Full though this world is of problems—moral, social, intellectual, artistic—weighty problems, the treatment of which must redound to the credit of any writer, shedding reflected lustre on his name and reaping him the praises of a grateful public; yet I here venture to approach you with a theme which even I myself cannot do otherwise than regard as preposterous, and, indeed, suspect. Surprise and contempt, I know, will be my portion from the general at my choice of it. But do people choose their subjects, I ask? No, they write and they talk of what they are ridden by, and nothing else; and that though the themes a man neglects may lay claim to pre-eminent importance, and the one which has taken his reason captive be actually mischievous. And all my good, respectable ideas have been vitiated by personal contacts and observations, which are at once so puerile, and yet to such a degree unexplainable (if I may talk about degrees of unexplainableness), that I cannot get away from them, and find myself, for the moment at least, spoilt for the contemplation of those more unsullied, those saner, chaster realms of thought where I could move with so much honour and credit to myself. I say spoilt. And truly it is a sort of corruption which breathes from the region I have in mind: that probably not deep, yet subterraneous region, that turbid and equivocal plane of existence, with which, in my folly, I have put myself in touch; it lures me astray from my lawful concerns to those which I know full well are none of mine, though they exercise upon my fancy and my brain a pungent attraction, like the fumes of wood-alcohol (by contrast with the bouquet from the pure wine of the spirit of civilization). Well do I comprehend how a man may fall victim to them as to a vice, and through that monomaniac, vain-foolish preoccupation be lost for ever to the moral upper world.
My case is no other than this: I have fallen into the hands of the occultists. Not precisely the spiritualists—though there were some of them too in the gathering I lately visited. But we must distinguish. The spiritualistic dogma is by no means obligatory, among the group of international scholars—not such a very small group now—whose members call themselves occultists because they are given to the study of phenomena which at present seem to us to contradict the natural order as we know it. The whole spirit-theory, as a method of explaining certain puzzles, is even, by many investigators, rejected with a gesture of stern scientific probity. And yet in fairness it must be said that in the production of occult events these scientific gentlemen do take advantage of the supra-normal, or at all events anormal disposition of certain persons who do not weigh very heavy in the intellectual scale; and that this technique (I refer, of course, to the somnambulistic state of the so-called mediums) constantly passes over into the transcendental and metaphysical. But metaphysics, of course, is not spiritualism; even less is spiritualism metaphysics. The difference in degree is so great as to become a difference in kind; and it is surely quite comprehensible that philosophical metaphysics should aim to keep spiritualism at arm’s length. For spiritualism—the belief in spirits, ghosts, revenants, spook intelligences with whom one gets into touch by interrogating a table and getting the most utter banalities by way of reply—spiritualism is in fact a kind of backstairs metaphysics, a blind credulity which is on the one hand not up to the conception of idealistic speculation, and on the other hand quite incapable of metaphysical orgies of emotion. A good example of the first alternative is Schopenhauer’s masterpiece The World as Will and Idea; while in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde we possess the classic opus metaphysicum. And one only needs to mention these lofty flights of intuition to feel at once the lamentable triviality of the whole of that which calls itself spiritualism—though what it is is not so much metaphysics as it is a Sunday afternoon diversion for the servants’ hall.
But is human dignity a criterion of truth? Yes, in a way it is. There is a man, Herr Krall of Elberfeld, well known for his famous calculating horses, a man whose trade and activities hover on the borders of the occult. I heard Herr Krall say: “If there are ghosts, then there is every reason why a man should pray for a long life; for there could not possibly be anything more insipid, childish, futile, confused, and pathetic than the existence of these creatures, to judge from their supposed manifestations.” One is reminded of the famous utterance of the shade of Achilles on the Cimmerian shore, the time that Odysseus held a seance there. Vain and senseless, the son of Peleus calls the existence of the dead; and, after all, the pagan world might so conceive the life after death, without making any mistake about this one as truth, fact, or dogma. On the other hand, it would go very much against the grain for a Christian to conceive another world in which things were even paltrier, stupider, and more futile than they are in this our earthly sphere; and when, as indeed it may easily happen, an intelligence knocks on a table and introduces itself to society as the spirit of Aristotle or Napoleon Bonaparte, only to belie the statement by a hundred blunders, gaucheries, and obviously intentional shufflings, then I think we are justified, on grounds of taste, in the conclusion that this is not only not Aristotle or Napoleon, it is nobody at all, but only acting as though it were; and that any complaisance toward such goings-on is beneath all human dignity.
