These supernormal phenomena (writes this competent and learned inquirer) are due not to the action of the spirits of deceased persons, as Wallace believes, but, for the most part, to the action of an incarnate spirit, either that of the subject himself or of some agent or other.[87]The word "subliminal" means what is beneath the threshold (limen) of the consciousness,—the sensations, the thoughts, the memories, which remain at the bottom, and seem to represent a kind of sleepingme. I do not pretend to affirm (adds the author) that there always exists in us twome'scorrelative and parallel: I denote rather by the subliminalmethat part of themewhich ordinarily remains latent, and I admit that there may be not merely co-operation between these two quasi-independent currents of thoughts, but also changes of level and alternations of personality.[88]Medical observation (Félida, Alma) proves that there is in us a rudimentary supernormal faculty, something which is probably useless to us, but which indicates the existence, beneath the level of our consciousness, of a reserve of latent unsuspected faculties.[89]
These supernormal phenomena (writes this competent and learned inquirer) are due not to the action of the spirits of deceased persons, as Wallace believes, but, for the most part, to the action of an incarnate spirit, either that of the subject himself or of some agent or other.[87]
The word "subliminal" means what is beneath the threshold (limen) of the consciousness,—the sensations, the thoughts, the memories, which remain at the bottom, and seem to represent a kind of sleepingme. I do not pretend to affirm (adds the author) that there always exists in us twome'scorrelative and parallel: I denote rather by the subliminalmethat part of themewhich ordinarily remains latent, and I admit that there may be not merely co-operation between these two quasi-independent currents of thoughts, but also changes of level and alternations of personality.[88]Medical observation (Félida, Alma) proves that there is in us a rudimentary supernormal faculty, something which is probably useless to us, but which indicates the existence, beneath the level of our consciousness, of a reserve of latent unsuspected faculties.[89]
What is it that is active in us in telepathic phenomena?We may recall the case of Thomas Garrison (Society for Psychical Research, VIII, p. 125) who, while sitting with his wife at a religious service, suddenly gets up in the middle of the sermon, goes out of the church, and, as if impelled by an irresistible impulse, walks twenty miles afoot to go to see his mother, whom he finds dead on his arrival, although he did not know that she was ill and although she was relatively young (fifty-eight years). I have a hundred observations similar to this in writing before me. It is not our normal habitual nature that is in action in such a case as this.
There is probably in us, more or less sentient, a sub-conscious nature, and it is this which seems to be at work in mediumistic experiences. I am pretty much of the opinion Myers expresses in the following paragraph:[90]
Spiritualists attribute the movement and the dictations at their séances to the action of disembodied intelligences. But if a table execute movements without being touched, there is no reason to attribute these movements to the intervention of my deceased grandfather, rather than to my own proper intervention; for if I do not see how I could have done it myself, it is not clear to me how the effect could have been produced by the action of my grandfather. As for dictations, the most plausible explanation seems to me to be for us to admit that they do not come from the consciousme, but from that profound and hidden region where fragmentary and incoherent dreams are elaborated.
Spiritualists attribute the movement and the dictations at their séances to the action of disembodied intelligences. But if a table execute movements without being touched, there is no reason to attribute these movements to the intervention of my deceased grandfather, rather than to my own proper intervention; for if I do not see how I could have done it myself, it is not clear to me how the effect could have been produced by the action of my grandfather. As for dictations, the most plausible explanation seems to me to be for us to admit that they do not come from the consciousme, but from that profound and hidden region where fragmentary and incoherent dreams are elaborated.
This explanatory hypothesis is held, with an important modification, by a distinguished savant to whom also we owe long and patient researches into the obscure phenomena of normal psychology; I mean Dr. Geley, who thus sums up his own conclusions:
A certain amount of the force, intelligence, and matter of the body may perform work outside of the organism,—act,perceive, organize, and think without the collaboration of muscles, organs, senses and brain. It is nothing less than the uplifted sub-conscious portion of our being. It constitutes, in truth, an externalizable sub-conscious nature, existing in themewith the normal conscious nature.[91]
A certain amount of the force, intelligence, and matter of the body may perform work outside of the organism,—act,perceive, organize, and think without the collaboration of muscles, organs, senses and brain. It is nothing less than the uplifted sub-conscious portion of our being. It constitutes, in truth, an externalizable sub-conscious nature, existing in themewith the normal conscious nature.[91]
This sub-conscious nature does not seem to depend upon the organism. It is probably anterior to it, and will survive it. It seems to be superior to it, endowed with powers and acquirements very different from the powers and acquirements of the normal, supernormal, and transcendent consciousness.
