Chapter III: Part 3

We have in fact to deal with the consummation of a long and deep-seated revolution, and there is no better way to understand the true character of the movement than by turning aside a moment to glance at its historical sources. The attempt to find a new basis of conduct, as we see it exemplified in the works of Miss Jane Addams and a host of other modern writers, is in fact only one aspect of the slow drift from mediæval religion to humanitarianism. For a thousand years, and well into the second thousand, the ethical feeling of Christian Europe may be said to have taken its color from the saying, "What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"--which in extreme cases was interpreted as if it read, If he _reform_ the whole world; and on the other, kindred saying, "Sell all that thou hast and distribute unto the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven, and come, follow me"--in which the command of charity was held to be not so much for the benefit of the poor as for the liberation of the giver's own soul from the powers of this world. Such was the law, and its binding force was confirmed by the conception of a final day of wrath when the souls of men should stand before a merciless tribunal and be judged to everlasting joy or everlasting torment. The vivid reality of the fear that haunted men, at least in their moments of reflection, may be understood from the vivid horrors of such a picture as Michael Angelo's "Last Judgment," or from the meditations of one of the most genial of English cavaliers. In his little treatise on "Man in Darkness"--appropriate title--Henry Vaughan puts the frank question to himself:

And what madness then is it, for the enjoying of one minute's
pleasure for the satisfaction of our sensual corrupt appetite, to
lie forever in a bed of burning brass, in the lake of eternal and
unquenchable fire? "Suppose," saith the same writer [Drexelius],
"that this whole globe of earth were nothing else but a huge mass
or mountain of sand, and that a little wren came but once in
every thousand years to fetch away but one grain of that huge
heap; what an innumerable number of years would be spent before
that world of sand could be so fetched away! And yet, alas! when
the damned have lain in that fiery lake so many years as all
those would amount to, they are no nearer coming out than the
first hour they entered in."

No doubt practice and precept were at variance then, as to a certain extent they are at all times, and there were many texts in the Bible which might be taken to mitigate the harsher commands; but such in its purest, highest form was the law, and in the more sensitive minds this conception of the soul naked before a judging God must have created a tremendous anxiety in practice. Morality was obedience and integrity and scorn of the world for an ideal of inner righteousness; it created a sense of individual responsibility for every word and deed; and, say what we will, there was something magnificent in this contempt of the reckoning of other men for that eternal fame which

... lives and speaks aloft by those pure eyes,
And perfect witness of all-judging Jove.

But there was also in this law something repellent and even monstrous. Who has not shuddered with amazement at the inscription which Dante set over the portal of Hell: E 'L PRIMO AMORE? Was it Love that prepared those winding coils of torture to enclose for endless time the vast majority of mankind? Was it even justice to make the everlasting doom of a soul depend on its grasp of truth in these few years spent in a world of shadows and illusions? There is something repulsively irrational in the notion of an unchanging eternity suspended on the action of a moment of time--_ex hoc momento pendet æternitas_. It should seem to be unthinkable, if it had not actually been thought. As a matter of fact the rigor and crudity of this doctrine had been mitigated in the Middle Ages by the interposition between man and God of the very human institution of the Church with its substitution of temporal penances and pardons, and an interposed Purgatory in place of the terrible paradox of irrevocable judgment. It remained for the Reformation and particularly for the Calvinistic Puritans to tear away those veils of compromise and bring man face to face with the awful abstraction he had created. The result was for a while a great hardening and strengthening of character, salutary indeed after what may be called the almost hypocritical compromise of Catholicism; but in the end human nature could not endure the rigidity of its own logic, and in revolting turned, not to another compromise, but to questioning of the very hypothesis of its faith.

The inevitable reaction from the intolerable logic of the Protestants was Deism, in which God was stript altogether of his judicial and moral attributes and reduced to a kind of immanent, all-benevolent force in nature. "But now comes a modern Sage," says Warburton of Bolingbroke, "... who tells us 'that they made the Basis of Religion far too wide; that men have no further concern with GOD than TO BELIEVE THAT HE IS, which his _physical Attributes_ make fully manifest; but, that he is _a rewarder of them who diligently seek him_, Religion doth not require us to believe, since this depends on God's MORAL ATTRIBUTES, of which we have no conception.'" But such a position was manifestly untenable, for it left no place for the undeniable existence of evil in this world and life. From the unaccountable distribution of wrong and suffering the divine had argued the certainty of adjustment in a future state; the deist had flown in the face of facts by retaining the belief in a benevolent Providence while taking from it the power of supernatural retribution; the atheist was more logical, he denied the existence of Providence altogether and turned the universe over to chance or blind law. Such was the progress of thought from Baxter to Bolingbroke and from Bolingbroke to Hume.

