Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death Part 29

There is no case that I have watched longer than Miss A.'s;--none where I have more absolute a.s.surance of the scrupulous probity of the princ.i.p.al sensitive herself and of the group who share the experiments;--but none also which leaves me more often baffled as to the unseen source of the information given. There is a knowledge both of the past and of the future, which seems capriciously limited, and is mingled with mistakes, yet on the other hand is of a nature which it is difficult to refer to any individual human mind, incarnate or discarnate. We meet here some of the first indications of a possibility that discarnate spirits communicating with us have occasional access to certain sources of knowledge which even to themselves are inscrutably remote and obscure.

The written diagnoses and prognoses given by the so-called "Semirus,"

often without Miss A.'s even seeing the patient or hearing the nature of his malady, have become more and more remarkable. Miss A. and her friends do not wish these private matters to be printed, and I cannot therefore insist upon the phenomena here. Yet in view of the amount of telaesthesia which Miss A.'s various automatisms reveal, it should first be noted that human organisms seem especially pervious to such _vue a distance_. "Semirus," "Gelalius," etc., are obvious pseudonyms; and neither Semirus' prescriptions nor Gelalius' cosmogony contain enough of indication to enable us to grasp their origin.[191]

From the communications of these remote personages I go on to certain messages avowedly coming from persons more recently departed, and into which something more of definite personality seems to enter. One element of this kind is _handwriting_; there are many cases where resemblance of handwriting is one of the evidential points alleged. Now proof of ident.i.ty from resemblance of handwriting may conceivably be very strong.

But in estimating it we must bear two points in mind. The first is that (like the resemblances of so-called "spirit-photographs" to deceased friends) it is often very loosely a.s.serted. One needs, if not an expert's opinion, at least a careful personal scrutiny of the three scripts--the automatist's voluntary and his automatic script, and the deceased person's script--before one can feel sure that the resemblance is in more than some general scrawliness. This refers to the cases where the automatist has provably never seen the deceased person's handwriting. Where he _has_ seen that handwriting, we have to remember (in the second place) that a hypnotised subject can frequently imitate any known handwriting far more closely than in his waking state; and that consequently we are bound to credit the subliminal self with a mimetic faculty which may come out in these messages without any supraliminal guidance whatever on the automatist's part. In _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. v. pp. 549-65 [864 A], is an account of a series of experiments by Professor Rossi-Pagnoni at Pesaro, into which the question of handwriting enters. The account ill.u.s.trates automatic utterance as well as other forms of motor automatism, and possibly also telekinetic phenomena. The critical discussion of the evidence by Mr.

H. Babington Smith, to whom we are indebted for the account, shows with what complex considerations we have to deal in the questions now before us.

I now cite a few cases where the point of central interest is the announcement of a death unknown to the sitters.[192]

In Appendix VIII. C is given a case which we received from Dr.

Liebeault, of Nancy, and which was first published in _Phantasms of the Living_ (vol. i. p. 293), where it was regarded as an example of a spontaneous telepathic impulse proceeding directly from a dying person.

I now regard it as more probably due to the action of the spirit after bodily death.

I shall next give a _resume_ of a case of curious complexity received from M. Aksakof;--an automatic message written by a Mdlle. Stramm, informing her of the death of a M. Duvanel. The princ.i.p.al incidents may here be disentangled as follows:--

Duvanel dies by his own hand on January 15th, 1887, in a Swiss village, where he lives alone, having no relations except a brother living at a distance, whom Mdlle. Stramm had never seen (as the princ.i.p.al witness, M. Kaigorodoff, informs us in a letter of May 1890).

Mdlle. Stramm's father does not hear of Duvanel's death till two days later, and sends her the news in a letter dated January 18th, 1887.

Five hours after Duvanel's death an automatic message announcing it is written at the house of M. Kaigorodoff, at Wilna in Russia, by Mdlle. Stramm, who had certainly at that time received no news of the event.

From what mind are we to suppose that this information came?

(1) We may first attempt to account for Mdlle. Stramm's message on the theory of _latency_. We may suppose that the telepathic message came from the dying man, but did not rise into consciousness until an opportunity was afforded by Mdlle. Stramm's sitting down to write automatically.

But to this interpretation there is an objection of a very curious kind. The message written by Mdlle. Stramm was not precisely accurate. Instead of ascribing Duvanel's death to suicide, it ascribed it to a stoppage of blood, "un engorgement de sang."

