I proceed now to indicate in further detail the nature of the evidence and the character of the manifestations themselves, and begin by quoting from Dr. Hodgson (_Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xiii. pp. 367-68) a brief statement of some of the historical facts of the case.
Mrs. Piper has been giving sittings for a period extending over thirteen [now, 1901, seventeen] years. Very early in her trance history she came under the attention of Professor James, who sent many persons to her as strangers, in most cases making the appointments himself, and in no case giving their names. She came to some extent under my own supervision in 1887, and I also sent many persons to her, in many cases accompanying them and recording the statements made at their sittings, and taking all the care that I could to prevent Mrs. Piper"s obtaining any knowledge beforehand of who the sitters were to be. In 1889-90 Mrs. Piper gave a series of sittings in England under the supervision of Dr. Walter Leaf and Mr. Myers and Professor Lodge, where also the most careful precautions possible were taken to ensure that the sitters went as strangers to Mrs. Piper. Further sittings were supervised by myself in 1890-91 after Mrs. Piper"s return to America. Many persons who had sittings in the course of these earlier investigations were convinced that they were actually receiving communications from their "deceased" friends through Mrs. Piper"s trance, but although the special investigators were satisfied, from their study of the trance-phenomena themselves and a careful a.n.a.lysis of the detailed records of the sittings, that some supernormal power was involved, there was no definite agreement as to their precise significance.
And to myself it seemed that any hypothesis that was offered presented formidable difficulties in the way of its acceptance. In the course of these earlier investigations the communications were given almost entirely through the speech-utterance of the trance-personality known as Phinuit, and even the best of them were apt to include much matter that was irrelevant and unlike the alleged communicators, while there were many indications that Phinuit himself was far from being the kind of person in whom we should be disposed to place implicit credence.
During the years 1892-96 inclusive, I exercised a yet closer supervision of Mrs. Piper"s trances than I had done in previous years, continuing to take all the precautions that I could as regards the introduction of persons as strangers. This period was marked by a notable evolution in the quality of the trance results, beginning early in 1892. The character of the manifestations changed with the development of automatic writing in the trance, and with what was alleged to be the continual rendering of active a.s.sistance by the communicator whom I have called G. P. [George Pelham]. As a result of this it appeared that communicators were able to express their thoughts directly through the writing by Mrs.
Piper"s hand, instead of conveying them more dimly and partially through Phinuit as intermediary; and the advice and guidance which they, apparently, received from G. P. enabled them to avoid much of the confusion and irrelevancy so characteristic of the earlier manifestations.
I do not propose here to discuss the hypothesis of fraud in this case, since it has been fully discussed by Dr. Hodgson, Professor William James, Professor Newbold of Pennsylvania University, Dr. Walter Leaf, and Sir Oliver Lodge.[209] I merely quote, as a summary of the argument, a few words of Professor James, from _The Psychological Review_, July, 1898, pp. 421-22:--
Dr. Hodgson considers that the hypothesis of fraud cannot be seriously maintained. I agree with him absolutely. The medium has been under observation, much of the time under close observation, as to most of the conditions of her life, by a large number of persons, eager, many of them, to pounce upon any suspicious circ.u.mstance for [nearly] fifteen years. During that time, not only has there not been one single suspicious circ.u.mstance remarked, but not one suggestion has ever been made from any quarter which might tend positively to explain how the medium, living the apparent life she leads, could possibly collect information about so many sitters by natural means. The scientist who is confident of "fraud" here, must remember that in science as much as in common life a hypothesis must receive some positive specification and determination before it can be profitably discussed, and a fraud which is no a.s.signed kind of fraud, but simply "fraud" at large, fraud _in abstracto_, can hardly be regarded as a specially scientific explanation of concrete facts.
Unfortunately we have no contemporary records of what occurred during Mrs. Piper"s earliest trances; nor practically any information as to the first manifestations of the Phinuit personality. It seems clear at least that the _name_ Phinuit was the result of suggestion at these earliest trances (see _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. viii. pp. 46-58), and many may think it most probable that the Phinuit "control" was nothing more than a secondary personality of Mrs. Piper. But, according to the statements (for which there is of course no evidence) made by "Imperator," Phinuit was an "earth-bound" or inferior spirit, who had become confused and bewildered in his first attempts at communication, and had, as we say, "lost his consciousness of personal ident.i.ty." That such an occurrence is not uncommon in this life is plain from the cases to which I have drawn attention in Chapter II. of this book, and we cannot prove it to be impossible that profound memory disturbances should be produced in an inexperienced discarnate spirit when first attempting to communicate with us through a material organism. Be that as it may, the Phinuit personality has not manifested either directly or indirectly since January 1897, when "Imperator" claimed the supervision of Mrs. Piper"s trances.
