Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death Part 22

But experience shows that when--as with these _post-mortem_ phantoms--the deceased person has gone well out of sight or reach there is a tendency, so to say, to _anthropomorphose_ the apparition; to suppose that, as the deceased person is not provably anywhere else, he is probably here; and that the apparition is bound to behave accordingly. All such a.s.sumptions must be dismissed, and the phantom must be taken on its merits, as indicating merely a certain connection with the deceased, the precise nature of that connection being a part of the problem to be solved.

And in the third place, just as we must cease to say that the phantom _is_ the deceased, so also must we cease to ascribe to the phantom the motives by which we imagine that the deceased might be swayed. We must therefore exclude from our definition of a ghost any words which a.s.sume its intention to communicate with the living. It may bear such a relation to the deceased that it can reflect or represent his presumed wish to communicate, or it may not. If, for instance, its relation to his _post-mortem_ life be like the relation of my dreams to my earthly life, it may represent little that is truly his, save such vague memories and instincts as give a dim individuality to each man's trivial dreams.

Let us attempt, then, a truer definition. Instead of describing a "ghost" as a dead person permitted to communicate with the living, let us define it as _a manifestation of persistent personal energy_, or as an indication that some kind of force is being exercised after death which is in some way connected with a person previously known on earth.

In this definition we have eliminated, as will be seen, a great ma.s.s of popular a.s.sumptions. Yet we must introduce a further proviso, lest our definition still seem to imply an a.s.sumption which we have no right to make. It is theoretically possible that this force or influence, which after a man's death creates a phantasmal impression of him, may indicate no continuing action on his part, but may be some residue of the force or energy which he generated while yet alive. There may be _veridical after-images_--such as Gurney hints at (_Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. v. p.

417) when in his comments on the recurring figure of an old woman--seen on the bed where she was murdered--he remarks that this figure suggests not so much "any continuing local interest on the part of the deceased person, as the survival of a mere image, impressed, we cannot guess how, on we cannot guess what, by that person's physical organism, and perceptible at times to those endowed with some cognate form of sensitiveness."

Strange as this notion may seem, it is strongly suggested by many of the cases of _haunting_ which do not fall within the scope of the present chapter. We shall presently find that there is strong evidence for the recurrence of the same hallucinatory figures in the same localities, but weak evidence to indicate any purpose in most of these figures, or any connection with bygone individuals, or with such tragedies as are popularly supposed to start a ghost on its career. In some of these cases of frequent, meaningless recurrence of a figure in a given spot, we are driven to wonder whether it can be some deceased person's past frequentation of that spot, rather than any fresh action of his after death, which has generated what I have termed the veridical after-image--veridical in the sense that it communicates information, previously unknown to the percipient, as to a former inhabitant of the haunted locality.

Such are some of the questions which our evidence suggests. And I may point out that the very fact that such bizarre problems should present themselves at every turn does in a certain sense tend to show that these apparitions are not purely subjective things,--do not originate merely in the percipient's imagination. For they are not like what any man would have imagined. What man's mind does tend to fancy on such topics may be seen in the endless crop of fict.i.tious ghost stories, which furnish, indeed, a curious proof of the persistence of preconceived notions. For they go on being framed according to canons of their own, and deal with a set of imaginary phenomena quite different from those which actually occur. The actual phenomena, I may add, could scarcely be made romantic. One true "ghost story" is apt to be very like another, and most of them to be fragmentary and apparently meaningless. Their meaning, that is to say, lies in their conformity, not to the mythopic instinct of mankind, which fabricates and enjoys the fict.i.tious tales, but to some unknown law, not based on human sentiment or convenience at all.

And thus, absurdly enough, we sometimes hear men ridicule the phenomena which actually do happen, simply because those phenomena do not suit their preconceived notions of what ghostly phenomena ought to be;--not perceiving that this very divergence, this very unexpectedness, is in itself no slight indication of an origin _outside_ the minds which obviously were so far from antic.i.p.ating anything of the kind.

