[2] Prof. Tyndall"s address before the British a.s.sociation at Belfast, August, 1874.
On that day the tap-root of materialism was wounded, and materialism itself has been an invalid of increasing languor and desuetude ever since.
On the other hand, supernaturalism in every form was left in little better plight.
To thinking men of all cla.s.ses this bold declaration opened up the grand thought, not new, but newly formulated and endorsed, that as the seed contained all the possibilities of the future plant--the ovum all the possibilities of the future animal, so matter, which had been thought so lightly of, contained within itself the germ, potency, and promise of nature in all her subsequent developments--of the vast universe of suns and systems, planets and satellites, and of every form of life, sensation, and intelligence which in due process of evolution has appeared upon their surfaces. It pointed the way to the thought of an infinite causal energy and intelligence pervading matter and working through nature in all its various grades of life from the first organized cell up to the grandest man. It gave a new meaning to mind in man, as being an individualized portion of that divine potency which ever existed in matter, and which acting through constantly improving and developing organisms, amidst constantly improving environments, at length appeared a differentiated, individualized, seeing, reasoning, knowing, loving spirit.
The mind, then, is of importance. It is no transient visitor which may have made its appearance by chance--a concatenation of coincidences, fortunate or unfortunate, but it is the intelligent tenant and master of a singularly beautiful and complicated house, a house which has been millions upon millions of years in the building, and yet which will be lightly laid aside when it ceases to accommodate and fulfil the needs of its tenant.
Who and what, then, is this lordly tenant whose germ was coeval with matter, whose birth was in the first living cell which appeared upon the planet, whose apprenticeship has been served through every grade of existence from the humble polyp upwards, whose education has been carried on through the brain and organs of every grade of animal life with its countless expedients for existence and enjoyment, until now, as lord of its domain, it looks back upon its long course of development and education, looks about upon its environments and wonders at itself, at what it sees, and at what it prophesies. Truly what is this tenant, what are its powers, and why is it here at all?
These are the questions which it has been the business of the strongest and wisest to discuss, from the time men began to think and record their thoughts until the present time; but how various and unsatisfactory have been the conclusions. The mental philosophers, psychologists, and encyclopedists simply present a chaos of conflicting definitions, principles, and premises, upon none of which are they in full agreement amongst themselves; they are not even agreed regarding the nature of mind--whether it is material or immaterial--how it should be studied, how it is related to the body, indeed whether it is an ent.i.ty at all, or simply "a series of feelings or possibilities of them"; whether it possesses innate ideas or is simply an accretion of experiences. In short, the stock of generally received facts relating to mind has always remained exceedingly small. Psychologists have busied themselves chiefly about its usual and obvious actions, and when in full relation to the body, ignoring all other mental action or arbitrarily excluding it as abnormal and not to be taken into account in the study of normal mind; so with only half the subject under consideration true results could hardly be attained.
Since the organization of the Society for Psychical Research, in 1882, new fields of investigation have been undertaken and the _unusual_ phenomena connected with the operations of mind have been systematically studied. A very hasty and imperfect sketch of this study and of the results obtained has been given in the preceding chapters, but for the use here made of these studies in connection with his own observations the writer alone is responsible. In these studies the field of investigation has been greatly extended beyond that examined by the old philosophers and physiologists.
Beyond the usual activities in which we constantly see the mind engaged--observation of surroundings made by the senses, memory of them, reasoning about them, and putting them in new combinations in science, literature, or art--new activities have been observed, activities lying entirely outside the old lines, in new and hitherto unexplored fields.
It has been demonstrated by experiment after experiment carefully made by competent persons that sensations, ideas, information, and mental pictures can be transferred from one mind to another without the aid of speech, sight, hearing, touch, or any of the ordinary methods of communicating such information or impressions. That is, Telepathy is a fact, and mind communicates with mind through channels other than the ordinary use of the senses.
It has been demonstrated that in the hypnotic condition, in ordinary somnambulism, in the dreams and vision of ordinary sleep, in reverie, and in various other subjective conditions the mind may perceive scenes and events at the moment transpiring at such a distance away or under such physical conditions as to render it impossible that knowledge of these scenes and events could be obtained by means of the senses acting in their usual manner. That is, mind under some circ.u.mstances _sees_ without the use of the physical organ of sight.