The positive consequences of this evolution are written large in the literature of the eighteenth century. With the idea of an avenging deity and a supernatural test there disappeared also the sense of deep personal responsibility; the very notion of a radical and fundamental difference between good and evil was lost. The evil that is apparent in character comes to be regarded merely as the result of the restraining and thwarting institutions of society as these exist--why, no one could explain. Envy and jealousy and greed and the sheer ambition of power, all those traits, which were summed up in the single Greek word _pleonexia_, _the desire to have more_, are not inherent in the human heart, but are artificially introduced by the possession of property and a false civilization. Change these institutions or release the individual entirely from restrictions, and his nature will recoil spontaneously to its natural state of virtue. He needs only follow the impulse of his instinctive emotions to be sound and good. And as a man feels of himself, so he feels of others. There is no real distinction between the good and the evil, but all are naturally good, and the superficial variations we see are caused by the greater or less freedom of development. Hence we should condemn no man, even as we do not condemn ourselves. There is no place for sharp judgment, and the laws which impose penalties and restrictions, and set up false discriminations between the innocent and the criminal, are subject to suspicion, and should be made as flexible as possible. In place of judgment we are to regard all mankind with sympathy, feeling with them a sort of emotional solidarity, the one great virtue, in which are included, or rather sunk, all the law and the prophets. In fine, we have arrived at humanitarianism; humanity has become God.

It was the great work of the eighteenth century, beginning in England and developing in France, to formulate this change, and indoctrinate with it the mind of the unthinking masses. Here is not the place to follow the development in detail, and those who care to see its outcome may be referred to the keen and unjustly neglected chapters in La Harpe's "Lycée" on the _philosophes_. To those, indeed, who are acquainted with the philosophical writings that preceded and introduced the French Revolution, the epithet "new" as it is attached to our present-day morality may seem a bit presumptuous, for it would be difficult to find a single fundamental idea in current literature on this subject which could not be closely paralleled by a quotation from Rousseau, or Diderot, or Helvétius, or one of their compeers. Thus, in our exaltation of sympathy above judgment, and of the unrestrained emotions generally as the final rule of character, we are but following Diderot's philosophy of the heart: "Les passions amorties dégradent les hommes extraordinaires"; and when we read in Ellen Key, and a host of other feminist liberators, the apotheosis of love as higher than any divine or human obligations, we are but meeting again with Toussaint's religion a little disguised: "On aime de même Dieu et sa maîtresse." Our revolt from constitutional law as a power imposed by the slower reflection of men upon their own immediate desires and opinions, is essentially the same as the restlessness consecrated by the French _économistes_ in the phrase, "le despotisme légal." And, to return whence we began, the economics of Hull House flow only too easily from Helvétius' definition of virtue as "le désir du bien public," and from his more specific statement: "The integrity which is related to an individual or to a small society is not the true integrity; integrity considered in relation to the public is the only kind that really deserves and generally obtains the name."

Miss Addams herself has been disturbed by these reminiscences. Thus she quotes from one of the older humanitarians a characteristic saying: "The love of those whom a man does not know is quite as elemental a sentiment as the love of those whom a man does know," and repudiates it as vague and impractical beside the New Morality. She ought to know, and may be right; yet it is not easy to see wherein her own ethics are any less vague, when she deplores the act of a boy who goes to work for his starving grandmother because in doing so he is unfitting himself for future service to society. And as for effectiveness, it might seem that the French Revolution was a practical result fairly equivalent in magnitude to what has been achieved by our college settlements. But Miss Addams is by no means peculiar in this assumption of originality. Nothing is more notable in the Humanitarian literature of the day than the feeling that our own age is severed from the past, and opens an entirely new epoch in history. "_The race has now crossed the great divide of human history!_" exclaims an hysterical doctor of divinity in a book just published. "The tendency of the long past has been toward _diversity_, that of the longer future will be toward _oneness_. The change in this stream of tendency is not a temporary deviation from its age-long course--a new bend in the river. It is an actual reversal of the current, which beyond a peradventure will prove permanent." To this ecstatic watcher, the sudden reversal took place at no remote date, but yesterday; and by a thousand other watchers the same miracle is vociferously heralded. Beyond a peradventure! Not a little of this flattering assumption is due to the blind and passionate hope of the human heart clamoring against the voice of experience from similar and different movements in the past, which have somehow failed to renovate the world. So many prophets before now have cried out, looking at the ever-flowing current of time, and having faith in some Thessalian magic:

Cessavere vices rerum.
... Amnisque cucurrit
Non qua pronus erat.

So often they have been disappointed; but at last we have seen--beyond a peradventure. If the vicissitudes of fate have not ceased, yet at least we have learned to look with complacency on the very law of mutation, from which the eyes of men had hitherto turned away in bewildered horror, at last the stream has turned back upon its sources, and change itself is carrying us no longer towards diversity, but towards the consummation of a divine oneness.

