The way the world is going

A number of people, including many whose intelligence and achievements in other directions one is bound to respect, believe and carry on a propaganda to spread their belief in a world of spirits, disembodied human beings for the most part, in fact what we used to call ghosts, which exists invisibly and intangibly side by side with our world of commonplace things, but which is capable of slight but significant physical and mental interference with this material, everyday, daylight world.

This belief, or something very like it, has been held by a certain number of people in nearly every age. One can trace it continuously through the last three centuries. It has always been stoutly denied by a considerable number of people and generally disregarded by the mass of active human beings. In earlier times, the powers of the spirits invoked by the necromancers seem to have been greater than they are to-day. They could inflict serious physical injuries and associate themselves with a cult of witches and warlocks, unpleasant in their habits and now happily unfashionable. Then they were more generally respected. They were respected rather than liked. The chief solicitude of the believer seems to have been to find expedients to keep them at a distance. But now they have mended their manners, and the chief solicitude of a number of people seems to be to develop this intercourse even at the price of very considerable fatigue and boredom.

Why is there so general a disregard now of allegations which, if true, should have the profoundest reaction upon our whole lives? Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir Conan Doyle ask this question in tones of natural astonishment. They have produced evidence of the real existence of this other world which they believe to be convincing. Sir Oliver Lodge has drawn back the veil on a sort of sublimated Hampstead, and Sir Conan Doyle has drawn back quite a number of veils. His latest book records the communications of an individual named “Pheneas,” through various media, to himself and his family, and he asks me to note the extraordinary quality and significance of the mind of Pheneas thus displayed. I am sorry to say I can find none of the qualities Sir Conan seems to expect me to observe. Pheneas seems to me a platitudinous bore and a reckless maker of vague promises. Ever since the end of 1922 he has been promising wonderful changes for the better in human life and knowledge, “the biggest thing in the earth’s history” and so forth. Well, here is Christmas, 1927.

Now I hate to seem derisive of two such men as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sir Oliver Lodge. I know something of the trade of story-writing, and I acknowledge Sir Conan Doyle as a master. I can peep up at the scientific achievements of Sir Oliver Lodge. But in this matter of the ghosts they put the evidence before us and invite us to judge for ourselves. A priori I find their ghosts and their ghost worlds incredible. And when they produce their evidence to convince me that this queer extra-existence does go on, I am bound to confess I find it unconvincing.

Now the fact that I find the ghost world revealed by these gentlemen far less attractive than an everlasting peace does not prove that such a world does not exist. It may be my fate to follow our old friend E. W. Hornung into that world of vague featureless satisfaction and hang about spots of “light” in order to transmit to earth through unattractive strangers the startling news that “This is wonderful,” and that I am “sorry and realize things” (never explicitly stated) now. I may be brought to confess that “I like this place. There is peace here, and beautiful vibrations. God bless you” (five times!), and suchlike maunderings. But I want very sound evidence indeed that this dismal substitute for the pungent liveliness of our present existence, its tender and flaming moments and its sweet earthliness, awaits me, before I resign myself to it, and so we come down to the material proofs.

I have done my best to sample the very large mass of records available. No doubt I start with a bias against the evidence, and that the reader must allow for, but I have been prepared to go on into the details of any group of investigations that produced a prima facie case. But I find that I am not given phenomena that I can scrutinize, recall, and examine in any way that pleases me. I am asked to make immense concessions before the evidence can be put before me. A person called the Medium, it is explained, has to be considered. He or she is the material vehicle of the phenomena. Most Mediums have been caught cheating. This, I am to grant, may be due to a peculiar temperamental weakness frequently associated with psychic gifts. Or to nasty, vulgar, bad ghosts.

I am to believe my eyes and ears. When a conjurer seems to me to take a large new-laid egg out of the top of his head, I am allowed to say that he has successfully deceived me without pretending to know how the trick was done, but when an entranced Medium produces the pet name of an old schoolfellow long deceased out of his head, I am asked to believe at once in all the explanations he gives of spirit controls, high and low spirits and so forth, unless I can trace every step by which he came to utter a name he had no right to know.

Moreover, I must go into favourable rooms for the phenomena and sit for a long time in a light so bad that it is the next thing to complete darkness. I must be still and not hostile. I must sit there until my fagged attention wanders. Many people must sleep at séances. But they never mention it. And dream. Possibly as they expect to dream. I must not complain if after some hours of such horrible boredom nothing ensues. I must be “fair” to the spirits and try again.

In some slightly incoherent way these moral and intellectual revelations of the ghosts which reveal nothing, which at best touch trivially upon quite minor matters in the intimate life, are inextricably mixed up with queer material phenomena. These are “materializations.”

Most Mediums are committed to these material phenomena, and by them their reputations stand or fall. There is this “ectoplasm,” which is our earthly foretaste of the wonderful loveliness of over there. Queer stuff, sometimes queer-smelling stuff, is exuded by the Mediums in the obscurity, often rather disagreeably. Its texture and appearance varies very greatly. This exudation defies all our daylight experiences of physical and chemical phenomena. It leaps in its character across gulfs that it has taken normal life vast ages to traverse. It becomes organized, in a few minutes, we are assured, as skin, muscle, nerve. It takes on the character of limbs, of heads, of entire quasi-human beings who move about.