Again, it has been demonstrated that some persons can voluntarily project the mind--some mind--some centre of intelligence or independent mental activity, clothed in a recognizable form, a distance of one, a hundred, or a thousand miles, and that it can there make itself known and recognized, perform acts, and even carry on a conversation with the person to whom it was sent. That is, mind can _act_ at a distance from, and independent of, the physical body and the organs through which it usually manifests itself.
These propositions present an aspect of mind which the authorities in the old fields of psychology have failed to observe or to recognize; or if they have at times caught a glimpse of it they have rather chosen to close their eyes and deny altogether the phenomena which these propositions imply, because they found it was impossible to cla.s.sify them in their system. It has been to a degree a repet.i.tion of the folly exhibited by Galileo"s contemporaries and critics, who refused to look through his telescope lest their favorite theories of the universe should be damaged.
Nevertheless, this newly studied aspect exists, and is adding greatly to our knowledge of the nature and action of mind.
Still another cla.s.s of unusual mental phenomena found in this outlying field of psychology is that known under the general name of automatism; and by this is meant something more than the "unconscious cerebration" and "unconscious muscular action" of the physiologists, and something quite different from that.
There is, first, the cla.s.s of motor automatisms, including Planchette-writing and other methods of automatic writing, drawing, painting, and kindred performances, also poetical or metrical improvisations, and trance, and so-called inspirational speaking:--Second, there are the sensory automatisms; or such as are manifested by impressions made upon the senses and which are reckoned as hallucinations.
The impression of hearing a voice, of feeling a touch, or seeing a vision may be reckoned as examples of this kind of automatism.
No other division of this newly cultivated field presents so many unusual and debatable phenomena. Not only do those modern mysteries, Planchette-writing, trance-speaking, and mediumistic utterances come easily under this cla.s.s of mental phenomena, but all that vast array of alleged supernatural phenomena which pervades the literature of every nation since the time when men first began to record their experiences.
The oracles of the Greeks and Romans, the daemon of Socrates, the voices of Joan of Arc, and the widespread custom of divination by means of crystal-gazing in some of its many forms have already been referred to and their relation to automatism or the action of the subliminal self has been noted.
There is still one important cla.s.s of persons who have wielded an enormous influence upon mankind, an influence in the main wholesome, elevating, and developing, whose relation to automatism demands a pa.s.sing consideration.
I refer to the religious chiefs of the world.
As prominent examples of those founders of religions we will briefly notice Moses, Zoroaster, Mahomet, and Swedenborg. Each either professed himself to be, or his followers have credited him with being, the inspired mouthpiece of the Deity. There can be no doubt in the minds of candid students that each one of these religious leaders was perfectly honest, both as regards his conception of the character and importance of his doctrines and also regarding the method by which he professed to receive them. Each believed that what he taught was ultimate and infallible truth, and was received directly from the Deity. It is evident, however, that from whatever source they were derived the doctrines could not all be ultimate truth, since they were not in harmony amongst themselves; but the authors of them all present their claim to inspiration, and whose claim to accept and whose to reject it is difficult to decide. But accepting the theory that each promulgated the doctrines, theological, cosmological, and ethical, that came to him automatically through the superior perception of the subliminal self, all the phenomena fall into line with the well ascertained action of that subliminal self.
The truth which Moses saw was such as was adapted to his age and the people with whom he had to deal. So there came to his perception not only the sublime laws received at Sinai, but also the particulars regarding the tabernacle and its furnishing--the rings and the curtains, the dishes and spoons and bowls and covers, the rams" skins dyed red, the badgers" skins, and the staves of s.h.i.ttim wood. The same also is true regarding the teachings of Zoroaster.
The splendid results which followed the promulgation of Mahomet"s revelation to a few insignificant Arab tribes are proof of its vital germ of truth and of its adaptability to the soil into which it fell. It developed into a civilization from which, at a later period, a benighted and debased Christianity relighted its torch.
Also the teachings of Swedenborg, notwithstanding the apparent egotism of the man and the tiresome verbiage of many of his communications, are elevating and refining in character and useful to those who are attracted to them. That in either case an infinite Deity spoke the commonplace which is attributed to Him in these communications is incredible, but to suppose it all, both the grand and the trivial, the work of the subconscious self of the respective authors is in accordance with what we know of automatism and of the wonderful work of the subliminal self when left free to exercise its highest activities.