But it would equally be an error to insist too dogmatically on the continuity of the present-day movement with that of the eighteenth century, for, after all, "the world do move." It is true for one thing that for a hundred years or thereabout there was a partial reaction against the doctrines of the _philosophes_, during which time the terrors of the Revolution lay like a warning nightmare in the imagination of the more thoughtful men. A hundred years is a long period for the memory to bridge, particularly in a time when the historical sense has been weakened. Superficially, too, the application of the theory is in some respects different from what it was; the law of social sympathy has been developed into different conceptions of Socialism, and we have devised fresh schemes for giving efficacy to the immediate will of the people. Even deeper is the change that has come over the attitude of religious organizations towards the movement. In the age of the Revolution the Church, both Catholic and Protestant, was still strongly entrenched in the old beliefs, and offered a violent resistance to the substitutions of humanitarianism for responsibility to itself and to a God. Now this last barrier has been almost swept away. Indeed, not the least remarkable feature of this literature is the number of clergymen who are contributing to it, with their constant appeal to the New Morality as the test of faith. Open one of these books before us--let us take "The Christian Reconstruction of Modern Life," for the promise of its title--and you will be pretty likely to come upon such a passage as this: "Faith's fellowship with Jesus is one with the realization of our fellowship in humanity"; or, on another page: "If the fundamental of the true philosophy cannot be found by common men, what advantage in any man's finding it? If life's secret, direction, and power ... is not attainable by the lowliest, then a man of this age, living in the social passion of our time, is forced to be indifferent to that which would be the monopoly of a few gifted souls." If such a social passion means anything, it means the reconstruction of life to the level of the gutter. It is the modern sham righteousness which would have called from Jesus the same utter scorn as that which he poured upon the Pharisaical cant of his own day. Yet it is not in religious books alone that you will meet with this sort of irreligion. For one sermon you will hear on the obligation of the individual soul to its maker and judge, and on the need of regeneration and the beauty of holiness, you will hear a score on the relation of a man to his fellows and on the virtue of social sympathy. In effect, the first and great commandment, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind," has been almost forgotten for the second, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." Worship in the temple is no longer a call to contrition and repentance, but an organized flattery of our human nature, and the theological seminary is fast becoming a special school for investigating poverty and spreading agnosticism. In this sense, or degree, that humanitarianism is no longer opposed by organized religion, but has itself usurped the place of religion, the New Morality may really justify its name.

What are the results of this glorification of humanity? What does the New Morality mean in life and conduct? Well, of such matters it is wise to speak cautiously. The actual morals of an age are an extremely complicated and elusive network of facts, and it is only too easy to generalize from incomplete observation. On the other hand we must guard against allowing ourselves to be deceived by the fallacy everywhere heard, that, because the preacher has always, even from the remotest record of Egypt, bewailed his own times as degenerate, therefore no age has fallen off in morality from its predecessor. Such an argument is a complete _non-sequitur_; there have been periods of degeneration, and there may yet be. As for our own age, only a fool would dogmatize; we can only balance and surmise. And in the first place a certain good must almost certainly be placed to the credit of humanitarianism. It has softened us and made us quicker to respond to the sufferings of others; the direct and frightful cruelty that runs through the annals of history like a crimson line has been largely eliminated from civilization, and with it a good deal of the brutality of human nature. We sometimes hear the present age compared with the later Roman Republic and the Empire, and in some respects speciously, but the callousness of the great Romans to human misery and their hardness are almost unthinkable to-day. Consider a sentence or two from Appian: "The head and hand of Cicero were suspended for a long time from the rostra in the forum where formerly he had been accustomed to make public speeches, and more people came together to behold this spectacle than had previously come to listen to him. It is said that even at his meals Antony placed the head of Cicero before his table, until he became satiated with the horrid sight." Such an episode scarcely stands out from the hideous story of the Civil Wars; to the modern reader it brings a feeling almost of physical sickness. So much we seem to have gained, and the change in this respect even from our own seventeenth century shows that the credit is due in no small part to the general trend of humanitarianism.

But in other directions the progress is not so clear. Statistics are always treacherous witnesses, but so far as we can believe them and interpret them we can at best draw no comfort from the prevalence of crime and prostitution and divorce and insanity and suicide. At least, whatever may be the cause of this inner canker of society, our social passion seems to be powerless to cure it. Some might even argue that the preaching of any doctrine which minimizes personal responsibility is likely to increase the evil. Certainly a teacher who, like Miss Jane Addams, virtually attributes the lawless and criminal acts of our city hoodlums to the wholesome desire of adventure which the laws unrighteously repress, would appear to be encouraging the destructive and sensual proclivities which are too common in human nature, young and old. Nor are the ways of honesty made clear by a well-known humanitarian judge of Denver, who refused to punish a boy for stealing a Sunday-School teacher's pocketbook, for the two good reasons, as his honor explained in a public address, "that the boy was not responsible, and, secondly, that there were bigger thieves in the pews upstairs." So, too, a respectable woman of New York who asks whether it may not be a greater wrong for a girl to submit to the slavery of low wages than to sell herself on the street, is manifestly not helping the tempted to resist. She is even doing what she can with her words to confuse the very bounds of moral and physical evil.