There were various cases of alleged direct "control" by spirits other than Phinuit during the first stage of Mrs. Piper"s trance history. But such cases were not usual, and on the whole, although there seemed to be abundant proof of some supernormal faculty which demanded at least the hypothesis of thought-transference from living persons both near and distant, and suggested occasionally some power of telaesthesia or perhaps even of premonition, yet the main question with which we are now concerned,--whether Mrs. Piper"s organism was controlled, directly or indirectly, by discarnate spirits who could give satisfactory evidence of their ident.i.ty,--remained undecided.
More important, as regards this question of personal ident.i.ty, is the series of sittings which formed the second stage of Mrs. Piper"s trance history, in the years 1892-96, (of which a detailed account is given in _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xiii. pp. 284-582, and vol. xiv. pp. 6-49), where the chief communicator or intermediary was G. P. This G. P., whose name (although, of course, well known to many persons) has been altered for publication into "George Pelham," was a young man of great ability, mainly occupied in literary pursuits. Although born an American citizen, he was a member of a n.o.ble English family. I never met him, but I have the good fortune to include a number of his friends among my own, and with several of these I have been privileged to hold intimate conversation on the nature of the communications which they received. I have thus heard of many significant utterances of G. P."s, which are held too private for print; and I have myself been present at sittings where G. P. manifested. For the full discussion of the evidence tending to prove the ident.i.ty of G. P., I refer my readers to the original report in the _Proceedings_ S.P.R. I quote here a general summary, given by Dr. Hodgson several years later, of the whole series of his manifestations. (From _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xiii. pp. 328-330.)
On the first appearance of the communicating G. P. to Mr. Hart in March 1892, he gave not only his own name and that of the sitter, but also the names of several of their most intimate common friends, and referred specifically to the most important private matters connected with them. At the same sitting reference was made to other incidents unknown to the sitters, such as the account of Mrs. Pelham"s taking the studs from the body of G. P. and giving them to Mr. Pelham to be sent to Mr. Hart, and the reproduction of a notable remembrance of a conversation which G. P. living had with Katharine, the daughter of his most intimate friends, the Howards.
These were primary examples of two kinds of knowledge concerning matters unknown to the sitters, of which various other instances were afterwards given; knowledge of events connected with G. P.
which had occurred since his death, and knowledge of special memories pertaining to the G. P. personality before death. A week later, at the sitting of Mr. Vance, he made an appropriate inquiry after the sitter"s son, and in reply to inquiries rightly specified that the sitter"s son had been at college with him, and further correctly gave a correct description of the sitter"s summer home as the place of a special visit. This, again, was paralleled by many later instances where appropriate inquiries were made and remembrances recalled concerning other personal friends of G. P.
Nearly two weeks later came his most intimate friends, the Howards, and to these, using the voice directly, he showed such a fulness of private remembrance and specific knowledge and characteristic intellectual and emotional quality pertaining to G. P. that, though they had previously taken no interest in any branch of psychical research, they were unable to resist the conviction that they were actually conversing with their old friend G. P. And this conviction was strengthened by their later experiences. Not least important, at that time, was his anxiety about the disposal of a certain book and about certain specified letters which concern matters too private for publication. He was particularly desirous of convincing his father, who lived in Washington, that it was indeed G. P. who was communicating, and he soon afterwards stated that his father had taken his photograph to be copied, as was the case, though Mr.
Pelham had not informed even his wife of this fact. Later on he reproduced a series of incidents, unknown to the sitters, in which Mrs. Howard had been engaged in her own home. Later still, at a sitting with his father and mother in New York, a further intimate knowledge was shown of private family circ.u.mstances, and at the following sitting, at which his father and mother were not present, he gave the details of certain private actions which they had done in the interim. At their sitting, and at various sittings of the Howards, appropriate comments were made concerning different articles presented which had belonged to G. P. living, or had been familiar to him; he inquired after other personal articles which were not presented at the sittings, and showed intimate and detailed recollections of incidents in connection with them. In points connected with the recognition of articles with their related a.s.sociations of a personal sort, the G. P. communicating, so far as I know, has never failed. Nor has he failed in the recognition of personal friends. I may say generally that out of a large number of sitters who went as strangers to Mrs. Piper, the communicating G. P. has picked out the friends of G. P. living, precisely as the G. P. living might have been expected to do [thirty cases of recognition out of at least one hundred and fifty persons who have had sittings with Mrs. Piper since the first appearance of G. P., and no case of false recognition], and has exhibited memories in connection with these and other friends which are such as would naturally be a.s.sociated as part of the G. P.
personality, which certainly do not suggest in themselves that they originate otherwise, and which are accompanied by the emotional relations which were connected with such friends in the mind of G.