Let us examine with some care the history of two examples of unusual or supranormal mental action, the first found in one of the earliest of human records, and reckoned as fully inspired; the other equally unusual occurring within the last half century and making no claim to any supernatural a.s.sistance.
The first example is presented in the first chapter of Genesis, and is a clear, connected, and in the main correct, though by no means complete, account of the changing conditions of the earth in the earliest geological periods, and of the appearance in their proper order of the different grades of life upon its surface. That such a written account should have existed three thousand years before any scientifically constructed schedule even of the order in which plants and animals succeeded each other, much less of the manner in which the earth was prepared for their reception and nurture, is a most remarkable circ.u.mstance, regarded either from a literary or a scientific standpoint. It has been criticised for its lack of scientific exactness, and the supposed error of representing light as created before the sun, ignoring the early existence of aquatic life, and similar points. But let us take our stand with the grand old seer, whoever he may have been, whom we know as Moses, who gave to the world this graphic account of the order of creation so many centuries before science had thrown its light upon the condition of the earth in those far-off ages, and let us endeavor to see what his quickened vision enabled him to behold.
The panorama opens and discloses in an hour the grand progressive action of millions upon millions of years.
The first picture represents the created earth covered with water and enveloped in a thick mantle of steaming mist, causing a condition of absolute and impenetrable darkness upon its surface. In the language of the seer, "The earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep." For ages the unbroken ocean which covered the earth was heated by internal fires; the rising vapor as it met the cooler atmosphere above was condensed and fell in one constant downpour of rain. Unceasing, steaming mist, vapor, and rain, wholly impenetrable to light: such were the conditions.
At length, as the cooling process went on, the density of the mists was diminished;--the wonderful fiat went forth, "Let light be"--and light was.
But still the mantle hung close upon the unbroken ocean.
The second picture appears. Not only was there light but a firmament--an arch with a clear s.p.a.ce underneath it; and it divided the waters which were above it from the waters which were beneath it.
Picture the third. The waters were gathered together and the continents appeared; and the land was covered with verdure--plants and trees, each bearing seed after its kind. Of the inhabitants of the sea the seer had taken no account. It was simply a picture that he saw--a natural, phenomenal representation.
Picture the fourth. The mists and clouds are altogether dispelled. The clear sky appears. The sun comes forth to rule the day--the moon to rule the night. The stars also appear.
Picture the fifth. The lower orders of animals are in full possession of the earth and sea--fish, fowl, and sea-monsters.
Picture the sixth. The higher orders of creation, mammals and man.
Such was the phenomenal aspect of the various epochs of creation roughly outlined, strong, distinct, and in the main true. Not even the scientific critic with his present knowledge could combine more strength and truth, with so few strokes of the brush.
Relieved of the burden of inspiration and the necessity for presenting absolute and unchangeable truth, and presenting the seer as simply telling what he saw, the picture is wonderful, and the telling is most graphic. It needed no deity nor angel to tell it--it was there--and the subliminal self of the seer whose special faculty it was to see, perceived the scene in all its grandeur. He also was the one best fitted to perceive the laws which should make his people great, and describe the forms and ceremonies which should captivate their senses and lead them on to higher intellectual, moral, and ethical development.
Next take the other example. Fifty years ago a young man, not yet twenty years of age, uneducated, a grocer"s boy and shoemaker"s apprentice, was hypnotized; and it was found that he had a most remarkable mental or psychical const.i.tution. He had most unusual experiences, and presented unusual psychical phenomena which need not be recounted here.
At length it was impressed upon him as it might have been upon Socrates or Joan of Arc, or Swedenborg or Mahomet, that he had a mission and had a message to give to the world. He came from the rural town where he had spent his boyhood to the city of New York and hired a room on a prominent thoroughfare. He then, in his abnormal condition, proceeded to choose those who should be specially a.s.sociated with him in his work--men of character and ability whom he did not even know in his normal state.
First: Three witnesses were chosen who should be fully cognizant of everything relating to the method by which the message or book was produced. Of these one was a clergyman, one a physician, and one an intelligent layman. Second: A scribe qualified to write out the messages as he dictated them, to edit and publish them. Third: A physician to put him into the hypnotic, or as it was then called, the magnetic condition, in which he was to dictate his messages.
