machinery a shove which had carried him a certain distance, and whose impetus had then been gradually dissipated by the friction of the parts. This momentum gone, he becomes as before—inert. He possesses apparently no initiative of his own.
While the foreign momentum lasts he acts with a perfection of performance realized in some machines, but not by conscious man. What he does he does far better than the best of which he is capable in his normal state. And he hesitates at little or nothing. His action is kin to the somnambulists who will walk on ridge-poles and the edges of precipices without fear and without falling; only that whereas the sleepwalker does so of his own motion, the hypnotic subject does so at the suggestion of another. And the hint needed to start him is at times inconceivably slight. What a bystander on the alert quite fails to notice, the hypnotic subject, to all appearance sunk in stupor, perceives and acts upon at once.
Side by side in the hypnotized with such trigger-like action toward his hypnotist goes in the initial cases an utter deadness to everything and everybody else. For him nothing exists but his hypnotizer. Through this person's fiat, and only through it, may anything enter the subject's world. At a word from this man other things and other people are perceived, either when directly pointed out or when indirectly involved in the execution of the suggestion itself. They can also be made to remain incognito by the same process. Still further, imaginary things can be made to seem real to the subject; their non-existence in fact forming no bar to their existence in his consciousness. If the operator says they exist, for him they do exist. In the full hypnotic state this is no mere nominal acquiescence, for the subject will go on to detail their characteristics and retail their subsequent actions without further prompting, showing that to him they are thorough-going realities.
Now this abnormal action of the mind in the trance state seems most explicable as follows. By the enforced inaction or induced tiring of the brain cells in action at the time of lapsing into unconsciousness, all activity in those cells ceases, while the rest of the brain, being inactive already and being shut off from outward stimulus, remains inert. Furthermore, the stopping of action in the cells acting at the time seems to bring the whole brain to the dead-point; which is logical since apparently it is only these cells that are vibrating at the moment. After the stoppage a time is necessary to raise the potential to the point of overcoming the inertia. Now if all the cells were at the same potential, this state of lethargy would continue till the whole brain eventually woke up. But the cells are not all at the same initial potential; some are nearer the activity point than others. Especially are two kinds of cells at a higher potential than their fellows: those connected with habitual ideas and those connected with ideas peculiarly poignant at the time. It is to the awaking to action of one of this latter class while yet the rest of the brain still stays torpid that the peculiar phenomena of the hypnotic trance are probably due. The initiation idea thus resurrected is the idea in the subject's mind that the operator will have a certain indefinite but all-effective power over him when he shall have lapsed into the trance. It is not necessary that this impression should reach the level of full belief; a bare fear that he may be thus controlled is enough. That the mere idea of it should be present to the person is all that is necessary. Now such idea is the last poignant idea in the subject's mind before he composes himself for the trance. Consequently, after he has entered the trance state it is this idea that is nearest the point of passing over into action and that, as the whole potential rises, passes over first. Thus it is the idea which the subject carries with him into the trance that becomes the dominant idea of the trance itself.
Now the fact that this idea alone is at the necessary potential to be stirred explains the insentience of the brain to all other stimuli. The brain cells connected with it alone are in a condition to be affected from without; all others are affected only as they are connected with them. Nor are these secondary ones as easily stirred by the first as they would be in normal life. The brain cells are all abnormally torpid. In consequence, as the motion passes along them very little side action is roused, and, as it is the ramifying side-thoughts that make comparison possible and constitute judgment, the hypnotic subject sees no incongruity in his actions and performs each with a self-abandonment to it that insures a perfection of performance unattainable in his complex normal state of mind.
The force of the habitual ideas makes itself felt by hindering and even preventing the performance of a suggested idea that conflicts with the subject's character. Indeed, other things equal, the grooves of temperament are followed by the train of thought. Less force is necessary to set them in motion. Not only is the subject's action under a suggested idea in keeping with his character, but it is impossible to get him to do things which are abhorrent to it. To induce a subject who is not essentially depraved to commit murder, for example, is practically beyond even the operator's power.