Assuredly, there is in this view of the case more than one mystery still, were it only the feat of performing a material act at a distance, and that (not less strange) of apparently having nothing to do with that kind of an act.
The first rule of the scientific method is first to seek explanations in the known before having recourse to the unknown, and we should never fail to comply with this rule. But if this method of sailing does not bring us to port, it is our duty to confess it.
I very much fear that that is what is the matter here. We are not satisfied. The explanation is not clear, and is floating a little too much at random in the waves—and the wavering uncertainty—of the hypothesis.
At the point at which we have now arrived in this chapter of explanations we are precisely in the position of Alexander Aksakof when he wrote his great work,Animism and Spiritualism, in reply to the book of Dr. von Hartmann onSpiritualism. Hartman claimed to explain all of these psychical phenomena by the following hypothesis.
A nervous force producing, outside of the limits of the human body, mechanical and plastic effects.Duplicate hallucinations of this same nervous force, and producing also physical and plastic effects.A latent somnambulistic consciousness, capable (the subject being in his normal state) of reading in the intellectual background of another man, his present and his past, and being able to divine the future.
A nervous force producing, outside of the limits of the human body, mechanical and plastic effects.
Duplicate hallucinations of this same nervous force, and producing also physical and plastic effects.
A latent somnambulistic consciousness, capable (the subject being in his normal state) of reading in the intellectual background of another man, his present and his past, and being able to divine the future.
Akaskof tried to see if these hypotheses (the last of which is a pretty bold one) are sufficient to explain everything, and he concludes that they are not. That is also my opinion. There is something else. This something else, this residue at the bottom of the crucible of experiment, is a psychic element, the nature of which remains still wholly hidden from us. I think that all the readers of this book will share my conviction.
Anthropomorphic hypotheses are far from explaining everything. Besides, they are only hypotheses. We must not hide from ourselves that these phenomena introduce us into another world, into an unknown world, one that is still to be explored in its whole extent.
As to beings different from ourselves,—what may their nature be? Of this we cannot form any idea. Souls of the dead? This is very far from being demonstrated. The innumerable observations which I have collected during more than forty years all prove to me the contrary. No satisfactory identification has been made.[92]
The communications obtained have always seemed to proceed from the mentality of the group, or, when they are heterogeneous, from spirits of an incomprehensible nature. The being evoked soon vanishes when one insists on pushing him to the wall and having the heart out of his mystery. And then my greatest hope has been deceived, that hope of my twentieth year, when I would so gladly have received celestial light upon the doctrine of the plurality of worlds. The spirits have taught us nothing.
Nevertheless, the agents seem sometimes to be independent. Crookes mentions having seen Miss Fox write automatically a communication for one of her sitters while another communication upon another subject was given to her for asecondperson by means of the alphabet and by raps, and all the while she was chatting with athirdperson upon another subject totally different from the other two. Does this remarkable fact prove with certainty the action of a spirit other than that of the medium?
The same scientist mentions that, during one of his séances, a little rod crossed the table, in full light, and came and rapped his hand, giving him a communication by following the letters of the alphabet spelled out by him. The other end of the rod rested on the table at a certain distance from the hand of the medium Home.
This case seems to me, as well as to Crookes, more conclusively in favor of an exterior spirit, so much the more since the experimenter having asked that the raps be given by the Morse telegraphic code, another message was thus rapped out. I also remember that the learned chemist mentions that the word "however" hidden by his finger, upon a newspaper, and unknown even to himself, was rapped out by a little rod.
Wallace also mentions a name written upon a piece of paper fastened by him under the central leg of the experiment table; Joncières, a water-color correctly painted in complete darkness, and a musical theme written with a pencil; M. Castex Dégrange, the announcement of a death, and the place where a lost object might be found. We have also seen sentences dictated either backwards or in such a way that every other letter only must be read to get the sense, or else by strange combinations showing the action of an unknown intellect. We have a thousand examples of this kind.