P. living. At one of his early communications G. P. expressly undertook the task of rendering all the a.s.sistance in his power towards establishing the continued existence of himself and other communicators, in pursuance of a promise of which he himself reminded me, made some two years or more before his death, that if he died before me and found himself "still existing," he would devote himself to prove the fact; and in the persistence of his endeavour to overcome the difficulties in communicating as far as possible, in his constant readiness to act as amanuensis at the sittings, in the effect which he has produced by his counsels,--to myself as investigator, and to numerous other sitters and communicators,--he has, in so far as I can form a judgment in a problem so complex and still presenting so much obscurity, displayed all the keenness and pertinacity which were eminently characteristic of G. P. living.
Finally the manifestations of this G. P. communicating have not been of a fitful and spasmodic nature, they have exhibited the marks of a continuous living and persistent personality, manifesting itself through a course of years, and showing the same characteristics of an independent intelligence whether friends of G. P. were present at the sittings or not. I learned of various cases where in my absence active a.s.sistance was rendered by G. P.
to sitters who had never previously heard of him, and from time to time he would make brief pertinent reference to matters with which G. P. living was acquainted, though I was not, and sometimes in ways which indicated that he could to some extent see what was happening in our world to persons in whose welfare G. P. living would have been specially interested.
The sitter called Mr. Hart, to whom G. P. first manifested, died at Naples three years afterwards, and communicated, with the help of G. P., on the second day after his death. An account of his communications is given in _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xiii. pp. 353-57.
There are numerous instances in the reports in the _Proceedings_ (see vol. vi. pp. 647-50; vol. viii. pp. 15-26; vol. xiii., _pa.s.sim_; and vol. xvi. pp. 131-3), of the giving of information unknown to the sitters and afterwards verified. A striking ill.u.s.tration of this occurred in the case of the lady called "Elisa Mannors," whose near relatives and friends concerned in the communications were known to myself. On the morning after the death of her uncle, called F. in the report, she described an incident in connection with the appearance of herself to her uncle on his death-bed. I quote Dr. Hodgson"s account of this (_Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xiii. p. 378, footnote).
The notice of his [F."s] death was in a Boston morning paper, and I happened to see it on my way to the sitting. The first writing of the sitting came from Madame Elisa, without my expecting it. She wrote clearly and strongly, explaining that F. was there with her, but unable to speak directly, that she wished to give me an account of how she had helped F. to reach her. She said that she had been present at his death-bed, and had spoken to him, and she repeated what she had said, an unusual form of expression, and indicated that he had heard and recognised her. This was confirmed in detail in the only way possible at that time, by a very intimate friend of Madame Elisa and myself, and also of the nearest surviving relative of F. I showed my friend the account of the sitting, and to this friend, a day or two later, the relative, who was present at the death-bed, stated spontaneously that F. when dying said that he saw Madame Elisa who was speaking to him, and he repeated what she was saying. The expression so repeated, which the relative quoted to my friend, was that which I had received from Madame Elisa through Mrs. Piper"s trance, when the death-bed incident was of course entirely unknown to me.
Rare are the "Peak in Darien" cases (see page 233), but cases like this are rarer still.
With regard to the last of the three periods of Mrs. Piper"s trance-history, the only detailed published accounts are contained in Professor Hyslop"s report of his sittings in _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol.
xvi.[210] But neither his records nor the ma.n.u.script records which I have seen contain any proof of the personal ident.i.ty of the alleged spirits called "Imperator," "Doctor," "Rector," etc., or any proof of the ident.i.ty of these intelligences with those claimed by Mr. Moses.
(See _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xiii. pp. 408-9.) Whether any such proof will be forthcoming in the future remains to be seen,--or indeed, whether proof or disproof for us at present is even possible.
We must now try to form some more definite idea--based not on preconceived theories but on our actual observation of trances--of the processes of possession.
Let us try to realise what kind of feat it is which we are expecting the disembodied spirit to achieve. Such language, I know, again suggests the medicine-man"s wigwam rather than the study of the white philosopher.
