The Book of Life Part 6

Also, it seems worthwhile to mention that it is no argument against immortality that we cannot imagine it, that we cannot picture a universe consisting of uncountable billions of living souls, or what these souls would do to pa.s.s the time. It may very well be that among these souls there is no such thing as time. It may be that they are thoroughly occupied in ways beyond our imagining, or again, that they are not occupied, and under no necessity of being occupied. Let the person who presents such arguments begin by picturing to you how the brain cells manage to store up the uncounted millions of memories which you have, the thousands of words and combinations of words, and the thoughts which go with them, musical notes and tunes, colors and odors and visual impressions, memories of the past and hopes of the future and dreams that never were. Where are all those hundreds of millions of things, and what are they like when they are not in our consciousness, and how do they pa.s.s the time, and where were they in the hundreds of millions of years before we were born, and where will they be in the hundreds of millions of years of the future? When our wise men can answer these questions completely, it will be time enough for them to tell us about the impossibility of immortality.

CHAPTER XV

THE EVIDENCE FOR SURVIVAL

(Discusses the data of psychic research, and the proofs of spiritism thus put before us.)

Let us now take up the question of survival of personality after death from the strictly scientific point of view; let us consider what facts we have, and the indications they seem to give. First, we know that to all appearances the consciousness and the subconsciousness are bound up with the body. They grow with the body, they decline with the body, they seem to die with the body. We can irretrievably damage the consciousness by drawing a whiff of cyanogen gas into the lungs, or by sticking a pin into the brain, or by clogging one of its tiny blood vessels with waste matter. It is terrible to us to think that the mind of a great poet or prophet or statesman may be snuffed out of existence in such a way; but then, it is no argument against a fact to say that it is terrible.

Insanity is terrible, war is terrible, pestilence is terrible, so also are tigers and poisonous snakes; but all these things exist, and all these things have power over the wisest and greatest mind, to put an end to its work on this earth at least.

And now we come with the new instrument of psychic research, to probe the question: What becomes of this consciousness when it disappears? Can we prove that it is still in existence, and is able by any method to communicate with us? Those who answer "Yes" argue that the mind of the dead person, unable to use its own bodily machinery any longer, manages in the hypnotic trance to use the bodily machinery of another person, called a "medium," and by it to make some kind of record to identify itself.

This, of course, is a strange idea, and requires a good deal of proof.

The law of probability requires us not to accept an unlikely explanation, if there is any more simple one which can account for the facts. When we examine the product of automatic writing, table-tipping, and other psychic phenomena, we have first to ask ourselves, Is there anything in all this which cannot be explained by what we already know?

Then, second, we have to ask, Is there any other supposition which will explain the facts, and which is easier to believe than the spirit theory?

These "spirits" apparently desire to convince us of their reality, and they tell us many things which are expected to convince us; they tell us things which we ourselves do not know, and which spirits might know. But here again we run up against the problem of the subconsciousness, with its infinite ma.s.s of "forgotten" knowledge. It is not so easy for the "spirits" to tell us things which we can be sure our subconscious mind could not possibly contain. Also, there comes the additional element of telepathy. It appears to be a fact that under trance conditions, or under any especially exciting conditions of the consciousness, one mind can reach out and take something out of another mind, or one mind can cause something to be pa.s.sed over to another mind; and so information can be communicated to the mind of a medium, and can appear in automatic writing, or in clairvoyance, or in crystal gazing.

One of the most conscientious and earnest of all the investigators of this subject was the late Professor Hyslop, who many years ago sought to teach me "practical morality" (from the bourgeois point of view) in Columbia University. Professor Hyslop worked for fifteen years with a medium by the name of Mrs. Piper, who was apparently sincere and was never exposed in any kind of fraud. In Professor Hyslop's books you will find innumerable instances of amazing facts brought out in Mrs. Piper's trances. You will find Professor Hyslop arguing that the only way telepathy can account for these facts is by the supposition that there is a universal subconscious mind, or that the subconscious mind of the medium possesses the power to reach into the subconscious mind of every other living person and take out anything from it. But for my part, I cannot see that the case is quite so difficult. Professor Hyslop recites, for example, how Mrs. Piper would tell him facts about some long dead relative--facts which he did not know, but was later able to verify. But that proves simply nothing at all, because there could be no possible way for Professor Hyslop to be sure that he had never known these facts about his relatives. The facts might have been in his subconscious mind without having ever been in his conscious mind at all; he might have heard people talking about these matters while he was reading a book, or playing as a boy, paying no attention to what was said.