And when M. Stramm, three days after the death, wrote to his daughter in Russia to tell her of it, he also used the same expression, "un engorgement de sang," thus disguising the actual truth in order to spare the feelings of his daughter, who had formerly refused to marry Duvanel, and who (as her father feared) might receive a painful shock if she learnt the tragic nature of his end. There was, therefore, a singular coincidence between the automatic and the normally-written message as to the death;--a coincidence which looks as though the same mind had been at work in each instance. But that mind cannot have been M. Stramm's ordinary mind, as he was not supraliminally aware of Duvanel's death at the time when the first message was written. It may, however, be supposed that his subliminal self had received the information of the death telepathically, had transmitted it in a deliberately modified form to his daughter, while it remained latent in himself, and had afterwards influenced his supraliminal self to modify the information in the same way when writing to her.

(2) But we must also consider the explanation of the coincidence given by the intelligence which controlled the automatic writing.

That intelligence a.s.serted itself to be a brother of Mdlle.

Stramm's, who died some years before. And this "Louis" further a.s.serted that he had himself influenced M. Stramm to make use of the same euphemistic phrase, with the object of avoiding a shock to Mdlle. Stramm; for which purpose it was needful that the two messages should agree in ascribing the death to the same form of sudden illness.

Now if this be true, and the message did indeed come from the deceased "Louis," we have an indication of continued existence, and continued knowledge of earthly affairs, on the part of a person long dead.

But if we consider that the case, as presented to us, contains no proof of "Louis'" ident.i.ty, so that "Louis" may be merely one of those arbitrary names which the automatist's subliminal intelligence seems so p.r.o.ne to a.s.sume; then we must suppose that Duvanel was actually operative on two occasions after death, first inspiring in Mdlle. Stramm the automatic message, and then modifying in M. Stramm the message which the father might otherwise have sent.

I next quote a case in Appendix VIII. D which ill.u.s.trates the continued terrene knowledge on the part of the dead of which other instances were given in the last chapter.

And lastly, I give in Appendix VIII. E a case which in one respect stands alone. It narrates the success of a direct experiment,--a test-message planned before death, and communicated after death, by a man who held that the hope of an a.s.surance of continued existence was worth at least a resolute effort, whatever its result might be. His tests, indeed, were two, and both were successful. One was the revealing of the place where, before death, he hid a piece of brick marked and broken for special recognition, and the other was the communication of the contents of a short letter which he wrote and sealed before death.

We may say that the information was certainly not possessed supraliminally by any living person. There are two other cases (_Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. vi. pp. 353-355, and _op. cit._ vol viii.

pp. 238-242 [876 A and B]) where information given through automatists may hypothetically be explicable by telepathy from the living, although, indeed, in my own view, it probably emanated from the deceased as alleged. In one of these cases the place where a missing will had been hidden was revealed to the automatist, but it is not clear whether the will was actually discovered or not before the automatic writing was obtained (although the automatist was unaware of its discovery), and in any case, apparently, its whereabouts was known to some living person who had hidden it, and may not have been known to the deceased before death.

In the other case the whereabouts of a missing note of hand was revealed to the automatists, and even if this could be regarded as absolutely unknown supraliminally to any living person, it is not by any means certain that the fact was known before death to the deceased person from whom the message purported to come.

These cases, therefore, are not such strong evidence for personal ident.i.ty as the one to which I have referred above, and which I have given, as recording what purports to be the successful accomplishment of an experiment which every one may make;--which every one _ought_ to make;--for, small as may be the chances of success, a few score of distinct successes would establish a presumption of man's survival which the common sense of mankind would refuse to explain away.

Here, then, let us pause and consider to what point the evidence contained in this chapter has gradually led us. We shall perceive that the motor phenomena have confirmed, and have also greatly extended, the results to which the cognate sensory phenomena had already pointed. We have already noted, in each of the two states of sleep and of waking, the variously expanding capacities of the subliminal self. We have watched a hyperaesthetic intensification of ordinary faculty,--leading up to telaesthesia, and to telepathy, from the living and from the departed.

Along with these powers, which, on the hypothesis of the soul's independent existence, are at least within our range of a.n.a.logical conception, we have noted also a precognitive capacity of a type which no fact as yet known to science will help us to explain.