Yet can we feel sure that the process in our own minds which has (as we think) refined and spiritualised man"s early conceptions of an unseen world has been based upon any observed facts?
In dealing with matters which lie outside human experience, our only clue is some attempt at _continuity_ with what we already know. We cannot, for instance, form independently a reliable conception of life in an unseen world. That conception has never yet been fairly faced from the standpoint of our modern ideas of continuity, conservation, evolution. The main notions that have been framed of such survival have been framed first by savages and then by _a priori_ philosophers.
The savage made his own picture first. And he at any rate dimly felt after a principle of continuity; although he applied it in the crudest fashion. Yet the happy hunting-ground and the faithful dog were conceptions not more arbitrary and unscientific than that eternal and unimaginable worship _in vacuo_ which more accredited teachers have proclaimed. And, pa.s.sing on to modern philosophic conceptions, one may say that where the savage a.s.sumed _too little_ difference between the material and the spiritual world the philosopher has a.s.sumed _too much_.
He has regarded the gulf as too unbridgeable; he has taken for granted too clean a sweep of earthly modes of thought. Trying to shake off time, s.p.a.ce, and definite form, he has attempted to transport himself too magically to what may be in reality an immensely distant goal.
What, then, is to be our conception of ident.i.ty prolonged beyond the tomb? In earth-life the actual body, in itself but a subordinate element in our thought of our friend, did yet by its physical continuity override as a symbol of ident.i.ty all lapses of memory, all changes of the character within. Yet it was memory and character,--the stored impressions upon which he reacted, and his specific mode of reaction,--which made our veritable friend. How much of memory, how much of character, must he preserve for our recognition?
Do we ask that either he or we should remember always, or should remember all? Do we ask that his memory should be expanded into omniscience and his character elevated into divinity? And, whatever heights he may attain, do we demand that he should reveal to us? Are the limitations of our material world no barrier to him?
It is safest to fall back for the present upon the few points which these communications do seem to indicate. The spirit, then, is holding converse with a living man, located in a certain place at a certain moment, and animated by certain thoughts and emotions. The spirit (to which I must give a neuter p.r.o.noun for greater clearness) in some cases can find and follow the man as it pleases. It is therefore in some way cognizant of s.p.a.ce, although not conditioned by s.p.a.ce. Its mastery of s.p.a.ce may perhaps bear somewhat the same relation to our eyesight as our eyesight bears to the gropings of the blind. Similarly, the spirit appears to be partly cognizant of our _time_, although not wholly conditioned thereby. It is apt to see as _present_ both certain things which appear to us as past and certain things which appear to us as future.
Once more, the spirit is at least partly conscious of the thought and emotions of its earthly friend, so far as directed towards itself; and this not only when the friend is in the presence of the sensitive, but also (as G. P. has repeatedly shown) when the friend is at home and living his ordinary life.
Lastly, it seems as though the spirit had some occasional glimpses of material fact upon the earth (as the contents of drawers and the like), not manifestly proceeding through any living mind. I do not, however, recall any clear evidence of a spirit"s perception of material facts which provably have never been known to any incarnate mind whatever.
Accepting this, then, for argument"s sake, as the normal condition of a spirit in reference to human things, what process must it attempt if it wishes to communicate with living men? That it _will_ wish to communicate seems probable enough, if it retains not only memory of the loves of earth, but actual fresh consciousness of loving emotion directed towards it after death.
Seeking then for some open avenue, it discerns something which corresponds (in G. P."s phrase) to a _light_--a glimmer of translucency in the confused darkness of our material world. This "light" indicates a _sensitive_--a human organism so const.i.tuted that a spirit can temporarily _inform_ or _control_ it, not necessarily interrupting the stream of the sensitive"s ordinary consciousness; perhaps using a hand only, or perhaps, as in Mrs. Piper"s case, using voice as well as hand, and occupying all the sensitive"s channels of self-manifestation. The difficulties which must be inherent in such an act of control are thus described by Dr. Hodgson:--
"If, indeed, each one of us is a "spirit" that survives the death of the fleshly organism, there are certain suppositions that I think we may not unreasonably make concerning the ability of the discarnate "spirit" to communicate with those yet incarnate. Even under the best of conditions for communication--which I am supposing for the nonce to be possible--it may well be that the apt.i.tude for communicating clearly may be as rare as the gifts that make a great artist, or a great mathematician, or a great philosopher. Again, it may well be that, owing to the change connected with death itself, the "spirit" may at first be much confused, and such confusion may last for a long time; and even after the "spirit"
has become accustomed to its new environment, it is not an unreasonable supposition that if it came into some such relation to another living human organism as it once maintained with its own former organism, it would find itself confused by that relation. The state might be like that of awaking from a prolonged period of unconsciousness into strange surroundings. If my own ordinary body could be preserved in its present state, and I could absent myself from it for days or months or years, and continue my existence under another set of conditions altogether, and if I could then return to my own body, it might well be that I should be very confused and incoherent at first in my manifestations by means of it. How much more would this be the case were I to return to _another_ human body. I might be troubled with various forms of aphasia and agraphia, might be particularly liable to failures of inhibition, might find the conditions oppressive and exhausting, and my state of mind would probably be of an automatic and dreamlike character. Now, the communicators through Mrs. Piper"s trance exhibit precisely the kind of confusion and incoherence which it seems to me we have some reason _a priori_ to expect if they are actually what they claim to be."