And then came Sir Oliver Lodge with his investigations. I will say this for his work--he was the first person who was able to make real to my mind the startling idea that perhaps after all the dead might be alive and able to communicate with us. You will find what he has to say in his book, "The Survival of Man," and it seems fair that a great scientist and a great man should have a chance to convince you of what seem to him the most important facts in the world.

Sir Oliver's son Raymond was killed in the war, and it is claimed that he began at once to communicate with his family. Among other things, he told them of the existence of a picture, which none of them had ever seen or heard of, a group photograph which he described in detail. But, of course, other people in this group knew of the existence of the photograph, and so we have again the possibility that some member of Sir Oliver's family may have taken into his subconscious mind without knowing it an impression or description of that picture. If you care to experiment, you will find that you can frequently play a part in the dreams of a child by talking to it in its sleep; and that is only one of a thousand different ways by which some member of a family might acquire, without knowing it, information of the existence of a photograph.

There is another possibility to be considered--that a portion of the consciousness may survive, and not necessarily forever. We are accustomed when death takes place to see the body before us, and we know that we can preserve the body for thousands of years if we wish. Why is it not possible that when conscious life is brought to a sudden end, there may remain some portion of the consciousness, or of the subconsciousness, cut off from the body, and slowly fading back into the universal mind energy, whatever we please to call it? There is a hard part of the body, the skeleton, which survives for some time; why might there not be a central core of the mind which is similarly tough and enduring? Of course, if consciousness is a function of the brain, it must decay as the brain decays; but how would it be if the brain were a function of the consciousness--which is, so far as I can see, quite as likely a guess.

I find many facts which seem to indicate the plausibility of this idea.

I notice that in trance phenomena it is the spirits of those recently dead which seem to manifest the most vitality. Of course, you can go to any seance in the "white light" district of your city and receive communications from the souls of Caesar and Napoleon and Alexander the Great and Pocahontas, and if the medium does not happen to be literary, you can communicate with Hamlet and Don Quixote and Siegfried and Achilles; but you will not find much reality about any of these people, they will not tell you very much about the everyday details of their lives. This fact that so much of what the "spirits" tell us is of our own time tends to cast doubt on the idea that the dead survive forever.

How simple it would be to convince us, if the spirit of Sophocles would come back to earth and tell us where to dig in order to find copies of his lost tragedies! You would think that the soul of Sophocles, seeing our great need of beauty and wisdom, would be interested to give us his works! From genius, operating under the guidance of the conscious mind, we get sublimity, majesty and power; but what the trance mediums give us suggests, both in its moral and intellectual quality, the operation of the subconscious. It is exactly like what we get, for example, from dissociated personalities.

There are, to be sure, the books of Patience Worth, produced by the automatic writing of a lady in St. Louis, who tells us in evident good faith that her conscious personality is entirely innocent of Patience, and all her thought and doings. Patience writes long novels and dramas in a quaint kind of old English, and the lady in St. Louis knows nothing about this language. But does she positively know that when she was a child, she never happened to be in the room with someone who was reading old English aloud? Nothing seems more likely than that her subconscious mind heard some quaint, strange language, and took possession of it, and built up a personality around it, and even made a new language and a new literature from that starting point.

That is precisely the kind of thing in which the subconscious revels. It creates new characters, with an imagination infinite and inexhaustible.

Who has not waked up and been astounded at the variety and reality of a dream? Who has not told his dreams and laughed over them? The subconscious will play at games, it will act and rehea.r.s.e elaborate roles; it will put on costumes, and delight in being Caesar and Napoleon and Alexander the Great and Pocahontas and Hamlet and Don Quixote and Siegfried and Achilles. Yes, it will even play at being "spirits"! It will be mischievous and impish; it will be swallowed up with a sense of its own importance, taking an insolent delight in convincing the world's most learned scientists of the fact that its play-acting is reality. It will call itself "Raymond" to move and thrill a grief-stricken family; it will call itself "Phinuit" and "Dr. Hodgson," and cause an earnest professor of "practical morality" to give up a respectable position in Columbia University and write books to convince the world that the dead are sending him messages.

