CHAPTER X.
Inall ages of the world, and in all parts of it, mankind have earnestly desired to learn the fate that awaited them when they had “shuffled off this mortal coil;” and those pretending to be their instructors have built up different systems which have stood in the stead of knowledge, and more or less satisfied the bulk of the people. The interest on this subject is, at the present period, in the most highly civilized portions of the globe, less than it has been at any preceding one. The great proportion of us live for this world alone, and think very little of the next: we are in too great a hurry of pleasure or business to bestow any time on a subject of which we have such vague notions—notions so vague, that, in short, we can scarcely by any effort of the imagination bring the idea home to ourselves; and when we are about to die, we are seldom in a situation to do more than resign ourselves to what is inevitable, and blindly meet our fate; while, on the other hand, what is generally called the religious world is so engrossed by its struggles for power and money, or by its sectarian disputes and enmities, and so narrowed and circumscribed by dogmatic orthodoxies, that it has neither inclination nor liberty to turn back or look around, and endeavor to gather up from past records and present observation such hints as are now and again dropped in our path, to give us an intimation of what the truth may be. The rationalistic age, too, out of which we are only just emerging, and which succeeded one of gross superstition, having settled, beyond appeal, that there never was such a thing as a ghost—that the dead never do come back to tell us the secrets of their prison-house, and that nobody believes such idle tales but children and old women—seemed to have shut the door against the only channel through which any information could be sought. Revelation tells us very little on this subject—reason can tell us nothing; and if Nature is equally silent, or if we are to be deterred from questioning her from the fear of ridicule, there is certainly no resource left us but to rest contented in our ignorance, and each wait till the awful secret is disclosed to ourselves.
A great many things have been pronounced untrue and absurd, and even impossible, by the highest authorities of the age in which they lived, which have afterward, and indeed within a very short period, been found to be both possible and true. I confess myself, for one, to have no respect whatever for these dogmatic denials and affirmations, and I am quite of opinion that vulgar incredulity is a much more contemptible thing than vulgar credulity. We know very little of whatis, and still less of what may be; and till a thing has been proved, by induction, logically impossible, we have no right whatever to pronounce that it is so. As I have said before,a prioriconclusions are perfectly worthless; and the sort of investigation that is bestowed upon subjects of the class of which I am treating, something worse—inasmuch as they deceive the timid and the ignorant, and that very numerous class which pins its faith on authority and never ventures to think for itself, by an assumption of wisdom and knowledge, which, if examined and analyzed, would very frequently prove to be nothing more respectable than obstinate prejudice and rash assertion.
For my own part, I repeat, I insist upon nothing. The opinions I have formed, from the evidence collected, may be quite erroneous; if so, as I seek only the truth, I shall be glad to be undeceived, and shall be quite ready to accept a better explanation of these facts, whenever it is offered to me: but it is in vain to tell me that this explanation is to be found in what is called imagination, or in a morbid state of the nerves, or an unusual excitement of the organs of color and form, or in imposture; or in all these together. The existence of all such sources of error and delusion I am far from denying, but I find instances that it is quite impossible to reduce under any one of those categories, as we at present understand them. The multiplicity of these instances, too—for, not to mention the large number that are never made known or carefully concealed, if I were to avail myself liberally of cases already recorded in various works, many of which I know, and many others I hear of as existing, but which I can not conveniently get access to, I might fill volumes (German literature abounds in them)—the number of the examples, I repeat, even on the supposition that they are not facts, would of itself form the subject of a very curious physiological or psychological inquiry. If so many people in respectable situations of life, and in apparently a normal state of health, are capable of either such gross impostures, or the subjects of such extraordinary spectral illusions, it would certainly be extremely satisfactory to learn something of the conditions that induce these phenomena in such abundance; and all I expect from my book at present is, to induce a suspicion that we are not quite so wise as we think ourselves; and that it might be worth while to inquire a little seriously into reports, which may perchance turn out to have a deeper interest for us than all those various questions, public and private, put together, with which we are daily agitating ourselves.
I have alluded, in an earlier part of this work, to the belief entertained by the ancients that the souls of men, on being disengaged from the bodies, passed into a middle state, called Hades, in which their portions seemed to be neither that of complete happiness nor of insupportable misery. They retained their personality, their human form, their memory of the past, and their interest in those that had been dear to them on earth. Communications were occasionally made by the dead to the living: they mourned over their duties neglected and their errors committed; many of their mortal feelings, passions, and propensities, seemed to survive; and they sometimes sought to repair, through the instrumentality of the living, the injuries they had formerly inflicted. In short, death was merely a transition from one condition of life to another; but in this latter state, although we do not see them condemned to undergo any torments, we perceive that they are not happy. There are, indeed, compartments in this dark region: there is Tartarus for the wicked, and the Elysian fields for the good, but they are comparatively thinly peopled. It is in the mid-region that these pale shades abound, consistently with the fact that here on earth, moral as well as intellectual mediocrity is the rule, and extremes of good or evil the exceptions.
With regard to the opinion entertained of a future state by the Hebrews, the Old Testament gives us very little information; but what glimpses we do obtain of it appear to exhibit notions analogous to those of the heathen nations, inasmuch as that the personality and the form seem to be retained, and the possibility of these departed spirits revisiting the earth and holding commune with the living is admitted. The request of the rich man, also, that Lazarus might be sent to warn his brethren, yet alive, of his own miserable condition, testifies to the existence of these opinions; and it is worthy of remark that the favor is denied, not because its performance is impossible, but because the mission would be unavailing—a prediction which, it appears to me, time has singularly justified.