There is, in fact, a terrible confusion hidden in the New Morality, an ulcerous evil that is ever working inward. Sympathy, creating the desire for even-handed justice, is in itself an excellent motive of conduct, and the stronger it grows, the better the world shall be. But sympathy, spoken with the word "social" prefixed, as it commonly is on the platforms of the day, begins to take on a dangerous connotation. And "social sympathy" erected into a theory which leaves out of account the responsibility of the individual, and seeks to throw the blame of evil on the laws and on society, though it may effect desirable reforms here and there in institutions, is bound to leave the individual weakened in his powers of resistance against the temptations which can never be eliminated from human life. The whole effect of calling sympathy justice, and putting it in the place of judgment, is to relax the fibre of character, and nourish the passions at the expense of reason and the will. And undoubtedly the conviction is every day gaining ground among cool observers of our life that the manners and morals of the people are beginning to suffer from this relaxation in many insidious ways apart from acts which come into the cognizance of the courts. The sensuality of the prevailing music and dancing, the plays that stir the country as organs of moral regeneration, the exaggeration of sex in the clothing seen on the street, are but symptoms more or less ominous to our mind as we do or do not connect them with the regnant theory of ethics. And in the end this form of social sympathy may itself quite conceivably bring back the brutality and cruelty from which it seems to have delivered us. The Roman who gloated over the head of his and the people's enemy lived two thousand years ago, and we think such bloodthirstiness is no longer possible in public life. Yet not much more than a century ago the preaching of social sympathy could send a Lebon and his kind over France with an insatiable lust for killing, complicated with Sadism, while at home the leader of the Government of the most civilized country of Europe was justifying such a régime on the pious principle that, "when the sovereign people exercises its power, we can only bow before it; in all it does all is virtue and truth, and no excess, error, or crime is possible." The animal is not dead within us, but only asleep. If you think he has been really conquered, read what he has been doing in Congo and the Putomayo Indians, or among the redeemers of the Balkan states. Or if you wish to get a glimpse of what he may yet do under the spur of social sympathy, consider the callous indifference shown by the labor unions to the revelation, if it deserves the name, of the system of dynamiting and murder employed in the service of "class-consciousness." These things are to be taken into account, not as bugbears, for society at large is no doubt sound at heart and will arouse itself at last against its false teachers, but as symptoms to warn and prepare.

To some few the only way out of what seems a state of moral blindness is through a return to an acknowledgment of the responsibility of the individual soul to its maker and inflexible judge. They may be right. Who can tell what reversal of belief may lie before us or what religious revolution may be preparing in the heart of infidelity? But for the present, at least, that supernatural control has lost its general efficacy, and even from the pulpit has only a slight and intermittent appeal. Nor does such a loss appear without its compensations, when we consider the harshness of mediæval theology or the obliquities of superstition that seem to be inherent in the purest of religions. Meanwhile, the troubled individual, whatever his scepticism may be, need not be withheld from confirming his moral faith by turning from the perverted doctrine of the "Enlightenment" and its recrudescence in modern humanitarianism, to the larger and higher philosophy which existed long before the materialism of the eighteenth century, and before the earlier anthropomorphism, and which persisted unchanged, though often half-concealed, through those ages, and still persists as a kind of shamefast inheritance of truth. It is not necessary to go to ancient books to recover that faith. Let a man cease for a moment to look so strenuously upon what is right for his neighbors. Let him shut out the voices of the world, and disregard the stream of informing books which pour upon him from the modern press, as the "floud of poyson" was spewed upon Spenser's Knight from "_Errours den_":

Her fruitful cursed spawne of serpents small.

Let him retire into himself, and in the silence of such recollection examine his own motives and the sources of his self-approval and discontent. He will discover there in that dialogue with himself, if his abstraction is complete and sincere, that his nature is not simple and single, but dual, and the consequences to him in his judgment of life and in his conduct will be of incalculable importance. He will learn, with a conviction which no science or philosophy falsely so-called can shake, that beside the passions and wandering desires and blind impulses and the cravings for pleasure and the prod of sensations, there is something within him and a part of him, rather in some way his truer self, which controls and checks and knows and pronounces judgment, unmoved amid all motion, unchanged amid continual change, of everlasting validity above the shifting valuations of the moment. He may not be able to express this insight in terms that will satisfy his own reason or will convince others, but if his insight is true, he will not waver in loyalty to it, though he may sin against it times without number in spoken word and impulsive deed. Rather his loyalty will be confirmed by experience. For he will discover that there is a happiness of the soul which is not the same as the pleasure of fulfilled desires, whether these be for good or for ill, a happiness which is not dependent upon the results of this or that choice among our desires, but upon the very act itself of choice and self-control, and which grows with the habit of staying the throng of besetting and inflicting impulses always until the judicial _fiat_ has been pronounced. It is thus that happiness is the final test of morality, bringing with it a sense of responsibility to the supernatural command within the soul of the man himself, as binding as the laws of religion, and based on no disputable revelation or outer authority. Such a morality is neither old nor new, and stands above the varying customs of society. It is not determined essentially by the relation of a man to his fellows or by their approval, but by the consciousness of rightness in the man's own breast,--in a word, by character. Its works are temperance, truth, honesty, trustworthiness, fortitude, magnanimity, elevation; and its crown is joy.

Then, under the guidance of this intuition, a man may turn his eyes upon the world with no fear of being swayed by the ephemeral winds of doctrine. Despite the clamor of the hour he will know that the obligation to society is not the primal law, and is not the source of personal integrity, but is secondary to personal integrity. He will believe that social justice is in itself desirable, but he will hold that it is far more important to preach first the responsibility of each man to himself for his own character. He will admit that equality of opportunity is an ideal to be aimed at, but he will think this a small thing in comparison with the universality of duty. In his attitude towards mankind he will not deny the claims of sympathy, but he will listen first to the voice of judgment:

Away with charity that soothes a lie,
And thrusts the truth with scorn and anger by.

He will be sensitive to the vast injustices of life, and its widespread sorrows, but he will not be seduced by that compassion into the hypocrisy of saying that "the love of those whom a man does not know is quite as elemental a sentiment as the love of those whom a man does know."

