Chapter I (1)

Early in the history of the Society for Psychical Research, Von Helmholtz speaking to Professor Barrett, of telepathy, said, “Neither the testimony of all the Fellows of the Royal Society, nor even the evidence of my own senses, could lead me to believe in the transmission of thought from one person to another independently of the recognized channels of sensation. It is clearly impossible.” Many have followed the example of the psychologist Wundt, in holding that “no man of science, truly independent and without _parti pris_, could be interested in occult phenomena.” Stranger still, as reported by William James, “An illustrious biologist told me one day that even if telepathy were proved to be true, the savants ought to band together to suppress and conceal it, because such facts would upset the uniformity of nature, and all sorts of other things without which the scientists cannot carry on their pursuits.” Dogmatic skepticism, veiled or overt contempt, and an unreasoning aversion--such was the attitude of the scientific world in general toward the men who, in the early eighties of last century, first seriously grappled with the problems of the weird and the uncanny; while the great majority of educated laymen, almost equally under the spell of the preponderating materialism of the age, heartily endorsed the verdict of the scientists.

Things have not much changed in the years that have passed. It is true that there have been numerous accessions to the ranks of the “psychical researchers” from the scientific world itself. Many men of science--some among them even eminent men of science--have scandalized their fellows by adopting Newton’s ridiculous point of view--“To myself I seem to have been as a child playing on the seashore, while the immense ocean of Truth lay unexplored before me”--and by deeming psychical research not unworthy their personal participation. Crookes, Lodge, James, Richet, Flammarion, Flournoy, Bergson, Lombroso, Morselli, are a few names that instantly flash into mind. And from some great thinkers of non-scientific training, but justly esteemed for their intellectual powers, has come an endorsement of Gladstone’s appreciation: “Psychical research is the most important work which is being done in the world--by far the most important.” But scientists and laymen, so far as concerns the great mass, are still over-eager to deride and belittle the delvers into the occult--who, so their critics say, have been laboring all these years to no purpose whatever, and whose labors, no matter how long continued, can have only futile or mischievous results.

This widespread conviction of the futility of psychical research is evinced in many ways. It is seen in the jesting or scornful comments of writers in the periodical press; it is continually cropping out in the half-contemptuous, half-pitying smile that greets any sympathetic reference to “ghosts” or “telepathy”; it manifests in petulant outbursts from “orthodox” scientists, akin to the outburst of Von Helmholtz, as when our genial friend, the excellent Professor Münsterberg, heatedly proclaims, “As to spirit communications, there are none, and there never will be any.” Perhaps most striking of all is the almost complete indifference with which the published reports of the various psychical research organizations now in existence are regarded by instructors and students alike in many, if not all, institutions for higher education. In one great American university, to the writer’s personal knowledge, the many volumes of the _Proceedings_ and _Journal_ of the English Society for Psychical Research, and of the younger American Society for Psychical Research, are seldom removed from the library shelves except to be dusted. Truth-seekers in this university, it would seem, have no time to waste on the “bosh,” “rot,” and “rubbish” which these silly publications contain.

Now, it may be true--though a number of really learned men believe otherwise--that those engaged in psychical research have not as yet demonstrated scientifically either telepathy or survival; and it may be true that they have set themselves a hopeless task in endeavoring to establish communication between this world and the next. But it decidedly is not true that their investigations have been entirely fruitless. On the contrary, it is safe to say that no other scientific movement ever set on foot has, in the same length of time, contributed so much toward the advancement of knowledge as has psychical research.

Few will dispute that psychology today is the most conspicuous and most promising of the “recognized” sciences. Its marvellous growth during the past quarter of a century is quite generally attributed to the increasing application of the laboratory methods devised by Wundt and his pupils. In reality a large part of the credit--perhaps the larger part--must be given to those “dabblers in the occult,” who, like Sidgwick, Myers, and Gurney, in England, and Janet and Richet in France, thought it not beneath their dignity to study table-tipping, alleged telepathy, and the disputed phenomena of the hypnotic trance. To them, incontrovertibly, we owe the foundation-laying of abnormal psychology, with its manifold practical implications to the physician, the criminologist, and the educator; to them, as will hereinafter be shown, we chiefly owe the opening up of vistas of progress undreamed in the days before scientific psychical research began.

The men who enrolled under Sidgwick in 1882 to form the English Society for Psychical Research, were not the fanatical, credulous “ghost-hunters” they are commonly supposed to have been. Their first task, they saw clearly, was to determine whether the alleged facts adduced in support of the soul doctrine were really facts; and, if facts, whether they were not susceptible of adequate explanation on a wholly naturalistic basis. In the words of Frank Podmore, one of the earliest and most active members of the Society (_The Naturalization of the Supernatural_, p. 2):

The title which I have chosen for the present book, _The
Naturalization 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 organized knowledge. It proposed to examine their claim to
be admitted within the pale. And it is important to recognize that
whether we found ourselves able to accept the credentials of these
postulants for recognition, or whether we felt ourselves compelled
to reject them as undesirables, the aim which the Society set before
itself would equally be fulfilled. In undertaking the inquiry 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 toward belief or disbelief, it will not, I think, be charged
against us, by any one who dispassionately studies the results ...
that any private prepossessions were allowed to pervert the methods
of the inquiry. 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.