We have parallels to such semi-spontaneity of action of an habitual idea in every-day life. In a preoccupied state of mind we engage upon some act only to wake to find ourselves doing not the thing we started to do, but the habitual one. I knew a man who, having come home late and gone upstairs to dress for a ball, which he proceeded to do mechanically, suddenly found himself in bed. The preparatory taking off of his clothes had started the machinery, which, in default of supervision, had run then itself and fatally done the habitual thing.
Of peculiarly poignant ideas we all know countless examples of the persistent manner in which they turn up in season and out of it. They are forever showing their faces amid the ever-changing crowd of other thoughts.
That the hypnotic subject seems to be on the lookout for everything connected with his hypnotizer is of course a purely unconscious one. It is paralleled in waking life by the exceeding sensitiveness of any acute idea to anything connected with itself. The lover, the politician, the burglar, are alive to actions related to their quest which to other mortals would pass unnoticed. We all catch our own name uttered in a conversation to all the rest of which we have been apparently quite oblivious. The exceeding sensibility of the entranced to the acts of the operator, joined to absolute insentience, so far as appears, to irrelevant matter, need not surprise us, since we are all hourly doing the same thing. It is only the degree of completeness with which it is done that differs sufficiently to startle us.
The relative sensibility of the hypnotized toward his hypnotizer, side by side with his complete insensibility toward all else, may thus be accounted for; but there is a further exhibition of sensibility that he shows which is as startling as it is inexplicable on the generally received theories of the subject. This is the surprising vividness of his consciousness of things of which he comes to have any consciousness at all. We have seen an adumbration of this in dreams, but in the case of the hypnotized it fairly rises into the region of the marvelous. Like dreams, it is evidenced by the general vivid character of the subject's experiences, but unlike them it is further borne direct witness to by mental acts so out of every-day experience as to lead hastily credulous persons to attribute them to some sort of supernatural power. For the hypnotic subject will display an amount of knowledge of which in his normal state he is known not to possess even the rudiments. Sometimes his apparently supernatural insight can be traced to the resurrection of memories faint at the time of their experiencing and long since lapsed; but sometimes it is due to the actual ex post facto creation of consciousness out of brain processes of which there was no consciousness at the time of their occurrence.
Now our present theory, whatever its merits or demerits may be, is at least able to give an explanation of this phenomenon. If consciousness be nerve-glow, a local molecular change of the cells due to a forced arrest of the neural current from temporary or permanent impermeability of path, it is precisely in the generally torpid brain of the hypnotic subject that it should be most acute. That his brain generally is torpid is shown by the fact that action does not spontaneously take place in it. When, however, a current is induced from the only starting point possible, the suggestion of the operator, and turned into the desired channel, it traverses a path whose resistance is much above the normal. Instead, therefore, of gliding rapidly along, it soon expends itself in overcoming the friction it meets, causing in the process a glow of the successive cells which we call consciousness. The current tends, of course, to make the molecules of the cells vibrate as they did before rather than in some perfectly new combination, but it finds unwonted difficulty in making them vibrate at all. The result is that the old combination of cell action is resurrected with accompaniment of consciousness; that is, we have an idea where before we had only its latent possibility. Whether this be the revival of a lapsed memory, or the evoking of an actual bit of brand-new consciousness, is mere question of degree. The greater the resistance, short of stopping the current, the greater the current's, so to speak, creative power.
That this is due to the increased resistance, and not to an hypothetically increased current, is further evident on considering the alternative. For if the current were greater than under normal conditions would be the case, it should both continue longer and rouse greater side action along its course. But, as we know, it does the contrary of both these suppositions. It speedily expends itself, and starts next to no side-thoughts in the process. It thus completely negatives an imputation of increased force.