Altogether, the notion that in the state entered upon after we leave this world, the personality and form are retained, that these shades sometimes revisit the earth, and that the memory of the past still survives, seems to be universal; for it is found to exist among all people, savage and civilized: and if not founded on observation and experience, it becomes difficult to account for such unanimity on a subject which I think, speculatively considered, would not have been productive of such results; and one proof of this is, that those who reject such testimony and tradition as we have in regard to it, and rely only on their own understandings, appear to be pretty uniformly led to form opposite conclusions. They can not discern the mode of such a phenomenon; it is open to all sorts of scientific objections, and thecui bonosticks in their teeth.
This position being admitted, as I think it must be, we have but one resource left, whereby to account for the universality of this persuasion—which is, that in all periods and places, both mankind and womankind, as well in health as in sickness, have been liable to a series of spectral illusions of a most extraordinary and complicated nature, and bearing such a remarkable similarity to each other in regard to the objects supposed to be seen or heard, that they have been universally led to the same erroneous interpretation of the phenomenon. It is manifestly not impossible that this may be the case; and if it be so, it becomes the business of physiologists to inquire into the matter, and give us some account of it. In the meantime, we may be permitted to take the other view of the question, and examine what probabilities seem to be in its favor.
When the body is about to die, that which can not die, and which, to spare words, I will callthe soul, departs from it—whither? We do not know: but, in the first place, we have no reason to believe that the space destined for its habitation is far removed from the earth, since, knowing nothing about it, we are equally entitled to suppose the contrary; and, in the next, that which we call distance is a condition that merely regards material objects, and of which a spirit is quite independent, just as our thoughts are, which can travel from here to China, and back again, in a second of time.
Well, then, supposing this being to exist somewhere—and it is not unreasonable to suppose that the souls of the inhabitants of each planet continue to hover within the sphere of that planet, to which, for anything we can tell, they may be attached by a magnetic attraction—supposing it to find itself in space, free of the body, endowed with the memory of the past, and consequently with a consciousness of its own deserts, able to perceive that which we do not ordinarily perceive, namely, those who have passed into a similar state with itself—will it not naturally seek its place among those spirits which most resemble itself, and with whom, therefore, it must have the most affinity? On earth, the good seek the good, and the wicked the wicked: and the axiom that “like associates with like,” we can not doubt will be as true hereafter as now. “In my Father’s house there are many mansions,” and our intuitive sense of what is fit and just must needs assure us that this is so. There are too many degrees of moral worth and of moral unworth among mankind, to permit of our supposing that justice could be satisfied by an abrupt division into two opposite classes. On the contrary, there must be infinite shades of desert; and, as we must consider that that which a spirit enters into on leaving the body is not so much aplaceas acondition, so there must be as many degrees of happiness or suffering as there are individuals, each carrying with him his own heaven or hell. For it is a vulgar notion to imagine that heaven and hell areplaces; they are states; and it is in ourselves we must look for both. When we leave the body, we carry them with us: “As the tree falls, so it shall lie.” The soul which here has wallowed in wickedness or been sunk in sensuality, will not be suddenly purified by the death of the body: its moral condition remains what its earthly sojourn has trained it to, but its means of indulging its propensities are lost. If it has had no godly aspirations here, it will not be drawn to God there; and if it has so bound itself to the body that it has known no happiness but that to which the body ministered, it will be incapable of happiness when deprived of that enjoyment. Here we see at once what a variety of conditions must necessarily ensue—how many comparatively negative states there must be between those of positive happiness or positive misery!
We may thus conceive how a soul, on entering upon this new condition, must find its own place or state; if its thoughts and aspirations here have been heavenward, and its pursuits noble, its conditions will be heavenly. The contemplation of God’s works, seen not as by our mortal eyes, but in their beauty and their truth and ever-glowing sentiments of love and gratitude—and, for aught we know, good offices to souls in need—would constitute a suitable heaven or happiness for such a being; an incapacity for such pleasures, and the absence of all others, would constitute a negative state, in which the chief suffering would consist in mournful regrets and a vague longing for something better, which the untrained soul, that never lifted itself from the earth, knows not how to seek; while malignant passions and unquenchable desires would constitute the appropriate hell of the wicked; for we must remember, that although a spirit is independent of those physical laws which are the conditions of matter, the moral law, which is indestructible, belongs peculiarly to it—that is, to the spirit—and is inseparable from it.
We must next remember, that this earthly body we inhabit is more or less a mask, by means of which we conceal from each other those thoughts which, if constantly exposed, would unfit us for living in community; but when we die, this mask falls away, and the truth shows nakedly: there is no more disguise; we appear as we are—spirits of light, or spirits of darkness;—and there can be no difficulty, I should think, in conceiving this, since we know that even our present opaque and comparatively inflexible features, in spite of all efforts to the contrary, will be the index of the mind; and that the expression of the face is gradually moulded to the fashion of the thoughts. How much more must this be the case with the fluent and diaphanous body which we expect is to succeed the fleshly one!