Artists, like John Tissot, attending such séances have put on record their impression of these exuded beings in all their dignity and beauty. In Paris an International Metapsychic Institute has been endowed for these experimentations, and the late Dr. Geley, a man of high scientific standing, produced a considerable book giving cases in which beautiful beings from another world have been exuded by Mediums, snapshotted in all their beauty and returned again through the pores and passages of the Mediums into that marvellous other world.

I have looked at Geley’s illustrations with interest. I note that the hands of the Medium when they appear in these pictures do not seem to be held as he says they were held. The head and face of a young woman are visible projecting from the body of the Medium, and it is certainly a very pretty face, rather of the Monna Lisa type, but when Dr. Geley assures me that it is a substantial face, I find myself sceptical. The eyes, the eyelids, the mouth and pose and expression of this being coming into our world from the mysterious outside remain absolutely the same throughout the séance in a series of photographs. But living eyes move. Living lips breathe. Living eyelids quiver. These do not. Living souls display interest. The more one looks at these pictures the less like a living face that face is seen to be and the more like a face painted or photographed on some distensible bladder. Dr. Geley considers many possibilities of fraud, but he never considers the part distensible pellicles may play in these manifestations. I find it more intelligible to suppose that this was the particular device adopted in this case than to suppose the hundred incredible things that are involved if one accepts this appearance as a “materialized” ghost.

Years ago in “Love and Mr. Lewisham” I ventured to hint that the possibilities of distensible skins were far too much neglected in the criticism of spiritualistic séances. Dr. Geley’s ideas recall that idea very vividly.

Another point about the material evidence for these phenomena upon which Sir Oliver Lodge, Sir Conan Doyle and their associates rest their belief in a whole second universe of immortal spirits interwoven with our own, is its unprogressive and unconfirmatory character. As Dr. Fournier d’Albe has recently pointed out in “Nature,” these phenomena keep on repeating themselves with variations in the same vague and inconclusive way without ever coming to a gripping demonstration. In spite of the promises of “Pheneas,” they never get on. There are changes in fashion, but no progress. With the tightening up of observation and the introduction of photography and moulds, for example, the noble and exalted figures put on record by John Tissot give place to these pellicular faces, to grotesque and horrible half-shapen things, and even to mere suggestively shaped lumps.

With the introduction of proper and complete photographic records of the mutterings of entranced Mediums there will probably be a very considerable diminution in the characteristic flavour that now makes the recognition of the revenants so facile. The phenomena still abound, but they deteriorate in quality even if they increase in abundance. We are told of floods of spiritual light, and, behold, “Pheneas speaks!” Wonderful prophecies are spoken of. Where are they?

For me the most fatal line of thought for all this stuff lies in the steadily changing ideas of modern people about individuality. Beneath all these necromancies is an assumption of the complete and incurable integrity of the eternal human person from the rest of the universe. The normal man, who is unaccustomed to analysis, assumes, it may be too readily, that his self is something detached and vis à vis with all other things. It may end, but it cannot amalgamate.

But that may be no more than an innate delusion by which for our lifetimes we carry on a fight for certain qualities and characteristics against our environment. We are self-centred for the ends of life, and we are most of us so richly endowed with self-love and self-appreciation that we find it extremely difficult to imagine or tolerate an existence turning on some other centre to which we may be merely incidental and contributory. Yet we lay aside self in deep sleep, and in our moments of greatest exaltation, and for most of us who are over thirty, the self of childhood has already faded out for us.

We may be but parts of a larger whole, as the quivering cells in our living bodies are parts of us. Perhaps the blood corpuscles in our arteries have a dim sense of being living individuals in a crowded thoroughfare. Perhaps we ourselves share a mightier immortality. Perhaps the dear lives we have loved close to our own are finished and done, not like something ended and cast away, but like beautiful deeds done for ever and fruitful for ever.

I do not know how new these ideas are to the reader, but he will find them set out very strikingly from the biological side in such a book as Huxley and Haldane’s recent volume on “Animal Biology.” Along that line he will come to conceptions of individuality and personality that will make the idea of Pheneas, who lived at Ur before the time of Abraham and was an Arab, “a magnificent man, honoured by all who knew him,” who is “a great power” in the spirit world, and who now attends Sir Conan Doyle’s lectures, directs his lecturing tours, advises in the choice of a new house, tells him when to take a day off in bed, knows “Johanna of Arc,” considers “the state of the churches a scandal,” and likes the room dark, as infantile and inadmissible as the nursery belief in Santa Claus or Old Bogey on the Stairs. “Pheneas” appears to be a new way of spelling “Phineas,” and the learned tell us that Phineas is probably of Egyptian origin and means negro. Racial snobbery perhaps accounts for Pheneas claiming to be an Arab. This Pheneas, I venture to think, is an impostor, wrought of self-deception, as pathetic as a rag doll which some lonely child has made for its own comfort.

The men of Ur have lived and passed like the light upon the specks in yesterday’s sunbeam that glowed upon my retina. Ur the ancient is dust to-day, and mounds of rubbish and disused and worn-out things, and all its individual lives are a fading memory. If ever a gentleman with the un-Ur-like name of Pheneas enlivened its streets, he melted back into the universal stream of being when his enlivening was done. But Ur was a place of events and a seed of consequences that live and continue so long as man endures. And we too live and pass, reflecting for our moment, and in the measure of our capacity, the light and wonder of the Eternal.

And is not that enough?

25 December, 1927.

THE END