Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death Part 25

Here, then, is a natural place of pause in our inquiry.

The discussion of the ethical aspect of these questions I have postponed to my concluding chapter. But one point already stands out from the evidence--at once so important and so manifest that it seems well to call attention to it at once--as a solvent more potent than any Lucretius could apply to human superst.i.tion and human fears.

In this long string of narratives, complex and bizarre though their details may be, we yet observe that the character of the appearance varies in a definite manner with their distinctness and individuality.

Haunting phantoms, incoherent and unintelligent, may seem restless and unhappy. But as they rise into definiteness, intelligence, individuality, the phantoms rise also into love and joy. I cannot recall one single case of a proved posthumous combination of intelligence with wickedness. Such evil as our evidence will show us--we have as yet hardly come across it in this book--is scarcely more than monkeyish mischief, childish folly. In dealing with automatic script, for instance, we shall have to wonder whence come the occasional vulgar jokes or silly mystifications. We shall discuss whether they are a kind of dream of the automatist's own, or whether they indicate the existence of unembodied intelligences on the level of the dog or the ape. But, on the other hand, all that world-old conception of Evil Spirits, of malevolent Powers, which has been the basis of so much of actual devil-wors.h.i.+p and of so much more of vague supernatural fear;--all this insensibly melts from the mind as we study the evidence before us.

Hunc igitur terrorem animi tenebrasque necessest Non radii solis, neque lucida tela diei Discutiant sed, naturae species ratioque.

Here surely is a fact of no little meaning. Our narratives have been collected from men and women of many types, holding all varieties of ordinary opinion. Yet the upshot of all these narratives is to emphasise a point which profoundly differentiates the scientific from the superst.i.tious view of spiritual phenomena. The terror which shaped primitive theologies still tinges for the populace every hint of intercourse with disembodied souls. The trans.m.u.tation of savage fear into scientific curiosity is of the essence of civilisation. Towards that trans.m.u.tation each separate fragment of our evidence, with undesigned concordance, indisputably tends. In that faintly opening world of spirit I can find nothing worse than living men; I seem to discern not an intensification but a disintegration of selfishness, malevolence, pride. And is not this a natural result of any cosmic moral evolution? If the selfish man (as Marcus Antoninus has it) "is a kind of boil or imposthume upon the universe," must not his egoistic impulses suffer in that wider world a sure, even if a painful, decay; finding no support or sustenance among those permanent forces which maintain the stream of things?

I have thus indicated one point of primary importance on which the undesignedly coincident testimony of hundreds of first-hand narratives supports a conclusion, not yet popularly accepted, but in harmony with the evolutionary conceptions which rule our modern thought. Nor does this point stand alone. I can find, indeed, no guarantee of absolute and idle bliss; no triumph in any exclusive salvation. But the student of these narratives will, I think, discover throughout them uncontradicted indications of the persistence of Love, the growth of Joy, the willing submission to Law.

These indications, no doubt, may seem weak and scattered la comparison with the wholesale, thorough-going a.s.sertions of philosophical or religious creeds. Their advantage is that they occur incidentally in the course of our independent and c.u.mulative demonstration of the profoundest cosmical thesis which we can at present conceive as susceptible of any kind of scientific proof. Cosmical questions, indeed, there may be which are in themselves of deeper import than our own survival of bodily death. The nature of the First Cause; the blind or the providential ordering of the sum of things;--these are problems vaster than any which affect only the destinies of men. But to whatever moral certainty we may attain on those mightiest questions, we can devise no way whatever of bringing them to scientific test. They deal with infinity; and our modes of investigation have grasp only on finite things.

But the question of man's survival of death stands in a position uniquely intermediate between matters capable and matters incapable of proof. It is in itself a definite problem, admitting of conceivable proof which, even if not technically rigorous, might amply satisfy the scientific mind. And at the same time the conception which it involves is in itself a kind of avenue and inlet into infinity. Could a proof of our survival be obtained, it would carry us deeper into the true nature of the universe than we should be carried by an even perfect knowledge of the material scheme of things. It would carry us deeper both by achievement and by promise. The discovery that there was a life in man independent of blood and brain would be a cardinal, a dominating fact in all science and in all philosophy. And the prospect thus opened to human knowledge, in this or in other worlds, would be limitless indeed.