PROFESSOR BERGSON AND THE SOCIETY FOR PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

When, some months since, M. Bergson delivered his inaugural address as President of the Society for Psychical Research, the circumstance was considered of enough importance to justify many cablegrams in the American papers, and much editorial comment. Had the address not been in French, it probably would have been reproduced here. Yet the event was not exceptional enough for that feature to explain the attention of the press. Men to be named in the same breath with Professor Bergson, for instance Professor William James and Mr. Arthur Balfour, had already been presidents of the Society. Therefore the importance attached to M. Bergson's acceptance of the presidency may indicate not merely an interest in his views of the subjects attacked by the Society, but a growing interest in the subjects themselves--perhaps an interest that may lead such of our readers as have not already studied them, to welcome some account of both. The information is doubly worth giving, as there is such a wide belief that the Society is but a group of cranks, while in fact it has always included some of the best minds of the age. This account, however, despite the disproportionate space we venture to allot to it, can give but a pitifully inadequate idea of the Society's work, and has been prepared mainly on the chance that it may lead a few readers to seek adequate knowledge elsewhere.

There is also a better reason for attention to the subject. No argument is needed to convince thinking people that this age stands in peculiar need of a revival, from some source, of that interest in the mysteries surrounding our little experience, without which no age has been really great.

The work hardly seemed worth doing at all unless on the present scale. If any reader begrudges the space, we can pretty safely promise that the subject will not call for so large a proportion in future [Editor].

In 1882 a group of friends who had been meeting occasionally at Cambridge for the discussion of mysterious phenomena, formed the Society for Psychical Research, and took rooms in London. The best known of the early members were Professor (now Sir William) Barrett, Professor Henry Sidgwick, Frederick W. H. Myers, Fellow of Cambridge, Arthur J. Balfour, Richard Holt Hutton (Editor of _The Spectator_); Professor Balfour Stewart, Hensleigh Wedgwood, Lord Houghton and Archbishop Trench. They were soon joined by, among others, Professor (now Sir William) Crookes, Alfred Russel Wallace, Lord Raleigh, Ruskin, Tennyson, William James, Edmund Gurney, Richard Hodgson, Frank Podmore, Professor (now Sir Oliver) Lodge, and Professor Schiller.

The Society's Proceedings now fill twenty-six octavo volumes, and it has also published a Journal for its members which has reached fifteen large twelvemo volumes.

All were originally published in "parts," of which, in all but two or three cases, several composed a volume. Any portion of the material can be obtained from the Society's American agents, the W. B. Clarke Co. of Boston.

The topic first reported on by the society was thought-transference. Experiments were made with cards, words, pictures and all sorts of objects. The Society published scores, possibly hundreds, of pairs of drawings, one of each pair having been made by a person not seeing the original, who had copied it closely enough to be recognized, in consequence of willing to copy it, and being similarly willed by another person drawing or gazing at it. Some of the duplicates would have been very fair performances even if the originals had been in sight.

The conviction before existing that all sorts of impressions could be conveyed at the will of a hypnotist, was abundantly confirmed, and a strong conviction was aroused in some minds, and it seems to be increasing, that all transference of thought without visible means has a hypnotic element, and is much more frequent than yet generally recognized.

Pictures were of course conveyed as subjective visions, and the Society began very early to collect and classify accounts of visions of all kinds, applying rigid canons of verification.

In 1886 the Society published a collection of "Phantasms of the Living" compiled by Gurney, Myers and Podmore. Seven hundred cases were thought sufficiently verified to be worth including.

This work was severely criticised by Mr. Charles Pearce in the Proceedings of a short-lived American society, and he was there answered by Mr. Gurney.

Gurney died while preparing a work on Phantasms of the Dead. His material was put in shape by Myers, and published in the Proceedings of the Society, Vol. V, pp. 403f. "Phantasms of the Living" is now out of print but much of its material is obtainable in Journal I and the Reports of the Literary Committee in the early volumes of the Proceedings.

Space does not admit of enough citation and discussion from these works to be of value. It may be said in general, however, that with one class of partial exceptions, there is hardly any ghost story that one has ever heard of which does not find its parallel here, confirmed by excellent witnesses and often by considerable supplementary investigation. The partial exceptions are the stories of freezing horror which, the evidence now suggests, would appear to have little, if any, basis in actual experience, but to be mainly the products of imagination--often of deliberate imagination laboring for dramatic effect. The authenticated phenomena are generally of gentle and innocuous character--appearance of dying friends, etc. There are some apparently of troubled souls, but hardly ever of malevolent ones.

The vast majority of the experiences have taken place in bed, and therefore are presumably dreams, and there is much reason to believe that the others come in some sort of a dream state, the whole business probably being associated, as before indicated, with telepathy, and telepathy probably being associated with hypnotism, not always voluntary or conscious.

The experiences are apparently of sight, sound, touch--all the senses. And yet in connection with visions, there have been few changes in objective Nature to account for them.

* * * * *

Much regarding hypnotism was published in the early volumes, but that subject is now so much a part of the knowledge of the medical world, and even the world in general, that we will not enlarge upon it here.