Consider, for example, the multiple personality of Miss Beauchamp.

Remember that here we are not dealing with any guess work about "spirits"; here we have half a dozen different "controls," none of them the least bit dead, but all of them a part of the consciousness of one entirely alive young lady. A specialist has spent some six years investigating the case, day after day, week after week, writing down the minute details of what happens. And now consider the miscreant known as "Sally." Sally is just as real as any child whom you ever held in your arms. Sally has love and hate, fear and hope, pain and delight--and Sally is a little demon, created entirely out of the subconsciousness of a highly refined and conscientious young college graduate of Boston.

Sally spends Miss Beauchamp's money on candy, and eats it; Sally p.a.w.ns Miss Beauchamp's watch and deliberately loses the ticket; Sally uses Miss Beauchamp's lips and tongue to tell lies about Miss Beauchamp; Sally strikes Miss Beauchamp dumb, or makes her hear exactly the opposite of what is spoken to her. Yes, and Sally pleads and fights frantically for her life; Sally enters into intrigues with other parts of Miss Beauchamp, and for years deliberately fools Doctor Prince, who is her Recording Angel and Heavenly Judge!

And can anybody doubt that Sally could have fooled a grieving mother, and made that mother think she was talking to the ghost of a long lost child? Can anybody doubt that Sally could and would play the part of any person she had ever known, or of any historic character she had ever read about? And don't overlook the all-important fact that the conscious Miss Beauchamp was absolutely innocent of all this, and was horrified when she was told about it. So here you have the following situation, no matter of guesswork, but definitely established: your dearest friend may act as a medium, and in all good faith may bring to the surface some part of his or her subconsciousness, which masquerades before you in a hundred different roles, and plays upon you with deliberate malice the most subtle and elaborate and cruel tricks.

And how much worse the situation becomes when to this there is added the possibility of conscious fraud! When the medium is a person who is taking your money, and thrives by making you believe in the "spirits"

she produces! You may go to Lily Dale, in New York state, the home of the Spiritualists, where they have a convention every summer, and in row after row of tents you may hear, and even see, every kind of spirit you ever dreamed of, ringing bells and shaking tambourines and dancing jigs.

And you may see poor farmers' wives, with tears streaming down their cheeks, listening to the endearments of their dead children, and to wisdom from the lips of Oliver Wendell Holmes speaking with a Bowery accent. This kind of thing was exposed many years ago by Will Irwin in a book called "The Medium Game"; and then--after traveling from one kind of medium to another, and studying all their frauds, Irwin tells how he went into a "parlor" on Sixth Avenue, and there by a fat old woman who had never seen him before, was suddenly told the most intimate secrets of his life!

It has recently been announced that Thomas A. Edison is at work upon a device to enable spirits to communicate with the living, if there really are spirits seeking to do this. It is Edison's idea that spirits may inhabit some kind of infinitely rarefied astral body, and he proposes to manufacture an instrument which is sensitive to an impression many millions of times fainter than anything the human body can feel. This should make it easier for the spirits, and should const.i.tute a fairer test, possibly a decisive one. When that machine is perfected and put to work by scientific men, I wish to suggest a few tests which will convince me that there really are spirits, and that the results are not to be explained by telepathy.

First, a.s.suming that the spirits live forever, there are some useful things which were known to the people of ancient time, and are not known to anyone living now. For example, let one of the Egyptian craftsmen come forward and tell us the secret of their gla.s.s-staining, which I understand is now a lost art. And then Sophocles, as I have already suggested, will tell us where we can find his lost dramas; or if he doesn't know where any copies are buried, let him find in the spirit world some scribe or librarian or book-lover who can give us this priceless information. All over the ancient lands are buried and forgotten cities, and in those cities are papyrus scrolls and graven tablets and bricks. Infinite stores of knowledge are thus concealed from us; and how simple for the ancient ones who possess this information to make it known to us, and so to convince us of their reality!