In this spirit the Society for Psychical Research attacked the whole strange medley of occult phenomena, from hypnotism to premonitions and hauntings. To most readers of these pages it may seem almost incredible that so short a time ago hypnotism was still outside the pale of science, and was pretty generally regarded as imaginary or supernatural, according to one’s temperament and training. But, prior to the founding of the Society for Psychical Research, only a few inquirers of established reputation--such as Esdaile, Braid, Liébeault, and Charcot--had deemed it a proper and desirable subject of investigation; the scientific brotherhood would have none of it, and frowned on its exponents as self-deluded simpletons or impudent charlatans. As late as 1875 a writer in the _Grand Dictionnaire Encyclopédique des Sciences Medicales_, summing up in a few words all that was to be said about hypnotism, brushed it aside as non-existent. It was because they questioned dogmatic utterances like this, and because they hoped through hypnotism to gain fresh light on the problem of the soul, that the members of the English Society for Psychical Research listed the study of hypnotism among their principal activities.

The result was not merely the confirmation and correction of much that Esdaile and other earlier inquirers had noted, but also an impressive, and in some respects startling, extension of knowledge concerning the processes of the human mind. Bearing out these discoveries, moreover, came the findings of sundry French savants--Janet, Binet, Féré, etc.--who, about the same time as the English investigators, and in the same spirit of open-minded research, sought to ascertain the true inwardness of hypnotism. On the one hand, the work of the Englishmen and the Frenchmen, between the years 1882 and 1890, made it certain that in hypnotism psychology possessed a wonderful instrument for experimentation. And, on the other hand, their own experiments with hypnotism revealed the various mental faculties--perception, attention, memory, and the rest--in entirely new aspects; paved the way to a correct understanding of hitherto obscure and baffling maladies; nay, even made necessary a radical readjustment of the scientific concept of human personality itself.

In this productive study of the phenomena of hypnotism two names stand supreme--the names of Pierre Janet and Edmund Gurney. Janet, who still is with us, deservedly enjoys today a worldwide fame for the part he has played in the inception and development of psychopathology, or medical psychology. Gurney to most people is not even a name. Yet in the brief period of experimentation that preceded his untimely death, he achieved so much as to suggest that had he lived he would probably have won a place in contemporary science fully as high as that held by Janet. More than one medical psychologist, in all likelihood, has been inspired by Gurney’s researches to specialize in that fascinating and important branch of the healing art--as was Morton Prince, on his own statement to the writer. It was not for medical purposes, however, that Gurney himself experimented with hypnotism: medical psychology was then in embryo, and Gurney was only secondarily interested in its possibilities. His great aim was to ascertain the nature of the hypnotic state, and the condition of the mind during hypnosis.

To review adequately the ingenious methods he adopted and the results he obtained, would delay us unduly. Enough to stress the salient fact that, through a brilliant series of experiments full of interest to modern psychology, he demonstrated the existence of a great undercurrent of mental life, in which the most complex processes are carried on without the individual’s conscious knowledge. Already, to be sure, several students of personality--Hamilton and Carpenter, for instance--had recognized the necessity of postulating something of the sort as the only means of rationally explaining certain anomalies and mysteries of human behavior. But to take it for granted was one thing, to demonstrate it was obviously quite another. And it remained for Gurney’s experiments--together with the concurrent experiments of Janet and his French colleagues--to effect the work of demonstration, and, still more, to trace the operations of this mental undercurrent in channels, and with consequences, formerly unsuspected.

Not until Gurney’s and Janet’s time, to be more explicit, had experimental proof been forthcoming of the far-reaching influence of “subconscious ideas” in affecting human conduct, and of the possibility of initiating trains of thought completely cut off, or “dissociated,” from the field of conscious mentation. This was first convincingly revealed by experiments based on the discovery of the fact that commands “suggested” to a hypnotized person would be faithfully executed at a stated moment after the awakening from hypnosis, and this despite the absence, in the normal waking state, of any conscious recollection of the commands in question. That this actually involved mentation beneath the threshold of consciousness was shown by Gurney in a number of experiments made possible by the further discovery that there are some people who can write “automatically”--that is, without conscious control of the words they put on paper, and even without knowing that they are writing anything. Thus Gurney records, in the course of his detailed record of these experiments (_Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research_, vol. iv, pp. 268-323):

On April 20 [P--ll] was told [while hypnotized] that half an hour
after his next arrival he was to wind up a ball of string, and to
let me know how the time was going. He arrived next evening at 8.30,
and was set to the planchette [an instrument then often used to
obtain automatic writing] at 8.43. He wrote, “13 minett has passed,
and 17 more minetts to pass.” Some more experiments followed, and
it so happened that at 9, the exact time when the fulfillment was
due, he was in the trance. He suddenly said “Oh!” as if recollecting
something, but did not move; he was then woke, and at 9.2 he walked
across the room to where some string was lying, and wound it up....

Another day the same “subject” was told that when I coughed for the
sixth time he was to look out of the window. He was woke, and I gave
at intervals five coughs--one of which, however, was a failure, owing
to its obvious artificiality. He was set to the planchette, and the
words produced were, “When Mr. Gurney cough 6 times I am to look
out.” At this point I read his writing and stopped it. I asked if he
had noticed my coughing, and he said, “No, sir”; but this, of course,
showed no more than [that] he had heard without attending. He was now
hypnotized, told that I wanted to know how often I had coughed, and
at once woke. The writing recommenced, “4 times he has cough, and 2
times more he has to cough.” I coughed twice more, and he went to the
window, drew aside the blind, and looked out. Two minutes afterward
I asked him what sort of a night it was. He said, “Fine when I came
in.” I said I thought I had seen him looking out just now, but he
absolutely denied it.

