Part 22

The anthropological test of evidence for faith in the rejected phenomena is thus amply satisfied. Unless we say that these phenomena are 'impossible,' whereas totemism, the couvade, cannibalism, are possible, the testimony to belief in clairvoyance, and the other peculiar occurrences, is as good in its way as the evidence for the practice of wild customs and institutions. There remains a last and notable circumstance. All the abnormal phenomena, in the modern and mediaeval tales, occur most frequently in the presence of convulsionaries, like the so-called victims of witches, like the Hon. Master Sandilands, Lord Torphichen's son (1720), like the grandson of William Morse in New England (1680), and like Bovet's case of the demon of Spraiton. {355}

The 'mediums' of modern spiritualism, like Francis Fey, are, or pretend to be, subject to fits, anaesthesia, jerks, convulsive movements, and trance. As Mr. Tylor says about his savage jossakeeds, powwows, Birraarks, peaimen, everywhere 'these people suffer from hysterical, convulsive, and epileptic affections'. Thus the physical condition, all the world over, of persons who exhibit most freely the accepted phenomena, is identical. All the world over, too, the same persons are credited with the rejected phenomena, clairvoyance, 'discerning of spirits,' powers of voluntary 'telepathic 'and 'telekinetic' impact. Thus we find that uniform and recurrent evidence vouches for a mass of phenomena which science scouts. Science has now accepted a portion of the mass, but still rejects the stranger occurrences. Our argument is that their invariably alleged presence, in attendance on the minor occurrences, is, at least, a point worthy of examination. The undesigned coincidences of testimony represent a great deal of smoke, and proverbial wisdom suggests a presumption in favour of a few sparks of fire. Now, if there are such sparks, the animistic hypothesis may not, of course, be valid,--'spirits' may not exist,--but the universal belief in their existence may have had its origin, not in normal facts only, but in abnormal facts. And these facts, at the lowest estimate, must suggest that man may have faculties, and be surrounded by agencies, which physical science does not take into account in its theory of the universe and of human nature.

We have already argued that the doctrines of theism and of the soul need not to be false, even if they were arrived at slowly, after a succession of grosser opinions. But if the doctrines were reached by a process which started from real facts of human nature, observed by savages, but not yet recognised by physical science, then there may have been grains of truth even in the cruder and earlier ideas, and these grains of gold may have been disengaged, and fashioned, not without Divine aid, into the sacred things of spiritual religion.

The stories which we have been considering are often trivial, sometimes comic; but they are universally diffused, and as well established as universally coincident testimony can establish anything. Now, if there be but one spark of real fire to all this smoke, then the purely materialistic theories of life and of the world must be reconsidered. They seem very well established, but so have many other theories seemed, that are long gone the way of all things human.

Footnotes:

{0a} Fortnightly Review, February 1866, and in a lecture, 1895.

{0b} This diary was edited for private circulation, by a son of Mr. Proctor's, who remembers the disturbances.

{0c} See essays here on Classical and Savage Spiritualism.

{0d} This was merely a cheerful obiter dictum by the learned President.

{4} Not the house agent.

{9} Porphyry, Epistola xxi. Iamblichus, De Myst., iii. 2.

{11} The Port Glasgow story is in Report of the Dialectical Society, p. 200. The flooring was torn up; walls, ceilings, cellars, were examined by the police, and attempts were made to imitate the noises, without success. In this case, as at Rerrick in the end of the seventeenth century, and elsewhere, 'the appearance of a hand moving up and down' was seen by the family, 'but we could not catch it: it quietly vanished, and we only felt cold air'. The house was occupied by a gardener, Hugh McCardle. Names of witnesses, a sergeant of police, and others, are appended.

{12} Report of Dialectical Society, p. 86.

{17a} For ourselves, we have never seen or heard a table give any responses whatever, any more than we have seen the ghosts, heard the raps, or viewed the flights of men in the air which we chronicle in a later portion of this work.

{17b} Report on Spiritualism, Longmans, London, 1871.

{18} Report, p. 229.

{21} Mr. Wallace may be credited with scoring a point in argument. Dr. Edmunds had maintained that no amount of evidence would make him believe in certain obvious absurdities, say the lions in Trafalgar Square drinking out of the fountains. Mr. Wallace replied: 'The asserted fact is either possible or not possible. If possible, such evidence as we have been considering would prove it; if not possible, such evidence could not exist.' No such evidence exists for the lions; for the phenomena of so-called spiritualism, we have consentient testimony in every land, period and stage of culture. That certainly makes a difference, whatever the weight and value of the difference may be.

{26a} This illustration is not Mr. Lecky's.

{26b} We have here thrown together a crowd of odd experiences. The savages' examples are dealt with in the next essay; the Catholic marvels in the essay on 'Comparative Psychical Research'. For Pascal, consult L'Amulette de Pascal, by M. Lelut; for Iamblichus, see essay on 'Ancient Spiritualism'. As to Welsh, the evidence for the light in which he shone is printed in Dr. Hill Burton's Scot Abroad (i. 289), from a Wodrow MS. in Glasgow University. Mr. Welsh was minister of Ayr. He was meditating in his garden late at night. One of his friends 'chanced to open a window towards the place where he walked, and saw clearly a strange light surround him, and heard him speak strange words about his spiritual joy'. Hill Burton thinks that this verges on the Popish superstition. The truth is that eminent ministers shared the privileges of Mediums and of some saints. Examples of miraculous cures by ministers, of clairvoyance on their part, of spirit-raps attendant on them, and of prophecy, are current on Presbyterian hagiology. No ministers, to our knowledge, were 'levitated,' but some nearly flew out of their pulpits. Patrick Walker, in his Biographia Presbyteriana, vol. ii. p. 21, mentions a supernatural light which floated round The Sweet Singers, Meikle John Gibb and his friends, before they burned a bible. Mr. Gibb afterwards excelled as a pow-wow, or Medicine Man, among the Red Indians.

{30} Teutonic Mythology, English translation, vol. ii. p. 514. He cites Pertz, i. 372.

{31} A very early turning table, of 1170, is quoted from Giraldus Cambrensis by Dean Stanley in his Canterbury Memorials, p. 103. The table threw off the weapons of Becket's murderers. This was at South Malling. See the original in Wharton's Anglia Sacra, ii. 425.

{35} See Mr. Tylor's Primitive Culture, chap, xi., for the best statement of the theory.

{38} Petitot, Traditions Indiennes du Canada Nord-Ouest, p. 434.

{40} Very possibly the whirring roar of the turndun, or [Greek], in Greek, Zuni, Yoruba, Australian, Maori and South African mysteries is connected with this belief in a whirring sound caused by spirits. See Custom and Myth.

{41a} Proc. S. P. R., xix. 180.

{41b} Brough Smyth, i. 475.

{42} Auckland, 1863, ch. x.

{45a} [Greek].--Iamblichus.