But if the mind of the medium may liberate itself andappear in an extra-normal state, why might it not be this mind which acts? Do we not have several distinct personalities in our dreams? If they could dynamically appear, would they not act somewhat in this way?
We ought not to lose sight of the fact that these phenomena are of amixedcharacter. They are at once physical and psychical, material and intellectual, are not always produced by our conscious will, and are rather the subject ofobservationthanexperiment.
It is expedient to insist on this characteristic. I one day, (January 31, 1901) heard E. Duclaux, member of the Institute, director of the Pasteur Institute, express the following confused idea (an idea held by so many physicists and so many chemists), in a company which was yet quite competent to discuss these phenomena: "There is no scientific fact except a fact which can be reproduced at will."[93]What a singular reasoning! The witnesses of the fall of a meteor bring us an aërolite which has just fallen from the sky and been dug up, all hot, from the hole it had made in the ground. "Error! illusion!" we ought to reply: "We shall only believe when you repeat the experiment."
They bring to us the body of a man killed by a stroke of lightning, stripped of his clothes, and shaved as if with a razor. "Impossible!" we ought to reply; "pure invention of your deluded senses." A woman sees appear before her, her husband, who has just died nearly two thousand miles away. We are asked to believe that this is not so, and will not be so until the apparition appears a second time.
This confusion between observation and experiment is a very strange thing as coming from cultivated men.
In psychical phenomena there is a voluntary, capricious, incoherent, intellectual element.
I repeat, we must learn to comprehend that everythingcannot be explained and resign ourselves to waiting for an extension of our knowledge. There is intelligence, thought, psychism, mind, in these phenomena. There is still more in certain communications. Can the observations be confirmed and justified by assuming the mind of the living merely as the active agents? Yes, perhaps, but only by attributing to us unknown and supernormal faculties. Yet it must be remembered that this is only an hypothesis. The Spiritualistic hypothesis of communication with the souls of the dead remains also as a working hypothesis.
That souls survive the destruction of the body I have not the shadow of a doubt. But that they manifest themselves by the processes employed in séances the experimental method has not yet given us absolute proof. I add that this hypothesis is not at all likely. If the souls of the dead are about us, upon our planet, the invisible population would increase at the rate of 100,000 a day, about 36 millions a year, 3 billions 620 millions a century, 36 billions in ten centuries, etc.,—unless we admit re-incarnations upon the earth itself.
How many times do apparitions, or manifestations occur? When illusions, auto-suggestions, hallucinations, are eliminated, what remains? Scarcely anything. Such an exceptional rarity as this pleads against the reality of apparitions.
We may suppose, it is true, that all human beings do not survive their death, and that, in general, their psychical entity is so insignificant, so wavering, so ineffectual, that it almost disappears in the ether, in the common reservoir, in the environment, like the souls of animals. But thinking beings who have the consciousness of their psychical existence do not lose their personality, but continue the cycle of their evolution. It would seem natural therefore to see them manifest themselves under certain circumstances. Persons condemned to death, in consequence of judicial errors, and executed, should they not return to protest their innocence?Would it not be reasonable to suppose that persons put to death in such a way that violence was not suspected would return to accuse the assassins? Knowing the characters of Robespierre, of Saint-Just, of Fouquier-Tinville, I should like to have seen them revenge themselves a little on those who triumphed over them. The victims of '93, should they not have returned to disturb the sleep of the conquerors? Out of the twenty thousand citizens shot by fusillades during the time of the Commune of Paris I should like to have seen a dozen unceasingly harassing the Hon. M. Theirs, who was really too puffed up and vain-glorious over his having first permitted the organization of that insurrection and then punished it.
Why do not children whose death is lamented by their parents ever come to console them? Why do our dearest attachments seem to disappear forever? And how about last wills and testaments stolen away, and the last will of the dead ignored and their intentions purposely misinterpreted?
"It is only the dead that do not return," says an old proverb. This aphorism is not of absolute application, perhaps; but apparitions are rare, very rare, and we do not understand their precise nature. Are they actual apparitions of the dead? It is not yet demonstrated.