Now, this would all be well and good if only there did not linger a doubt whether dignity and good taste are absolute criteria in the field of science, in the search for truth, in that process, in short, whereby nature explores herself through the mind of man. Dignity there is only in the province of pure spirit; and metaphysics, in the sense of transcendental speculation in the theory of knowledge, belongs to that province. But when metaphysics becomes empirical; when it condescends, or begins to feel the obligation, or yields to the temptation, to track out the riddle of the universe experimentally—and that is what it does in occultism, which is nothing but empirical, experimental metaphysics—then it must not count on keeping its hands clean or its bearing stately. The only dignity it has left is the irreducible remnant that must cleave to all honourable service in the cause of truth; and it must make up its mind that it will have to deal with a great deal of filth and foolishness. For mediumism and somnambulism, the sources of occult phenomena, are a mixing of suprasensual mysteries with the mystery of organic life; and the result is turbid. There is no longer any talk of taste, of mental or spiritual niveau, or of the beauty of rashness. For here nature takes the field; and nature is an equivocal element: impure, obscene, spiteful, dæmonic; while man, proud man, in his very essence opposed to her, loves to put on an aristocratic air and find his own peculiar dignity in forgetting that he is a child of nature just as much as he is a child of spirit. And yet, if one were seriously, on humane grounds, to forbid metaphysics to become experimental—that is, to practise occultism—that would be to deny to natural research, to knowledge of nature in general, every human value and importance, as did the Middle Ages and the Church. As though the exact natural sciences themselves stop at the point where an encounter with metaphysics becomes unavoidable! The fact that I know and understand very little of the famous doctrines of Einstein (except that, more or less, things have a fourth dimension—namely, time) prevents me as little as it does every other intelligent layman from seeing that in this doctrine of relativity the border-line between mathematical physics and metaphysics has become fluid. Is it still “physics,” or what is it, when they tell us—and they are telling us today—that matter is ultimately and inmostly not material, it is just one manifestation of energy, and its smallest parts, which are neither small nor large, are, though surrounded indeed by time-spatial fields of power, themselves timeless and spaceless?
But enough of theorizing. Let us get on to my experiences. They begin at my acquaintance with a man about whom opinions have been of late strongly divided, some finding him a charlatan and traitor betrayed, others respecting him as a genuine and meritorious investigator, and one of the initiators of a new science. He is Dr. Albert Freiherr von Schrenck-Notzing. A practising physician, from a family of physicians, specialist in nervous diseases, sexual pathologist, he more than thirty years ago arrived at the study of the occult by the route of hypnotism and somnambulism. It appears that for a time he leaned toward spiritualism; but today he rejects it, and refers all the unexplainable phenomena he evokes and observes to the operation of unknown but natural forces, which will in time be recognized as such.
The appearance of his book Phenomena of Materialization, a few years before the war, produced a full-grown public scandal. From the official and learned world came a perfect hail of protests against such a combination of credulity, confused thinking, and fraud. The public, in so far as it came to hear about it at all, held its sides with laughter; and really the book was a severe trial of our seriousness, as to both text and illustrations—photographs which struck one as at once silly and grotesque. Evidence was not lacking that Dr. Schrenck-Notzing had been bamboozled—and this was probably true in more than one case. Most unfortunately, the mediumistic faculty, however genuine, is no guarantee of good character. On the contrary, it even seems to have a perfect flair for mystification. Anyhow, it looked for years as though Schrenck-Notzing had irretrievably damaged his good name as a scholar.
The years passed. The war came and with it undreamed-of chances and changes. When the second volume of Phenomena of Materialization came out, it was in an entirely altered atmosphere. Not that the second volume was less crazy than the first, or that the official world of science, the press, or the public welcomed it more cordially than before. No, there was no stinting of scorn and contumely. But both seemed to lack conviction, to be less fortified than before by comfortable self-assurance. There was a mild resignation, a fatalistic laissez-faire in the air. People had borne so much they never dreamed of bearing, such outrageous experiences had been their lot, that even their honest indignation lacked the right ring; it betrayed an unmistakable tendency to compound.