At the outset of this chapter I compared the phenomena of possession with those of alternating personalities, of dreams, and of somnambulism.
Now it seems probable that the thesis of multiplex personality--namely, that no known current of man"s consciousness exhausts his whole consciousness, and no known self-manifestation expresses man"s whole potential being--may hold good both for embodied and for unembodied men, and this would lead us to expect that the manifestations of the departed,--through the sensory automatisms dealt with in Chapter VII., and the motor automatisms considered in Chapter VIII., up to the completer form of possession ill.u.s.trated in the present chapter,--would resemble those fugitive and unstable communications between widely different strata of personality of which embodied minds offer us examples. G. P. himself appears to be well aware of the dreamlike character of the communications, which, indeed, his own style often exemplifies. Thus he wrote on February 15th, 1894:--
"Remember we share and always shall have our friends in the dream-life, _i.e._ your life so to speak, which will attract us for ever and ever, and so long as we have any friends _sleeping_ in the material world; you to us are more like as we understand sleep, you look shut up as one in prison, and in order for us to get into communication with you, we have to enter into your sphere, as one like yourself, asleep. This is just why we make mistakes, as you call them, or get confused and muddled."
Yet even this very difficulty and fragmentariness of communication ought in the end to be for us full of an instruction of its own. We are here actually witnessing the central mystery of human life, unrolling itself under novel conditions, and open to closer observation than ever before.
We are seeing a mind use a brain. The human brain is in its last a.n.a.lysis an arrangement of matter expressly adapted to being acted upon by a spirit; but so long as the accustomed spirit acts upon it the working is generally too smooth to allow us a glimpse of the mechanism.
_Now_, however, we can watch an unaccustomed spirit, new to the instrument, installing itself and feeling its way. The lessons thus learnt are likely to be more penetrating than any which mere morbid interruptions of the accustomed spirit"s work can teach us. In aphasia, for instance, we can watch with instruction special difficulties of utterance, supervening on special injuries to the brain. But in _possession_ we perceive the controlling spirit actually engaged in overcoming somewhat similar difficulties--writing or uttering the wrong word, and then getting hold of the right one--and sometimes even finding power to explain to us something of the minute verbal mechanism (so to term it) through whose blocking or dislocation the mistake has arisen.
And we may hope, indeed, that as our investigations proceed, and as we on this side of the fateful gulf, and the discarnate spirits on the other, learn more of the conditions necessary for perfect control of the brain and nervous system of intermediaries,--the communications will grow fuller and more coherent, and reach a higher level of unitary consciousness.
Among the cases of trance discussed in this chapter, we have found intimately interwoven with the phenomena of possession many instances of its correlative,--ecstasy. Mrs. Piper"s fragmentary utterances and visions during her pa.s.sage from trance to waking life,--utterances and visions that fade away and leave no remembrance in her waking self; Stainton Moses" occasional visions, his journeys in the "spirit world"
which he recorded on returning to his ordinary consciousness; Home"s entrancement and converse with the various controls whose messages he gave;--all these suggest actual excursions of the incarnate spirit from its organism. The theoretical importance of these spiritual excursions is, of course, very great. It is, indeed, so great that most men will hesitate to accept a thesis which carries us straight into the inmost sanctuary of mysticism; which preaches "a precursory entrance into the most holy place, as by divine transportation."
Yet I think that this belief, although extreme, is not, at the point to which our evidence has carried us, in any real way improbable. To put the matter briefly, if a spirit from outside can enter the organism, the spirit from inside can go out, can change its centre of perception and action, in a way less complete and irrevocable than the change of death.