Up to this day, I have sought in vain for certain proof of personal identity through mediumistic communications. And then one does not see why spirits, if they exist around us, should have need of mediums at all, in order to manifest themselves. They surely must form a part of nature, of the universal nature which includes all things.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that the Spiritualistic hypothesis should be preserved by the same right as those I have summed up in the immediately preceding pages, for the discussions have not eliminated it.[94]
But why are there manifestations the result of the grouping of five or six persons around the table? That this should be asine qua nonis not a very likely thing either.
It may be, it is true, that spirits exist around us, and that it is normally impossible for them to make themselves visible, audible, or tangible, not being able to reflect rays of light accessible to our retina, or to produce sonorous waves, or to effect touches. Therefore, certain conditions present in mediums might be necessary for their manifestation. Nobody has the right to deny this. But why so many puzzling incoherences and solecisms?
I have on a bookshelf before me several thousand communications dictated by "spirits." In the last analysis, a dim obscurity remains hanging over the causes. Unknown psychic forces: fugitive entities; vanishing figures; nothing solid to grasp, even for the thought. These things do not yield us the consistency of a definition of chemistry or of a theorem in geometry. A molecule of hydrogen is a granite cliff in comparison.
The greater part of the phenomena observed,—noises, movement of tables, confusions, disturbances, raps, replies to questions asked,—are really childish, puerile, vulgar, often ridiculous, and rather resemble the pranks of mischievous boys than serious bona-fide actions. It is impossible not to notice this.
Why should the souls of the dead amuse themselves in this way? The supposition seems almost absurd.
We know that an ordinary man does not change his intellectual or moral value from day to day, and, if his spiritcontinues to exist after the death of his body, we may expect to find it such as it was before. But why so many oddities and incoherences?
However these things may be, it behooves us not to have any preconceived idea, and our bounden duty is to seek to prove the facts as they present themselves to us.
The unknown natural force brought into play for the lifting of a table is not the exclusive property of mediums. In different degrees it forms a part of all organisms, with different coefficients, 100 for organisms such as those of Home, or Eusapia, 80 for others, 50 or 25 for less favored individuals. But I should hold it as certain that it never drops in any case to 0. The best proof of this is that, with patience, perseverance, and the exercise of the will, almost all the groups of experimenters who have seriously occupied themselves with these researches have succeeded in obtaining, not merely movements, but also complete levitations, raps, and other phenomena.
The word "medium" scarcely has any longer a reason for being, since the existence of an intermediary between the spirits and us is not yet proved. But still the word may be preserved, logic being the rarest of things in grammar and in everything else that is human. The word "electricity" has had no connection for a long time with amber (ἠλεκτρον), nor the word "veneration" with the genitive case of Venus (Veneris), nor the (at first astrological) term "disaster" withaster(star), nor the word "tragedy" withgoat-song(τράγος, ᾠδή). But this does not hinder these words from being understood in their habitual sense.[95]
As respects explanatory hypotheses, I repeat, the field is open to all. It is to be noted that communications dictated are closely related to the condition of mind, the ideas, the opinions, the beliefs, the knowledge, and even the literary culture, of the experimenters. They are like a reflection, or counterpart, of this ensemble of ideas and faculties. Compare the communications noted down in the house of Victor Hugo in Jersey, those of the Phalansterian Society of Eugéne Nus, those of astronomical meetings, those of religious believers,—Catholics, Protestants, etc.
If the hypothesis were not so bold as to seem unacceptable to us, I should dare to think that the concentration of the thoughts of psychic experimenters creates a momentary intellectual being who replies to the questions asked and then vanishes.
Reflection, reflex action?That is perhaps the true expression. Everybody has seen his image reflected in a mirror, and nobody is astonished by it. However, analyse the thing. The more you look at this optical being moving there behind the mirror, the more remarkable the image appears to you. Now suppose looking-glasses had not been invented. If we had not knowledge of those immensemirrors which reflect whole apartments and the visitors in them, if we had never seen anything of the kind, and if someone should tell us that images and reflections of living persons could thus manifest themselves and thus move, we should not comprehend, and should not believe it.