CHAPTER VIII

MOTOR AUTOMATISM

????t? ???? s?p?e?? t? pe??????t? ????, ???' ?d? ?a? s?f??????

t? pe??????t? p??ta ??e??

--MARCUS AURELIUS.

At this point, one may broadly say, we reach the end of the phenomena whose existence is vaguely familiar to popular talk. And here, too, I might fairly claim, the evidence for my primary thesis,--namely, that the a.n.a.lysis of man's personality reveals him as a spirit, surviving death,--has attained an amplitude which would justify the reader in accepting that view as the provisional hypothesis which comes nearest to a comprehensive co-ordination of the actual facts. What we have already recounted seems, indeed, impossible to explain except by supposing that our inner vision has widened or deepened its purview so far as to attain some glimpses of a spiritual world in which the individualities of our departed friends still actually subsist.

The reader, however, who has followed me thus far must be well aware that a large cla.s.s of phenomena, of high importance, is still awaiting discussion. _Motor_ automatisms,--though less familiar to the general public than the phantasms which I have cla.s.sed as _sensory_ automatisms,--are in fact even commoner, and even more significant.

Motor automatisms, as I define them, are phenomena of very wide range.

We have encountered them already many times in this book. We met them in the first place in a highly developed form in connection with multiplex personality in Chapter II. Numerous instances were there given of motor effects, initiated by secondary selves without the knowledge of the primary selves, or sometimes in spite of their actual resistance. All motor action of a secondary self is an automatism in this sense, in relation to the primary self. And of course we might by a.n.a.logy extend the use of the word still further, and might call not only post-epileptic acts, but also maniacal acts, automatic; since they are performed without the initiation of the presumedly sane primary personality. Those degenerative phenomena, indeed, are not to be discussed in this chapter. Yet it will be well to pause here long enough to make it clear to the reader just what motor automatisms I am about to discuss as _evolutive_ phenomena, and as therefore falling within the scope of this treatise;--and what kind of relation they bear to the dissolutive motor phenomena which occupy so much larger a place in popular knowledge.

In order to meet this last question, I must here give more distinct formulation to a thesis which has already suggested itself more than once in dealing with special groups of our phenomena.

_It may be expected that supernormal vital phenomena will manifest themselves as far as possible through the same channels as abnormal or morbid vital phenomena, when the same centres or the same synergies are involved._

To ill.u.s.trate the meaning of this theorem, I may refer to a remark long ago made by Edmund Gurney and myself in dealing with "Phantasms of the Living," or veridical hallucinations, generated (as we maintained), not by a morbid state of the percipient's brain, but by a telepathic impact from an agent at a distance. We observed that if a hallucination--a subjective image--is to be excited by this distant energy, it will probably be most readily excited in somewhat the same manner as the morbid hallucination which follows on a cerebral injury. We urged that this is _likely_ to be the case--we showed ground for supposing that it _is_ the case--both as regards the mode of evolution of the phantasm in the percipient's brain, and the mode in which it seems to present itself to his senses.

And here I should wish to give a much wider generality to this principle, and to argue that if there be within us a secondary self aiming at manifestation by physiological means, it seems probable that its readiest _path of externalisation_--its readiest outlet of visible action--may often lie along some track which has already been shown to be a line of low resistance by the disintegrating processes of disease.

Or, varying the metaphor, we may antic.i.p.ate that the part.i.tion of the primary and the secondary self will lie along some plane of cleavage which the _morbid_ dissociations of our psychical synergies have already shown themselves disposed to follow. If epilepsy, madness, etc., tend to _split up_ our faculties in certain ways, automatism is likely to split them up in ways somewhat resembling these.

But in what way then, it will be asked, do you distinguish the supernormal from the merely abnormal? Why a.s.sume that in these aberrant states there is anything besides hysteria, besides epilepsy, besides insanity?