Any doubt that the memory oblivion in the waking state was genuine was removed by the interesting circumstance that though the “subjects”--men to whom even small sums of money meant much--were repeatedly offered substantial rewards if they could state what had been said to them during hypnosis, they were invariably unable to do so. Stranger still, Gurney demonstrated that it was entirely possible to develop, in the hypnotic state itself, different sets of memories, each completely independent of the others; so that, so far as concerned the contents of his consciousness, the hypnotized “subject” seemed to possess two or more personalities, each with its own distinct set of memory-images (_Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research_, vol. iv, pp. 515-521). This may be made clearer by giving a sample of the many curious conversations between one of the “subjects” and G. A. Smith (known in the published reports as S.), a hypnotist often employed by Gurney to assist him in his experiments:

A young man named S--t ... after being hypnotized was told in state
A that the pier-head had been washed away, and in state B that an
engine-boiler had burst at Brighton station and killed several
people. He was then roused to state A, when he proved to recollect
about the accident to the pier; after which a few passes brought him
again to state B.

S. “But I suppose they’ll soon be able to build a new one.”

Had the pier been now present in S--t’s mind, this remark would
have been naturally understood to refer to it, as it had formed the
subject of conversation a few seconds before. But he at once replied,
“Oh, there are plenty on the line”--meaning plenty of engines.

S. “The pile-driving takes time, though.”

S--t. “Pile-driving? Well, I don’t know anything about engines
myself.”

A few upward passes were now made, and it at once became clear that
the memory had shifted.

S. “If they have plenty more, it doesn’t matter much.”

S--t. “Oh, they can’t put it on in a day; it was a splendid place.”

S. “Why, I’m talking about the engine.”

S--t. “Engine! What, on the pier? I never noticed one there.”

Again, the same “subject” was told in state A that a balloon had
been seen passing over the King’s-road. Some passes were made which
carried him into state B, when S. said, “But I didn’t see it myself.”

S--t. “What was that?”

He was now told that two large dogs had been having a fight in the
Western-road; and a few upward passes roused him to state A.

S. “But it was a good long time in sight.”

S--t. “The balloon?”

S. “No, the dog.”

S--t. “Dog? Why, was there one on it? A dog on a balloon!”

The “subject” is brought down again to state B.

S. “But it didn’t remain in sight long; it soon went up.”

S--t. “What didn’t? What went up?”

S. “Weren’t we talking about balloons?”

S--t. “No; but one of them dogs looked like a busted balloon when he
was down.”

A few upward passes, and S. says, “Which one?”

S--t. “Why, there was only one.”

S. “One what?”

S--t. “Balloon.”

S. “I was talking about dogs.”

S--t. “I don’t know nothing of dogs.”

Three days afterward S--t was again hypnotized, and S. said, “What
was that you said about the pier?”

S--t. “Oh, about the head being washed away.”

This, it will be seen, was the memory appropriate to state A. Some
downward passes were made, and S. said, “A good thing that things
don’t often happen like that.”

S--t. “No, they don’t at Brighton; they do on the Northern lines.”

Here we have the engine accident again--the memory appropriate to
state B. The balloon over the King’s-road was now strongly suggested
to S; but that idea belonging to state A, it could not be recalled in
state B.

In all these conversations, in short, it was exactly as if the hypnotist, S., when talking to his subject in state A, and talking to him in state B, were talking to two different persons, each ignorant of facts known to the other. (The profound significance of this, from a practical as well as a theoretical standpoint will be made evident later.) On the other hand, and in sharp contrast, Gurney, in common with the Continental investigators, also demonstrated through hypnotic experimentation that the memory process as a regular thing is almost incredibly retentive, so that under appropriate conditions it is possible to recall happenings, it may be of earliest childhood, which have long since dropped out of conscious recollection--happenings, even, of which one has never had conscious knowledge. But, indeed, credit for the experimental demonstration of this twofold principle of subconscious perception and subconscious memory--which lies at the very root of abnormal psychology--by no means belongs wholly to Gurney and the French hypnotists. Many other pioneers in the systematic study of the “phenomena outside science” had a hand in proving and elucidating it, notably those who made a special study of crystal-gazing.

The average scientist of that time--perhaps it would be true to say the same of the average scientist of today--had about as much interest in the phenomena of crystal-gazing as he had in the “ravings” of the entranced spiritistic “medium.” He well knew that from time immemorial it had been a practice among the mystically minded to employ crystals, mirrors, or other objects with a reflecting surface, for purposes of divination; and that it had been insistently claimed that, by gazing steadily into such objects, hallucinatory pictures often became visible, imparting useful knowledge about people and events outside the crystal-gazer’s ken. But the scientist dismissed this as merely another evidence of the invincible superstitiousness of mankind. It never occurred to him to try crystal-gazing on his own account; or if it did, he shudderingly repelled the idea. The founders of the Society for Psychical Research were not so squeamish; crystal-gazing was approved by them as a fitting subject for investigation; and ere long, their decision was abundantly vindicated.