Another general phenomenon of hypnosis proves the same relation of increased resistance to increased consciousness. As is well known, the events of the subject's normal life are both possible of recall and spontaneously remembered in the hypnotic state; while, contrariwise, the hypnotic life is entirely hid from the man's normal consciousness. Now this fact, instead of implying greater powers in the hypnotic state, as superficially viewed it seems to do, implies exactly the opposite. It is indeed but a more general instance of what we have just considered. For the permeability of a path depends, cæsteris paribus, on the number of times it has been traversed. Now the hypnotic or possession paths, having been comparately little used, are relatively less permeable than the normal ones. Consequently an hypnotic path is not likely to be entered in the waking state, the current preferring its more habitual routes. Even if the hypnotic idea should reappear, it would probably fail of recognition in the broad glare of the normal state, since in the twilight of the trance its associations were too few and feeble to give it fringe enough for identification. For like reasons, even suggestion will fail to resurrect hypnotic ideas, or identify them if resurrected. The normal ideas, on the contrary, can be recalled in the hypnotic state, because, unless blocked by suggestion, their paths are the most permeable paths there. Consequently that the hypnotic life can be made to include the waking one, while reversely the waking life cannot be made to include the hypnotic one, instead of being proof of greater powers in the latter, is simply proof of less permeability of path.
XII.
From hypnotic trances we now pass to possession ones.
So far as the subject is aware, the portal to both is the same. In a quite unconsciously similar manner to that purposely taken by the hypnotic subject, the person to be possessed either shuts his eyes or keeps them fixed, while at the same time he fixes his thought on nothing. If he thus properly focuses both kinds of attention, he soon goes off.
In spite, however, of the apparent sameness of method employed in both cases, the subject's symptoms as he lapses into his trance, and his subsequent actions in it, differ radically in the two.
A throe marks the entrance into the possession trance, and a suppressed quiver accompanies it throughout; the hypnotic trance is entered imperceptibly, and the subject continues apathetic till instigated to action by a word or sign from the operator. Perhaps the most peculiar physical feature of the possession trance is the rolled-up condition of the eyeballs, so rolled up that the iris is half out of sight. This position they hold throughout the trance, and the eye never winks, though the eyelids are constantly twitching. For the rest, their names sufficiently describe the two states,—the one subject seeming in truth possessed by a devil, while the other, if left alone, appearing to sleep as he stands. It requires, indeed, no faith in the onlooker to see in the one an alien spirit acting and speaking through the man. Such is the instant natural inference from his looks and behavior. On the other hand, the hypnotic subject can hardly be said to have either looks or behavior till commanded to have them to order by the hypnotist.
The one subject thus acts from spontaneous impulse; the other only of derivative accord. The next point of dissimilarity is that the sense of self differs entirely in the two. The possessed believes himself to be another person, the possessing spirit. The hypnotized continues to think himself himself unless told by the hypnotist that he is some one else, upon which he promptly conceives himself that other person.
In both trances such sensations only as are compatible with the hypothesis entertained by the entranced are allowed to enter consciousness. These are perceived with abnormal alacrity, so abnormal as to have suggested a possible explanation of clairvoyance. All irrelevant sensations are simply ignored. It is as if telegrams were constantly arriving to a man from all parts of the world, and he should leave all but those from Chili unopened on his desk. That the senses and the lower centres do their work perfectly, and that it is in the hemispheres that the messages are laid aside unscanned, is proved clearly by hypnotic experiments. For in certain cases the subject can be shown to have carefully distinguished two things first, in order subsequently to ignore one of them. These last sensations may afterward be recovered.
The same thing occurs in the case of the possessed. Violent sensations unconnected with the spirit of the trance, and even wounds inflicted in it, pass unnoticed. Pins stuck into the man are not felt by the god at all, though the pain of the prick continues sharp enough to be very disagreeably felt by the man on coming back again to himself. Yet when he does thus become aware of it he remains quite unable to assign its cause. On the other hand, sensations appropriate to the god may almost be said to be divined rather than ordinarily perceived, so alert to them is the entranced.
In neither trance, under natural, that is, unsuggested, conditions, does the man remember anything of what happened in the trance after he has waked up. In the case of the hypnotic trance, a suggestion by the operator during the trance that he shall remember it afterwards, will enable him to do so. As to the possession trance, I am not aware that it is ever remembered in the waking state, though I believe this could be done. Certainly it is not done in Japan. The man knows nothing of the god.
Discontinuous, however, as the trance consciousness is from the normal one, in each kind of trances its own consciousness is continuous. The hypnotic subject remembers in subsequent trances what happened in former ones. So does the god. Some curious details of this I shall consider presently.
Agreeing thus as the two kinds of trances do in so many respects, it becomes all the more singular that they should differ so in others, entered, as they both seemed to be, by the same gate. In what, then, does the difference consist? It consists, so I conceive, in the idea that dominates the trance.