The answer to this question has virtually been given in previous chapters of this book. The reader is already accustomed to the point of view which regards all psychical as well as all physiological activities as necessarily either developmental or degenerative, tending to evolution or to dissolution. And now, whilst altogether waiving any teleological speculation, I will ask him hypothetically to suppose that an evolutionary _nisus_, something which we may represent as an effort towards self-development, self-adaptation, self-renewal, is discernible especially on the psychical side of at any rate the higher forms of life. Our question, Supernormal or abnormal?--may then be phrased, Evolutive or dissolutive? And in studying each psychical phenomenon in turn we shall have to inquire whether it indicates a mere degeneration of powers already acquired, or, on the other hand, the "promise and potency," if not the actual possession, of powers as yet unrecognised or unknown.

Thus, for instance, Telepathy is surely a step in _evolution_.[160] To learn the thoughts of other minds without the mediation of the special senses, manifestly indicates the possibility of a vast extension of psychical powers. And any knowledge which we can ama.s.s as to the conditions under which telepathic action takes place will form a valuable starting-point for an inquiry as to the evolutive or dissolutive character of unfamiliar psychical states.[161]

For example, we may learn from our knowledge of telepathy that the superficial aspect of certain stages of psychical evolution, like the superficial aspect of certain stages of physiological evolution, may resemble mere _inhibition_, or mere _perturbation_. But the inhibition may involve latent dynamogeny, and the perturbation may mask evolution.

The hypnotised subject may pa.s.s through a lethargic stage before he wakes into a state in which he has gained _community of sensation_ with the operator; somewhat as the silkworm (to use the oldest and the most suggestive of all ill.u.s.trations) pa.s.ses through the apparent torpor of the coc.o.o.n-stage before evolving into the moth. Again, the automatist's hand (as we shall presently see) is apt to pa.s.s through a stage of inco-ordinated movements, which might almost be taken for ch.o.r.eic, before it acquires the power of ready and intelligent writing. Similarly the development, for instance, of a tooth may be preceded by a stage of indefinite aching, which might be ascribed to the formation of an abscess, did not the new tooth ultimately show itself. And still more striking cases of a _perturbation which masks evolution_ might be drawn from the history of the human organism as it develops into its own maturity, or prepares for the appearance of the fresh human organism which is to succeed it.

a.n.a.logy, therefore, both physiological and psychical, warns us not to conclude that any given psychosis is merely degenerative until we have examined its results closely enough to satisfy ourselves whether they tend to bring about any enlargement of human powers, to open any new inlet to the reception of objective truth. If such there prove to be, then, with whatever morbid activities the psychosis may have been intertwined, it contains indications of an evolutionary _nisus_ as well.

These remarks, I hope, may have sufficiently cleared the ground to admit of our starting afresh on the consideration of such motor automatisms as are at any rate not morbid in their effect on the organism, and which I now have to show to be _evolutive_ in character. I maintain that we have no valid ground for a.s.suming that the movements which are _not_ due to our conscious will must be less important, and less significant, than those that _are_. We observe, of course, that in the organic region the movements which are _not_ due to conscious will are really the most important of all, though the voluntary movements by which a man seeks food and protects himself against enemies are also of great practical importance--he must first live and multiply if he is to learn and know.

But we must guard against confusing importance for immediate practical life with importance for science--on which even practical life ultimately depends. As soon as the task of living and multiplying is no longer all-engrossing, we begin to change our relative estimate of values, and to find that it is not the broad and obvious phenomena, but the residual and elusive phenomena, which are oftenest likely to introduce us to new avenues of knowledge. I wish to persuade my readers that this is quite as truly the case in psychology as in physics.

As a first step in our a.n.a.lysis, we may point out certain main characters which unite in a true cla.s.s all the automatisms which we are here considering--greatly though these may differ among themselves in external form.