And in fact the very qualities which are most apt to raise derision are such as the evidence set forth in the earlier chapters of this work might reasonably lead us to expect. For I hold that now for the first time can we form a conception of ghostly communications which shall in any way consist or cohere with more established conceptions; which can be presented as in any way a development of facts which are already experimentally known. Two preliminary conceptions were needed--conceptions in one sense ancient enough; but yet the first of which has only in this generation found its place in science, while the second is as yet awaiting its brevet of orthodoxy. The first conception is that with which hypnotism and various automatisms have familiarised us,--the conception of multiplex personality, of the potential coexistence of many states and many memories in the same individual. The second is the conception of telepathy; of the action of mind on mind apart from the ordinary organs of sense; and especially of its action by means of hallucinations; by the generation of veridical phantasms which form, as it were, messages from men still in the flesh. And I believe that these two conceptions are in this way connected, that the telepathic message generally starts from, and generally impinges upon, a subconscious or submerged stratum in both agent and percipient.[129]

Wherever there is hallucination, whether delusive or veridical, I hold that a message of some sort is forcing its way upwards from one stratum of personality to another,--a message which may be merely dreamlike and incoherent, or which may symbolise a fact otherwise unreachable by the percipient personality. And the mechanism seems much the same whether the message's path be continued within one individual or pa.s.s between two; whether A's own submerged self be signalling to his emergent self, or B be telepathically stimulating the hidden fountains of perception in A. If anything like this be true, it seems plainly needful that all that we know of abnormal or supernormal communications between minds, or states of the same mind, still embodied in flesh, should be searched for a.n.a.logies which may throw light on this strangest mode of intercourse between embodied and disembodied minds.

A communication (if such a thing exists) from a departed person to a person still on earth is, at any rate, a communication from a mind in one state of existence to a mind in a very different state of existence.

And it is, moreover, a communication from one mind to another which pa.s.ses through some channel other than the ordinary channels of sense, since on one side of the gulf no material sense-organs exist. It will apparently be an extreme instance of both these cla.s.ses--of communications between state and state,[130] and of telepathic communications; and we ought, therefore, to approach it by considering the less advanced cases of both these types.

On what occasions do we commonly find a mind conversing with another mind not on the same plane with itself?--with a mind inhabiting in some sense a different world, and viewing the environment with a difference of outlook greater than the mere difference of character of the two personages will account for?

The first instance of this sort which will occur to us lies in spontaneous somnambulism, or colloquy between a person asleep and a person awake. And observe here how slight an accident allows us to enter into converse with a state which at first sight seems a type of incommunicable isolation. "Awake, we share our world," runs the old saying, "but each dreamer inhabits a world of his own." Yet the dreamer, apparently so self-enclosed, may be gently led, or will spontaneously enter, into converse with waking men.

The somnambulist, or rather the somniloquist--for it is the talking rather than the walking which is the gist of the matter--is thus our first natural type of the _revenant_.

And observing the habits of somnambulists, we note that the degree in which they can communicate with other minds varies greatly in different cases. One sleep-waker will go about his customary avocations without recognising the presence of any other person whatever; another will recognise certain persons only, or will answer when addressed, but only on certain subjects, his mind coming into contact with other minds only on a very few points. Rarely or never will a somnambulist spontaneously notice what other persons are doing, and adapt his own actions thereto.

Next let us turn from natural to induced sleep-waking, from idiopathic somnambulism to the hypnotic trance. Here, too, throughout the different stages of the trance, we find a varying and partial (or elective) power of communication. Sometimes the entranced subject makes no sign whatever; sometimes he seems able to hear and answer one person, or certain persons, and not others; sometimes he will talk freely to all; but, however freely he may talk, he is not exactly his waking self, and as a rule he has no recollection, or a very imperfect recollection, in waking life of what he has said or done in his trance.

Judging, then, from such a.n.a.logy as communications from one living state to another can suggest to us, we shall expect that the communication of a disembodied or discarnate person with an incarnate, if such exist, will be subject to narrow limitations, and very possibly will not form a part of the main current of the supposed discarnate consciousness.

These preliminary considerations are applicable to any kind of alleged communication from the departed--whether well or ill evidenced; whether conveyed in sensory or in motor form.