The first lecture was given November 28th, 1845, and the last June 21st, 1847. During this time 157 lectures were given, varying in length from forty minutes to four hours, and they were all carefully written out by the scribe. To 140 of these ma.n.u.scripts were attached 267 names of persons who listened to them and subscribed their names as witnesses at the end of each lecture--to some a single signature was affixed, to some, many. Any person really desirous of knowing the purport of these lectures and the manner of their delivery could be admitted by making application beforehand.
At each sitting the speaker was first put into the deep hypnotic trance in which he was rigid and unconscious; but his sub-conscious or second self was active and lucid, and a.s.sociated with the principles and knowledge which he needed and which he was to communicate. From this condition he came back to the somnambulic state in which he dictated that which he had acquired in the deep trance, or what he called the "superior condition"; and the transition from one of these states to the other took place many times during each lecture. Such were the conditions under which Andrew Jackson Davis produced the _Principles of Nature--Her Divine Revelation_--a book of nearly 800 pages, divided into three parts:--First, a setting forth of first principles, which served as a philosophical explanation or key to the main work. Second, a cosmogony or description of the method by which the universe came to its present state of development, and third, a statement of the ethical principles upon which society should be based and the practical working of these principles. It a.s.sumes to be thoroughly scientific and philosophical. It has literary faults, and there is plenty of opportunity for cavil and scientific fault-finding; but these remarkable facts remain.
A poor boy, thoroughly well known and vouched for by his neighbors for his strict integrity, having had only five months of ordinary district school instruction for his education, having never read a scientific or philosophical book, and not a dozen all told of every kind, having never a.s.sociated with people of education except in the most casual way, yet in the manner just described he dictated a book containing the outlines of a thoroughly sound and reasonable system of philosophy, theology, and ethics, and a complete system of cosmogony representing the most advanced views in geology, which was then in its infancy--astronomy, chemistry, and other departments of physical science, criticising current scientific opinions, and in points where he differed from these opinions giving full and cogent reason for that difference.
On March 16th, 17th, and 20th, 1846, he announced the fact of the motion of our sun and solar system about a still greater centre, in harmony with the Nebular Hypothesis by which he explained the formation of the whole vast system. He also announced the existence of an eighth and ninth planet, and the apparently abnormal revolution of the satellites of Ura.n.u.s. Neptune, the eighth planet, had not then been discovered and was not found until six months later. On the 29th of April he announced the discovery and application of diamagnetism by Faraday, concerning which none of his a.s.sociates had any knowledge, and which I believe had not then been noticed in this country. He gave a distinct and vivid description of the formation of the different bodies const.i.tuting the solar system, of the introduction of life upon our planet, and of its evolution from grade to grade from the lowest to the highest--all in minute detail, in general accord with established scientific deduction and in scientific and technical language. In several particulars he differed from the received opinions, and gave his reasons for so doing. No claim was made to inspiration nor to the presentation of absolute or infallible truth, but when hypnotized and in what he termed the "superior condition," his perceptive faculties were vastly increased, and that which he then perceived he made known. He simply gave the truth as he saw it, and he commended it to the judgment and reason of mankind for reception or rejection. In other words, the subliminal self was brought into action by hypnotism, and then by means of its greatly increased perceptive powers he gathered knowledge from various sources quite inaccessible to him in his ordinary state, and seemingly inaccessible also to others.
Concerning the truth or falsity of the revelations beyond what was already known or has since been confirmed by science, I do not a.s.sume to p.r.o.nounce judgment; but that this also, as well as the first chapter of Genesis, from either a literary or scientific standpoint, is one of the most remarkable productions of this or of any age, will not be denied by any competent and candid examiner; while the remarkable character of the book will be still better appreciated when the status of the theory of evolution and of the science of geology fifty years ago is taken into the account.
Here are presented two prominent examples of supranormal mental activity--one in the early ages of man"s development, when _everything_ was supernatural, the immediate work of a G.o.d--the other in man"s later development when natural law is found intervening between phenomena and their cause, and when it is found possible for men to comprehend the fact that truth, extraordinary and even that which had previously been unknown or was beyond the reach of the senses in their ordinary state, may nevertheless be discovered or revealed by other means than direct communications from Deity.
It is seen, then, how various and how wonderfully important are the mental phenomena grouped under the general designation of automatism.