* * * * *

As there have "always" been stories of visions and hypnotic control, so there have been stories of objects moved by human beings without the exercise of muscular force, and indeed without contact. Years before the foundation of the S. P. R., the present writer saw a conclusive illustration of the first. It was an exhibition of something to which it might be well to transfer the name of zoömagnetism, which was originally suggested by Dr. Liebault for the force assumed to act in hypnotism. That assumption is now abandoned. For the effects of the force--the manifestations to the senses, the name telekinesis is accepted by the Society.

This zoömagnetic force with telekinetic effects seems quite plainly a mode of the cosmic energy. Putting it forth generally leaves the agent much exhausted, although very strangely in one of the best accounts, in Pr. S. P. R. VII, 175f. by Professor Alexander, of the University of Rio Janiero, regarding his neighbors the Davis children's performance, he says that they were not fatigued. This seems like a denial of the persistence of force. But there may be a force manifested by the human system and yet not generated in it (or appropriated by it from food and air), but merely passing through it, as some classes of thoughts are held by some students to be entirely independent of human origination. If so, there are _two_ modes of force as yet uncorrelated with our knowledge, which produce telekinetic effects: for there is certainly one which exhausts human energies. (See Pr. VI, VII, IX, XII.)

Perhaps a more certain correlation of the zoömagnetic force with the modes of force already well correlated, is that, if the evidence collected by the S. P. R. is reliable, it is, like them, mutable into the production of light--including the alleged magnetic aura, even around persons--sound, electricity and the other modes of force already well known. (See Pr. IV, VIII, IX, XI.) These modes possibly include that which moves the dowser's rod. But as we know of no case where a dowser has manifested any of the more definitely correlated modes of zoömagnetic force, the chance of dowsing being one is small. Much information regarding dowsing, which convinced several eminent scientists--Sir William Barrett among them, is published by the Society in Pr. II, XIII, XV. Moreover, there is evidence (Jour. IX, Pr. XV), so far as it goes, that the zoömagnetic force can _resist_ heat, not only in the Fijian "fire walk," but in London drawing-rooms in the person of the medium Home, but in him alone--that it has enabled him and many others to counteract the effects of gravity upon their own persons; and to "materialize," that is to produce on the senses of other people, possibly by hypnotizing several at once, without the aid of matter as we know it, the impressions of light, sound, resistance and pressure which ordinarily indicate the presence of the living human body, when no such object in the ordinary sense is actually present. (For all this see Jour. VI, Pr. VI, IX.)

The Society investigated the display of these phenomena by many agents, among them the notorious Eusapia Palladino. Her working in the dark and with a "cabinet" and other apparatus favorable for fraud, was of course against her, but it seems the unescapable conclusion that of her phenomena some were genuine--and some fraudulent. With unintelligent and uneducated mediums, the doctrine "falsus in uno falsus in omnibus" does not hold: for such mediums, often, sometimes involuntarily, eke out the lion's skin with the fox's.

* * * * *

The records of the Society contain much evidence of a connection between telekinetic power and the telepsychic power of conveying thought already described. Perhaps Mrs. Piper is the only well known medium not manifesting both. The two powers are shown together in tipping furniture or producing sounds or lights to signal yes and no; and while the alphabet is being enunciated, to mark letters so as to spell out significant words and sentences. There is strong reason to believe that the intelligence in these indications has been generally that of the operator, often acting involuntarily and entirely honestly, and sometimes, especially in the case of "planchette," that of some other person present, acting telepathically through the operator. (Pr. VII, IX, XI.)

Of course there has not been the slightest necessity of attributing any of these queer manifestations of zoömagnetism to "spirits," and, despite one or two exceptions (notably the late Stainton Moses), the members of the Society for Psychical Research have not so attributed them. But the average man has attributed all mysterious things to spirits, ever since the primitive times when everything was mysterious.

* * * * *

Unfortunately, two of the most remarkable mediums, perhaps the most remarkable, Foster and Home, were too early to come directly under the investigation of the S. P. R. as a body; but fortunately Sir William Crookes did come into association with Home in the early Seventies before the foundation of the Society, tested his zoömagnetism many times in the laboratory, with entirely satisfactory results, and later gave the Society the results of his observations, which were published in Journals VI and IX, and Pr. VI, IX and XV. Of course his testimony to a laboratory experiment is the last word, but many of his accounts of social sittings with Home stagger belief, and tempt an impression that there must have been hypnosis somewhere. But the Proceedings contain considerable collateral evidence. And Myers and Sir William Barrett applied "the higher criticism" to Home's autobiography and his wife's accounts of him, and published the results, which were favorable, in Jour. IV, VI.

* * * * *

But while the evidence for the things already recounted here was pouring in, there came evidence too strong to be thrown aside without examination, of things harder to attribute to any incarnate power.

Home's accordeon, we are told by no less an authority than Sir William Crookes, and by several others (Pr. Vol. VI), was often played intelligently and beautifully without the apparent agency of human hands; and the inspirational writing which in earlier times had come from overwrought religious mystics, began to appear from people who were by no means overwrought or mystical, or even religious, though the most noted of them was. This was the Rev. W. Stainton Moses, the first remarkable medium who associated freely with the members of the Society. It is alleged that he manifested movement of objects without contact, lights, sounds in both the air and material objects, levitation and materialization--all the modes of zoömagnetism except resistance to heat--assuming that to be one of them. His molecular telekineses indicated intelligence.