Let us next consider what types of communication from the dead our existing evidence of communications among the living suggests to us as a.n.a.logically possible. It appears to me that there is an important parallelism running through each cla.s.s of our experiments in automatism and each cla.s.s of our spontaneous phenomena. Roughly speaking, we may say that our experiment and observation up to this point have comprised five different stages of phenomena, viz., (I.) hypnotic suggestion; (II.) telepathic experiments; (III.) spontaneous telepathy during life; (IV.) phantasms at death; (V.) phantasms after death. And we find, I think, that the same types of communication meet us at each stage; so that this recurrent similarity of types raises a presumption that the underlying mechanism of manifestation at each stage may be in some way similar.

Again using a mere rough form of division, we shall find three main forms of manifestation at each stage: (1) hallucinations of the senses; (2) emotional and motor impulses; (3) definite intellectual messages.

(I.) And first let us start from a cla.s.s of experiments into which telepathy does not enter, but which exhibit in its simplest form the mechanism of the automatic transfer of messages from one stratum to another of the same personality. I speak, of course, of post-hypnotic suggestions. Here the agent is a living man, operating in an ordinary way, by direct speech. The unusual feature lies in the condition of the percipient, who is hypnotised at the time, and is thus undergoing a kind of dislocation of personality, or temporary upheaval of a habitually subjacent stratum of the self. This hypnotic personality, being for the time at the surface, receives the agent's verbal suggestion, of which the percipient's waking self is unaware. Then afterwards, when the waking self has resumed its usual upper position, the hypnotic self carries out at the stated time the given suggestion,--an act whose origin the upper stratum of consciousness does not know, but which is in effect a message communicated to the upper stratum from the now submerged or subconscious stratum on which the suggestion was originally impressed.

And this message may take any one of the three leading forms mentioned above;--say a hallucinatory image of the hypnotiser or of some other person; or an impulse to perform some action; or a definite word or sentence to be written automatically by the waking self, which thus learns what order has been laid upon the hypnotic self while the waking consciousness was in abeyance.

(II.) Now turn to our experiments in thought-transference. Here again the agent is a living man; but he is no longer operating by ordinary means,--by spoken words or visible gestures. He is operating on the percipient's subconscious self by means of a telepathic impulse, which he desires, indeed, to project from himself, and which the percipient may desire to receive, but of whose _modus operandi_ the ordinary waking selves of agent and percipient alike are entirely unaware.

Here again we may divide the messages sent into the same three main cla.s.ses. First come the hallucinatory figures--always or almost always of himself--which the agent causes the percipient to see. Secondly come impulses to act, telepathically impressed; as when the hypnotiser desires his subject to come to him at an hour not previously notified.

And thirdly, we have a parallel to the post-hypnotic writing of definite words or figures in our own experiments on the direct telepathic transmission of words, figures, cards, etc., from the agent, using no normal means of communication, to the percipient, either in the hypnotised or in the waking state.

(III.) We come next to the spontaneous phantasms occurring during life.

Here we find the same three broad cla.s.ses of messages, with this difference, that the actual apparitions, which in our telepathic experimentation are thus far unfortunately rare, become now the most important cla.s.s. I need not recall the instances given in Chapters IV.

and VI., etc., where an agent undergoing some sudden crisis seems in some way to generate an apparition of himself seen by a distant percipient. Important also in this connection are those apparitions of the _double_, where some one agent is seen repeatedly in phantasmal form by different percipients at times when that agent is undergoing no special crisis.

Again, among our telepathic impressions generated (spontaneously, not experimentally) by living agents, we have cases, which I need not here recapitulate, of pervading sensations of distress; or impulses to return home, which are parallel to the hypnotised subject's impulse to approach his distant hypnotiser, at a moment when that hypnotiser is willing him to do so.

And thirdly, among these telepathic communications from the living to the living, we have definite sentences automatically written, communicating facts which the distant person knows, but is not consciously endeavouring to transmit.

