Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death Part 2

_Percipient._--The correlative term to Agent; the person on whose mind the telepathic impact falls; or, more generally, the person who perceives any motor or sensory impression.

_Phantasm and Phantom._--Phantasm and phantom are, of course, mere variants of the same word; but since phantom has become generally restricted to _visual_ hallucinations, it is convenient to take phantasm to cover a wider range, and to signify any hallucinatory sensory impression, whatever sense--whether sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste, or diffused sensibility--may happen to be affected.

_Phantasmogenetic centre._--A point in s.p.a.ce apparently modified by a spirit in such a way that persons present near it perceive a phantasm.

_Phobies._--Irrational restricting or disabling preoccupations or fears; _e.g._, _agoraphobia_, fear of open s.p.a.ces.

_Photism._--See _Secondary sensations_.

_Point de repere._--Guiding mark. Used of some (generally inconspicuous) real object which a hallucinated subject sometimes sees as the nucleus of his hallucination, and the movements of which suggest corresponding movements of the hallucinatory object.

_Polyzoism._--The property, in a complex organism, of being composed of minor and quasi-independent organisms. This is sometimes called "colonial const.i.tution," from animal _colonies_.

_Possession._--A developed form of motor automatism, in which the automatist's own personality disappears for a time, while there appears to be a more or less complete subst.i.tution of personality, writing or speech being given by another spirit through the entranced organism.

_Post-hypnotic._--Used of a suggestion given during the hypnotic trance, but intended to operate after that trance has ceased.

_Precognition._--Knowledge of impending events supernormally acquired.

_Premonition._--A supernormal indication of any kind of event still in the future.

_*Preversion._--A tendency to characteristics a.s.sumed to lie at a further point of the evolutionary progress of a species than has yet been reached; opposed to reversion.

_*Promnesia._--The paradoxical sensation of recollecting a scene which is only now occurring for the first time; the sense of the _deja vu_.

_*Psychorrhagy._--A special idiosyncrasy which tends to make the phantasm of a person easily perceptible; the breaking loose of a psychical element, definable mainly by its power of producing a phantasm, perceptible by one or more persons, in some portion of s.p.a.ce.

_*Psychorrhagic diathesis._--A habit or capacity of detaching some psychical element, involuntarily and without purpose, in such a manner as to produce a phantasm.

_Psycho-therapeutics._--"Treatment of disease by the influence of the mind on the body." (Tuke's _Dict._)

_Reciprocal._--Used of cases where there is both agency and percipience at each end of the telepathic chain, so that A perceives P, and P perceives A also.

_*Retrocognition._--Knowledge of the past, supernormally acquired.

_Secondary personality._--It sometimes happens, as the result of shock, disease, or unknown causes, that an individual experiences an alteration of memory and character, amounting to a change of personality, which generally seems to have come on during sleep. The new personality is in that case termed _secondary_, in distinction to the original, or _primary_, personality.

_Secondary sensations_ (_Secunddrempfindungen_, _audition coloree_, _sound-seeing_, _synaesthesia_, _etc._).--With some persons every sensation of one type is accompanied by a sensation of another type; as for instance, a special sound may be accompanied by a special sensation of colour or light (_chromatisms_ or _photisms_). This phenomenon is a.n.a.logous to that of _number-forms_,--a kind of diagrammatic mental picture which accompanies the conception of a progression of numbers.

See Galton's _Inquiries into Human Faculty_.

_Sh.e.l.l-hearing._--The induction of hallucinatory voices, etc., by listening to a sh.e.l.l. a.n.a.logous to crystal-gazing.

_Stigmatisation._--The production of blisters or other cutaneous changes on the hands, feet, or elsewhere, by suggestion or self-suggestion.

_Subliminal._--Of thoughts, feelings, etc., lying beneath the ordinary _threshold_ (_limen_) of consciousness, as opposed to _supraliminal_, lying _above_ the threshold.

_Suggestion._--The process of effectively impressing upon the subliminal intelligence the wishes of some other person. _Self-suggestion_ means a suggestion conveyed by the subject himself from one stratum of his personality to another, without external intervention.

_*Supernormal._--Of a faculty or phenomenon which transcends ordinary experience. Used in preference to the word _supernatural_, as not a.s.suming that there is anything outside nature or any arbitrary interference with natural law.

_Supraliminal._--See _Subliminal_.

_Synaesthesia._--See _Secondary Sensations_.

_Synergy._--A number of actions correlated together, or combined into a group.

_Telekinesis._--Used of alleged supernormal movements of objects, not due to any known force.

_*Telepathy._--The communication of impressions of any kind from one mind to another, independently of the recognised channels of sense.