Thus, I think, we have arrived at forming some conception of the state that awaits us hereafter: the indestructible moral law fixes our place or condition; affinity governs our associations; and the mask under which we conceal ourselves having fallen away, we appear to each other as we are;—and I must here observe, that in this last circumstance must be comprised one very important element of happiness or misery; for the love of the pure spirits for each other will be for ever excited, by simply beholding that beauty and brightness which will be the inalienable expression of their goodness;—while the reverse will be the case with the spirits of darkness; for no one loves wickedness, in either themselves or others, however we may practise it. We must also understand, that the words “dark” and “light”—which, in this world of appearance, we use metaphorically to express good and evil—must be understood literally when speaking of that other world where everything will be seen as it is. Goodness is truth, and truth is light—and wickedness is falsehood, and falsehood is darkness; and so it will be seen to be. Those who have not the light of truth to guide them, will wander darkly through this valley of the shadow of death; those in whom the light of goodness shines will dwell in the light, which is inherent in themselves. The former will be in the kingdom of darkness—the latter in the kingdom of light. All the records existing of the blessed spirits that have appeared, ancient or modern, exhibit them as robed in light, while their anger or sorrow is symbolized by their darkness. Now, there appears to me nothing incomprehensible in this view of the future; on the contrary, it is the only one which I ever found myself capable of conceiving or reconciling with the justice and mercy of our Creator. He does not punish us—we punish ourselves: we have built up a heaven or a hell to our own liking, and we carry it with us. The fire that for ever burns without consuming, is the fiery evil in which we have chosen our part; and the heaven in which we shall dwell, will be the heavenly peace which will dwell in us. We are our own judges and our own chastisers. And here I must say a few words on the subject of that apparently (to us) preternatural memory which is developed under certain circumstances, and to which I alluded in a former chapter. Every one will have heard that persons who have been drowned and recovered, have had—in what would have been their last moments, if no means had been used to revive them—a strange vision of the past, in which their whole life seemed to float before them in review; and I have heard of the same phenomenon taking place, in moments of impending death, in other forms. Now, as it is not during the struggle for life, but immediately before insensibility ensues, that this vision occurs, it must be the act of a moment; and this renders incomprehensible to us what is said by the seeress of Prevorst, and other somnambules of the highest order, namely, that the instant the soul is freed from the body, it sees its whole earthly career in a single sign: it knows that it is good or evil, and pronounces its own sentence. The extraordinary memory occasionally exhibited in sickness, where the link between the soul and the body is probably loosened, shows us an adumbration of this faculty.
But this self-pronounced sentence we are led to hope is not final; nor does it seem consistent with the love and mercy of God that it should be so. There must be few, indeed, who leave this earth fit for heaven; for, although the immediate frame of mind in which dissolution takes place is probably very important, it is surely a pernicious error, encouraged by jail chaplains and philanthropists, that a late repentance and a few parting prayers can purify a soul sullied by years of wickedness. Would we at once receive such a one into our intimate communion and love? Should we not require time for the stains of vice to be washed away and habits of virtue to be formed? Assuredly we should! And how can we imagine that the purity of heaven is to be sullied by that approximation which the purity of earth would forbid? It would be cruel to say, and irrational to think, that this late repentance is of no avail; it is doubtless so far of avail, that the straining upward and the heavenly aspirations of the parting soul are carried with it, so that when it is free, instead of choosing the darkness it will flee to as much light as is in itself, and be ready, through the mercy of God and the ministering of brighter spirits, to receive more. But in this case, as also in the innumerable instances of those who die in what may be called a negative state, the advance must be progressive; though, wherever the desire exists, I must believe that this advance is possible. If not, wherefore did Christ, after being “put to death in the flesh,” go and “preach to the spirits in prison”? It would have been a mockery to preach salvation to those who had no hope; nor would they, having no hope, have listened to the preacher.
I think these views are at once cheering, encouraging, and beautiful; and I can not but believe, that were they more generally entertained and more intimately conceived, they would be very beneficial in their effects. As I have said before, the extremely vague notions people have of a future life prevent the possibility of its exercising any great influence upon the present. The picture, on one side, is too revolting and inconsistent with our ideas of Divine goodness to be deliberately accepted; while, with regard to the other, our feelings somewhat resemble those of a little girl I once knew, who, being told by her mother what was to be the reward of goodness if she were so happy as to reach heaven, put her finger in her eye and began to cry, exclaiming, “Oh, mamma, how tired I shall be singing!”
The question which will now naturally arise, and which I am bound to answer, is, how have these views been formed? and what is the authority for them? And the answer I have to make will startle many minds when I say, that they have been gathered from two sources; first and chiefly from the state in which those spirits appear to be, and sometimes avow themselves to be, who, after quitting the earth, return to it and make themselves visible to the living; and, secondly, from the revelations of numerous somnambules of the highest order, which entirely conform in all cases, not only with the revelations of the dead, but with each other. I do not mean to imply, when I say this, that I consider the question finally settled as to whether somnambules are really clear-seers or only visionaries; nor that I have by any means established the fact that the dead do sometimes actually return; but I am obliged to beg the question for the moment, since, whether these sources be pure or impure, it is from them the information has been collected. It is true that these views are extremely conformable with those entertained by Plato and his school of philosophers, and also with those of the mystics of a later age; but the latter certainly, and the former probably, built up their systems on the same foundation; and I am very far from using the termmysticsin the opprobrious, or at least contemptuous, tone in which it has of late years been uttered in this country; for, although abounding in errors, as regarded the concrete, and although their want of an inductivemethodologyled them constantly astray in the region of the real, they were sublime teachers in that of the ideal; and they seem to have been endowed with a wonderful insight into this veiled department of our nature.
It may be here objected, that we only admire their insight, because, being in entire ignorance of the subject of it, we accept raving for revelation; and that no weight can be attached to the conformity of later disclosures with theirs, since they have no doubt been founded upon them. As to the ignorance, it is admitted; and, simply looking at their views, as they stand, they have nothing to support them but their sublimity and consistency; but, as regards the value of the evidence afforded by conformity, it rests on very different grounds; for the reporters from whom we collect our intelligence are, with very few exceptions, those of whom we may safely predicate, that they were wholly unacquainted with the systems promulgated by the Platonic philosophers, or the mystics either, nor, in most instances, had ever heard of their names; for, as regards that peculiar somnambulic state which is here referred to, the subjects of it appear to be generally very young people of either sex, and chiefly girls; and, as regards ghost-seeing, although this phenomenon seems to have no connection with the age of the seer, yet it is not usually from the learned or the cultivated that we collect our cases, inasmuch as the apprehension of ridicule on the one hand, and the fast hold the doctrine of spectral illusions has taken of them on the other, prevent their believing in their own senses, or producing any evidence they might have to furnish.