To explain it, we must look a little back of the immediate phenomena, for it is the power behind the throne of thought that does the business. Now in both trances the general state of the brain is the same. In both it is as a whole torpid, and in both action eventually takes place along certain isolated lines. The idea that first reaches sufficient potential to respond to an outside stimulus, or to stir of itself, is the idea that acts. This idea is the dominant idea of the trance.
We have followed this out in the case of the hypnotic trance. We shall now see that it applies equally to the possession trance, and that the intrinsic differences in the dominant idea of each account for the different phenomena.
Let us see what the dominant idea in each case is. The hypnotic subject enters the deadening processes leading to the trance with the idea—more or less definite, from a full belief to a bare fear—that in the coming trance the hypnotizer will have an irresistible power over him. That he will then lose his identity, will cease to be himself, is no part of this thought, except as unconsciously included in the power the operator may be able to exert. The person to be possessed, on the other hand, enters his trance under the firm conviction that he is about to become the god or the devil, or whatever else the possessing spirit is to be.
Now each of these ideas proves exponent of what happens in their respective trances. In the one trance, the subject acts like a mind-mechanism worked at the will of the operator; in the other, he acts, as the community considers, like a god.
That this is due to the dominant idea rising first to potential possibility, is more or less demonstrable phenomenally. In the possession trance we can actually see the increasing effect of this rise. The statuesque immovability preceding the trance is eventually shaken by a slight quiver, and gains till it culminates in the throe of possession. In the hypnotic subject, the rise is not directly evident. The character of the dominant idea accounts for this. The hypnotic subject is possessed by a purely passive idea, the idea of the eventual influence over him of the operator, which, as yet, is latent, and passes into action only on command. His dominant idea never thus quite peeps over the threshold of consciousness, but merely stands by to usher other ideas in. It gives them their pass, without which they would be refused admittance. In the spirit-possessed, action is spontaneous. There, the dominant idea actually takes possession of the otherwise vacated apartments of the mind and runs the establishment of its own motion, incidentally permitting no idea to come in that has not somehow business with it. Its energy, therefore, passes over of itself from the potential kinetic form. Its energy, also, is much the greater of the two. For to initiate action of itself shows more activity inherent in the idea than merely to respond to a shove from without. This explains the apathy of the general hypnotic state on the one hand, and the throe and subsequent quiver of the possessory trance on the other.
If the energy of the idea be not kept up by appropriate stimulation, it gradually falls, as is shown by the lapsing of the subject, when left alone, into a state of coma. But the aptitude of the idea to act remains relatively the same. For, on renewed incantation, the dominant idea again rises to a point of action before the rest of the brain.
Both entranced states thus differ from the normal condition, not in the mind's being curiously open, as at first one is tempted to think, but in its being curiously shut. For, in the normal state, unless some fixed idea chance for the time partially to have closed the avenues of approach, the mind lies open to all comers, incoming ideas as well as sensations, all of whom it eagerly welcomes, and then after admission quietly chokes such as on inspection it does not happen to fancy. In the entranced state, on the other hand, no idea is admitted at all unless personally related to the possessing idea, and when once introduced is permitted full play in the premises.
Whatever thus gains admittance through the dominant idea is, therefore, from meeting little or no opposition, all-powerful. In the perfectly hypnotized person, the slightest hint from the operator produces instantaneous and complete action. For, in that motionless mind, there are practically no counter-forces present to oppose it, nor are any such roused by its action to check it after it has started. There is nothing but it to act. Only when it clashes with another visitor does any hesitation or difficulty result. But the man's sense of his own identity does not change, because it is not a part of the dominant idea that it should. When by suggestion an idea of such change enters his mind, identity changes at once.
In perfect subjects there is no consciousness of constraint. It is only when the hypnosis is imperfect that side-ideas are roused enough to suggest the possibility of acting otherwise. The subject then becomes dimly aware of compulsion, without, however, having any definite conception of what that compulsion consists. He simply feels that he must do so and so; and he does it.
