The Naturalisation of the Supernatural/Chapter 1
THE NATURALISATION OF THE SUPERNATURAL
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTORY
It has been widely felt that the present is an opportune time for making an organized and systematic attempt to investigate that large group of debatable phenomena designated by such terms as mesmeric, psychical, and spiritualistic.
From the recorded testimony of many competent witnesses, past and present, including observations recently made by scientific men of eminence in various countries, there appears to be, amid much delusion and deception, an important body of remarkable phenomena, which are prima facie inexplicable on any generally recognised hypothesis, and which, if incontestably established, would be of the highest possible value.
The task of examining such residual phenomena has often been undertaken by individual effort, but never hitherto by a scientific society organised on a sufficiently broad basis.
The above extract from the original prospectus of the Society for Psychical Research, issued in 1882, shows the spirit in which it entered on its investigations, the aim which it set before itself, and the methods by which it was proposed to pursue this aim.
The title which I have chosen for the present book, "The Naturalisation of the Supernatural," describes in popular language the object aimed at. The facts which the Society proposed to investigate stood, and some still stand, as aliens, outside the realm of organised knowledge. It proposed to examine their claim to be admitted within the pale. And it is important to recognise that whether we found ourselves compelled to reject them as undesirables, the aim which the Society set before itself would equally be fulfilled. In undertaking the enquiry we did not assume to express any opinion beforehand on the value of the evidence to be examined. Whatever the present bias of individual members towards belief or disbelief, it will not, I think, be charged against us, by any one who dispassionately studies the results published in the earlier volumes of the Proceedings and in the book, Phantasms of the Living, in which the case for telepathy was first set before the public, that any private prepossessions were allowed to pervert the methods of the enquiry. To ascertain the facts of the case, at whatever cost to established opinions and prejudices, has been the consistent aim of the Society and its workers. If some of our investigations have resulted in the detection of imposture, the discovery of unsuspected fallacies of sense and memory, and the general disintegration of some imposing structures built upon too narrow foundations; whilst others have revealed the occurrence of phenomena which neither chance nor fraud nor fallacy of sense can plausibly explain, and for which the present scientific synthesis has as yet found no place, it is pertinent to remember that the investigators have been the same, the methods pursued the same, and the object in all cases was simply the discovery of the truth.
There is another point to be made clear. The prospectus just cited speaks of an "organised and systematic" investigation. It was characteristic of the Society in the first few years that its methods of work were elaborated and the canons of evidence laid down in committee; and that the greater part of the actual work, whether of experimental investigation or merely of weighing and analysing reports made by contributors, was again done in concert. It may be admitted that the leading investigators were attracted to the enquiry mainly in the hope of finding empirical evidence for the existence of the soul after death. So long as the collection and appraisal of evidence was a joint work, there were no grounds for thinking that the existence of this hope in any way biassed our reception of the evidence or the scope of the conclusions based upon it. But after the preliminary survey which occupied the first few years of the Society's existence, the need for concerted action was no longer so urgently felt. Different portions of the field attracted different workers; and the results of individual investigations in the outlying regions show marked divergences of opinion. Wherever this divergence exists, I shall endeavour to sum up the evidence as fairly as I can: but it must be remembered that the conclusions set down are my own, for which my colleagues are in no way responsible.
Another misconception of the nature of our work should perhaps be referred to. It is objected, of recent years, by some scientific critics that the Society for Psychical Research has no justification for its existence. Some of the phenomena which it investigates, say these critics, are subject-matter for the psychologist or the physicist; the remainder can be left to the police court. The best justification for our work is that it is now possible for such a contention to be put forward. Twenty-five years ago the psychologist and the physicist showed no eagerness to come forward; and even the interference of the police court was intermittent, and frequently ill advised. The phenomena which we have investigated have proved no doubt to be heterogeneous, but until they were investigated their relations could not be discovered. It is obvious now that some of them can be subsumed under existing branches of science. But, to take an illustration, until some disposition is shown by medical men or professional psychologists to undertake the task of investigating the hallucinations of the sane, it is surely premature to brand the investigators of the Society for Psychical Research as usurpers. A brief survey, however, of what has actually been done will make the position clearer. The phenomena to be investigated by the Society were roughly classified in 1882 under five heads:
- An examination of the nature and extent of any influence which may be exerted by one mind upon another, apart from any generally recognised mode of perception.