And here will be offered another subtle objection, namely, that the testimony of such witnesses as I have above described is perfectly worthless; but this I deny. The somnambulic states I allude to, are such as have been developed, not artificially, but naturally; and often, under very extraordinary nervous diseases, accompanied with catalepsy, and various symptoms far beyond feigning. Such cases are rare, and, in this country, seem to have been very little observed, for doubtless they must occur, and when they do occur they are very carefully concealed by the families of the patient, and not followed up or investigated as a psychological phenomenon by the physician; for it is to be observed that, without questioning, no revelations are made; they are not, as far as I know, ever spontaneous. I have heard of two such cases in this country, both occurring in the higher classes, and both patients being young ladies; but, although surprising phenomena were exhibited, interrogation was not permitted, and the particulars were never allowed to transpire.
No doubt there are examples of error and examples of imposture, so there are in everything where room is to be found for them; and I am quite aware of the propensity of hysterical patients to deceive, but it is for the judicious observers to examine the genuineness of each particular instance; and it is perfectly certain and well established by the German physiologists and psychologists, who have carefully studied the subject, that there are many above all suspicion. Provided, then, that the case be genuine, it remains to be determined how much value is to be attached to the revelations, for they may be quite honestly delivered, and yet be utterly worthless—the mere ravings of a disordered brain; and it is here that conformity becomes important, for I can not admit the objection that the simple circumstance of the patients being diseased invalidates their evidence so entirely as to annul even the value of their unanimity, because, although it is not logically impossible that a certain state of nervous derangement should occasion all somnambules, of the class in question, to make similar answers, when interrogated regarding a subject of which, in their normal condition, they know nothing, and on which they have never reflected, and that these answers should be not only consistent, but disclosing far more elevated views than are evolved by minds of a very superior order whichhavereflected on it very deeply—I say, although this is not logically impossible, it will assuredly be found, by most persons, an hypothesis of much more difficult acceptance than the one I propose; namely, that whatever be the cause of the effect, these patients are in a state of clear-seeing, wherein they have “more than mortal knowledge;” that is, more knowledge than mortals possess in their normal condition: and it must not be forgotten, that we have some facts confessed by all experienced physicians and physiologists, even in this country, proving that there are states of disease in which preternatural faculties have been developed, such as no theory has yet satisfactorily accounted for.
But Dr. Passavent, who has written a very philosophical work on the subject of vital magnetism and clear-seeing, asserts, that it is an error to imagine that the ecstatic condition is merely the product of disease. He says, that it has sometimes exhibited itself in persons of very vigorous constitutions, instancing Joan of Arc, a woman, whom historians have little understood, and whose memory Voltaire’s detestable poem has ridiculed and degraded, but who was, nevertheless, a great psychological phenomenon.
The circumstance, too, that phenomena of this kind are more frequently developed in women than in men, and that they are merely the consequence of her greater nervous irritability, has been made another objection to them—an objection, however, which Dr. Passavent considers founded on ignorance of the essential difference between the sexes, which is not merely a physical but a psychological one. Man is more productive than receptive. In a state of perfectibility, both attributes would be equally developed in him; but in this terrestrial life, only imperfect phases of the entire sum of the soul’s faculties are so. Mankind are but children, male or female, young or old; of man, in his totality, we have but faint adumbrations, here and there.
Thus the ecstatic woman will be more frequently a seer, instinctive and intuitive; man, a doer and a worker; and as all genius is a degree of ecstasy or clear-seeing, we perceive the reason wherefore in man it is more productive than in woman, and that our greatest poets and artists, in all kinds, are of the former sex, and even the most remarkable women produce but little in science or art; while on the other hand, the feminine instinct, and tact, and intuitive seeing of truth, are frequently more sure than the ripe and deliberate judgment of man; and it is hence that solitude and such conditions as develop the passive or receptive at the expense of the active, tend to produce this state, and to assimilate the man more to the nature of the woman; while in her they intensify these distinguishing characteristics; and this is also the reason that simple and child-like people and races are the most frequent subjects of these phenomena.
It is only necessary to read Mozart’s account of his own moments of inspiration, to comprehend not only the similarity, but the positive identity, of the ecstatic state with the state of genius in activity. “When all goes well with me,” he says—“when I am in a carriage, or walking, or when I can not sleep at night, the thoughts come streaming in upon me most fluently: whence, or how, is more than I can tell. What comes, I hum to myself as it proceeds. Then follow the counterpoint and the clang of the different instruments; and, if I am not disturbed, my soul is fixed, and the thing grows greater, and broader, and clearer; and I have it all in my head, even when the piece is a long one; and I see it like a beautiful picture—not hearing the different parts in succession as they must be played, but the whole at once. That is the delight! The composing and the making is like a beautiful and vivid dream; but this hearing of it is the best of all.”
What is this but clear-seeing, backward and forward, the past and the future? The one faculty is not a whit more surprising and incomprehensible than the other, to those who possess neither; only we see the material product of one, and therefore believe in it. But, as Passavent justly observes, these coruscations belong not to genius exclusively—they are latent in all men. In the highly-gifted this divine spark becomes a flame to light the world withal; but even in the coarsest and least-developed organizations, it may and does momentarily break forth. The germ of the highest spiritual life is in the rudest, according to its degree, as well as in the highest form of man we have yet seen;—he is but a more imperfect type of the race, in whom this spiritual germ has not unfolded itself.