In waking life, a fixed idea will often mask itself in the same manner. We feel that we must act in a certain way, often in a very trivial way, against our will, as we say, yet without questioning for an instant that it is we who act. As a matter of fact, it is the idea that for the moment is the I; and the faint remonstrance of which we are conscious is due to such faint side-ideas as are roused by its action.
But in the possession trance the dominant idea consists consciously in a change of identity. The consciousness in the entranced state throbs with the sense of this new personality as waking life does with the sense of self. Consequently, all the possessed's thoughts, words, and actions conform to it; none that do not finding foothold in his mind. The man does not simulate the spirit or the god. Mentally, he is the spirit or the god, and his mechanism, in so far as in him lies, responds in its performance. His is anything but a case of acting; it is an absolute change of identity, the new ego being the man's conception of the god. Such may not be the god, but it also is not the man.
From all this, we perceive a certain parallelism between trances and dreams, with certain divergences. In both the mind is inac tive, except along a particular line. In both the illumination is lightning-like, and in both no general illumination resulting in a general judgment of things as they really are takes place, because of the current's failure to rouse side-thoughts. But in the trance the dominant idea is much stronger than in the dream, and persists through the whole of it as a ground for all other ideas. Especially is this so in the possession trance. And the reason for this is more or less patent. The idea that causes the dream is much less consciously absorbing than the idea that possessed the possessed. The one is haphazardly entertained, the other is purposed. Secondly, it is probable that the brain, generally, is much deeper asleep in the trance than in the dream. The fact that of our own motion we are so close to waking when we begin to dream implies this, and the easy consequence of one idea upon another in the dream state goes to back it up. Lastly, the possessing idea in the trance is repeated and realized again and again in successive trances. This strengthens it immensely. How much so, is evident from the great development observable in trances. A trance that occurs for the first time is usually very embryonic; but by repetition the idea acquires momentum that rivals that of single-purposed waking action.
Habit is just as potent in the trance state as in the normal one. In both lives a self-educatory process goes on, any action gaining proficiency by practice. As we have seen, divine development is as duly marked in the Shintō trances as human development in every-day man.
Much of the supposed divinatory power of the possessed is attributable to the same cause that makes the hypnotic subject so supernaturally omniscient. The brain of any one is a register of sense impressions to a degree unsuspected by its owner. It is none too much to say that everything we have ever experienced is there, could we only get at it! The possessed does get at it, or at some of it, and surprises himself quite as much as others by having done so. Whence his honesty in denying that it is he that does it and the natural belief of others in its supernatural origin.
In conclusion it may be noted here how ill the self fares under these illusions and disillusions of the trance. That self can thus be snuffed out at a word from the operator, or by the mere idea of god in the possession trance, betrays it no transcendental thing. Self, indeed, would seem itself to be illusion; and the bundle of ideas in that mass of machinery, the brain, alone to constitute the I.
XIII.
Certain differences between the Japanese possession trances and others of their kind are significant. To begin with, one peculiarity of the Shintō trance is the maeza's connection with it. This man is the official intermediary of the god, and he holds a curious intermediary position between the person spoken to in the mediumistic trance and the operator in the hypnotic one. He is the nakōdo, or go-between, of the whole transaction. He is the only part of humanity whom the god deigns spontaneously to recognize. He alone may speak to the god, and him alone the god condescends to answer. Any one else, however pious, who desires to converse with the god, must first be brought in rapport with him by the maeza. Until such rapport be established, the god pays the outsider's remarks no attention. That he is not quite so deaf as he seems, however, is shown by his occasionally scolding the maeza for irreverential conduct on the part of such outsider. I blush to say that I never knew this to happen except in my own case, when engaged in testing the reality of the god by making, too openly, a pin-cushion of him, or otherwise treating him with what he took for disrespect.
But the maeza does not affect the god's actions, and only incidentally suggests by his questions the current of the divine thought precisely as one person does that of another in every-day conversation. The maeza usually starts the topic, but the god is responsible for the replies. The maeza is thus, unlike the operator in the hypnotic trance, not the power behind the throne, but merely the master of ceremonies before it. In this he differs again from a person who has a sitting with a trance-medium, and who is not supposed to open his mouth except upon his own business. There is, however, a greater gulf between the god and the maeza particularly pure as the latter is, than between the sitter and the informing spirit.