In the first place, then, our automatisms are _independent_ phenomena; they are what the physician calls _idiognomonic_. That is to say, they are not merely symptomatic of some other affection, or incidental to some profounder change. The mere fact, for instance, that a man writes messages which he does not consciously originate will not, when taken alone, prove anything beyond this fact itself as to the writer's condition. He may be perfectly sane, in normal health, and with nothing unusual observable about him. This characteristic--provable by actual observation and experiment--distinguishes our automatisms from various seemingly kindred phenomena. Thus we may have to include in our cla.s.s the occasional automatic utterance of words or sentences. But the continuous exhausting vociferation of acute mania does not fall within our province; for those shouts are merely _symptomatic_; nor, again, does the _cri hydrocephalique_ (or spontaneous meaningless noise which sometimes accompanies water on the brain); for that, too, is no independent phenomenon, but the direct consequence of a definite lesion.

Furthermore, we shall have to include in our cla.s.s certain simple movements of the hands, co-ordinated into the act of writing. But here, also, our definition will lead us to exclude _ch.o.r.eic_ movements, which are merely symptomatic of nervous malnutrition; or which we may, if we choose, call _idiopathic_, as const.i.tuting an independent malady. But our automatisms are not _idiopathic_ but _idiognomonic_; they may indeed be a.s.sociated with or facilitated by certain states of the organism, but they are neither a symptom of any other malady, nor are they a malady in themselves.

Agreeing, then, that our peculiar cla.s.s consists of automatisms which are idiognomonic,--whose existence does not necessarily imply the existence of some profounder affection already known as producing them,--we have still to look for some more positive bond of connection between them, some quality common to all of them, and which makes them worth our prolonged investigation.

This we shall find in the fact that they are all of them _message-bearing_ or _nunciative_ automatisms. I do not, of course, mean that they all of them bring messages from sources external to the automatist's own mind. In some cases they probably do this; but as a rule the so-called messages seem more probably to originate within the automatist's own personality. Why, then, it may be asked, do I call them _messages_? We do not usually speak of a man as sending a message to himself. The answer to this question involves, as we shall presently see, the profoundest conception of these automatisms to which we can as yet attain. They present themselves to us as messages communicated from one stratum to another stratum of the same personality. Originating in some deeper zone of a man's being, they float up into superficial consciousness, as deeds, visions, words, ready-made and full-blown, without any accompanying perception of the elaborative process which has made them what they are.

Can we then (we may next ask) in any way predict the possible _range_ of these motor automatisms? Have we any limit a.s.signable _a priori_, outside which it would be useless to look for any externalisation of an impulse emanating from sub-conscious strata of our being?

The answer to this must be that no such limit can be with any confidence suggested. We have not yet learnt with any distinctness even how far the wave from a _consciously_-perceived stimulus will spread, or what changes its motion will a.s.sume. Still less can we predict the limitations which the resistance of the organism will impose on the radiation of a stimulus originated within itself. We are learning to consider the human organism as a practically infinite complex of interacting vibrations; and each year adds many new facts to our knowledge of the various transformations which these vibrations may undergo, and of the unexpected artifices by which we may learn to cognise some stimulus which is not directly felt.

A few concrete instances will make my meaning plainer. And my first example shall be taken from those experiments in _muscle-reading_--less correctly termed mind-reading--with which the readers of the _Proceedings_ of the S.P.R. are already familiar. Let us suppose that I am to hide a pin, and that some accomplished muscle-reader is to take my hand and find the pin by noting my muscular indications.[162] I first hide the pin in the hearth-rug; then I change my mind and hide it in the bookshelf. I fix my mind on the bookshelf, but resolve to make no guiding movement. The muscle-reader takes my hand, leads me first to the rug, then to the bookshelf, and finds the pin. Now, what has happened in this case? What movements have I made?

Firstly, I have made no _voluntary_ movement; and secondly, I have made no _conscious involuntary_ movement. But, thirdly, I have made an _unconscious involuntary_ movement which directly depended on conscious ideation. I strongly thought of the bookshelf, and when the bookshelf was reached in our vague career about the room I made a movement--say rather a tremor occurred--in my hand, which, although beyond both my knowledge and my control, was enough to supply to the muscle-reader's delicate sensibility all the indication required. All this is now admitted, and, in a sense, understood; we formulate it by saying that my conscious ideation contained a motor element; and that this motor element, though inhibited from any conscious manifestation, did yet inevitably externalise itself in a peripheral tremor.