_*Telaesthesia._--Any direct sensation or perception of objects or conditions independently of the recognised channels of sense, and also under such circ.u.mstances that no known mind external to the percipient's can be suggested as the source of the knowledge thus gained.

_*Telergy._--The force exercised by the mind of an agent in impressing a percipient,--involving a direct influence of the extraneous spirit on the brain or organism of the percipient.

_Veridical._--Of hallucinations, when they correspond to real events happening elsewhere and unknown to the percipient.

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Maior agit deus, atque opera la maiora remitt.i.t.

--VIRGIL.

In the long story of man's endeavours to understand his own environment and to govern his own fates, there is one gap or omission so singular that, however we may afterwards contrive to explain the fact, its simple statement has the air of a paradox. Yet it is strictly true to say that man has never yet applied to the problems which most profoundly concern him those methods of inquiry which in attacking all other problems he has found the most efficacious.

The question for man most momentous of all is whether or no he has an immortal soul; or--to avoid the word _immortal_, which belongs to the realm of infinities--whether or no his personality involves any element which can survive bodily death. In this direction have always lain the gravest fears, the farthest-reaching hopes, which could either oppress or stimulate mortal minds.

On the other hand, the method which our race has found most effective in acquiring knowledge is by this time familiar to all men. It is the method of modern Science--that process which consists in an interrogation of Nature entirely dispa.s.sionate, patient, systematic; such careful experiment and c.u.mulative record as can often elicit from her slightest indications her deepest truths. That method is now dominant throughout the civilised world; and although in many directions experiments may be difficult and dubious, facts rare and elusive, Science works slowly on and bides her time,--refusing to fall back upon tradition or to launch into speculation, merely because strait is the gate which leads to valid discovery, indisputable truth.

I say, then, that this method has never yet been applied to the all-important problem of the existence, the powers, the destiny of the human soul.

Nor is this strange omission due to any general belief that the problem is in its nature incapable of solution by any observation whatever which mankind could make. That resolutely agnostic view--I may almost say that scientific superst.i.tion--"_ignoramus et ignorabimus_"--is no doubt held at the present date by many learned minds. But it has never been the creed, nor is it now the creed, of the human race generally. In most civilised countries there has been for nearly two thousand years a distinct belief that survival has actually been proved by certain phenomena observed at a given date in Palestine. And beyond the Christian pale--whether through reason, instinct, or superst.i.tion--it has ever been commonly held that ghostly phenomena of one kind or another exist to testify to a life beyond the life we know.

But, nevertheless, neither those who believe on vague grounds nor those who believe on definite grounds that the question might possibly be solved, or has actually been solved, by human observation of objective facts, have hitherto made any serious attempt to connect and correlate that belief with the general scheme of belief for which Science already vouches. They have not sought for fresh corroborative instances, for a.n.a.logies, for explanations; rather they have kept their convictions on these fundamental matters in a separate and sealed compartment of their minds, a compartment consecrated to religion or to superst.i.tion, but not to observation or to experiment.

It is my object in the present work--as it has from the first been the object of the Society for Psychical Research, on whose behalf most of the evidence here set forth has been collected,--to do what can be done to break down that artificial wall of demarcation which has thus far excluded from scientific treatment precisely the problems which stand in most need of all the aids to discovery which such treatment can afford.

Yet let me first explain that by the word "scientific" I signify an authority to which I submit myself--not a standard which I claim to attain. Any science of which I can here speak as possible must be a _nascent_ science--not such as one of those vast systems of connected knowledge which thousands of experts now steadily push forward in laboratories in every land--but such as each one of those great sciences was in its dim and poor beginning, when a few monks groped among the properties of "the n.o.ble metals," or a few Chaldean shepherds out.w.a.tched the setting stars.

What I am able to insist upon is the mere Socratic rudiment of these organisms of exact thought--the first axiomatic prerequisite of any valid progress. My one contention is that in the discussion of the deeper problems of man's nature and destiny there ought to be exactly the same openness of mind, exactly the same diligence in the search for objective evidence of any kind, exactly the same critical a.n.a.lysis of results, as is habitually shown, for instance, in the discussion of the nature and destiny of the planet upon which man now moves.

Obvious truism although this statement may at first seem, it will presently be found, I think, that those who subscribe to it are in fact committing themselves to inquiries of a wider and stranger type than any to which they are accustomed;--are stepping outside certain narrow limits within which, by ancient convention, disputants on either side of these questions are commonly confined.

A brief recall to memory of certain familiar historical facts will serve to make my meaning clearer. Let us consider how it has come about that, whereas the problem of man's survival of death is by most persons regarded as a problem in its nature soluble by sufficient evidence, and whereas to many persons the traditional evidence commonly adduced appears insufficient,--nevertheless no serious effort has been made on either side to discover whether other and more recent evidence can or cannot be brought forward.