We now come to a very suggestive dissimilarity between the Shintō possessions and all others.
Of trances of the possessory sort there are manifold varieties to be found scattered over the surface of our globe. Believers grade them after the ethics of the possessing spirits, a pious if not over-profitable criterion. In Japan, for example, the rank of the god is gauged by the knowledge he displays of his own family mythology, while in America possessing spirits are valued for their proficiency in a certain milk-and-water philosophy, metaphysically tinctured of religion. The more milk-and-water their well of information proves, the purer proof-spirit is it esteemed to be.
To science the spirits' morals would be of more consequence did they not so singularly mirror the morals of the race which the spirits are kind enough to possess. As it is, so remarkable a resemblance in ethical standards between the immutable gods and ever-evolving man, observable at all times and among all peoples, proves too much for popular deity. Such concordance, further emphasized by the striking manner in which as a race advances in its conception of conduct the moral development of deity keeps pace with the moral development of the devotee, hints that between the orthodox and the true divine comedy, the parts of creature and creator have unfortunately got reversed.
The more abstract the conceptions of a race grow to be, the more abstract become its gods, and in consequence the less they deign temporarily to inhabit mankind. A growing incapacity to conceive how a more and more abstracted god would act in the concrete is indirectly responsible for this. Among aboriginal peoples the gods themselves descend to embodiment in man; among more evolved races the spirits of departed men take their place.
But it is not simply in their morals that the gods show themselves in sympathy with their people. In their characters generally you shall see reflected the race characteristics. In Japan the gods are eminently Japanese. They are dignified, artistic, simple souls, of the most exceptional deportment. Their life is made up of one long chain of ornamental, if somewhat conventional, moments.
Especially is this agreement of gods and men conspicuous in that most interesting of Japanese traits—the race's unindividuality. As we saw, one of the strangest features of Japanese possession is the way in which several gods deign to share one trance. Now when this copartnership is closely scrutinized it will be found to afford proof of a curiously conceived impersonal kind of deity.
It is not that to one unacquainted with the gods there appears at first sight to be a very strong family likeness between them, so strong as to imply no very marked individuality in any, for such superficial resemblance is common to every race in the eyes of others. It is in the character of the divine consciousness that the peculiarity consists. For the consciousness of any one god is continuous in successive trances, and the consciousness of successive gods is continuous in any one trance. That is, in the person of the same man the god remembers what he did, said, and heard in different trances, and different gods remember what the others did, said, and heard in the same trance, while perfectly differentiating themselves from those others. But different gods do not remember about each other in different trances. The first of these capabilities is of course the usual trance-memory, as self-identifying a one as the man's normal memory. The second shows that an indefinite idea of god underlies the several special manifestations of it. The third indicates the extent of this common bond.
That each god thus knows his own acts and sensations from those of every other god, in the same trance, and remembers his previous acts and sensations in successive trances, fulfills all the phenomena that we recognize as constituting an individual self. It is therefore only natural for it instantly and irrevocably to have been taken for such. On the other hand, that one god should have any idea of the actions of his predecessor when embodied, hints at a ground-work of unindividual self.
The change of god evidently comes about by unconscious auto-suggestion. Certainly the subject himself has no inkling beforehand what gods will constitute his surprise party, if his seemingly honest profession to that effect is to be believed, and there is really no reason to doubt it. Nor is the change due to any suggestion on the part of the maeza, the official interviewer of the god. For the maeza asks no leading questions on the subject; he confines himself to asking after the fact who has come, and then to questionings about the cure of the disease, or other desired mundane or divine matter, quite apart from the personality of the god.
The auto-suggestion is of two parts,—the general idea of change, and its particular performance. The first is like the unintentionally induced hypnotic habits of the Salpétrière. The gods have learned that they are expected to come in Indian file, and kindly do so accordingly. That they did so initially is due undoubtedly to the underlying impersonality of the race.