Then, with respect to our second source of information, I am quite aware that it is equally difficult to establish its validity; but there are a few arguments in our favor here, too. In the first place, as Dr. Johnson says, though all reason is against us, all tradition is for us; and this conformity of tradition is surely of some weight, since I think it would be difficult to find any parallel instance of a universal tradition that was entirely without a foundation in truth; for with respect to witchcraft, the belief in which is equally universal, we now know that the phenomena were generally facts, although the interpretations put upon them were fables. It may certainly be objected that this universal belief in ghosts only arises from the universal prevalence of spectral illusions; but if so, as I have before observed, these spectral illusions become a subject of very curious inquiry; for, in the first place, they frequently occur under circumstances the least likely to induce them, and to people whom we should least expect to find the victims of them; and, in the second, there is a most remarkable conformity here, too, not only between the individual cases occurring among all classes of persons, who had never exhibited the slightest tendency to nervous derangement or somnambulism, but also between these and the revelations of the somnambules. In short, it seems to me that life is reduced to a mere phantasmagoria, if spectral illusions are so prevalent, so complicated in their nature, and so delusive as they must be if all the instances of ghost-seeing that come before us are to be referred to that theory. How numerous these are, I confess myself not to have had the least idea, till my attention was directed to the inquiry; and that these instances have been equally frequent in all periods and places we can not doubt, from the variety of persons that have given in their adhesion, or at least that have admitted, as Addison did, that he could not refuse the universal testimony in favor of the reappearance of the dead, strengthened by that of many credible persons with whom he was acquainted. Indeed, the testimony in favor of the facts has been at all periods too strong to be wholly rejected; so that even the materialists, like Lucretius and the elder Pliny, find themselves obliged to acknowledge them; while, on the other hand, the extravagant admissions that are demanded of us by those who endeavor to explain them away, prove that their disbelief rests on no more solid foundation than their own prejudices. I acknowledge all the difficulty of establishing the facts—such difficulties as indeed encompass few other branches of inquiry; but I maintain that the position of the opponents is still worse, although, by their high tone and contemptuous laugh, they assume to have taken up one that, being fortified by reason, is quite impregnable, forgetting that the wisdom of man is pre-eminently “foolishness before God,” when it wanders into this region of unknown things;—forgetting, also, that they are just serving this branch of inquiry, as their predecessors, whom they laughed at, did physiology; concocting their systems out of their own brains, instead of the responses of nature—and with still more rashness and presumption, this department of her kingdom being more inaccessible, more incapable of demonstration, and more entirely beyond our control; for these spirits will not “come when we do call them;”—and I confess it often surprises me to hear the very shallow nonsense that very clever men talk upon the subject, and the inefficient arguments they use to disprove what they know nothing about. I am quite conscious that the facts I shall adduce are open to controversy: I can bring forward no evidence that will satisfy a scientific mind; but neither are my opponents a whit better fortified. All I do hope to establish is, not a proof, but a presumption; and the conviction I desire to awaken in people’s minds is, not that these thingsareso, but that theymay beso, and that it is well worth our while to inquire whether they are or not.
It will be seen that these views of a future state are extremely similar to those of Isaac Taylor, as suggested in his physical theory of another life—at least, as far as he has entered upon the subject;—and it is natural that they should be so, because he seems also to have been a convert to the opinion that “the dead do sometimes break through the boundaries that hem in the ethereal crowds; and if so, as if by trespass, may in single instances infringe upon the ground of common corporeal life.”
Let us now fancy this dispossessed soul entering on its new career, amazed, and no more able than when it was in the body to accommodate itself at once to conditions of existence for which it was unprepared. If its aspirations had previously been heavenward, these conditions would not be altogether new, and it would speedily find itself at home in a sphere in which it had dwelt before; for, as I have formerly said, a spirit must be where its thoughts and affections are, and the soul, whose thoughts and affections had been directed to heaven, would only awaken after death into a more perfect and unclouded heaven. But imagine the contrary of all this. Conceive what this awakening must be to an earth-bound spirit—to one altogether unprepared for its new home—carrying no light within it—floating in the dim obscure—clinging to the earth, where all its affections were garnered up: for where its treasure is, there shall it be also. It will find its condition evil, more or less, according to the degree of its moral light or darkness, and in proportion to the amount of the darkness will be its incapacity to seek for light. Now, there seems nothing offensive to our notions of the Divine goodness in this conception of what awaits us when the body dies. It appears to me, on the contrary, to offer a more comprehensible and coherent view than any other that has been presented to me; yet the state I have depicted is very much the hades of the Greeks and Romans. It is the middle state, on which all souls enter—a state in which there are many mansions; that is, there are innumerable states—probably not permanent, but ever progressive or retrograde; for we can not conceive of any moral state being permanent, since we know perfectly well that ours is never so; it is always advancing or retroceding. When we are not improving, we are deteriorating; and so it must necessarily be with us hereafter.
Now, if we admit the probability of this middle state, we have removed one of the great objections which are made to the belief in the reappearance of the dead: namely, that the blest are too happy to return to the earth, and that the wicked have it not in their power to do so. This difficulty arises, however, very much from the material ideas entertained of heaven and hell—the notion that they are places instead of states. I am told that the Greek wordhadesis derived fromæides,invisible; and that the Hebrew wordscheôl, which has the same signification, also implies a state, not a place, since it may be interpreted intodesiring,longing,asking,praying. These words in the Septuagint are translatedgrave,death, andhell; but previously to the Reformation they seem to have borne their original meaning—that is, the state into which the soul entered at the death of the body. It was probably to get rid of the purgatory of the Roman Church, which had doubtless become the source of many absurd notions and corrupt practices, that the doctrine of a middle state or hades was set aside: besides which, the honest desire for reformation, in all reforming churches, being alloyed by theodium theologicum, the purifying besom is apt to take too discursive a sweep, exercising less modesty and discrimination than might be desirable, and thus not uncommonly wiping away truth and falsehood together.