One member of the society, Miss Goodrich-Freer, finding that she possessed the crystal-gazer’s “gift,” sedulously cultivated it for experimental purposes, and made as careful and detailed a record of what she observed as would any scientist employed in the vitally important task of watching and recording the wriggles of a tadpole. A fact which soon made itself evident to her was the frequency with which her crystal-visions represented incidents in her own past life, sometimes incidents dating back to early childhood. On one occasion, she notes, somebody was speaking in her presence, though not to her, of Palissy ware. She happened at the moment to be staring aimlessly at a dark green scent-bottle. At once there appeared in it a picture of a man furiously tearing up garden palings. She was wondering what this meant, when it was followed by a second picture showing, with the greatest distinctness, the library where as a child she had kept her books. Among these, Miss Goodrich-Freer now remembered, was one she had not seen for many years called _The Provocations of Madame Palissy_. Then she also remembered that one of this lady’s provocations was a bad habit her husband had of using the first material that came to hand as fuel for his furnace; and immediately the meaning of the first picture became clear to her.

Similarly one of her earliest experiences in crystal-vision was a picture of “a quaint oak chair, an old hand, a worn black coat-sleeve resting on the back of the chair--slowly recognized as a recollection of a room in a country vicarage, which I had not entered, and had seldom recalled, since I was a child of ten.” Again, looking in her crystal she saw a copy of a medical prescription for which, a few hours before, she had been vainly hunting. On further inspection she perceived, without being able to read the words, that it was in the handwriting, not of her physician, but of a friend. Acting on the hint she searched through her friend’s letters, and found the medical prescription folded in one of them, where, she had reason to believe, it had been for more than four years. It could have been put there only accidentally, yet it was clear that she must have subconsciously perceived what she was doing when she slipped the prescription into the letter, and that the mechanism of memory had registered an image of her absent-minded act. Many other examples of the memory registration of subconscious percepts are given in Miss Goodrich-Freer’s reports to the Society (_Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research_, vol. v, pp. 486-521; vol. viii, pp. 484-495). For example:

I find in the crystal a bit of dark wall, covered with white
jessamine, and I ask myself, “Where have I walked today?” I have no
recollection of such a sight, not a common one in the London streets
but tomorrow I will repeat my walk of this morning, with careful
regard for creeper-covered walls. Tomorrow solves the mystery. I find
the very spot, and the sight brings with it the further recollection
that at the moment we passed this spot I was engaged in absorbing
conversation with my companion, and my voluntary attention was
pre-occupied.

To take another example. I had been occupied with accounts; I opened
a drawer to take out my banking-book. My hand came in contact with
the crystal, and I welcomed the suggestion of a change in occupation.
However, figures were still uppermost, and the crystal had nothing
more attractive to show me than the combination 7694. Dismissing
this as probably the number of the cab I had driven in that day, or
a chance grouping of the figures with which I had been occupied, I
laid aside the crystal and took up my banking-book, which I certainly
had not seen for some months, and found, to my surprise, that the
number on the cover was 7694. Had I wished to recall the figures I
should, without doubt, have failed and could not even have guessed
at the number of digits or the value of the first figure. Certainly,
one result of crystal-gazing is to teach one to abjure the verb “to
forget,” in all its moods and tenses....

I saw in the crystal a young girl, an intimate friend, waving to me
from her carriage. I observed that her hair, which had hung down her
back when I last saw her, was now put up in young-lady fashion. Most
certainly I had not consciously seen even the carriage, the look
of which I knew very well. But next day I called on my friend; was
reproached by her for not observing her as she passed; and perceived
that she had altered her hair in the way which the crystal had shown.

Next as to sounds not attended to.... A relative of mine was
talking one day with a caller in the room next to that in which I
was reading, and beyond wishing that they were _further_ I paid no
attention to anything they said, and certainly could have declared
positively that I did not hear a word. Next day I saw in a polished
mahogany table, “1, [Earl’s]-square, Notting Hill.” I had no idea
whose this address might be. But some days later my relative
remarked, “H. (the caller aforesaid) has left Kensington. She told me
her address the other day, but I did not write it down.” It occurred
to me to ask, “Was it 1, [Earl’s]-square?” and this turned out to be
the case.

From investigators in other departments of psychical research came--and still comes--evidence no less impressively testifying to the marvellous power of the human memory, with its subconscious awareness even for sights and sounds not consciously perceived. It was further discovered that memory-images not infrequently emerge above the threshold of consciousness in the form of spontaneously externalized visual and auditory hallucinations, sometimes of a striking sort. The discovery was also made that, in persons of a peculiar temperament, subconscious memories might be so completely switched off, or “dissociated,” from the field of consciousness that on coming into it again they would be unrecognized, and would give rise to the conviction that they related to matters which could not possibly have been within the range of previous knowledge, conscious or subconscious. Perhaps the best illustration of this curious and important psychological fact is found in a case reported quite recently by Mr. Lowes Dickinson.

Among his friends was a young lady who developed a form of “trance mediumship,” in which she claimed to visit another world and meet and talk with people there, particularly a certain Blanche Poynings, described as an earth-dweller in the time of Richard II. This “spirit,” speaking through the voice of the entranced “medium,” gave as proof of her identity many interesting particulars regarding her sojourn on earth. She had been, it seemed, an intimate friend of Maud, Countess of Salisbury, and much of her talk had to do with that lady, and with the Earl of Salisbury. Odd little incidents in the latter’s life were vivaciously recounted--such as his throwing an image out of his chapel into a ditch, where it was found by a wayfarer, who repainted it and set it up in a bake-house. “Blanche” also commented in an amusing way on the appearance of Joan, “The Fair Maid of Kent,” and other historical personages; told about her own exile from Court; and gave much information respecting the customs and manners of the period.