In politics there is always a right and a left wing. So in the scientific world there is, with reference to the occult, a strongly conservative and a radical-revolutionist position, together with all sorts of shadings and gradings between, on the one hand, obstinate denial of all rationally unexplainable but persistently reported manifestations like telepathy, true-dreaming, and second sight, and, on the other, a fanatical and uncritical credulity, based, this last, less on a solid reverence for the mystery than an inhuman prejudice against all reason and science. And the intransigent conservative position has a good deal on its side—as, after all, it has in politics too. For between the right and the left lies an inclined plane where it is only too easy to slip; to concede belief in one single case of the occult is to reach your little finger to a devil who almost infallibly ends by taking the whole hand and therewith the whole man. Principiis obsta! There is beginning to prevail in Germany today a dangerous liberalism in the camp of orthodox science—in Germany, which might hitherto have been regarded as the stronghold of conservatism in this respect. Abroad—in England, in France—there had always been a more yielding temper, and more often displayed. (I will not speak of America, where an unnecessary amount of humbug seems to have got mixed up with occult studies.) Perhaps we Germans were influenced by the fact that Schrenck-Notzing’s book was translated into English; that the Society for Psychical Research two years ago summoned to London his principal medium, a person named Eva C., and published a very serious report of the sittings with her; that French savants like Richet, Flammarion, Gustave Geley, Dr. Bourbon, and others supported this report in its boldness, tested its experiments, confirmed its results. All in all, a slight shakiness is evident, a certain demoralization of our conservative and sceptical front. There are traitors, and the traitors are secret before they become public. There are university professors, and not only philosophers and psychologists, but natural scientists, physicists, physiologists, and physicians, who take advantage of the bad street-lighting in Munich to steal like conspirators to the evening sittings of Herr von Schrenck-Notzing to see what it does not profit them to see. For they must know, and they do, that the only way of remaining intact is to shut their eyes and not see. They are lost, or as good as lost, it is all up with their scepticism—or, rather, their scepticism begins—when they see. There are instances. A much-sought-after Munich oculist openly confessed that after what he had seen at Schrenck-Notzing’s he had grown “very cautious in his scepticism.” A charming phrase—the most equivocal phrases are usually the charmingest. For I aver that that can be no true scepticism which is not sceptical of itself; and a sceptic, in my humble view, is not merely one who believes the prescribed things and averts his eyes from everything that might imperil his virtue. Rather your true sceptic will, in ordinary language, find all sorts of things possible, and he will not, for the sake of convention, deny the evidence of his sound senses.
As for me, I have always stood, theoretically, rather far left in this business of the occult; holding, in the sense of the thoroughgoing scepticism I just defined, that all sorts of things are quite possible; but not boasting any personal or practical experience in suprasensual realms. I have rested in a theoretical benevolence. I have felt, and may have even casually expressed, a desire to attend a sitting, but nothing came of it, and that nothing came of it was probably my own doing.
And now? At the present moment? Just lately? You must let me tell the tale as it fell out. I had a visitor, an artist man from a comic paper, with an order to make a caricature of me. Very good. He drew me a crooked nose, and one thing led up to another. God knows how we came to speak of Herr von Schrenck-Notzing. Had I heard that he was working with a new medium, my guest asked, as he went on cracking jokes with his pencil. It was a youth, hardly a man yet, named Willy S., a dentist by profession and a devil of a fellow in the psychical line. Schrenck got perfectly crazy manifestations through him. He had discovered him, brought him to Munich, found him lodgings and a job, besides paying a deposit to ensure Willy’s exclusive services. He had been working with him a year now, and had him so well trained, psychically speaking, that Willy, unlike most mediums, could endure an almost constant change of audience, with the rarest disappointments. That was important for Schrenck-Notzing for the sake of the propaganda.—“Might one get to see a sitting?” I asked. The artist man thought it quite possible. He knew Schrenck-Notzing, and he would like to go to one himself. Leave it to him, he would arrange an invitation.
