A comparison will aid in comprehending this. Take a carriage-wheel. Place it horizontally on a pivot. While the wheel is motionless, let a rubber ball fall between its spokes. This ball will almost always pa.s.s through between the spokes. Now give a slight movement to the wheel. The ball will be pretty often hit by the revolving spokes, and will rebound. If we increase the rotation, the ball will now no longer pa.s.s through the wheel, which will have become for it a wholly impenetrable disc.
We can try a similar experiment by arranging the wheel vertically and shooting arrows through it. A bicycle-wheel will serve the purpose very well, owing to the slenderness of its spokes. When not in movement, the arrows will pa.s.s through it nine times out of ten. In movement, it will produce in the arrows deviations more or less marked. With increase in the speed, it would be made impenetrable, and all the arrows would be broken as if against the steel plating of an armored ship.
These comparisons allow us to understand how matter is really only a mode of motion, only an expression of force, a manifestation of energy. It will disappear (it must be borne in mind) on a.n.a.lysis, which ends by taking refuge in the intangible, invisible, imponderable, and almost immaterial atom. The atom itself which was regarded as the basis of matter fifty years ago, has now disappeared, or rather has been metamorphosed and reappears as a hypothetical, impalpable vortex.
I will allow myself to repeat here what I have said a hundred times elsewhere: _The universe is a dynamism_.
The difficulty we have in explaining to ourselves apparitions, materializations, when we try to apply to them the ordinary conception of matter, is considerably lessened the moment we conceive that matter is only a mode of motion.
Life itself, from the most rudimentary cell up to the most complicated organism, is a special kind of movement, a movement determined and organized by a directing force. According to this theory, momentary apparitions would be less difficult to accept and to comprehend. The vital force of the medium might externalize itself and produce in a point of s.p.a.ce a vibratory system which should be the counterpart of itself, in a more or less advanced degree of visibility and solidity. These phenomena can with difficulty be reconciled with the old hypothesis of the independent and intrinsic existence of matter: They better fit that of matter as a mode of motion--in a word, simple movement, giving the sensation of matter.
There is, of course, only one substance, the primitive substance, which antedates the original nebula--the womb from which all bodies in the universe have issued. The substances which the chemists take to be simple bodies--oxygen, hydrogen, azote, iron, gold, silver, etc.--are mineral elements which have been gradually formed and differentiated, just as, later, the vegetable and animal species were differentiated. And not only is the substance of the world one, but it also has the same origin as energy, and these two forms are mutually interchangeable. Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed.[86]
The unique substance is immaterial and unknowable in its essence. We see and touch only its condensations, its aggregations, its arrangements; that is to say, forms produced by movement. Matter, force, life, thought, are all one.
In reality, there is only one principle in the universe, and it is at once intelligence, force, and matter, embracing all that is and all that possibly can be. That which we call matter is only a form of motion. At the basis of all is force, dynamism, and universal mind, or spirit.
Visible matter, which stands to us at the present moment for the universe, and which certain cla.s.sic doctrines consider as the origin of all things--movement, life, thought--is only a word void of meaning. The universe is a great organism controlled by a dynamism of the psychical order. Mind gleams through its every atom.
The environment or atmosphere is psychic. There is mind in every thing, not only in human and animal life, but in plants, in minerals, in s.p.a.ce.
It is not the body which produces life: it is rather life which organizes the body. Does not the will to live increase the viability of enfeebled persons, just as the giving up of the wish to live may abridge life and even extinguish it?
Your heart beats, night and day, whatever be the position of your body. It is a well-mounted spring. Who or what adjusted this elastic spring?
The embryo is formed in the womb of the mother, in the egg of the bird.
There is neither heart nor brain. At a certain moment the heart beats for the first time. Sublime moment! It will beat in the child, in the adolescent, in the man, in the woman, at the rate of about 100,000 pulsations a day, of 36,500,000 a year, of 1,825,000,000 in fifty years.
This heart that has just been formed is going to beat a thousand millions of pulsations, two thousand millions, three thousand millions, a number determined by its inherent force; then it will stop and the body will fall into ruins. Who or what wound up this watch once for all?
Dynamism, the vital energy.
What sustains the earth in s.p.a.ce?
Dynamism, the velocity of its movement.
What is it in the bullet that kills?
Its velocity.