- The study of hypnotism, and the forms of so-called mesmeric trance, with its alleged insensibility to pain; clairvoyance, and other allied phenomena.
- A critical revision of Reichenbach's researches with certain organisations called "sensitive", and an inquiry whether such organisations possess any power of perception beyond a highly exalted sensibility of the recognised sensory organs.
- A careful investigation of any reports, resting on strong testimony, regarding apparitions at the moment of death, or otherwise, or regarding disturbances in houses reputed to be haunted.
- An inquiry into the various physical phenomena commonly called spiritualistic; with an attempt to discover their causes and general laws.
The inquiry under heading 3 proved inconclusive; but there seems now little room for doubt that the phenomena reported by Reichenbach were due in the main to unconscious suggestion, a fruitful and until recent years insufficiently recognised source of error in all investigations in this obscure region. The inquiries under 1, 4, and 5 are still proceeding; and the results so far reached will be set forth in the chapters which follow. But the study of hypnotism (2) has been practically abandoned of recent years by the lay members of the S. P. R., precisely because it has been claimed by medical men, who both by their education and their opportunities are better qualified for its prosecution. But in 1882 no English doctor who cared for his reputation had a good word to say for hypnotism; and on the continent its chief, almost its only exponent was Liébeault, an obscure practitioner in a small provincial town. The attitude of the scientific world to the subject may be inferred from the fact that in drafting the Society's prospectus it was thought necessary to class hypnotism amongst "debatable phenomena," and to write, a generation after Esdaile and Braid, of the "alleged insensibility to pain" in the "mesmeric" trance. That within the last decade or so the facts of hypnotism have begun to find acceptance with British medical men is no doubt partly due to the experimental work begun by Edmund Gurney and the writings of Frederic Myers, and later to the adoption of hypnotic suggestion in medical practice by Dr. Milne Bramwell, Dr. Lloyd Tuckey, and other members of the Society.
The investigations under headings 1, 4, and 5 of the prospectus are, as already said, still proceeding. And in the course of its existence the Society has found many subjects to investigate of a cognate character, though not actually included in the original scheme. A committee of the Society, for instance, of which Dr. Hodgson was the leading member, examined and exposed the pretended marvels of Mme. Blavatsky and the early Theosophists, and Professor Barrett has by his exhaustive researches made out a strong case for the use of the divining-rod in finding underground water. But the most important of the investigations undertaken by the Society is that connected with Thought Transference, or Telepathy, as it has been happily named by the late F. W. H. Myers. The subject is important because of its wide scope; if the principle of a new mode of communication is once accepted an extensive range of phenomena can be explained. It is important also, as will be shown below, because of its possible implications.
The belief in telepathy has, it should be premised, a distinguished pedigree—a pedigree which it shares with the doctrine of gravitation. It is as old as the days when Chaldean shepherds, watching the stars by night, essayed to read therein the revelation of the Divine Will and to forecast the destiny of human kind. From these nightly vigils came the fruitful conception of an invisible influence radiating from the heavenly bodies—an influence potent for good and evil, yet transcending the limitations of mortal senses. At the hands of the later alchemists—Paracelsus and his successors—this conception received a remarkable extension. Not the stars only, but all substances in the universe, they taught, radiate influence and receive influence in turn. Especially was this true of man, for man is the true microcosm—"Man containeth in himself," says Fludd, "no otherwise his heavens, circles, poles, and stars than the great world doth." Man, above all other substances, and above all other living things, was perpetually acting upon his fellows by means of this invisible effluence.
Star vibrates light to star, may soul to soul
Strike through some finer element of her own.