Dismissing the idea, therefore, that heaven and hell are places in which the soul is imprisoned, whether in bliss or woe, and supposing that, by a magnetic relation, it may remain connected with the sphere to which it previously belonged, we may easily conceive that, if it have the memory of the past, the more entirely sensuous its life in the body may have been, the closer it will cling to the scene of its former joys; or even if its sojourn on earth were not a period of joy, but the contrary, still, if it have no heavenward aspirations, it will find itself, if not in actual wo, yet aimless, objectless, and out of a congenial element. It has no longer the organs whereby it perceived, communicated with, and enjoyed, the material world and its pleasures. The joys of heaven are not its joys; we might as well expect a hardened prisoner in Newgate, associating with others as hardened as himself, to melt into ecstatic delight at the idea of that which he can not apprehend! How helpless and inefficient such a condition seems! and how natural it is to us to imagine that, under such circumstances, there might be awakened a considerable desire to manifest itself to those yet living in the flesh, if such a manifestation be possible! And what right have we, in direct contradiction to all tradition, to assert that it is not? We may raise up a variety of objections from physical science, but we can not be sure that these are applicable to the case; and of the laws of spirit we know very little, since we are only acquainted with it as circumscribed, confined, and impeded, in its operations, by the body; and whenever such abnormal states occur as enable it to act with any degree of independence, man, under the dominion of his all-sufficient reason, denies and disowns the facts.
That the manifestation of a spirit to the living, whether seen or heard, is an exception, and not the rule, is evident; for, supposing the desire to exist at all, it must exist in millions and millions of instances which never take effect. The circumstances must therefore no doubt be very peculiar, as regards both parties in which such a manifestation is possible. What these are, we have very little means of knowing; but, as far as we do know, we are led to conclude that a certain magnetic rapport or polarity constitutes this condition, while, at the same time, as regards the seer, there must be what the prophet called the “opening of the eye,” which may perhaps signify the seeing of the spirit without the aid of the bodily organ—a condition which may temporarily occur to any one under we know not what influence, but which seems, to a certain degree, hereditary in some families.
The following passage is quoted from Sir William Hamilton’s edition of Dr. Reid’s works, published in 1846:—
“No man can show it to be impossible to the Supreme Being to have given us the power of perceiving external objects, without any such organs”—that is, our organs of sense. “We have reason to believe that when we put off these bodies, and all the organs belonging to them, our perceptive powers shall rather be improved than destroyed or impaired. We have reason to believe that the Supreme Being perceives everything in a much more perfect manner than we do, without bodily organs. We have reason to believe that there are other created beings endowed with powers of perception more perfect and more extensive than ours, without any such organs as we find necessary;” and Sir William Hamilton adds the following note:—
“However astonishing, it is now proved beyond all rational doubt that in certain abnormal states of the nervous organism, perceptions are possible through other than the ordinary channels of the sense.”
Of the existence of this faculty in nature, any one, who chooses, may satisfy himself by a very moderate degree of trouble, provided he undertake the investigation honestly; and this being granted, another objection, if not altogether removed, is considerably weakened. I allude to the fact that, in numerous reported cases of ghost-seeing, the forms were visible to only one person, even though others were present, which, of course, rendered them undistinguishable from cases of spectral illusion, and indeed unless some additional evidence be afforded, they must remain so still, only we have gained thus much, that this objection is no longer unanswerable; for whether the phenomenon is to be referred to a mutual rapport, or to the opening of the spiritual eye, we comprehend how one may see what others do not. But really, if the seeing depended upon ordinary vision, I can not perceive that the difficulty is insurmountable; for we perfectly well know that some people are endowed with an acuteness of sense, or power of perception, which is utterly incomprehensible to others; for, without entering into the disputed region of clear-seeing, everybody must have met with instances of those strange antipathies to certain objects, accompanied by an extraordinary capacity for perceiving their presence, which remain utterly unexplained. Not to speak of cats and hares, where some electrical effects might be conceived, I lately heard of a gentleman who fainted if he were introduced into a room where there was a raspberry tart; and that there have been persons endowed with a faculty for discovering the proximity of water and metals, even without the aid of the divining rod—which latter marvel seems to be now clearly established as an electrical phenomenon—will scarcely admit of further doubt.
A very eminent person, with whom I am acquainted, possessing extremely acute olfactory powers, is the subject of one single exception. He is insensible to the odor of a beanfield, however potent: but it would surely be very absurd in him to deny that the beanfield emits an odor, and the evidence of the majority against him is too strong to admit of his doing so.
Now, we have only the evidence of a minority with regard to the existence of certain faculties not generally developed, but surely it argues great presumption to dispute their possibility. We might, I think, with more appearance of reason, insist upon it that my friendmustbe mistaken, and that he does smell the beanfield, for we have the majority against him there most decidedly. The difference is, that nobody cares whether the odor of the beanfield is perceptible or not: but if the same gentleman asserted that he had seen a ghost, beyond all doubt his word would be disputed.
Though we do not know what the conditions are that develop the faculty of what St. Paul calls the discerning of spirits, there is reason to believe that the approach of death is one. I have heard of too many instances of this kind, where the departing person has been in the entire possession of his or her faculties, to doubt that in our last moments we are frequently visited by those who have gone before us; and it being admitted by all physiologists that preternatural faculties are sometimes exhibited at this period, we can have no right to say that “the discerning of spirits” is not one of them.