(IV.) Pa.s.sing on to phantasms which cl.u.s.ter about the moment of death, we find our three main cla.s.ses of cases still meeting us. Our readers are familiar with the _visual_ cases, where there is an actual apparition of the dying man, seen by one or more persons; and also with the _emotional and motor_ cases, where the impression, although powerful, is not definitely sensory in character. And various cases also have been published where the message has consisted of definite words, not always externalised as an auditory hallucination, but sometimes automatically _uttered_ or automatically _written_ by the percipient himself, as in the case communicated by Dr. Liebeault (see Appendix VIII. C), where a girl writes the message announcing her friend's death at the time when that friend is, in fact, dying in a distant city.

(V.) And now I maintain that in these post-mortem cases also we find the same general cla.s.ses persisting, and in somewhat the same proportion.

Most conspicuous are the actual _apparitions_, with which, indeed, the following pages will mainly deal. It is very rare to find an apparition which seems to impart any verbal message; but a case of this kind has been given in Appendix IV. F. As a rule, however, the apparition is of the apparently automatic, purposeless character, already so fully described. We have also the _emotional and motor_ cla.s.s of post-mortem cases;[131] and these may, perhaps, be more numerous in proportion than our collection would indicate; for it is obvious that impressions which are so much less definite than a visual hallucination (although they may be even more impressive to the percipient himself) can rarely be used as evidence of communication with the departed.

But now I wish to point out that, besides these two cla.s.ses of post-mortem manifestations, we have our _third_ cla.s.s also still persisting; we have definite verbal messages which at least purport, and sometimes, I think, with strong probability, to come from the departed.

I have, indeed, for the reader's convenience, postponed these motor cases to a subsequent chapter, so that the evidence here and now presented for survival will be very incomplete. Yet, at any rate, we are gradually getting before us a fairly definite task. We have in this chapter to record and a.n.a.lyse such sensory experiences of living men as seem referable to the action of some human individuality persisting after death. We have also obtained some preliminary notion as to the kind of phenomena for which we can hope, especially as to what their probable limitations must be, considering how great a gulf between psychical states any communication must overpa.s.s.

Let us now press the actual evidential question somewhat closer. Let us consider, for it is by no means evident at first sight, what conditions a visual or auditory phantasm is bound to fulfil before it can be regarded as indicating _prima facie_ the influence of a discarnate mind.

The discussion may be best introduced by quoting the words in which Edmund Gurney opened it in 1888.[132] The main evidential lines as there laid down retain their validity, although the years which have since pa.s.sed have greatly augmented the testimony, and in so doing have ill.u.s.trated yet other tests of true post-mortem communication,--to which we shall presently come.

"It is evident that in alleged cases of apparitions of the dead, the point which we have held to distinguish certain apparitions of _living_ persons from purely subjective hallucinations is necessarily lacking. That point is _coincidence_ between the apparition and some critical or exceptional condition of the person who seems to appear; but with regard to the dead, we have no independent knowledge of their condition, and therefore never have the opportunity of observing any such coincidences.

"There remain three, and I think only three, conditions which might establish a presumption that an apparition or other immediate manifestation of a dead person is something more than a mere subjective hallucination of the percipient's senses. Either (1) more persons than one might be independently affected by the phenomenon; or (2) the phantasm might convey information, afterwards discovered to be true, of something which the percipient had never known; or (3) the appearance might be that of a person whom the percipient himself had never seen, and of whose aspect he was ignorant, and yet his description of it might be sufficiently definite for identification. But though one or more of these conditions would have to be fully satisfied before we could be convinced that any particular apparition of the dead had some cause external to the percipient's own mind, there is one more general characteristic of the cla.s.s which is sufficiently suggestive of such a cause to be worth considering. I mean the disproportionate number of cases which occur _shortly after_ the death of the person represented. Such a time-relation, if frequently enough encountered, might enable us to argue for the objective origin of the phenomenon in a manner a.n.a.logous to that which leads us to conclude that many phantasms of the living have an objective (a telepathic) origin. For, according to the doctrines of probabilities, a hallucination representing a known person would not _by chance_ present a definite time-relation to a special cognate event--viz., the death of that person--in more than a certain percentage of the whole number of similar hallucinations that occur; and if that percentage is decidedly exceeded, there is reason to surmise that some other cause than chance--in other words, some objective origin for the phantasm--is present."

But on the other hand, a phantasm representing a person whose death is recent is specially likely to arouse interest and, in cases where the death is previously known to the percipient, his emotional state may be considered a sufficient cause of the hallucination.