This natural action and reaction could, the alchemists taught, be strengthened in particular cases by the exercise of will-power, by the practice of medicine, and by magical arts. "By the magic power of the will," Paracelsus writes, "a person on this side of the ocean may make a person on the other side hear what is said on this side. . . the ethereal body of a man may know what another man thinks at a distance of 100 miles and more." A later mystic, the Scottish physician Maxwell asserts that physician who has learnt to influence his patient's vital spirits can cure that patient's disease at any distance by invoking the aid of the universal spirit.
This conception of an influence which emanates from all things in the universe, but from human bodies in particular, was popularised by that genius among quacks, Franz Antoine Mesmer. Many of Mesmer's followers in France, Germany, and England proved, or thought they proved, that there did indeed radiate such an invisible healing effluence from the mesmerist to his patient. The proof was chiefly exhibited in the power of the mesmerist—or hypnotiser as we should now call him—to send his subject into the trance or to cause him, by mere force of will, to approach from a distance.
A very curious result of this supposed reciprocal influence of mesmerist and subject was demonstrated in the forties by some of our English mesmerists. The entranced subject, it was shown, would frequently be able to share the sensations of his mesmerist, to taste what he was eating, or to feel what he was feeling. The manifestations of this curious faculty—the existence of which, whatever its explanation, has been confirmed by later experiment—are sometimes extremely ludicrous. In the hypnotic sleep it is as a rule quite easy to make the subject insensible to pain. I have seen a youth in this condition who suffered gladly the most injurious attacks upon his own person—who would allow his hair to be pulled, his ears pinched, his fingers even to be scorched by lighted matches. But the same youth would the next moment indignantly resent the slightest injury inflicted upon his hypnotiser, who would all the time be standing at the other end of the room.
Professor Barrett was in the present generation the first to reproduce experimental results similar to those recorded by Elliotson and his contemporaries, and his lead has since been followed by many others. But the later experiments have been conducted under much stricter conditions. It is comparatively easy to exclude deliberate fraud: the real difficulty lies in the fact that the hypnotic subject—and experiments of this kind are found to succeed best with hypnotised persons—is extremely susceptible to suggestion of any kind. And his susceptibility is frequently increased by hyperaesthesia of the special senses, especially the sense of hearing. The strictest precautions are necessary, therefore, in all experiments conducted at close quarters, to ensure that no information shall reach him through the look, the gesture, or even the breathing of the bystander. In the cases cited in the next chapter the conditions of the experiment have been briefly indicated, but the reader is in all cases recommended to study the fuller records given in the publications of the Society.
There remains the question as to the nature of the transmission. When I tell a piece of news to a friend, a psychical state in me produces a corresponding psychical state in him. But we recognise that the psychical process proceeds pari passu with a physical process. The tension in my nerve centres provokes to action my organs of speech, which give rise to aerial waves, which in turn produce a physical change in friend's ears and so ultimately in his brain. Can any corresponding chain of physical causation be traced when the news is conveyed telepathically? So far as the experiments at close quarters are concerned, when the two parties are separated by a few feet or yards only, there is no difficulty in conceiving that the entire process may be susceptible of expression in physical terms. We have at either end of the chain a physical event—the changes in the cerebral tissues which are presumed to correspond to every act of thought or sensation. And it is not without interest to note in this connection that the arrangement of some of the nerve cells in the brain bears a superficial resemblance to the arrangement of particles in the "coherer" used for the reception of the message in wireless telegraphy. Again,
Röntgen has familiarised us [says Sir William Crookes] with an order of vibrations of extreme minuteness compared with the smallest waves with which we have hitherto been acquainted, and of dimensions comparable with the distances between the centres of the atoms of which the material universe is built up: and there is no reason to suppose that we have here reached the limit of frequency. It is known that the action of thought is accompanied by certain molecular movements in the brain, and here we have physical vibrations capable from their extreme minuteness of acting direct on individual molecules, while their rapidity approaches that of the internal and external movements of the atoms themselves.[1]