Yes, the ephemeral personification created in Spiritualistic séances sometimes recalls the image that we see in a mirror, which has nothing real in itself, but which yet exists and reproduces the original. The image fixed by the photograph is of the same kind, only durable. The potential image formed at the focus of the mirror of a telescope, invisible in itself, but which we can receive on a level mirror and study, at the same time enlarging it by the microscope of the eye-piece, perhaps approaches nearer to that which seems to be produced by the concentration of the psychical energy of a group of persons. We create an imaginary being, we speak to it, and in its replies it almost always reflects the mentality of the experimenters. And just as with the aid of mirrors we can concentrate light, heat, ether-waves, electric waves, in a focus, so, in the same way, it seems sometimes as if the sitters added their psychic forces to those of the medium, of the dynamogen, condensing the waves, and helping to produce a sort of fugitive being more or less material.
The sub-conscious nature, the brain of the medium, or his astral body, the fluidic mind, the unknown powers latent in sensitive organisms, might we not consider these as the mirror which we have just imagined? And might this mirror also not receive and reproduce impressions, or influence, from a soul at a distance?
But we must not generalize partial conclusions which we have already had much trouble in defining.
I do not say that spirits do not exist: on the contrary, I have reasons for admitting their existence. Even certainsensations expressed by the animals,—by dogs, by cats, by horses,—plead in favor of the unexpected and impressive presence of invisible beings or agents. But, as a faithful servant of the experimental method, I think that we ought to exhaust all the simple, natural hypotheses, already known, before having recourse to others.
Unfortunately, a large number of Spiritualists prefer not to go to the bottom of things, or analyse anything, but to be the dupes of nervous impressions. They resemble certain worthy women who tell their beads while believing that they have before them Saint Agnes or Saint Filomena. There is no harm in that, says some one. But it is an illusion. Let us not be its dupes.
If the elementals, theélémentaires, the spirits of the air, the gnomes, the spectres of which Goethe speaks (following Paracelsus in this), exist, they are natural and not supernatural. They are in nature, for nature includes all things. The supernatural does not exist. It is then the duty of science to study this question as it studies all others.
As I have already remarked, there are in these different phenomena several causes in action. Among these causes the ones that supposes the action to proceed from disembodied spirits, the souls of the dead, is a plausible hypothesis which ought not to be rejected without examination. It seems sometimes to be the most logical; but there are weighty objections to it, and it is of the highest importance to be able to demonstrate it with certainty. Its partisansought to be the first to approve the severity of the scientific methods which we apply in our studies of the phenomena, for Spiritualism will receive thereby so much the more solid a foundation and will have so much the more value. The illusions and the artless faith of simple souls cannot give it any more solid and substantial basis. The religion of the future will be the religion of science. There is only one kind of truth.
Sometimes authors are made to say that which they have never said. For my part, I have had frequent proof of this, notably in the case of Spiritualism. I should not be surprised if certain interpretations of the pages which precede should come to light, shaped into the opinion that I do not believe in the existence of spirits. Yet it will be impossible to find any affirmation of this kind in this work, or in any other published by me. What I say is that the physical phenomena studied in these pagesdo not provethe existence of spirits, and may probably be explained without them,—that is, by unknown forces emanating from the experimenters, and especially from mediums. But these phenomena indicate, at the same time, the existence of a psychical atmosphere or environment.
What is this environment? It is indeed very difficult to get a true idea of it, since we are not able to apprehend it by any of our senses. It is also very difficult not to admit it in view of the multitude of psychical phenomena. If we admit the survival of individual souls, what becomes of these souls? Where are they? It may be replied that the conditions of space and of time in which our material senses exist do not represent the real nature of space and time, that our estimates and our measures are essentially relative, that the soul, the spirit, the thinking entity, does not occupy space. Still, we may consider also that pure spirit does not exist, that it is attached to a substance occupying a certain point. We may also consider that all souls are not equal; that there is a superior and inferior class; that certain human beings are scarcely conscious of their existence; that superior souls, being self-conscious, as well after death as during life, preserve their entire individuality, have the power of continuing their evolution, of voyaging from world to world and adding to their moral and intellectual growth by successive reincarnations. But the others, the unconscious souls, are theymore advanced the day after death than the day before? Why should death bestow upon them any perfection? Why should it make a genius out of an imbecile? How could it make a good man out of a bad one? Why should it turn an ignoramus into a wise man? How could it make a shining light out of an intellectual nobody?