Or, again, supposing that spirits are not immortal, but that they slowly fade from life as do their bodies. Suppose that a Raymond Lodge or other recently dead soldier wishes to communicate with his father and to convince his father that it is really an independent being, and not simply a part of the father's subconscious mind--let him try something like this. Let the father write six brief notes, and put them in six envelopes all alike, and shuffle them up and put them in a hat and draw out one of them. Now, a.s.suming that the experimenter is honest, there is no living human being who knows the contents of that envelope, and if the medium is dipping into the subconscious mind of the experimenter, the chances are one in six of the right note being hit upon. a.s.suming that spirits may not be able to get inside an envelope and read a folded letter, there is no objection to the experimenter, provided he is honest, and provided there are no mirrors or other tricks, holding the envelope behind his back, and tearing it open, and spreading it out for the convenience of the spirit. And now, if the spirit can read that letter correctly every time, we shall be fairly certain that whatever force we are dealing with, it is not the subconscious mind of the experimenter.

Or, let us take another test. Let us have a roulette wheel in a covered box, or hidden away so that no one but the spirit can see it. We spin the wheel, and any one of the habitues of Monte Carlo can figure out the chance of the little ball dropping into any particular number. If now the spirit can tell us each time where we shall find the ball, we shall know that we are dealing with knowledge which does not exist either in the conscious or the subconscious mind of any living human being.

Among the things that "spirits" have been accustomed to do, since the days when they first made their appearance with the Fox sisters in America, are the lifting of tables and the ringing of bells and the a.s.suming of visible forms. These are what is known as "materializations," and when I was a boy, and used to hear people talking about these things, there was always one test required: let the materializations manifest themselves upon recording instruments scientifically devised; let photographs be taken of them, let them be weighed and measured, and so on. Well, time has moved forward, and these tests have been met, and it appears that "materializations" are facts--although it is still as uncertain as ever what they are materializations of. An English scientist, Professor Crawford, has published a book ent.i.tled "The Reality of Psychic Phenomena," in which he tells the results of many years of testing materializations by the strictest scientific methods. When the medium "levitates" a table--that is, causes it to go up in the air without physical contact--it appears that her own weight increases by exactly the weight of the table. When she exerts any force, which apparently she can do at a distance, the recording instruments show the exact counter-force in her own body.

The results of these investigations are calculated at first to take your breath away. It begins to appear that the theosophists may be right, and that we may have one or more "astral" bodies within or coincident with the physical body; and that under the trance conditions we mold and make over this "astral" body in accordance with our imaginations, precisely as a sculptor molds the clay. At any rate, our subconsciousness has the power to project from it ma.s.ses of substance, and to cause these to take all kinds of forms, for example, human faces, which have been photographed innumerable times. Or the body can shoot out long rods or snaky projections, which lift tables, and exert force which has been recorded upon pressure instruments and weighed by scales.

As I write, a friend lends me a fifteen-dollar volume, a translation just published of an elaborate work by Baron von Schrenck-Notzing, a physician of Munich, giving minute details of four years' experiments in this field. So rigid was this investigator in his efforts to exclude fraud, that not merely was the medium stripped and sewed up in black tights, but the "cabinet" in which she sat was a big sack of black cloth, everywhere sewed tight by machine. Every crevice of the medium's body was searched before and after the tests, and every inch of the "cabinet" gone over. The investigators sat within a couple of feet of the medium, and would draw back the curtains, and while holding her hands and her feet, would watch great ma.s.ses of filmy gray and white stuff exude from the medium's mouth, from her armpits and b.r.e.a.s.t.s and sides. This would happen in red light of a hundred candle power, by which print could be easily read; and the medium would herself illuminate the phenomena with a red electric torch. The investigators would be privileged to examine these "phantom" forms, to touch them gently, and be touched by them--soft and slimy, like the tongue of an animal; but sometimes the things would misbehave, and strike them in the eye, hurting them.

The medium, a young French girl living in the home of the wife of a well-known French playwright, had begun with spiritualist ideas, but came to take a matter-of-fact att.i.tude to what happened, and in her trances would labor to mold these emanations into hands or faces, as requested by those present. She finally succeeded in allowing them to separate the soft mucous stuff from her body, and keep it for chemical and bacteriological examination. All this time she would be surrounded by a battery of cameras, nine at once, some of them inside the cabinet; and when the desired emanation was in sight, all these cameras would be set off by flashlight, and in the book you have over two hundred such photographs, showing faces and hands from every point of view. There are even moving-pictures, showing the material coming out of her mouth and going back!