All this interested and puzzled Mr. Dickinson, because his friend, whose veracity he could not doubt, assured him that she had never made a study of the events of King Richard’s reign, and had not so much as read anything about it. Yet, as he ascertained by patient research among old chronicles, the alleged “spirit” unquestionably possessed accurate and extensive knowledge of the men and women who had been prominent at King Richard’s Court, and of happenings which in some instances were barely mentioned by the annalists. The only logical explanation seemed to be that this was a genuine case of “spirit communication.” But one day, taking tea with his friend and her aunt, Mr. Dickinson made a discovery that placed the affair in an entirely different light.

The subject of automatic writing chanced to come up, and it developed that the “medium” owned a planchette, and often experimented with it. At her investigator’s request it was brought out, she placed her hands on it, and questions were put to it concerning the Blanche Poynings statements. These questions elicited the unexpected announcement, by the automatic writing, that corroboration of every statement made by “Blanche” would be found in a book called _Countess Maud_, written by Emily Holt. So soon as planchette wrote the name of this book, the “medium” exclaimed that she believed there was a novel with that title, and that she had once read it. Her aunt confirmed this, but neither she nor her aunt could recall anything about its plot or characters, nor even the period with which it dealt. Following the clue thus strangely given Mr. Dickinson soon had _Countess Maud_ in his hands, and found mentioned in it, with corresponding detail, almost every person and every incident given by the “spirit” of Blanche, who, in the novel, was of quite secondary importance. Even then his mediumistic friend could not recall anything about the book, except a vague impression that she had read it as a child.

He now caused her to be hypnotized, and questioned her anew, when he learned to his surprise that she had never actually read _Countess Maud_ herself, but had heard her aunt read it aloud. “I looked at it, and painted a picture in the beginning. I used to turn over the pages. I didn’t read it, because it was dull. Blanche Poynings was in the book; not much about her.” And, in response to a question as to how the Blanche Poynings impersonation really originated, she made the reply, of great interest psychologically, “There was a real person named Blanche Poynings that I met, and I think her name started the memory, and I got the two mixed up.”

These, then, were some of the first-fruits of systematic psychical research: Proof that percepts may be subconsciously, as well as consciously acquired, and that, as Pierre Janet so tersely put it, “Whatever has gone into the mind may come out of the mind”; proof that the emergence of subconscious memories may be in the form of self-induced hallucinations; proof that such memories sometimes develop a dynamic force, impelling the individual to seemingly inexplicable conduct; proof that the personality itself may be artificially dislocated, so that whole areas of memory sink temporarily below the threshold of consciousness; proof that, even below the threshold, intelligent mentation continues in a fashion similar to the mentation consciously directed by the waking will; and, finally, proof that in hypnotism, crystal-gazing, and automatic writing, invaluable means are available for exploring the remotest nooks and corners of “the subconscious.” From one point of view their establishment of such facts as these was, indeed, disconcerting to the “psychical researchers,” for it obviously made increasingly difficult the demonstration of the survival of the soul on evidence afforded by phenomena like apparitions, hauntings, and mediumistic utterances. But it also marked an enormous advance in man’s knowledge of himself, and in his control of his development here on earth.

The first to appreciate this--at any rate, the first to turn it to practical account--were the Frenchmen who, like Gurney, had attacked with special vigor the problems raised by hypnotism. Sharing to the full the belief of their English colleagues that here was a subject which science ought to have investigated long before--many of them, in fact, expressing their sympathy with the general purposes of the Society for Psychical Research by becoming members of it--the French savants’ motive in invading the realm of the occult had in most cases been intellectual curiosity rather than any ardent desire to prove life after death. They were not so much concerned with the possible bearing of hypnotic phenomena on the soul problem, as with their possible bearing on man’s earthly welfare. And no sooner was it borne in on them that hypnotism did have practical uses, than the majority concentrated their efforts on ascertaining what these uses were, and to what extent, and with what consequences, the phenomena of the hypnotic state were paralleled in everyday life.

The leader in this movement--which, with Gurney’s experiments in England, may be said to constitute the beginning of abnormal psychology--was Pierre Janet, who, in 1881, at the early age of twenty-two, had been appointed professor of philosophy in the college of Chateauroux, and soon afterward received a similar appointment in the College of Havre. At Havre, Janet took up in earnest the investigation of things psychical, studying mediumistic phenomena, and making a series of experiments in hypnotic telepathy that brought him into mutually helpful relations with Gurney, Myers, and other active workers in the Society for Psychical Research. But from the first he was specially interested in the peculiarities of the mind in hypnosis, and his interest in this particular problem became all-absorbing when he observed that even the most bizarre hypnotic phenomena were sometimes spontaneously produced. Perhaps most influential in determining the future course of his life-activities was his discovery that hypnotization was not always necessary to effect the strange dissociation of personality evinced in, for instance, the case of Gurney’s “subject,” S--t, cited above.