Many examples of this and other cla.s.ses of unusual mental action have been given in previous chapters, not as c.u.mulative evidence of their verity--that would require volumes, but simply to ill.u.s.trate the subject and give some degree of definiteness to our reasoning regarding them. Not even all the _cla.s.ses_ of facts properly belonging to our subject have here been represented; but taking them as they have been enumerated and hastily described, they const.i.tute a body of well observed and well authenticated facts and phenomena of undeniable interest, and if received as true their importance is certainly to be compared with the greatest discoveries of modern science. They are, however, the very facts which the science and philosophy of to-day hesitates to accept. The only exception to this statement is found in the treatment lately accorded to hypnotism, which after a hundred years of hesitation, rejection and even ridicule, has at length been definitely received as regards its main facts. It is true, however, that in numerous other instances the evidence regarding unusual mental states and phenomena is equally weighty and unimpeachable; but because these phenomena are unusual, marvelous or seemingly miraculous, belonging to no recognized cla.s.s of mental action, therefore it is argued, they cannot be genuine; there _must be_ some flaw in the evidence and they cannot be accepted.
It is tedious going over the arguments which reduce this mode of reasoning to an absurdity. The same reasoning has been applied to every important discovery in physical science for the past three hundred years; and if it were carried out to its logical conclusions no substantial advance in human knowledge could ever take place, since every discovery or observation of phenomena outside of known laws must on that ground be rejected. And the history of scientific discoveries shows that this has actually been the case. The announcement of the discovery of the movements of the planets around the sun, of the attraction of gravitation, of the ident.i.ty of lightning with electricity, of the relation and derivation of species in the world of living forms--of the discovery of living toads in geological strata of untold antiquity, and scores of other now accepted facts, were accounted visionary and were received with scoffs and jeers by the accredited leaders of science, because they were outside of any known natural laws; and it was only after the study and contemplation of the new discoveries had educated and enlarged the minds of a new generation of men to a better understanding of the extent and magnitude of nature and her laws that the scoffs subsided and the new facts quietly took their places as accredited science.
The same process is going on regarding mental phenomena to-day. It may require a generation for men unused to think in this direction to become familiarized with the thought that telepathy, clairvoyance, and the subliminal self, with its augmented powers, are facts in nature; but thousands of intelligent people, and many accustomed to examine facts critically and according to approved methods, are already so interpreting nature, and their number is constantly increasing.
Such are some of the facts discovered by the pioneers in this outlying field of psychology. In attempting to explain or account for them it is useless to take refuge in the hazy definitions of the old psychologists, or to imagine that the secret is bound up in the vital processes which occupy the biologist and physiologist, interesting and important as those studies are; even the neurologist can help us comparatively little--he can tell us all about diseases of the nervous system and how they manifest themselves, and his labor has earned for him the grat.i.tude of mankind; but he cannot tell us how thinking is accomplished, nor what thought is; he cannot tell the cause of so normal and easily observed a phenomenon as ordinary sleep, much less of the new faculties which are developed in somnambulism. In all these related departments of science, in considering mental phenomena it is found convenient to deny the existence of that for which they cannot account. Nature"s processes, however, are simple when once we comprehend them, so much so that we wonder at their simplicity, and wonder that we ever could have failed to understand them; and we learn to distrust explanations which are involved and complicated, knowing that error often lies that way. And of this kind for the most part, the attempted explanations of mental processes in terms of physiology have proved to be; they are complicated, inapplicable, and unsatisfactory; and they give no aid in the generalizations which have hitherto been so much needed.
The phenomena in this new field at first sight seem heterogeneous, without system or any common bond; they seem each to demand a separate origin and field. But let the idea of the subliminal self, intelligent, and endowed with its higher perceptive faculties, be presented, and lo! all these refractory phenomena fall into place in one harmonious system. The subliminal self is the active and efficient agent in telepathy--it is that which sees and hears and acts far away from the body, and reports the knowledge which it gains to the ordinary senses, sometimes by motor and sometimes by sensory automatism--by automatic writing, speaking, audition, the vision, the phantasm. It acts sometimes while the primary self is fully conscious--better and most frequently in reverie, in dreams, in somnambulism, but best of all when the ordinary self is altogether subjective and the body silent, inactive, and insensible, as in that strange condition which accompanies the higher phases of trance and lucidity, into which few enter, either spontaneously or by the aid of hypnotism. Then still retaining its attenuated vital connection, it goes forth and sees with extended vision and gathers truth from a thousand various and hidden sources.
Will it act less freely, less intelligently, with less consciousness and individuality when that attenuated vital connection is severed, and the body lies--untenanted?