Myers says (Pr. IX, 250f.):

"In 1882 he aided in the foundation of the Society for Psychical
Research; but he left that body in 1886, on account of its
attitude towards Spiritualism, which he regarded as unduly
critical.... Many members of the Society held an intellectual
position widely differing from that of Mr. Moses, and although
his own published records were of a kind not easily credible, no
suspicion as to his personal probity and veracity was ever, so
far as I know, either expressed or entertained.

"... [Moses] was very reticent about exhibiting his powers, and
consequently almost the only records are his own and those of his
physician, Dr. Stanhope Speer, Mrs. Speer, and their son, Mr.
Charlton T. Speer, Associate of the Royal Academy of Music--all
persons of undoubted capacity and probity.... Dr. Speer's cast of
mind was thoroughly materialistic, and it is remarkable that his
interest in Mr. Moses' phenomena was from first to last of a
purely scientific, as contrasted with an emotional or religious
nature."

There are half a dozen other good witnesses, however.

Despite Moses' telepsychic telekineses, his principal alleged communications with the spirit world were by automatic (we prefer to call it heteromatic) writing. Of this he left twenty-four note books. The writings in these were in several different hands and bore the marks of as many different characters, that were never mixed up. They signed the names, Imperator, Rector, Doctor, etc., and declared their earthly selves to have been various eminent persons in the remote past.

* * * * *

We shall find later that after Moses' death, his alleged spirit gave an entirely different set of names for the earthly originals of these alleged personalities. Myers, having seen all the heteromatic writing, tacitly endorses Moses' statements regarding its visible qualities. Moses continues:

"By degrees I found that many spirits who were unable to
influence my hand themselves sought the aid of a spirit 'Rector'
[a gentleman whom we shall meet often. Editor of this article],
who was apparently able to write more freely and with less strain
on me;

He says that they differed from him and criticised him severely, but ultimately converted him to a higher faith than the Anglicanism he had previously preached.

* * * * *

Myers comments (Pr. XI, 69):

"The tone of the spirits towards Mr. Moses himself is habitually
courteous and respectful. But occasionally they have some
criticism which pierces to the quick, and which goes far to
explain to me Mr. Moses's unwillingness to have the books fully
inspected during his lifetime."

We have no space for any of this script, and it probably would not tend much to edification if we had. After a good deal of reading and pondering, I find the proportion of Moses' self in all these proceedings looming in my apprehension larger and larger. The benefits he got from them look to me like that portion--how large a portion I am not saying--of the benefits of prayer which are independent of external results, and consist in the effect upon character of intense absorption in an inspiring subject.

Myers testifies that Moses' heteromatic writing announced the death of a friend of Myers before it could have been known by other means, and that the writing closely resembled hers. Moses himself declares, and many fairly judicious people believed him, that among other marvels, the writing told him, in advance of any other possible agency, of the death of President Garfield, and of a suicide in London under a steam roller. The latter statement has several confirmatory witnesses.

The account of Moses is given here, not so much because of himself, as to prepare for later appearances of Imperator, Rector, Doctor & Co., which will be of more interest.

* * * * *

In America there was of course not leisure enough to continue the Am. S. P. R., which had been started a couple of years after the English one, and it was merged with the English Society, becoming a "branch." In 1887 Dr. Richard Hodgson, who had been lecturing at Cambridge, was sent over as secretary to take charge of it, and soon began a set of experiences which immeasurably surpass all others in connection with the subject.

In 1886, Professor William James had found a remarkable medium in Mrs. Piper, a New England woman of average position and education, and Dr. Hodgson devoted himself to her phenomena. In trance she spoke as a self-alleged French physician who called himself Dr. Jean Phinuit Schliville, and who professed to be in the other world in association with friends of people who came to sit with Mrs. Piper. Dr. Phinuit professed to give messages from them, and to deliver the sitters' messages to them. The only thing apparently unprecedented in these proceedings was the consistently dramatic character of Dr. Phinuit himself, and the verisimilitude, varying but often astounding, between the utterances, dramatic characterizations and recollections of the alleged message senders, and the persons as known in life.

Mrs. Piper's career with Dr. Phinuit was an inheritance by her from a Dr. Cocke, who was controlled by a Dr. Finney. Dr. Cocke was an "inspirational healer" and in 1884 Mrs. Piper went to consult him about some physical ailment. A circle was being held, and she joined it. On a second visit she experienced a sensation as of a blinding flash, and then fainted, and on recovering began to talk in trance as somebody else.

Hodgson says (Pr. VIII, 46f.):

"She was said to have been controlled by an Indian girl who gave
the name 'Chlorine,' and to have given a remarkable test to a
stranger who was present. She had several more sittings with Mr.
Cocke, and was again controlled, apparently on each occasion by
'Chlorine.'

This name is evidently pitched upon on account of its euphony and apparent femininity, by some consciousness--we can't tell whose, perhaps Mrs. Piper's subliminal (whatever that may mean)--unaware of the meaning of the word, which I hardly need tell the reader usually refers to a rather fetid gas. Hodgson continues:

"She was also ostensibly controlled at occasional times by Mrs.
Siddons, Bach, Longfellow, Commodore Vanderbilt, and Loretta
Ponchini. It was said that 'Mrs. Siddons' recited a scene from
Macbeth, Longfellow was said to have written some verses, and
Loretta Ponchini (who purported to be an Italian girl) to have
made some drawings....