Proceeding to the study of motor automatisms, we have found a _third_ group of cases which independently confirm in each of these lines in turn the results of our a.n.a.lysis of sensory automatisms both in sleep and in waking. Evidence thus convergent will already need no ordinary boldness of negative a.s.sumption if it is to be set aside. But motor automatisms have taught us much more than this. At once more energetic and more persistent than the sensory, they oblige us to face certain problems which the lightness and fugitiveness of sensory impressions allowed us in some measure to evade. Thus when we discussed the mechanism (so to call it) of visual and auditory phantasms, two competing conceptions presented themselves for our choice,--the conception of _telepathic impact_, and the conception of _psychical invasion_. Either (we said) there was an influence exerted by the agent on the percipient's mind, which so stimulated the sensory tracts of his brain that he externalised that impression as a quasi-percept, or else the agent in some way modified an actual portion of s.p.a.ce where (say) an apparition was discerned, perhaps by several percipients at once.

Phrased in this manner, the telepathic impact seemed the less startling, the less extreme hypothesis of the two,--mainly, perhaps, because the picture which it called up was left so vague and obscure. But now instead of a fleeting hallucination we have to deal with a strong and lasting impulse--such, for instance, as the girl's impulse to _write_, in Dr. Liebeault's case (Appendix VIII. C):--an impulse which seems to come from the depths of the being, and which (like a post-hypnotic suggestion) may override even strong disinclination, and keep the automatist uncomfortable until it has worked itself out. We may still call this a _telepathic impact_, if we will, but we shall find it hard to distinguish that term from a _psychical invasion_. This strong, yet apparently alien, motor innervation corresponds in fact as closely as possible to our idea of an _invasion_--an invasion no longer of the room only in which the percipient is sitting, but of his own body and his own powers. It is an invasion which, if sufficiently prolonged, would become a _possession_; and it both unites and intensifies those two earlier conjectures;--of telepathic impact on the percipient's mind, and of "phantasmogenetic presence" in the percipient's surroundings. What seemed at first a mere impact is tending to become a persistent control; what seemed an incursion merely into the percipient's environment has become an incursion into his organism itself.

As has been usual in this inquiry, this slight forward step from vagueness to comparative clearness of conception introduces us at once to a whole series of novel problems. Yet, as we have also learnt to expect, some of our earlier phenomena may have to be called in with advantage to ill.u.s.trate phenomena more advanced.

In cases of split personality, to begin with, we have seen just the same phenomena occurring where certainly no personality was concerned save the percipient's own. We have seen a section of the subliminal self partially or temporarily dominating the organism; perhaps controlling permanently one arm alone;[193] or perhaps controlling intermittently the whole nervous system;--and all this with varying degrees of displacement of the primary personality.

Similarly with post-hypnotic suggestion. We have seen the subliminal self ordered to write (say) "It has left off raining"--and thereupon writing the words without the conscious will of the automatist--and again with varying degrees of displacement of the waking self. The step hence to such a case as Mrs. Newnham's is thus not a very long one. Mrs.

Newnham's subliminal self, exercising supernormal faculty, and by some effort of its own, acquires certain facts from Mr. Newnham's mind, and uses her hand to write them down automatically. The great problem here introduced is how the subliminal self acquires the facts, rather than how it succeeds in writing them down when it has once acquired them.

But as we go further we can no longer limit the problem in this way,--to the activities of the automatist's subliminal self. We cannot always a.s.sume that some portion of the automatist's personality gets at the supernormal knowledge by some effort of its own. Our evidence, as we know, has pointed decisively to telepathic impacts or influences from without. What, then, is the mechanism here? Are we still to suppose that the automatist's subliminal self executes the movements--obeying somehow the bidding of the impulse from without? or does the external agent, who sends the telepathic message, himself execute the movements also, directly using the automatist's arm? And if telekinetic movements accompany the message (a subject thus far deferred, but of prime importance), are we to suppose that these also are effected by the percipient's subliminal self, under the guidance of some external spirit, incarnate or discarnate? or are they effected directly by that external spirit?

We cannot really say which of these two is the easier hypothesis.

From one point of view it may seem simpler to keep as long as we can to that acknowledged _vera causa_, the automatist's subliminal self; and to collect such observations as may indicate any power on its part of producing physical effects outside the organism. Such scattered observations occur at every stage, and even Mrs. Newnham (I may briefly observe in pa.s.sing) thought that her pencil, when writing down the messages telepathically derived from her husband, was moved by something other than the ordinary muscular action of the fingers which held it. On the other hand, there seems something very forced in attributing to an external spirit's agency impulses and impressions which seem intimately the automatist's own, and at the same time refusing to ascribe to that external agency phenomena which take place outside the automatist's organism, and which present themselves to him as objective facts, as much outside his own being as the fall of the apple to the ground.