Everywhere energy, everywhere the invisible element. It is this same dynamism that produces the phenomena we have been studying. The question at present resolves itself into this: Does this dynamism belong wholly to the experimenters? We have so little real knowledge of our mental nature that it is impossible for us to know what this nature is capable of producing, even in certain states of unconsciousness--in fact especially in these. The directing intelligence is not always the personal, _normal_, intelligence of the experimenters or of any one whatever among them. We ask the ent.i.ty what its name is, and it gives us a name which is not ours; it replies to our questions, and usually claims to be a discarnate soul, the spirit of a deceased person. But if we drive the question home, this ent.i.ty finally steals away without having given us sufficient proofs of its ident.i.ty. There results from this the impression that the "medium," or princ.i.p.al subject of the experiment, has responded for himself, has reflected himself, without knowing it.
Moreover, this ent.i.ty, this personality, this spirit, has his individual will, his caprices, his cantankerousness, and sometimes acts in opposition to our own thoughts. He tells us absurd, foolish, brutal, insane things, and amuses himself with fantastic combinations of letters, real head-splitting puzzles. It astonishes and stupefies us.
What is this being?
Two inescapable hypotheses present themselves. Either it is we who produce these phenomena or it is spirits. But mark this well: these spirits are not necessarily the souls of the dead; for other kinds of spiritual beings may exist, and s.p.a.ce may be full of them without our ever knowing anything about it, except under unusual circ.u.mstances. Do we not find in the different ancient literatures, demons, angels, gnomes, goblins, sprites, spectres, elementals, etc? Perhaps these legends are not without some foundation in fact. Then we cannot but remark that, in our mediumistic studies and experiments, in order to succeed we always address an invisible being who is supposed to hear us. If this is an illusion, it dates from the very origin of Spiritualism, from the raps produced unconsciously by the Fox sisters in their chambers at Hydesville and at Rochester in 1848. But once more, this personification may pertain to our own being or it may represent a mind external to ourselves.
In order to admit the first hypothesis we must admit at the same time that our mental nature is not simple, that there are in us several psychic elements, and that one at least of these elements may act unknown to ourselves, make raps in a table, move any piece of furniture, lift a weight, touch us with a hand that seems real, play an instrument, create a spectral figure, read hidden words, answer questions, act with a personal will--and all this, I repeat, without our own knowledge.
This is tolerably complicated; but it is not impossible.
That there are in us psychic elements, obscure, unconscious, capable of acting outside of the sphere of our normal consciousness, this is something we can notice every night in our dreams; that is to say, during a quarter, or a third part of our life. Scarcely has sleep closed our eyes, our ears, all our senses, than our thoughts begin to work just the same as during the day, though without rational direction, without logic, under the most incoherent forms, freed from our customary conceptions of s.p.a.ce and time, in a world entirely different from the normal world. The physiologists and psychologists have for centuries been trying to determine the mechanism of the dream without having yet obtained any satisfactory solution of the problem. But the proved fact that we see sometimes, in our dreams, occurrences which take place at a distance, proves that we have in us unknown powers.
Again, it is not rare for each of us to experience, sometimes (all our faculties being on the alert), the play of an interior power, distinct from our dominant reason. We are on the point of p.r.o.nouncing words that are not a part of our habitual vocabulary, and ideas suddenly traverse and arrest the course of our thoughts. During the reading of a book which seemed interesting to us, our soul spreads her wings and flies to other realms, while our eyes continue in vain the mechanical act of reading. We are discussing certain projects in our mind, as if we were so many judges; and then, one would like to know in all simplicity, whence comes this distraction?
In his tireless researches, the great investigator of psychic phenomena, Myers, to whom we owe synthetic studies upon the subliminal consciousness, reached the conviction, with Ribot, that "the _me_ is a co-ordination."
These supernormal phenomena (writes this competent and learned inquirer) are due not to the action of the spirits of deceased persons, as Wallace believes, but, for the most part, to the action of an incarnate spirit, either that of the subject himself or of some agent or other.[87]
The word "subliminal" means what is beneath the threshold (_limen_) of the consciousness,--the sensations, the thoughts, the memories, which remain at the bottom, and seem to represent a kind of sleeping _me_. I do not pretend to affirm (adds the author) that there always exists in us two _me"s_ correlative and parallel: I denote rather by the subliminal _me_ that part of the _me_ which ordinarily remains latent, and I admit that there may be not merely co-operation between these two quasi-independent currents of thoughts, but also changes of level and alternations of personality.[88] Medical observation (Felida, Alma) proves that there is in us a rudimentary supernormal faculty, something which is probably useless to us, but which indicates the existence, beneath the level of our consciousness, of a reserve of latent unsuspected faculties.[89]
What is it that is active in us in telepathic phenomena? We may recall the case of Thomas Garrison (_Society for Psychical Research_, VIII, p.