But, fourthly, something more than this has clearly taken place. Before the muscle-reader stopped at the bookshelf he stopped at the rug. I was no longer consciously thinking of the rug; but the idea of the pin in the rug must still have been reverberating, so to say, in my sub-conscious region; and this unconscious memory, this unnoted reverberation, revealed itself in a peripheral tremor nearly as distinct as that which (when the bookshelf was reached) corresponded to the strain of conscious thought.

This tremor, then, was in a certain sense a message-bearing automatism.

It was the externalisation of an idea which, once conscious, had become unconscious, though in the slightest conceivable degree--namely, by a mere slight escape from the field of direct attention.

Having, then, considered an instance where the automatic message pa.s.ses only between two closely-adjacent strata of consciousness, externalising an impulse derived from an idea which has only recently sunk out of consciousness and which could easily be summoned back again;--let us find our next ill.u.s.tration in a case where the line of demarcation between the strata of consciousness through which the automatic message pierces is distinct and impa.s.sable by any effort of will.

Let us take a case of _post-hypnotic suggestion_;--say, for instance, an experiment of Edmund Gurney's (see _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. iv. p.

319). The subject had been trained to write with planchette, after he had been awakened, the statements which had been made to him when in the hypnotic trance. He wrote the desired words, or something like them, but while he wrote them his waking self was entirely unaware of what his hand was writing. Thus, having been told in the trance, "It has begun snowing again," he wrote, after waking, "It begun snowing," while he read aloud, with waking intelligence, from a book of stories, and was quite unconscious of what his hand (placed on a planchette behind a screen) was at the same time writing.

Here we have an automatic message of traceable origin; a message implanted in the hypnotic stratum of the subject's self, and cropping up--like a fault--in the waking stratum,--externalised in automatic movements which the waking self could neither predict nor guide.

Yet once more. In the discussion which will follow we shall have various instances of the transformation (as I shall regard it) of psychical shock into definite muscular energy of apparently a quite alien kind.

Such transformations of so-called psychical into physical force--of will into motion--do of course perpetually occur within us.

For example, I take a child to a circus; he sits by me holding my hand; there is a discharge of musketry and his grip tightens. Now in this case we should call the child's tightened grip automatic. But suppose that, instead of merely holding my hand, he is trying with all his might to squeeze the dynamometer, and that the sudden excitation enables him to squeeze it harder--are we then to describe that extra squeeze as automatic? or as voluntary?

However phrased, it is the fact (as amply established by M. Fere and others[163]) that excitations of almost any kind--whether sudden and startling or agreeable and prolonged--do tend to increase the subject's dynamometrical power. In the first place, and this is in itself an important fact, the average of squeezing-power is found to be greater among educated students than among robust labouring men, thus showing that it is not so much developed muscle as active brain which renders possible a sudden concentration of muscular force. But more than this; M. Fere finds that with himself and his friends the mere listening to an interesting lecture, or the mere stress of thought in solitude, or still more the act of writing or of speech, produces a decided increase of strength in the grip, especially of the right hand. The same effect of dynamogeny is produced with hypnotic subjects, by musical sounds, by coloured light, especially red light, and even by a hallucinatory suggestion of red light. "All our sensations," says M. Fere in conclusion, "are accompanied by a development of potential energy, which pa.s.ses into a kinetic state, and externalises itself in motor manifestations which even so rough a method as dynamometry is able to observe and record."

I would beg the reader to keep these words in mind. We shall presently find that a method apparently even rougher than dynamographic tracings may be able to interpret, with far greater delicacy, the automatic tremors which are coursing to and fro within us. If once we can get a spy into the citadel of our own being, his rudest signalling will tell us more than our subtlest inferences from outside of what is being planned and done within.

And now having to deal with what I define as messages conveyed by one stratum in man to another stratum, I must first consider in what general ways human messages can be conveyed. Writing and speech have become predominant in the intercourse of civilised men, and it is to writing and speech that we look with most interest among the communications of the subliminal self. But it does not follow that the subliminal self will always have such complex methods at its command. We have seen already that it often finds it hard to manage the delicate co-ordinations of muscular movement required for writing,--that the attempt at automatic script ends in a thump and a scrawl.