There is an interesting story recorded by Beaumont, in his “World of Spirits,” and quoted by Dr. Hibbert with the remark that no reasonable doubt can be placed on the authenticity of the narrative, as it was drawn up by the bishop of Gloucester from the recital of the young lady’s father; and I mention it here, not for any singularity attending it, but first, because its authenticity is admitted, and next, on account of the manner in which—so much being granted—the fact is attempted to be explained away:—
“Sir Charles Lee, by his first lady, had only one daughter, of which she died in childbirth; and when she was dead, her sister, the Lady Everard, desired to have the education of the child, and she was very well educated till she was marriageable, and a match was concluded for her with Sir W. Parkins, but was then prevented in an extraordinary manner. Upon a Thursday night, she thinking she saw a light in her chamber after she was in bed, knocked for her maid, who presently came to her, and she asked why she left a candle burning in her room. The maid answered that she had left none, and that there was none but what she had brought with her at that time. ‘Then,’ she said, ‘it must be the fire;’ but that, her maid told her, was quite out, adding she believed it was only a dream, whereupon Miss Lee answered that it might be so, and composed herself again to sleep. But, about two of the clock, she was awakened again, and saw the apparition of a little woman between her curtains and her pillow, who told her she was her mother, that she was happy, and that, by twelve of the clock that day, she should be with her. Whereupon, she knocked again for her maid, called for her clothes, and when she was dressed, went into her closet, and came not out again till nine, and then brought out with her a letter, sealed, to her father, carried it to her aunt, the Lady Everard, told her what had happened, and desired that as soon as she was dead it might be sent to him. The lady thought she was suddenly fallen mad, and therefore sent presently away to Chelmsford for a physician and surgeon, who both came immediately, but the physician could discern no indication of what the lady imagined, or of any indisposition of her body; notwithstanding, the lady would needs have her let blood, which was done accordingly; and when the young woman had patiently let them do what they would with her, she desired that the chaplain might be called to read prayers; and when the prayers were ended, she took her guitar and psalm-book, and sat down upon a chair without arms, and played and sung so melodiously and admirably, that her music-master, who was then there, admired at it. And near the stroke of twelve, she rose and sat herself down in a great chair with arms, and presently fetching a strong breathing or two, she immediately expired, and was so suddenly cold as was much wondered at by the physician and surgeon. She died at Waltham, in Essex, three miles from Chelmsford, and the letter was sent to Sir Charles, at his house in Warwickshire; but he was so afflicted at the death of his daughter, that he came not till she was buried; but when he came, he caused her to be taken up, and to be buried with her mother, at Edmonton, as she desired in her letter.”
This circumstance occurred in the year 1662, and is, as Dr. Hibbert observes, “one of the most interesting ghost-stories on record;” yet he insists on placing it under the category of spectral illusions, upon the plea that, let the physician (whose skill he arraigns) say what he would, her death within so short a period proves that she must have been indisposed at the time she saw the vision, and that probably “the languishing female herself might have unintentionally contributed to the more strict verification of the ghost’s prediction,” concluding with these words: “All that can be said of it is, that the coincidence was afortunate one; for, without it, the story would probably never have met with a recorder,” &c., &c.
Now, I ask if this is a fair way of treating any fact, transmitted to us on authority which the objector himself admits to be perfectly satisfactory—more especially as the assistants on the occasion appear to have been quite as unwilling to believe in thesupernaturalinterpretation of it as Dr. Hibbert could have been himself, had he been present; for what more could he have done than conclude the young lady to be mad, and bled her?—a line of practice which is precisely what would be followed at the present time, and which proves that they were very well aware of the sensuous illusions produced by a disordered state of the nervous system; and with respect to his conclusion that the “languishing female” contributed to the verification of the prediction, we are entitled to ask, where is the proof that she was languishing? A very clever watchmaker once told me that a watch may go perfectly well for years, and at length stop suddenly, in consequence of an organic defect in its construction, which only becomes perceptible, even to the eye of a watchmaker, when this effect takes place; and we do know that many persons have suddenly fallen dead immediately after declaring themselves in the best possible health: and we have therefore no right to dispute what the narrator implies, namely, that there were no sensible indications of the impending catastrophe.
There was either some organic defect or derangement in this lady’s physical economy, which rendered her death inevitable at the hour of noon, on that particular Thursday, or there was not. If there was, and her certain death was impending at that hour, how came she acquainted with the fact? Surely it is a monstrous assumption to say that it was “a fortunate coincidence,” when no reason whatever is given us for concluding that she felt otherwise than perfectly well! If, on the contrary, we are to take refuge in the supposition that there was no death impending, and that she only died of the fright, how came she—feeling perfectly well, and, in this case, we have a right to concludebeingperfectly well—to be the subject of such an extraordinary spectral illusion? And if such spectral illusions can occur to people in a good normal state of health, does it not become very desirable to give us some clearer theory of them than we have at present?
But there is a third presumption to which the skeptical may have recourse, in order to get rid of this well-established, and therefore very troublesome fact, namely, that Miss Leewasill, although unconscious of it herself, and indicating no symptoms that could guide her physician to an enlightened diagnosis; and that the proof of this is to be found in the occurrence of the spectral illusion; and that this spectral illusion so impressed her that it occasioned the precise fulfilment of the imaginary prediction—an hypothesis which appears to me to be pressing very hard on the spectral illusion; for it is first called upon to establish the fact of an existing indisposition of no slight character, of which neither patient nor physician was aware, and it is next required to kill the lady with unerring certainty, at the hour appointed, she being, according to the only authority we have for the story, in a perfectly calm and composed state of mind! for there is nothing to be discerned in the description of her demeanor but an entire and willing submission to the announced decree, accompanied by that pleasing exaltation, which appears to me perfectly natural under the circumstances; and I do not think that anything we know of human vitality can justify us in believing that life can be so easily extinguished. But to such straits people are reduced, who write with a predetermination to place their facts on a Procrustean bed till they have fitted them into their own cherished theory.
In the above-recorded case of Miss Lee, the motive for the visit is a sufficient one; but one of the commonest objections to such narrations, is the insignificance of the motive when any communication is made, or there being apparently no motive at all, when none is made. Where any previous attachment has subsisted, we need seek no further for an impelling cause; but in other cases this impelling cause must probably be sought in the earthly rapport still subsisting and the urgent desire of the spirit to manifest itself and establish a communication where its thoughts and affections still reside; and we must consider that, provided there be no law of God prohibiting its revisiting the earth, which law would of course supersede all other laws, then, as I have before observed, where its thoughts and affections are it must be also. What is it but our heavy material bodies that prevents us from being where our thoughts are? But the being near us, and the manifesting itself to us, are two very different things, the latter evidently depending on conditions we do not yet understand.