No such connection between thinking brains has been proved of course; but we have here a mechanism apparently sufficient for the purpose: sufficient at any rate to meet the objection urged by some that the establishment of telepathy would dislocate our entire conception of the physical universe. Nor does the fact that only certain persons, apparently, are affected by the telepathic impulse present any serious difficulty. For the brain of both agent and percipient may conceivably, on the analogy of wireless telegraphy, be set to transmit and receive only vibrations of a certain amplitude. A more formidable objection is found in the action of the force at a distance. For successful experiment, it seems necessary, in most cases, that the two parties should be in the same room. In a few experimental cases, however, as we shall see, the distance over which the transmission must be presumed to have operated extends to twenty miles or more. And in some of the best evidenced cases of spontaneous apparitions the agent and percipient were half the world apart.[2] If, however, the transmission is effected by ethereal vibrations, the force diminishing, as in the case of other physical energies, in the ratio of the square of the distance, it is difficult to conceive how an impulse which in some of our experiments can barely produce its effect at a distance of a few yards, should even under the most favourable circumstances, when the disturbance is presumably of a much more massive character, prove sufficiently intense to bridge a gulf of thousands of miles. Sir W. Crookes hazards the suggestion that "intense thought concentrated towards a sensitive with whom the thinker is in close sympathy may induce a telepathic chain of brain waves along which the message of thought can go straight to its goal without loss of energy due to distance."[3] But he indicates that the suggestion is almost a forlorn hope by asking further—"Is it inconceivable that our mundane ideas of space and distance may be superseded in these subtile regions of unsubstantial thought where 'near' and 'far' may lose their usual meaning? The difficulty is indeed so great as to induce some thinkers to suggest that the psychical process may be without a physical parallel—that the connection between the two psychical states may conceivably be found in the psychical world alone.[4]
But after all such a conclusion rests entirely upon a negation—our present inability to conceive of an explanation. And that inability the progress of scientific research may at any time remove, as has happened again and again in the past in the case of similar problems which at one time seemed equally secure against explanation in physical terms. The phenomena of animal life were not so very long ago held to stand outside the physical world: the very substances of which our tissues are composed were supposed to owe some of their physical properties to a principle of vitality. But chemists can now build up, out of the bricks and mortar of the dead world, many of these once mysterious organic compounds. They have not yet, it is true, built up the cathedral of life, even in the humblest protozoön; but all architects must have time to learn their trade. Again, the activities of man, especially those activities which are accompanied by consciousness and will, were also for long thought to be outside the physical world. But the case is so far altered that the burden of proof is now shifted to the other side. The philosopher who claims to interpolate a psychical link in the chain of physical processes which connects nerve-stimulus with action has to meet the challenge of the physiologist.
We have grounds for hoping, then, that, if we are content to wait, the difficulties in the way of a physical explanation of telepathy may ultimately diminish. And meanwhile the hypothesis of telepathy is in no worse case than is, or was until recently,[5] the hypothesis of gravitation. The energy which causes weight conforms to the law of the inverse square; but the only physical explanations of its action which have been suggested are so cumbrous and involve such large assumptions as to be little more than curiosities of speculation. On the other hand, we have little difficulty in conceiving of a mechanism by which telepathy could operate; the difficulty is to account for the energy not diminishing more rapidly as the distance increases. But, after all, is is inconceivable that the energy, when it is liberated under the most favourable circumstances, may suffice to produce the effects reported in the spontaneous cases referred to?
At any rate we can but wait until the further progress of research, not necessarily in this field alone, may throw some light upon the problem.
- ↑ Presidential address to the British Association, Sept. 1898.
- ↑ See, e.g., case No. 37 where the agent was in Dublin and the percipient in Tasmania.
- ↑ Proceedings, S.P.R., vol xii. p 352.
- ↑ This was, so far as I can gather the view held by Mr. Meyers (see Human Personality, especially vol. i, p. 8. "this direct and supersensuous communion of mind with mind"). See also report of the Committee on the Census of Hallucinations (Proceedings, vo. x., p. 27.) and the Presidential address to the Society by Mr. A. J. Balfour, Proceedings, vol. x., p. 9–11.
- ↑ Possibly the recent discovery that atoms are not atomic, and that their constituent parts may, under certain circumstances, move freely through space, may facilitate the acceptance of a corpuscular theory of gravitation.