Ecstasy would thus be simply the complementary or correlative aspect of spirit-control. Such a change need not be a _spatial_ change, any more than there need be any _spatial_ change for the spirit which invades the deserted organism. Nay, further: if the incarnate spirit can in this manner change its centre of perception in response (so to say) to a discarnate spirit"s invasion of the organism, there is no obvious reason why it should not do so on other occasions as well. We are already familiar with "travelling clairvoyance," a spirit"s change of centre of perception among the scenes of the material world. May there not be an extension of travelling clairvoyance to the spiritual world? a spontaneous transfer of the centre of perception into that region from whence discarnate spirits seem now to be able, on their side, to communicate with growing freedom?
The conception of _ecstasy_--at once in its most literal and in its most lofty sense--has thus developed itself, almost insensibly, from several concurrent lines of actual modern evidence. It must still, of course, be long before we can at all adequately separate,--I can hardly say the objective from the subjective element in the experience, for we have got beyond the region where the meaning of those words is clear,--but the element in the experience which is recognised and responded to by spirits other than the ecstatic"s, from the element which belongs to his own spirit alone.
In the meantime, however, the fact that this kind of communion of ecstasy has been, in preliminary fashion, rendered probable is of the highest importance for our whole inquiry. We thus come directly into relation with the highest form which the various religions known to men have a.s.sumed in the past.
It is hardly a paradox to say that the evidence for ecstasy is stronger than the evidence for any other religious belief. Of all the subjective experiences of religion, ecstasy is that which has been most urgently, perhaps to the psychologist most convincingly, a.s.serted; and it is not confined to any one religion. From a psychological point of view, one main indication of the importance of a subjective phenomenon found in religious experience will be the fact that it is common to all religions. I doubt whether there is any phenomenon, except ecstasy, of which this can be said. From the medicine-man of the lowest savages up to St. John, St. Peter, St. Paul, with Buddha, Mahomet and Swedenborg on the way, we find records which, though morally and intellectually much differing, are in psychological essence the same.
At all stages alike we find that the spirit is conceived as quitting the body; or, if not quitting it, at least as greatly expanding its range of perception in some state resembling trance. Observe, moreover, that on this view all genuine recorded forms of ecstasy are akin, and all of them represent a real fact.
To our embodied souls the matter round us seems real and self-existent; to souls emanc.i.p.ated it is but the sign of the degree which we have reached, and thus the highest task of science must be to link and co-ordinate the symbols appropriate to our terrene state with the symbols appropriate to the state immediately above us. Nay, one might push this truth to paradox, and maintain that of all earth"s inspired spirits it has been the least divinised, the least lovable, who has opened the surest path for men. Religions have risen and die again; philosophy, poetry, heroism, answer only indirectly the prime need of men. Plotinus, "the eagle soaring above the tomb of Plato," is lost to sight in the heavens. Conquering and to conquer, the Maid rides on through other worlds than ours. Virgil himself, "light among the vanished ages, star that gildest yet this earthly sh.o.r.e," sustains our spirit, as I have said, but indirectly, by filling still our fountain of purest intellectual joy. But the prosaic Swede,--his stiff mind p.r.i.c.kly with dogma,--the opaque cell-walls of his intelligence flooded cloudily by the irradiant day,--this man as by the very limitations of his faculty, by the practical humility of a spirit trained to acquire but not to generate truth,--has awkwardly laid the corner-stone, grotesquely sketched the elevation of a temple which our remotest posterity will be upbuilding and adorning still. For he dimly felt that man"s true pa.s.sage and intuition from state to state depends not upon individual ecstasy, but upon comprehensive law; while yet all law is in fact but symbol; adaptation of truth timeless and infinite to intelligences of lower or higher range.
Beyond us still is mystery; but it is mystery lit and mellowed with an infinite hope. We ride in darkness at the haven"s mouth; but sometimes through rifted clouds we see the desires and needs of many generations floating and melting upwards into a distant glow, "up through the light of the seas by the moon"s long-silvering ray."
The high possibilities that lie before us should be grasped once for all, in order that the dignity of the quest may help to carry the inquirer through many disappointments, deceptions, delays. But he must remember that this inquiry must be extended over many generations; nor must he allow himself to be persuaded that there are byways to mastery.
I will not say that there cannot possibly be any such thing as occult wisdom, or dominion over the secrets of nature ascetically or magically acquired. But I will say that every claim of this kind which my colleagues or I have been able to examine has proved deserving of complete mistrust; and that we have no confidence here any more than elsewhere in any methods except the open, candid, straightforward methods which the spirit of modern science demands.