Janet himself, experimenting with Madame B., the peasant wife of a charcoal-burner, had been astonished to find that when hypnotized she developed a personality markedly different from that of her normal waking life. The waking Madame B. was a timid, dull, ignorant woman; the hypnotized Madame B. (who called herself Léontine) was bright, vivacious, even inclined to be mischievous. Between the two personalities, again, there was an absolute cleavage of memory; each knew nothing of the other’s thoughts and actions. And after a time, to Janet’s profound astonishment, the Léontine personality began to manifest spontaneously. In an article contributed to the _Revue Philosophique_, for March, 1888, he records (translation by Frederic Myers):

She had left Havre more than two months when I received from her a
very curious letter. She was unwell, she said, worse on some days
than on others, and she signed her true name, Madame B. But over
the page began another letter in a very different style, and which
I may quote as a curiosity, “My dear good sir, I must tell you that
B. really, really makes me suffer very much; she cannot sleep,
she spits blood, she hurts me; I am going to demolish her, she
bores me, I am ill also, this is from your devoted Léontine.” When
Madame B. returned to Havre I naturally questioned her about this
singular missive. She remembered the _first_ letter very distinctly
... but had not the slightest recollection of the second.... I at
first thought that there must have been an attack of spontaneous
somnambulism between the moment when she finished the first letter
and the moment when she closed the envelope.... But afterward these
unconscious, spontaneous letters became common, and I was better
able to study their mode of production. I was fortunately able to
watch Madame B. on one occasion while she went through this curious
performance. She was seated at a table, and held in her left hand
the piece of knitting at which she had been working. Her face was
calm, her eyes looked into space with a certain fixity, but she was
not cataleptic, for she was humming a rustic air; her right hand
wrote quickly, and, as it were, surreptitiously. I removed the paper
without her noticing me, and then spoke to her; she turned round,
wide awake, but surprised to see me, for in her state of abstraction
she had not noticed my approach. Of the letter which she was writing
she knew nothing whatever.

To Janet this strange occurrence, when viewed in conjunction with phenomena manifested by two or three other of his “subjects,” was chiefly significant as hinting at the possibility that the same mechanism which produced the various phenomena of the hypnotic state--from hallucinations, loss of memory, and automatic execution of “suggestions” given during hypnosis, to the production of blisters, paralyses, and other physical effects of hypnotic suggestion--might be operant in, and responsible for, the protean manifestations of that baffling disease hysteria, with which Madame B. and the other subjects were known to be afflicted. On this theory, hysteria--which until then had been generally assumed to have a physical basis--would be essentially a mental malady; and its fundamental characteristic would be some degree of dissociation of personality.

Already, as Janet was aware, Charcot had demonstrated the inadequacy and downright error of the prevalent medical notions concerning hysteria, and had also rendered a splendid service to humanity by compelling recognition of the fact that sufferers from hysteria often develop symptoms--paralyses, growths, etc.--all too easily mistaken for the symptoms of some really organic disease perhaps incurable, or curable only by the aid of the surgeon’s knife. But while he had thus revealed the wholly functional character of hysteria, and had saved countless sufferers from useless and unnecessary operations, Charcot had thrown little or no light on its causation and mechanism, and this was the problem which Janet now undertook to solve, removing from Havre to Paris, and associating himself with Charcot in the latter’s clinic at the Salpétrière Hospital.

Observing, experimenting, recording--with a truly catholic mind profiting from the observations and experiments of other workers, including his fellow-members in the Society for Psychical Research--he gradually achieved his epoch-marking demonstration of the rôle played by “dissociated memories” in the causation, not alone of hysteria, but of all functional nervous and mental troubles. He showed that severe emotional shocks--frights, griefs, worries--might be, and frequently were, completely effaced from conscious recollection, while continuing to be vividly remembered in the depths of the subconscious; he showed that thence they might, and frequently did, exercise a baneful effect on the whole organism giving rise to disease-symptoms, the particular types of which were determined by the victim’s “self-suggestions” (just as Mr. Dickinson’s “medium” suggested to herself the Blanche Poynings impersonation); and he showed how important it was, as a preliminary to effecting a permanent cure, to get at these dissociated memories and drag them back to the full light of conscious recollection.

To get at them he made use, as medical psychologists all over the civilized world are today making use, of hypnotism, of automatic writing, even of the “mystical” crystal-gazing, the use of which for medical purposes was directly suggested to him by the experiments of Miss Goodrich-Freer. Janet himself, it should perhaps be added, would be the last to disavow the assistance he received in one way or another from the “psychical researchers” of England; indeed, he has not forgotten that everything he has accomplished is the outgrowth of his early studies in the “occult” phenomena of hypnotism. It is to be regretted that many of his present-day fellow-workers in the domain of scientific psychotherapy are not equally appreciative of the fact that every “cure” they put to their credit--every hysteric, neurasthenic, or psychasthenic patient whom they send on his or her way rejoicing in a restoration to health--is a living witness to the beneficial results that have flowed from the patient labors of the courageous pioneers, who, at the risk of their scientific reputations, so boldly adventured into the psychical thirty years ago.

We shall have more to say in a later article on what society owes to psychical research.

THE WAR BY A HISTORIAN

When for slight reason a continent shakes with the tread of marching battalions, it is easy to fall into moral despair. We seem to confront a world-order that limits the sway of reason between nations, and gives full scope only to the hatreds and destructive ingenuities of mankind. In the wholesale deliberate slaughter of multitudes of men of good will, workers, lovers, husbands, fathers suddenly dedicated to systematic homicide of their fellows, piling up in blood and travail grievous burdens for their own children’s children--in such a spectacle the thoughtful mind at first finds only nightmare. And nightmare intolerable it is, if to the end of time a few out of pride or fear or sheer incapacity shall thus be able to decree the last sacrifice and swift death to the many.