"If, then," Gurney continues, "we are to draw any probable conclusion as to the objective nature of _post-mortem_ appearances and communications (or of some of them) from the fact of their special frequency soon after death, we must confine ourselves to cases where the fact of death has been unknown to the percipient at the time of his experience. Now, in these days of letters and telegrams, people for the most part hear of the deaths of friends and relatives within a very few days, sometimes within a very few hours, after the death occurs; so that appearances of the sort required would, as a rule, have to follow very closely indeed on the death. Have we evidence of any considerable number of such cases?

"Readers of _Phantasms of the Living_ will know that we have. In a number of cases which were treated in that book as examples of telepathic transference from a dying person, the person was actually dead at the time that the percipient's experience occurred; and the inclusion of such cases under the t.i.tle of _Phantasms of the Living_ naturally occasioned a certain amount of adverse criticism. Their inclusion, it will be remembered, required an a.s.sumption which cannot by any means be regarded as certain. We had to suppose that the telepathic transfer took place just before, or exactly at, the moment of death; but that the impression remained latent in the percipient's mind, and only after an interval emerged into his consciousness, whether as waking vision or as dream or in some other form. Now, as a provisional hypothesis, I think that this a.s.sumption was justified. For in the first place, the moment of death is, in time, the central point of a cl.u.s.ter of abnormal experiences occurring to percipients at a distance, of which some _precede_, while others follow, the death; it is natural, therefore, to surmise that the same explanation will cover the whole group, and that the motive force in each of its divisions lies in a state of the 'agent' prior to bodily death. In the second place, some of the facts of experimental thought-transference countenance the view that 'transferred impressions' may be latent for a time before the recipient becomes aware of them; and recent discoveries with respect to the whole subject of automatism and 'secondary intelligence' make it seem far less improbable than it would otherwise have seemed that telepathy may take effect first on the 'unconscious' part of the mind.[133]

And in the third place, the period of supposed latency has in a good many instances been a period when the person affected was in activity, and when his mind and senses were being solicited by other things; and in such cases it is specially easy to suppose that the telepathic impression did not get the right conditions for rising into consciousness until a season of silence and _recueillement_ arrived.[134] But though the theory of latency has thus a good deal to be said for it, my colleagues and I are most anxious not to be supposed to be putting forward as a dogma what must be regarded at present merely as a working hypothesis.

Psychical research is of all subjects the one where it is most important to avoid this error, and to keep the mind open for new interpretations of the facts. And in the present instance there are certain definite objections which may fairly be made to the hypothesis that a telepathic impression derived from a dying person may emerge after hours of latency. The experimental cases to which I have referred as a.n.a.logous are few and uncertain, and, moreover, in them the period of latency has been measured by seconds or minutes, not by hours. And though, as I have said, some of the instances of apparent delay among the death-cases might be accounted for by the fact that the percipient's mind or senses needed to be withdrawn from other occupations before the manifestation could take place, there are other instances where this is not so, and where no ground at all appears for connecting the delay with the percipient's condition. On the whole, then, the alternative hypothesis--that the condition of the phenomenon on the 'agent's' side (be it psychical or be it physical) is one which only comes into existence at a distinct interval after death, and that the percipient really is impressed at the moment, and not before the moment, when he is conscious of the impression--is one which must be steadily kept in view.

"So far I have been speaking of cases where the interval between the death and the manifestation was so short as to make the theory of latency possible. The rule adopted in _Phantasms of the Living_ was that this interval must not exceed twelve hours. But we have records of a few cases where this interval has been greatly exceeded, and yet where the fact of the death was still unknown to the percipient at the time of his experience. The theory of latency cannot reasonably be applied to cases where weeks or months divide the vision (or whatever it may be) from the moment of death, which is the latest at which an ordinary[135] telepathically transferred idea could have obtained access to the percipient. And the existence of such cases--so far as it tends to establish the reality of objectively-caused apparitions of the dead--diminishes the objection to conceiving that the appearances, etc., which have very shortly _followed_ death have had a different causation from those which have coincided with or very shortly _preceded_ it. For we shall not be inventing a wholly new cla.s.s for the former cases, but only provisionally s.h.i.+fting them from one cla.s.s to another--to a much smaller and much less well-evidenced cla.s.s, it is true, but one nevertheless for which we have evidence enough to justify us in expecting more."