Reflecting on such points--and once admitting this kind of interaction between the automatist's own spirit and an external spirit, incarnate or discarnate--we find the possible combinations presenting themselves in perplexing variety;--a variety both of agencies on the part of the invading spirit, and of effects on the part of the invaded spirit and organism.

What is that which invades? and what is that which is displaced or superseded by this invasion? In what ways may two spirits co-operate in the possession and control of the same organism?

These last words--control and possession--remind us of the great ma.s.s of vague tradition and belief to the effect that spirits of the departed may exercise such possession or control over the living. To those ancient and vague beliefs it will be our task in the next chapter to give a form as exact and stable as we can. And observe with how entirely novel a preparation of mind we now enter on that task. The examination of "possession" is no longer to us, as to the ordinary civilised inquirer, a merely antiquarian or anthropological research into forms of superst.i.tion lying wholly apart from any valid or systematic thought. On the contrary, it is an inquiry directly growing out of previous evidence; directly needed for the full comprehension of known facts as well as for the discovery of facts unknown. We need, (so to say), to a.n.a.lyse the spectrum of helium, as detected in the sun, in order to check and correct our spectrum of helium as detected in the Bath waters.

We are obliged to seek for certain definite phenomena in the spiritual world in order to explain certain definite phenomena of the world of matter.

CHAPTER IX

TRANCE, POSSESSION, AND ECSTASY

Vicit iter durum pietas.

--VIRGIL.

_Possession_, to define it for the moment in the narrowest way, is a more developed form of Motor Automatism. The difference broadly is, that in Possession the automatist's own personality does for the time altogether disappear, while there is a more or less complete _subst.i.tution_ of personality; writing or speech being given by a spirit through the entranced organism. The change which has come over this branch of evidence since the present work was first projected, in 1888, is most significant. There existed indeed, at that date, a good deal of evidence which pointed in this direction,[194] but for various reasons most of that evidence was still possibly explicable in other ways. Even the phenomena of Mr. W. S. Moses left it possible to argue that the main "controls" under which he wrote or spoke when entranced were self-suggestions of his own mind, or phases of his own deeper personality. I had not then had the opportunity, which the kindness of his executors after his death afforded to me, of studying the whole series of his original note-books, and forming at first-hand my present conviction that spiritual agency was an actual and important element in that long sequence of communications. On the whole, I did not then antic.i.p.ate that the theory of possession could be presented as more than a plausible speculation, or as a supplement to other lines of proof of man's survival of death.

The position of things, as the reader of the S.P.R. _Proceedings_ knows, has since that time undergone a complete change. The trance-phenomena of Mrs. Piper--so long and so carefully watched by Dr. Hodgson and others--formed, I think, by far the most remarkable ma.s.s of psychical evidence till then adduced in any quarter. And more recently other series of trance-phenomena with other "mediums"--though still incomplete--have added materially to the evidence obtained through Mrs.

Piper. The result broadly is that these phenomena of possession are now the most amply attested, as well as intrinsically the most advanced, in our whole repertory.

Nor, again, is the mere increment of direct evidence, important though that is, the sole factor in the changed situation. Not only has direct evidence grown, but indirect evidence, so to say, has moved to meet it.

The notion of personality--of the control of organism by spirit--has gradually been so modified that Possession, which pa.s.sed till the other day as a mere survival of savage thought, is now seen to be the consummation, the furthest development of many lines of experiment, observation, reflection, which the preceding chapters have opened to our view.

Let us then at once consider what the notion of possession does actually claim. It will be better to face that claim in its full extent at once, as it will be seen that the evidence, while rising through various stages, does in the end insist on all that the ancient term implies. The leading modern cases, of which Stainton Moses and Mrs. Piper may be taken as types, are closely a.n.a.logous, presenting many undesigned coincidences, some of which come out only on close examination.

The claim, then, is that the automatist, in the first place, falls into a trance, during which his spirit partially "quits his body:" enters at any rate into a state in which the spiritual world is more or less open to its perception; and in which also--and this is the novelty--it so far ceases to occupy the organism as to leave room for an invading spirit to use it in somewhat the same fas.h.i.+on as its owner is accustomed to use it.