In such moments of natural dejection, the mind must rally to its own defence. We live after all in a moral world. Intelligence has persisted and grown through worse occultations. The future may hold out hopes of a world-order in which the nightmare of the present cannot repeat itself. Meanwhile if we face the thing steadily in the light of its underlying causes, considering the moral issues involved, looking forward to the just retributions that the world will surely require of those who have shattered its peace, we may reëstablish in ourselves the sense of an overruling moral order, toward which we may each in his degree work. Such an inquiry into the responsibility for the war will lift the obsession of universal, insensate violence. Even the offenders are obeying race loyalty, and responding to certain obsolete ideals which yet are deeply grounded in history, while the defenders are vindicating the cause of the world’s peace by the only course left open to them. Against the brute law of strongest battalions, they have been forced to fight, that ideals of forbearance, comity, and honor may still be held among nations.

On the broader moral issue of the war, mankind has already spoken. The military isolation of Austria and Germany is no more marked than their moral isolation. In the history of warfare, has there ever been so uniform a verdict of the human race? Though instinctive and rapid, the sentiment may also be rationally grounded. Let us test it by an examination of the causes of the war.

What made the war possible is the fixed antipathy between impatient, ruling Germans and restless, subject Slavs. Such racial discord is naturally most acute in Austria, where a domineering Teuton minority holds in uneasy subordination the Slavs of Bohemia, Austrian Poland, and the Balkan and Adriatic range; but it is a distinct factor also in Prussia, where an embittered and losing campaign against Polish national feeling in the Posen region has long been waged. These disharmonies are an inevitable incident of expansion without the consent of the annexed peoples. The part of wise statesmanship is to bear much of this sort of opposition, trusting to healing process of just government and time. In Austria and Germany, however, these antipathies, were deliberately fomented by the war clique. The surest way of getting huge army appropriations is to show a foe or a rebel in being. In 1908 the unrest of all the Balkan Slavs was increased by Austria’s assuming permanent tenure of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where by treaty she had been exercising a temporary, police jurisdiction. The annexation extinguished national hopes, and while it undoubtedly established order, did so in arbitrary and oppressive fashion. The fact that Germany supported the annexation, intimidating the natural ally of the Balkan Slavs, Russia, accentuated the racial feud. The recent heroic struggle in the Balkans, which resulted in the aggrandizement of the Slavic powers of Servia, Bulgaria, and Montenegro, naturally excited the Slavs under Austrian domination. Austria, on the other hand, had maintained a persistent hostility to her southern neighbors, and after the war, had by diplomatic means, and again aided by Germany, frustrated many of the legitimate hopes of Servia and Montenegro. An illogical and already derelict Albania, is the chief result of Austria’s dog in the manger policy. Her smouldering resentment against Servia was raised to an intense pitch by the deplorable assassination of the Crown Prince and his wife. It was an act as foolish as heinous, but it was also a natural product of arrogant and oppressive rule. Though the deed was done on Austrian soil, the assassins were Slavs, and the plot traceable to Belgrade, and this gave Austria the chance to hold Servia nationally responsible for the crime. She issued an ultimatum in which Servia was virtually required to avow responsibility for the outrage, to investigate and punish anti-Austrian agitators, and in such proceedings to admit Austrian officials. In effect, Servia was asked to plead guilty, on penalty of invasion, and to place her case in the hands of Austria as both prosecutor and judge.

The ultimatum of July 23, was outrageous, such as no state ever dreams of issuing to an equal. Weakened by two wars and apparently menaced by overwhelming force, Servia drank the cup, hesitating only at the last dregs. With the bulk of the Austrian demands she complied, demurring only to the waiver of her own national estate implied in alien interference with her police. Even this humiliating stipulation she offered to arbitrate. The reply of Austria was to set 300,000 troops across the Danube, and to shell the undefended city of Belgrade. The history of war has shown few more baseless aggressions. Austria had reckoned on Servia’s weakness, and on the willingness and ability of Germany, as in 1908, to hold off Russia. Austria unwittingly reckoned with forces to which Russia and Germany are small. The analogy of the Bosnian annexation was false. There the deed had been carefully prepared and delay had blunted the effect of the final move. This time Austria suddenly and without preparation outraged the moral sense of the world. The official plea is that in some mysterious way the Austro-Hungarian Empire was threatened in its very existence by the machinations of the Serbs at home and in the newly annexed Austrian provinces. That plea is hollow. Austria was neither more nor less in peril than she has been for sixty years; she was merely enduring a slight, however sensational, exaggeration of the chronic difficulties of dominion over alien and unwilling races. The reality is that Austria was incensed by the prosperity of the new Slavic nations in possessions that she had prospectively marked out as her own. To confuse ulterior ambitions with immediate rights is characteristic of the mentality of neo-Imperialism.