125) who, while sitting with his wife at a religious service, suddenly gets up in the middle of the sermon, goes out of the church, and, as if impelled by an irresistible impulse, walks twenty miles afoot to go to see his mother, whom he finds dead on his arrival, although he did not know that she was ill and although she was relatively young (fifty-eight years). I have a hundred observations similar to this in writing before me. It is not our normal habitual nature that is in action in such a case as this.
There is probably in us, more or less sentient, a sub-conscious nature, and it is this which seems to be at work in mediumistic experiences. I am pretty much of the opinion Myers expresses in the following paragraph:[90]
Spiritualists attribute the movement and the dictations at their seances to the action of disembodied intelligences. But if a table execute movements without being touched, there is no reason to attribute these movements to the intervention of my deceased grandfather, rather than to my own proper intervention; for if I do not see how I could have done it myself, it is not clear to me how the effect could have been produced by the action of my grandfather. As for dictations, the most plausible explanation seems to me to be for us to admit that they do not come from the conscious _me_, but from that profound and hidden region where fragmentary and incoherent dreams are elaborated.
This explanatory hypothesis is held, with an important modification, by a distinguished savant to whom also we owe long and patient researches into the obscure phenomena of normal psychology; I mean Dr. Geley, who thus sums up his own conclusions:
A certain amount of the force, intelligence, and matter of the body may perform work outside of the organism,--act, perceive, organize, and think without the collaboration of muscles, organs, senses and brain. It is nothing less than the uplifted sub-conscious portion of our being. It const.i.tutes, in truth, an externalizable sub-conscious nature, existing in the _me_ with the normal conscious nature.[91]
This sub-conscious nature does not seem to depend upon the organism. It is probably anterior to it, and will survive it. It seems to be superior to it, endowed with powers and acquirements very different from the powers and acquirements of the normal, supernormal, and transcendent consciousness.
a.s.suredly, there is in this view of the case more than one mystery still, were it only the feat of performing a material act at a distance, and that (not less strange) of apparently having nothing to do with that kind of an act.
The first rule of the scientific method is first to seek explanations in the known before having recourse to the unknown, and we should never fail to comply with this rule. But if this method of sailing does not bring us to port, it is our duty to confess it.
I very much fear that that is what is the matter here. We are not satisfied. The explanation is not clear, and is floating a little too much at random in the waves--and the wavering uncertainty--of the hypothesis.
At the point at which we have now arrived in this chapter of explanations we are precisely in the position of Alexander Aksakof when he wrote his great work, _Animism and Spiritualism_, in reply to the book of Dr. von Hartmann on _Spiritualism_. Hartman claimed to explain all of these psychical phenomena by the following hypothesis.
A nervous force producing, outside of the limits of the human body, mechanical and plastic effects.
Duplicate hallucinations of this same nervous force, and producing also physical and plastic effects.
A latent somnambulistic consciousness, capable (the subject being in his normal state) of reading in the intellectual background of another man, his present and his past, and being able to divine the future.
Akaskof tried to see if these hypotheses (the last of which is a pretty bold one) are sufficient to explain everything, and he concludes that they are not. That is also my opinion. There is something else. This something else, this residue at the bottom of the crucible of experiment, is a psychic element, the nature of which remains still wholly hidden from us.
I think that all the readers of this book will share my conviction.
Anthropomorphic hypotheses are far from explaining everything. Besides, they are only hypotheses. We must not hide from ourselves that these phenomena introduce us into another world, into an unknown world, one that is still to be explored in its whole extent.
As to beings different from ourselves,--what may their nature be? Of this we cannot form any idea. Souls of the dead? This is very far from being demonstrated. The innumerable observations which I have collected during more than forty years all prove to me the contrary. No satisfactory identification has been made.[92]
The communications obtained have always seemed to proceed from the mentality of the group, or, when they are heterogeneous, from spirits of an incomprehensible nature. The being evoked soon vanishes when one insists on pushing him to the wall and having the heart out of his mystery. And then my greatest hope has been deceived, that hope of my twentieth year, when I would so gladly have received celestial light upon the doctrine of the plurality of worlds. The spirits have taught us nothing.
Nevertheless, the agents seem sometimes to be independent. Crookes mentions having seen Miss Fox write automatically a communication for one of her sitters while another communication upon another subject was given to her for a _second_ person by means of the alphabet and by raps, and all the while she was chatting with a _third_ person upon another subject totally different from the other two. Does this remarkable fact prove with certainty the action of a spirit other than that of the medium?