It is evident that we have here a whole universe of unexplored phenomena; and it seems that many of the old-time superst.i.tions which were dumped overboard have now to be dragged back into the boat and examined in the light of new knowledge. What could smack more of magic and fraud than crystal-gazing? Yet it appears that the subconsciousness has power to project an image of its hidden memories into a crystal ball, where it may be plainly seen. We find so well-recognized an authority as Dr. Morton Prince using this method to enable one of the many Miss Beauchamps to recall incidents in her previous life which were otherwise entirely lost to her. Likewise this exploration of the disintegration of personality enables us to watch in the making all the phenomena of trance and ecstasy which have had so much to do with the making of religions. We know now how Joan of Arc heard the "voices," and we can make her hear more voices or make her stop hearing voices, as we prefer. Also we know all about demons and "demoniac possession." We can cast out demons--and without having to cause them to enter a herd of swine! We may some day be prepared to investigate the wonder stories which the Yogis tell us, about their ability to leave their physical bodies in a trance, and to appear in England at a few moments' notice for the transaction of their spiritual business!

But we want things proven to us, and we don't want the people with whom we work to be animated either by religious fanaticism or by money greed.

We are ready to unlimber our minds, and prepare for long journeys into strange regions, but we want to move cautiously, and choose our route carefully, and be sure we do not lose our way! We want to deal rationally with life; we don't want to make wild guesses, or to choose a complicated and unlikely solution when a simple one will suffice. But, on the other hand, we must be alive to the danger of settling down on our little pile of knowledge, and refusing to take the trouble to investigate any more. That is a habit of learned men, I am sorry to say; the law of inertia applies to the scientist, as well as to the objects he studies. The scientists of our time have had to be prodded into considering each new discovery about the subconscious mind, precisely as the scientists of Galileo's time had to be prodded to watch him drop weights from the tower of Pisa. When he told them that the earth moved round the sun instead of the sun round the earth, they tortured him in a dungeon to make him take it back, and he did so, but whispered to himself, "And yet it moves." And it did move, of course, and continued to move. And in exactly the same way, if it be true that we have these hidden forces in us, they will continue to manifest themselves, and ma.s.ses of people will continue to flock to Lily Dale, and to pay out their hard-earned money, until such a time as our learned men set to work to find out the facts and tell us how we can utilize these forces without the aid of either superst.i.tion or charlatanry.

CHAPTER XVI

THE POWERS OF THE MIND

(Sets forth the fact that knowledge is freedom and ignorance is slavery, and what science means to the people.)

We have now completed a brief survey of the mind and its powers.

Whatever we may have proved or failed to prove, this much we may say with a.s.surance: the reader who has followed our brief sketch attentively has been disabused of any idea he may have held that he knows it all; and this is always the first step towards knowledge.

The mind is the instrument whereby our race has lifted itself out of beasthood. It is the instrument whereby we hold ourselves above the forces which seek to drag us down, and whereby we shall lift ourselves higher, if higher we are to go. How shall we protect this precious instrument? How shall we complete our mastery of it? What are the laws of the conduct of the mind?

The process of the mind is one of groping outward after new facts, and digesting and a.s.similating them, as the body gropes after and digests and a.s.similates food. The senses bring us new impressions, and we take these and a.n.a.lyze them, tear them into the parts which compose them, compare them with previous sensations, recognize difference in things which seem to be alike, and resemblances in things which seem to be different; we cla.s.sify them, and provide them with names, which are, as it were, handles for the mind to grasp. Above all, we seek for causes; those chains of events which make what we know as order in the world of phenomena. And when the mind has what seems to be a cause, it proceeds to test it according to methods it has worked out, the rules and principles of experimental science.