As I am not writing a book on vital magnetism, and there are so many already accessible to everybody who chooses to be informed on it, I shall not here enter into the subject ofmagnetic rapport, it being, I believe, now generally admitted, except by the most obstinate skeptics, that such a relation can be established between two human beings. In what this relation consists, is a more difficult question, but the most rational view appears to be that of a magnetic polarity, which is attempted to be explained by two theories—the dynamical and the ethereal, the one viewing the phenomena as simply the result of the transmission of forces, the other hypothetizing an ether which pervades all space and penetrates all substance, maintaining the connection between body and soul, and between matter and spirit. To most minds this latter hypothesis will be the most comprehensible; on which account, since the result would be the same in either case, we may adopt for the moment; and there will then be less difficulty in conceiving that the influence or ether of every being or thing, animate or inanimate, must extend beyond the periphery of its own terminations: and that this must be eminently the case where there is animal life, the nerves forming the readiest conductors for this supposed imponderable. The proofs of the existence of this ether are said to be manifold, and more especially to be found in the circumstances that every created thing sheds an atmosphere around it, after its kind; this atmosphere becoming, under certain conditions, perceptible or even visible, as in the instances of electric fish, &c., the fascinations of serpents, the influence of human beings upon plants, andvice versa; and finally, the phenomena of animal magnetism, and the undoubted fact, to which I myself can bear witness, that the most ignorant girls, when in a state of somnambulism, have been known to declare that they saw their magnetiser surrounded by a halo of light; and it is doubtless this halo of light, that, from their being strongly magnetic men, has frequently been observed to surround the heads of saints and eminently holy persons: the temperament that produced the internal fervor, causing the visible manifestation of it. By means of this ether, or force, a never-ceasing motion and an inter-communication are sustained between all created things, and between created things and their Creator, who sustains them and creates them ever anew, by the constant exertion of his Divine will, of which this is the messenger and the agent as it is between our will and our own bodies; and without this sustaining will, so exerted, the whole would fall away, dissolve, and die; for it is the life of the universe. That all inanimate objects emit an influence, greater or less, extending beyond their own peripheries, is established by their effects on various susceptible individuals, as well as on somnambules; and thus there exist a universal polarity and rapport, which are however stronger between certain organisms; and every being stands in a varying relation of positive and negative to every other.
With regard to these theories, however, where there is so much obscurity even in the language, I do not wish to insist; more especially as I am fully aware that this subject may be discussed in a manner much more congruous with the dynamical spirit of the philosophy of this century: but, in the meanwhile, as either of the causes alluded to is capable of producing the effects, we adopt the hypothesis of an all-pervading ether as the one most easily conceived.
Admitting this, then, to be the case, we begin to have some notion of themodus operandiby which a spirit may manifest itself to us, whether to our internal universal sense, or even to our sensuous organs; and we also find one stumbling-block removed out of our way, namely, that it shall be visible or even audible to one person and not to another, or at one time and not at another; for by means of this ether, or force, we are in communication with all spirit, as well as with all matter; and since it is the vehicle of will, a strong exertion of will may reinforce its influence to a degree far beyond our ordinary conceptions: but man is not acquainted with his own power, and has, consequently, no faith in his own will: nor is it probably the design of Providence, in ordinary cases, that he should. He can not therefore exert it; if he could, he “might remove mountains.” Even as it is, we know something of the power of will in its effect on other organisms, as exhibited by certain strong-willed individuals; also in popular movements; and more manifestly in the influence and far-working of the magnetizer on his patient. The power of will, like the seeing of the spirit, is latent in our nature, to be developed in God’s own time; but meanwhile, slight examples are found, shooting up here and there, to keep alive in man the consciousness that he is a spirit, and give evidence of his Divine origin.
What especial laws may appertain to this supersensuous domain of nature, of course we can not know, and it is therefore impossible for us to pronounce how far a spirit is free, or not free, at all times to manifest itself; and we can, therefore, at present, advance no reason for these manifestations not being the rule instead of the exception. The law which restrains more frequent intercourse may, for anything we know to the contrary, have its relaxations and its limitations, founded in nature; and a rapport with, or the power of acting on, particular individuals, may arise from causes of which we are equally ignorant. Undoubtedly, the receptivity of the corporeal being is one of the necessary conditions, while, on the part of the incorporeal, the will is at once the cause and the agent that produces the effect; while attachment, whether to individuals or to the lost joys of this world, is the motive. The happy spirits in whom this latter impulse is weak, and who would float away into the glorious light of the pure moral law, would have little temptation to return, and at least would only be brought back by their holy affections, or desire to serve mankind. The less happy, clinging to their dear corporeal life, would hover nearer to the earth; and I do question much whether the often-ridiculed idea of the mystics, that there is a moralweight, as well as a moraldarkness, be not founded in truth. We know very well that even these substantial bodies of ours are, to our own sensations (and, very possibly, if the thing could be tested, would prove to be in fact), lighter or heavier, according to the lightness or heaviness of the spirit—terms used figuratively, but perhaps capable of a literal interpretation; and thus the common idea ofupanddown, as applied to heaven or hell, is founded in truth, though not mathematically correct, we familiarly using the wordsupanddownto expressfartherornearer, as regards the planet on which we live.
Experience seems to justify this view of the case; for, supposing the phenomena I am treating of to be facts, and not spectral illusions, all tradition shows that the spirits most frequently manifested to man have been evidently not in a state of bliss; while, when bright ones appeared it has been to serve him; and hence the old persuasion, that they were chiefly the wicked that haunted the earth, and hence, also, the foundation for the belief that not only the murderer but the murdered returned to vex the living, and the just view, that in taking away life the injury is not confined to the body, but extends to the surprised and angry soul, which is—