So far, for convenience, I have spoken of Austria and other powers as units, and with the usual rhetorical personification. The practice is misleading. When we say Austria, in the political sense, we mean a mere handful of high administrative and military officers, a few diplomats and journalists, a portion of a small and exclusive aristocracy, a pack of manufacturers of arms and military contractors, a rabble of speculators hoping out of troubled waters to fish extraordinary profits--that is political Austria, that with slight differences is the permanent war party in every nation. The peace of the world ultimately hangs on the nod of a few hundred individuals--men at best of intense, narrow, and backward-looking vision; at worst basely interested in the destruction of their fellow beings, accustomed to regard carnage as normal business. The problem of insuring the world’s peace is that of putting such men out of control, and replacing them by men who think the thoughts and feel the feelings of modern civilization. Incapacity to grasp the modern man, is the defect of the war caste everywhere. It indulges mediæval alarms, appeals to factitious loyalties, speaks an obsolete tongue. Politically Austria is still very much where Metternich left her. A crafty balancing off of the aspirations of new nationalities has been the method of consolidating the artificial sway of the Emperor. There has been a constant disregard, perhaps ignorance, of the generous motives that move in modern society. The aged and afflicted Emperor has many times shown himself to have an insight superior to that of his counsellors. Had the present emergency not caught him infirm in body and spirit, I believe the event would have been very different. Free from his controlling hand, the war machine has worked almost automatically its fitting product.

When we say Austria and Germany, we must distinguish clearly between the peasants of many tongues, the thrifty tradesmen, the ingenious manufacturers and hardy artisans, the scientists and scholars, the keen students of public betterment, the artists and musicians,--between these socially useful people with their women and children, upon whom falls the actual burden of this war,--and a little, complacent, opinionated minority, miseducated, aloof from the generous instincts of humanity, dead to the kindling enthusiasms of the new century,--a little complacent, pitiful, minority which from any outcome of the worst war reaps its private harvest of profit, promotion, and prestige. Any genuine representation of the real Austria and Germany would have made this war impossible, any adjustment looking to permanent peace must include the elimination of the misrepresentative administrators who have frivolously plunged a continent into war.

In a moral analysis of the causes of the war, the single ambiguous term is Russia. On the face of it she promptly rallied to the support of her fellow Slavs in Servia, by diplomatic protests at Berlin and Vienna and by mobilizing on the Austrian border. Humanitarian and political motives combined to force some kind of intervention. Without denying the bond of race, Russia could not permit any Slavic nation to be ruthlessly overborne. Honor in the highest sense and policy combined to dictate some such course as Russia actually took. The official statements of Austria and Germany waver between two attitudes. On the whole, the Austrian apologists condemn the Russian move as merely defective and unhappy in form. Had Russia not mobilized, the Servian situation might have been adjusted diplomatically. As things went, the provocative moves of Russia, forced similar precautions first on Austria, then on Germany, with the unforeseen result of a general war. The speech of the German Chancellor, however, echoes that of the Kaiser, in charging Russia with deliberately provoking Germany and Austria into war.

To me the issue, though evidently a crucial one,--for if Russia is deliberately making a war, most of the European world is being dragged into devil’s work,--is set in such technical fashion by the German manifestoes, that their own sincerity is open to doubt. It remains a somewhat interesting academic question what a Russian protest without mobilization might have effected. The obduracy of Germany in the face of more formidable military preparations by France and England, seems to indicate that a wholly pacific intervention by Russia would have effected little. On an alternative theory, Germany and Austria are fighting solely on a point of technical honor. They couldn’t “take a dare” from a threatening neighbor. Doubtless some of the arbiters of war in Germany and Austria did honestly so feel. But in so feeling they were parrotting the phrases and indulging the alarms of forty years ago.

The figment of a ruthlessly expansive Russia has today little reality behind it, but for militaristic ends it is still a most useful bugbear. Twice in a generation Russia has tasted the bitter fruits of heedless aggression. Today she is overtaxed, not merely by the arrears of these wars, but also by the great task of assimilating her present subjects. Her political situation at home is one of instability. Direct gain from venturing to support Servia, Russia had none to hope for. Twice she has stood aside while her sphere of influence in the Balkans was being repartitioned. In short, there is no conceivable reason why Russia should have invited war at this time, and every reason why she should have desired peace. Her mobilization must be interpreted in that light. Ostensibly it was done _pari passu_ with similar preparations in Austria and Germany, but suppose she began first. Mobilization means just what those who order it mean. It is not _per se_ an offence, much less a cause of war. Russia made most solemn protestations that she would fight only in the last resort. All the world except the Germans and Austrians believed these assurances.

What weakens the Austrian case is the unduly spectacular demonstration she made on the Danube. Ostensibly she was engaged in a punitive expedition which might have been satisfied with the occupation of the offending capital, and an indemnity. It is probable that Russia and the world, rather than hazard a general war, would have tolerated a reprisal, which however inherently excessive, did not transcend the usual bounds of such enterprises. But Austria hurled half her effective force into Servian territory. Surely she had given ground for the inference that no argument unaccompanied by show of force would deter her. In our day we shall probably not know what Austria actually intended towards Servia, but it is plain enough that, granting the whole thing was a merely punitive move, it was exaggerated with the insolent thick-headedness characteristic of military bureaucracies. At best it can only be said that Austria needlessly blundered into a demonstration that must be alarming to Europe and most offensive to Russia, without correctly calculating either the moral reaction of Europe or the limits of Russia’s forbearance. It must be conceded, however, that the Austrian militarists had been grievously exasperated by the murder of their Prince, and the impulse to seek somewhere some sort of vengeance was, however mistaken, entirely natural.