That there is this general predisposition to rotation in office is proved by the earliness with which the change shows itself. It appears long before the possession is perfect enough for words. The boy whose divine development I instanced before was already several gods in turn, while as yet unable to talk as any. The particular change comes about from associations between the idea of one god and the idea of the other, contracted either in the normal or the entranced state, and then evoked in the course of the entranced's heavenly thinking. Sometimes the link becomes visible. A god will say that he is himself unable to answer a question put to him, and will report the matter to some higher god for solution, after which an attendant of the higher god descends. This would seem to show that a sufficiently connective thought in one trance will pass over to become a part of the dominant idea in the next. A god may thus present his successor.
Somewhat analogous to this, though not similar, is the way in which the control of a trance medium has been known to change. But this, so far as I am aware, has rarely happened in the midst of any one trance. The spirits spoken to change with kaleidoscopic activity, but the control itself is a tolerably stable spirit.
Indifferentism to individuality crops out thus in the curious thread of impersonal god-head, mere god-head as such, upon which the several particular personalities are strung, because it is so fundamental a quality of the race that it forms of necessity part of their every idea.
The subject's dominant idea evidently consists not of the possession by any particular god, but rather of the prognostication of possession by deity in general. For were the idea of the individuality of the possessory god strong, it would not of itself yield possession of the premises to another. On the other hand, it is no mere abstract idea of god, but rather a vaguely concrete general idea, accidentally clothed upon by particularity. For the gods are successively individual enough, in spite of their hasty succession. In fact, the Japanese idea of god is kin to all the other Japanese ideas; like their idea of man, for example, as it shows itself in their speech, the idea neither of a man nor of mankind, but just the idea: man.
The dominant idea thus betrays a very curious state of mind in the possessed.
Though the man's self has quite departed, the mere lessness of that self survives, and not only characterizes all subsequent tenants, but unites them by a sort of common lease. The individual has vanished; but the race is left.
Such a result, indeed, is what we should expect from our theory on the subject. For the race characteristics are the ones most deeply graven into the character of the individual. They are the great arteries of thought, the well-worn channels through which the stream flows most easily. So easily does the current pass through them that the thoughts it rouses there mingle unconsciously with a man's thinking most of the time. They constitute what we know as habitual ones in the normal state. When, therefore, the brain lies clogged in the general lethargy of the trance, these channels still remain relatively more permeable than the less pervious veins of more recently evolved sensations peculiar to the individual. Thus the activity that cannot wake the man wakes the race.
This brings us to confront the atavistic character of the general trance state. A priori, we have just seen that the state should hark back, and a posteriori that it does so in this particular case. But we have evidence that it is atavistic generally. The easy transition from one idea to another in the hypnotic state, the want of reasoning shown in it, the intentness and energy with which any given idea will be pursued one moment, only to be thrown over the next with a completeness which is caricatural, are states of mind that recall childhood for comparison. The man has become a sort of grotesque boy again. Could all idées fixes be eradicated, that is, could we have the perfectly normal man for subject, then if the operator could suggest some action colorless enough to let only native activity come into play,—a purity of experiment practically unattainable,—we should probably, as the trance state deepened and the man lost himself, see him lose first his individual characteristics, then his family traits, then the habits of his clan, and so down, till only the broadly human ones survived. The trance state would undo what evolution has done, and return to us a primeval savage in the body of an end-of-the-century man. But fortunately that most insipid individual, the normal man, whose mild portrait you shall see in any composite photograph, it is impossible to obtain. For the very essence of evolution consists in the survival of the slightly abnormal. The spirit of the cosmos is itself one great ideé fixe working itself out. The normality of the whole depends upon the abnormality of each part. To be a trifle onesided gives each of us our chance. Indeed, nothing is easier than to show that were everything, as the Roman expression had it, smooth and round, nothing could ever have developed, just as without irregularity no motion could have existed in the solar system except one vast self-crushing in the sun.
Thus idiosyncracies are a necessary part of us, but they are numerous and diverse in proportion to the height the individual development has attained. They are much less marked between man and man in Japan than among Aryan folk. The average Japanese more nearly approaches his own national norm.
This lands us in our investigation at an unexpected conclusion, to wit, that these gods really are what they claim to be. In Shintō god-possession we are viewing the actual incarnation of the ancestral spirit of the race. The man has temporarily become once more his own indefinitely great great-grandfather. It is a veridic incarnation, if ever there was one. If these his ancestors were gods in the past, gods they are that descend to embodiment to-day.