These unconscious souls,—that is to say, the multitude,—do they not disappear at death into the surrounding ether, and do they not constitute a kind of psychic atmosphere, in which a subtle analysis can discover spiritual as well as material elements? If the psychic force performs an action in the existing order of things, it is as worthy of consideration as the different forms of energy in operation in the ether.
Without, then, admitting the existence of spirits to be demonstrated by the phenomena, we feel that these do not all belong to a simply material order,—physiological, organic, cerebral,—but that there issomething elseinvolved, something else inexplicable in the actual state of our knowledge.
But a something else of the psychical order. Perhaps we shall be able to go a little farther, some day, in our independent impartial researches, guided by the experimental scientific method, denying nothing in advance, but admitting whatever is proved by sufficient observation.
To sum up:In the actual state of our knowledge it is impossible to give a complete, total, absolute, final explanation of the observed phenomena. The Spiritualistic hypothesis ought not to be dismissed. Still, we may admit the survival of the soul without necessarily admitting a physical communication between the dead and the living. But then all the observed facts leading up to the affirmation of this communication are worthy of the most serious attention of the philosopher.
One of the chief difficulties in the way of thesecommunications seems to be the condition itself of the soul freed from bodily senses. It would have other ways of perceiving. It would not see, hear, touch. How then can it enter into relation with our senses?
There is a whole problem in that which is not to be neglected in the study of any psychical manifestations whatever.
We take our ideas to be realities. This is a mistake. For example, to our senses the air is not a solid body; we pass through it without effort, while we cannot pass through an iron door. The converse is true of electricity: it passes through iron, and finds the air to be a solid impassible body. To the electrician, a wire is a canal leading electricity across the solid rock of the air. Glass is opaque to electricity and transparent to magnetism. The flesh is transparent to the X-rays, while glass is opaque, etc.
We feel the need of explaining everything, and we are driven to admit only the phenomena of which we have had an explanation; but that does not prove that our explanations are valid. Thus for example, if some one had affirmed the possibility of instantaneous communication between Paris and London, before the invention of the telegraph, people would have regarded the assertion as utopian. Later it would not have been admitted, except on condition of the existence of a wire between the two stations, and any communication without the medium of an electric wire would have been declared impossible. Now that we have wireless telegraphy we can apply this discovery to the explanation of the phenomena of telepathy. But it is not yet proved that this explanation is the true one.
Why do we wish to explain these phenomena at all hazards? Because we naïvely imagine that we are able to do so in the present state of our knowledge.
The physiologists who claim to see daylight in this matter are like Ptolemy persisting in accounting for themovements of the heavenly bodies by holding to the idea of the immobility of the earth; or Galileo explaining the attraction of amber by the rarefaction of the surrounding air; or Lavoisier seeking (with the common people) the origin of aërolites in thunder storms or denying their existence; or Galvani, who saw in his frogs aspecialorganic electricity. I put my physiologists in good company, surely, and they have nothing of which to complain. But who does not feel that this natural propensity to explain everything is not justified, that science progresses from age to age, that what is not known to-day will be known later, and that we ought sometimes to know how to wait?
The phenomena of which we are speaking are manifestations of the universal dynamism, with which our five senses put us very imperfectly in relation. We live in the midst of an unexplored world, in which the psychical forces play a role still very insufficiently investigated.
These forces are of a class superior to the forces usually analyzed in mechanics, in physics, in chemistry: they are of the psychical order, have in them something vital and a kind of mentality. They confirm what we know from other sources,—that the purely mechanical explanation of nature is insufficient and that there is in the universe something else than so-called matter. It is not matter that rules the world: it is a dynamic and psychic element.
What light will the study of these still unexplained forces shed upon the origin of the soul and upon the conditions of its survival? That is something that the future has to teach us.
The truth that the soul is a spiritual entity distinct from the body is proved by other arguments. These arguments are not made for the purpose of injuring this doctrine; but while confirming it and while putting in clear light the application of psychic forces, they still do not solve the great problem by the material proofs that we should like to have.