This, as I conceive, is a sound method of proceeding from ground made secure in _Phantasms of the Living_--and traversed in my own just previous chapter--to cases closely a.n.a.logous, save for that little difference in _time-relations_, that occurrence in the hours which follow, instead of the hours which precede, bodily dissolution, which counts for so much in our insight into cosmic law.[136]

The hypothesis of _latency_ which thus meets us _in limine_ in this inquiry will soon be found inadequate to cover the facts. Yet it will be well to dwell somewhat more fully upon its possible range.

If we examine the proportionate number of apparitions observed at various periods before and after death, we find that they increase very rapidly for the few hours which precede death, and decrease gradually during the hours and days which follow, until after about a year's time they become merely sporadic.

Yet one more point must be touched on, to avoid misconception of the phrase cited above, that "the moment of death is the centre of a cl.u.s.ter of abnormal experiences, of which some precede, while others follow, the death." Gurney, of course, did not mean to a.s.sume that the act of death itself was the cause of all these experiences. Those which occur before death may be caused or conditioned, not by the death itself, but by the abnormal state, as of coma, delirium, etc., which preceded the death.

This we say because we have many instances where veridical phantasms have coincided with moments of _crisis_--carriage-accidents and the like--occurring to distant agents, but not followed by death.

Accordingly we find that in almost all cases where a phantasm, apparently veridical, has _preceded_ the agent's death, that death was the result of disease and not of accident. To this rule there are very few exceptions. There is a case given in _Phantasms of the Living_ (vol.

ii. p. 52), where the phantasm seems on the evidence to have preceded by about half an hour (longitude allowed for) a sudden death by drowning.

In this case the percipient was in a Norfolk farmhouse, the drowning man--or agent--was in a storm off the island of Tristan d'Acunha; and we have suggested that an error of clocks or of observation may account for the discrepancy. In another case the death was in a sense a violent one, for it was a suicide; but the morbidly excited state of the girl a few hours before death--when her phantasm was seen--was in itself a state of crisis. But there are also a few recorded cases (none of which were cited in _Phantasms of the Living_) where a phantasm or double of some person has been observed some days previous to that person's accidental death. The evidence obtained in the Census of Hallucinations, however, tended to show that cases of this sort are too few to suggest even _prima facie_ a causal connection between the death and the apparition (see _Proceedings_ S.P.R. vol. x. p. 331).

I now proceed briefly to review some of the cases where the interval between death and phantasm has been measurable by minutes or hours.

It is not easy to get definite cases where the interval has been measurable by _minutes_; for if the percipient is at a distance from the agent we can seldom be sure that the clocks at both places have been correct, and correctly observed; while if he is _present_ with the agent we can rarely be sure that the phantasm observed is more than a mere subjective hallucination. Thus we have several accounts of a rus.h.i.+ng sound heard by the watcher of a dying man just after his apparent death, or of some kind of luminosity observed near his person; but this is just the moment when we may suppose some subjective hallucination likely to occur, and if one person's senses alone are affected we cannot allow much evidential weight to the occurrence.[137]

There are some circ.u.mstances, however, in which, in spite of the fact that the death is already known, a hallucination occurring shortly afterwards may have some slight evidential value. Thus we have a case where a lady who knew that her sister had died a few hours previously, but who was not herself in any morbidly excited condition, seemed to see some one enter her own dining-room, opening and shutting the door. The percipient (who had never had any other hallucination) was much astonished when she found no one in the dining-room; but it did not till some time afterwards occur to her that the incident could be in any way connected with her recent loss. This reminds us of a case (ii. p.

694[138]) where the Rev. R. M. Hill sees a tall figure rush into the room, which alarms and surprises him, then vanishes before he has time to recognise it. An uncle, a tall man, dies about that moment, and it is remarked that although Mr. Hill knew his uncle to be ill, the anxiety which he may have felt would hardly have given rise to an unrecognised and formidable apparition.