It is a comparatively small number of sensations which the body brings to the mind of itself; it is a narrow world in which we should live if our minds adopted a pa.s.sive att.i.tude toward life. But some minds possess what we call curiosity; they set out upon their own impulse to explore life; they discover new laws and make new experiences and new sensations for themselves. The mind forms an idea, and at first, after the fas.h.i.+on of the ancient Greek philosophers, it glorifies that idea and sets it in the seat of divinity. But presently comes the empirical method, which refuses authority to any idea unless it can stand the test of experiment, and prove that it corresponds with reality. Nowadays the thinker ama.s.ses his facts, and forms a theory to explain them, and then proceeds to try out this theory by the most rigid method that he or his critics can devise. If the theory doesn't "work"--that is, if it doesn't explain all the facts and stand all the tests--it is thrown away like a worn-out shoe. So little by little a body of knowledge is built up which is real knowledge; which will serve us in our daily lives, which we can use as foundation-stones in the structure of our civilization.

By this method of research man is expanding his universe beyond anything that could have been conceived in the pre-scientific days. Hour by hour, while we work and play and sleep, the mind of our race is discovering new worlds in which our posterity will dwell. For uncounted ages man walked upon the earth, surrounded by infinite swarms of bacterial life of whose existence he never dreamed. The invisible rays of the spectrum beat upon him, and he knew nothing of what they did to him, whether good or evil. He lifted his head and saw vast universes of suns, in comparison with which his world was a mere speck of dust; yet to him these universes were globes or lanterns which some divinity had hung in the sky.

One of the most fascinating ill.u.s.trations of how the mind runs ahead of the senses is the story of the planet Ura.n.u.s, which, less than two hundred years ago, had never been beheld by the eye of man. A mathematician seated in his study, working over the observations of other planets, their motions in relation to their ma.s.s and distance, discovered that their behavior was not as it should be. At certain times none of them were in quite the right place, and he decided that this variation must be due to the existence of an unknown body. He worked out the problem of what must be the ma.s.s and the exact orbit of this body, in order for it to be responsible for the variations observed; and when he had completed these calculations, he announced to the astronomical world, "Turn your telescopes to a certain spot in the heavens at a certain minute of a certain night, and you will find a new planet of a certain size." And so for the first time the human senses became aware of a fact, which by themselves they might not have discovered in all eternity.

Now, the importance of exact knowledge concerning a new planet may not be apparent to the ordinary man; but if the thing which is discovered is, for example, an unknown ray which will move an engine or destroy a cancer, then we realize the worthwhileness of research, and the masters of the world's commerce are willing to give here and there a pittance for the increase of such knowledge. But men of science, who have by this time come to a sense of their own dignity and importance, understand that there is no knowledge about reality which is useless, no research into nature which is wasted. You might say that to describe and cla.s.sify the fleas which inhabit the bodies of rats and ground-squirrels, and to study under the microscope the bacteria which live in the blood of these fleas--that this would be an occupation hardly worthy of the divinity that is in man. But presently, as a result of this knowledge about fleas and flea diseases being in existence and available, a bacteriologist discovers the secret of the dread bubonic plague, which hundreds of times in past history has wiped out a great part of the population of Europe and Asia.

Mark Twain tells in his "Connecticut Yankee" how his hero was able to overcome the wizard Merlin, because he knew in advance of an eclipse of the sun. And this was fiction, of course; but if you prefer fact, you may read in the memoirs of Houdin, the French conjurer, how he was able to bring the Arab tribes into subjection to the French government by depriving the great chieftains of their strength. He gathered them into a theatre, and invited their mighty men upon the stage, and there was an iron weight, and they were able to lift it when Houdin permitted, and not to lift it when he forbade. These n.o.ble barbarians had never heard of the electro-magnet, and could not conceive of a force that could operate through a solid wooden floor beneath their feet.

Such things, trivial as they are, serve to ill.u.s.trate the difference between ignorance and knowledge, and the power which knowledge gives.

The man who knows is G.o.dlike to those who do not know; he may enslave them, he may do what he pleases with their lives, and they are powerless to help themselves. Anyone who would help them must begin by giving them knowledge, real knowledge. There is no such thing as freedom without knowledge, and it must be the best knowledge, it must be new knowledge; he who goes against new knowledge armed with old knowledge is like the Chinese who went out to meet machine-guns with bows and arrows, and with umbrellas over their heads.