However, if the study of these phenomena has not yet yielded all that is claimed for it, nor all that it will in the future yield, we still cannot help recognizing that it has considerably enlarged the sphere of psychology, and that the knowledge of the nature of the soul and of its faculties has been once for all expanded under grander and deeper skies and wider horizons.
There is in nature, especially in the domain of life, in the manifestation of instinct in vegetables and animals, in the general soul of things, in humanity, in the cosmic universe, a psychic element which appears more and more in modern studies, especially in researches in telepathy, and in the observation of the unexplained phenomena which we have been studying in this book. This element, this principle, is still unknown to contemporary science. But, as in so many other cases, it was divined by the ancients.
Besides the four elements fire, water, air and earth, the ancients admitted a fifth, belonging to the material order, which they namedanimus, the soul of the world, the animating principle, ether. "Aristotle" (writes Cicero,Tuscul. Quaest.I. 22), "after having mentioned the four kinds of material elements, believes that we ought to admit a fifth kind from which the soul proceeds; for, since the soul and the intellectual faculties cannot reside in any of the material elements, we must admit a fifth kind, which had not yet received a name and which he stylesentelechy; that is to say, eternal and continued movement." The four material elements of the ancients have been dissected by modern analysis. The fifth is perhaps more fundamental.
Citing the philosopher Zeno, the same orator adds that this wise man did not admit this fifth principle, which might be compared to fire. But, from all the evidence, fire and thought are two distinct things.
Virgil has written in theÆneid(Book VI) these admirable verses which are known to everybody:
Principio cœlum ac terras camposque liquentesLucentemque globum Lunae Titaniaque astraSpiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artusMens agitat molem,et magno se corpore miscet.
Martianus Capella, like all the authors of the first centuries of Christianity, mentions this directive force, also calling it the fifth element, and furthermore describes it under the name "ether."
A Roman emperor, well known to the Parisians, since it was in their city (in the palace built by his grandfather near the presentThermes, or old Roman baths) that he was proclaimed emperor in the year 360 (I mean Julian, called the Apostate), celebrates this fifth principle in his discourse in honor of the "The Sun, the Monarch,"[96]styling it sometimes the solar principle, sometimes the soul of the world, or intellectual principle, sometimes ether, or the soul of the physical world.
This psychical element is not confounded by the philosophers with God and Providence. In their eyes, it is something which forms part of nature.
One more word before closing. Human nature is endowed with faculties as yet little explored, that the observations made with mediums, or dynamogens, bring to light—such as human magnetism, hypnotism, telepathy, clairvoyance, and premonition. These unknown psychic forces are worthy of being embraced within the scope of scientific analysis. At present they have been almost as little studied as in the time of Ptolemy, and have not yet found theirKepler, and their Newton, yet fairly obtrude themselves upon our notice, and cry out to be examined.
Many another unknown force will be revealed. The earth and the planets were circling about the sun in their harmonious orbits while astronomical theories saw in them only a complicated whirl of seventy-nine crystalline shells. Magnetism was encircling the earth with its currents long before the invention of the mariner's compass which reveals them to us. The waves of wireless telegraphy existed long before they were arrested in their flight. The sea was moaning along its shores ages before the ear of any being had come to hear it. The stars were darting their rays through the ether before any human eye had been raised to them.
The observations set forth in this work prove that the conscious will, or desire, on the one hand, and the subliminal consciousness on the other hand, exert an influence, or perform work, beyond the limits of our body. The nature of the human soul is still a deep mystery to science and to philosophy.
It seems rather remarkable that the conclusions drawn from my labors here are the same as those of my workThe Unknown, which were founded upon the examination of the phenomena of telepathy, apparitions of the dying, communications at a distance, premonitory dreams, etc. Indeed, the following deductions were drawn at the close of that volume:
1.The soul exists as a real entity independent of the body.
2.It is endowed with faculties still unknown to science.
3.It is able to act at a distance, without the intervention of the senses.
The conclusions of the present work concord with those of the former, and yet the subjects studied in this are entirely different from the subject-matter of that.
I may sum up the whole matter with the single statement that there exists in nature, in myriad activity, apsychic elementthe essential nature of which is still hidden from us. I shall be happy for my part, if I have helped to establish by these two works the above important principle, exclusively based upon the scientific verification of certain phenomena studied by the experimental method.
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