So it came about. There followed an appointment by telephone; and one winter evening at eight o’clock, toward Christmas-time, I found myself on the tram with my caricaturist, bound for the seance. Both of us were in high spirits, exhilarated, curious, in a mood between bluster and funk, something like the feelings of a young man going for the first time to a girl.
The palatial residence of Baron von Schrenck-Notzing is near the Karolinenplatz, in an exclusive quarter. We arrived, and a servant led us through a marble vestibule and up some steps to an antechamber. As we took off our things we were greeted by our host, with cool, aristocratic politeness, and ushered into a good-sized library, where the other participants in the coming seance were already gathered. Only one of them was known to me. I addressed him, expressing my surprise at finding him here. This was Professor G., the zoologist, an enthusiastic sportsman, ski-runner, yachtsman, and Alpinist, a beardless, young-looking man, though certainly in the middle forties; distinctly out-of-doorish and nature-loving—I should never have taxed him with any hankerings after the occult. Introductions followed. I was delighted to meet Emanuel Reicher, celebrated actor and hyphenated American, just then living in Germany. Then there was the medium’s housekeeper and foster-mother, a widow in middle life, named Frau P. Likewise a Polish artist, blond and clean-shaven, full of friendly talk in a gruff, hearty voice. Then this and that member of the Schwabing intelligentsia. But the intellectual laity were outnumbered, on this occasion at least, by the medical men and natural scientists. There was another professor of zoology, a typical Gelehrter, mild and shy; a young doctor from Switzerland; a still youthful German physician, assistant at a Munich hospital, who had brought along an apparatus to measure blood-pressure; a jolly, fair-haired lady specialist in nerve massage.... Many of those present were novices, Reicher for one. He seemed to have no affiliations with the occult, but merely with the social circle represented.
The medium, Willy S., kept rather in the background. The Baron introduced me to him among others. “Here,” he said, “is our star performer.” He repeated the phrase more than once, obviously with the idea of stimulating the young man’s sense of importance, but also by way of prepossessing me in favour of this precious and delicately organic instrument of his experiments. In my case, his concern was quite unnecessary. My sympathies were boundless, and I took pains to let our artist feel that I was no hostile onlooker, present with the sole idea of pouncing and unmasking, with a bellow of triumph. I was a sceptic on the positive side, who would rejoice at his success—I wished him to know that. Deception? Between deception and reality there were many degrees, and at some point they were one. Perhaps there was a sort of natural deception, which might be just as good to talk to as reality! I had come hither, not humbugging myself in the least, to see what there was to be seen, just that, no more and no less. I exchanged a few words with Willy S. and tried to get an idea of his personality. I found a dark-haired youth of some eighteen or nineteen, not unattractive, certainly with nothing striking about him. His origins were plainly simple; his speech a South-German-Austrian dialect, and his manner decent and friendly, with no signs of wanting to curry favour by over-politeness. His answers to my matter-of-fact questions were monosyllabic; and he seemed, quite excusably, in a sort of stage-fright, a state of suppressed excitement united with the shyness natural to his youth.
The young clinician summoned Master Willy to have his blood-pressure measured, and I turned away and followed our host’s invitation to have a look round in the laboratory adjoining. It was a large room, filled with a confusion of photographic apparatus and arrangements for a magnesium flash-light. There were tables and chairs upon which stood or lay a variety of objects: a music-box, a little table-bell with a handle, a typewriter, several white felt rings, and so on—objects uninteresting in themselves, which yet would be employed by young Willy to accomplish strange matters. We shall come back to them. There was a sort of cage made of fine wire in which they had confined the youth during a severely scientific and critical sitting. It had not prevented him from doing what they could not explain. Lastly there was the so-called “black cabinet,” about which so much had been said and so much more whispered. Some of Willy’s predecessors had been sorely in need of it. I looked within. There was nothing special about it. Indifferent lumber stood behind the ceiling-high curtain which shut off one corner of the room from the rest. “We shall not require the cabinet,” said Dr. von Schrenck-Notzing. Willy did not need it. He was strong. He sat right out in the room in his operations. So much the better. My positive scepticism had swallowed the cabinet too—but if Willy was strong, why, so much the better. We returned to the library. Beyond it lay a study with a writing-table, where Willy made his toilet for the sitting.