"Dr. Phinuit only came at first to give medical advice. He
'didn't care to come for other matters,' as he thought them 'too
_trivial_.'

"Finally Sebastian Bach said they were going to concentrate all
their powers on Phinuit, and he became ultimately the chief
control.

"Mr. Piper says that there is no question but that it is the same
Phinuit or personality who controls Dr. Cocke, no matter how
their names are spelt."

All this seems clap-trap, but wait.

* * * * *

The questions regarding Phinuit are different from those regarding most of the other controls in the Society's records: for, with the exception of the Imperator group, they, in ordinary life, were generally known, personally or historically, to the sitters; while Phinuit has loomed upon the world as free from origins as Melchizedek, and some people think, despite his lack of priestly ways, with as important a mission. But he has alleged a lot of origins that, so far, cannot be traced. Even, however, if they never can be, the fact would not prove that he never existed.

After a while the communications began to be occasionally in writing, and at times the voice would be speaking as Phinuit, and the hand writing as somebody else. There was at least one occasion (Pr. XIII, 293) when Phinuit was joking with a lot of young girls, and the hand writing on other subjects with Dr. Hodgson.

The records of the S. P. R. contain the most contradictory accounts of Phinuit's character and attainments. Several habitual sitters are very fond of him. He and Sir Oliver Lodge were intimate friends, and while I have had but one conversation with him, I find reading him as delightful as reading Falstaff. Yet Professor Shaler calls him a preposterous scoundrel, as was Falstaff; but I can't find serious dishonesty in Phinuit.

Professor William James, who went to school in French Switzerland, and was entirely at home in French, says Phinuit knew none. Other sitters agree with him. Mr. Rogers Rich, who was equally at home in the language, says he and Phinuit talked French together a good deal, to Mr. Rich's entire satisfaction. Other sitters indicate the same. Mrs. Piper knew no French. Mr. Rich and many sitters, including Sir Oliver Lodge, in whose family Dr. Phinuit practiced extensively, found benefit in his prescriptions; he successfully gave one treatment which seems to the lay mind the opposite of reasonable, and yet I myself found prompt relief through a similar one given by an eminent New York physician. Nevertheless there are those who call Phinuit a shameless quack. While in the Pr. S. P. R. there are several prescriptions by him in correct technical language, there are also several statements that he does not know the ordinary terms of the pharmacopeia.

The following particulars are taken from a report on Mrs. Piper's trance which Hodgson made to the S. P. R. in 1892 published in Vol. VIII of their Proceedings. Although the messages generally went through Dr. Phinuit, sometimes the alleged personages themselves took control and carried on conversations with their friends through the vocal organs and gestures of Mrs. Piper. The voices of the controls varied with the alleged personalities.

_R. Hodgson. First Sitting. May 4th, 1887._ (Pr. VIII, 60.)

[From notes made on return to my rooms immediately after the
sitting.]

"Phinuit began, after the usual introduction, by describing
[correctly] members of my family....

"Phinuit mentioned the name 'Fred.' ... 'He says you went to
school together. He goes on jumping-frogs, and laughs.... He had
convulsive movements before his death, struggles. He went off in
a sort of spasm.... [My cousin Fred far excelled any other person
that I have seen in the games of leap-frog, fly the garter,
etc.... He injured his spine in a gymnasium ... lingered for a
fortnight, with occasional spasmodic convulsions, in one of which
he died.] Phinuit described a lady, in general terms, dark hair,
dark eyes, slim figure, etc., and said she was much closer to me
than any other person: that she 'died slowly.' ... She had two
rings; one was buried with her body; the other ought to have gone
to you. The second part of her first name is--sie.' [True, with
the exception of the statement about the rings, which may or may
not be true.... No ring ever passed between the lady and
myself.... After trying in vain to 'hear distinctly' the first
part of the name, Phinuit gave up the attempt, and asked me what
the first name was. I told him. I shall refer to it afterwards as
'Q.']"

All this could well have been involuntary telepathy from Hodgson to the medium. But again, wait.

At Hodgson's second sitting, November 18th, 1887, Phinuit referred to the beautiful teeth of "Q." and Hodgson says: "'Q.'s' teeth were not beautiful."

* * * * *

Here is something better (Pr. VIII):

"5, Boylston-place, _March 6th, 1889_.

"Mr. Robertson James has just called here on return from a
sitting with Mrs. P., during which he was informed by Mrs.
P.--entranced--that 'Aunt Kate' had died about 2 or 2.30 in the
morning. Aunt Kate was also referred to as Mrs. Walsh.

"Mrs. Walsh has been ill for some time and has been expected
during the last few days to die at any hour. This is written
before any despatch has been received informing of the death, in
presence of the following:--

"RICHARD HODGSON.
"WILLIAM JAMES.
"ROBERTSON JAMES.

"On reaching home an hour later I found a telegram as
follows:--'Aunt Kate passed away a few minutes after
midnight.--E. R. WALSH.'

"(Signed) WM. JAMES.

"Mrs. William James, who accompanied Mr. Robertson James to the
sitting on March 6th, writes as follows:--

"18, Garden-street, CAMBRIDGE, _March 28th, 1889_.