He did not make it by himself. By no means. He made it under the argus-eyed control of three persons: the master of the house and two assistants. This time Dr. von Schrenck appointed as assistants the lively nerve-specialist and myself. And we obliged him—though privately I doubted my fitness for the office. I felt lax and benevolent, and inclined to regard the supervision as a formality. I am not at home in the rôle of misdoubting observer; it embarrasses me, it is repugnant to my humanity. You cannot expect a man to turn you his good side when you take his bad one for granted. This youth now girding up his loins to perform marvels—why should I dash his spirits by showing him I suspected him of preparing to take me in? I am a sceptic, but I want something to happen. Yet might not that be the most fundamental and extreme form of scepticism? Perhaps I, in my laxity and benevolence, was the most unbelieving of all?—But no more, for the moment. Make your toilet, young man, I will watch you.
The Baron showed us the black, one-piece tricot affair in which Willy was to cover himself from neck to ankle. He urged us to subject it to a careful scrutiny, to feel it all over. He laid great stress on a critical attitude. A garment, of cotton tricot. Very good. No sign of deception about that; and Willy drew it on over his tanned, boyish body. As he did so I caught a shy and solemn look he cast at my colleague, the blonde lady nerve-specialist, who blithely regarded the ceiling. But in nothing but the tricot the chap would freeze, that was humanly plain; so they gave him a dressing-gown besides, a comfortable old wadded kimono of the Baron’s, which likewise we conscientiously examined, pockets, lining, and all. A good-natured old dressing-gown. Good. But it had one curious feature: the Baron explained it to us. It was trimmed all over with ribbons, on the sleeves, the seams, the hem, sewed on everywhere. And these ribbons had been treated with a luminous preparation so that you would be able to see the outline of Willy’s figure even by a dim light and easily keep it in your eye. That seemed a sensible precaution. More luminous ribbon went like a diadem about his head; he stuck his feet into an old pair of Turkish slippers. They completed the preparations. Or no. For when he stood arrayed he opened his jaws very wide, like a lion, as though to swallow us. I gasped; until it was explained to me that this was a matter of controlling the mouth cavity. The deuce! And I had been within an ace of forgetting the mouth cavity. He already had one gold tooth in it, to the honour of his trade. For the rest, it was an irreproachable mouth cavity. We saw it as far down as the glottis. In God’s name, enough. We returned to the other room.
A chorus of friendly shouts welcomed us. The old hands hailed their Willy in his professional disguise. It was a merry masquerade, and Willy himself, in his talar and priestly bands, laughed too, in good-natured embarrassment. Allons, mes enfants! The company trooped into the laboratory and our host shut the door behind us.
Things were looking serious. Unnatural events were to take place in this strange room that was like a photographic studio even down to the objects to distract the children’s minds with. I confess to a little faint-heartedness, an inner resistance, a doubt whether I, personally, was a suitable candidate for the enterprise. But now the conductor of the experiment, all unsolicited, entrusted me with the control of the medium, Willy’s landlady, Frau P., acting as the second control; and began at once to instruct me in the technique. And technique it was, in all seriousness, very thorough and gratifying indeed. I sat opposite to the young man, with my chair close to his, his two knees between mine. I held both his hands and my assistant both his wrists. Nobody could deny—and I was far from doing so—that Willy was in safe arrest; we sat and looked idiotically at each other, while the rest of the company took their places chattering.
We were grouped in front of the curtain, in an irregular circle, three-quarters closed. At one end sat the medium, with us “controls,” and at the other the master of the house. Not all those present found a place in this circle; two or three people had to move back into a second row, where they stood or sat as they liked. Among them was the sporting zoology professor, who to my astonishment had armed himself with an accordion. It appeared that he was a skilled performer on this instrument, in demand for excursions and summer evening garden-parties, and particularly welcome in such gatherings as the present one, for a medium needs music, almost continuous music, for his demonstrations—a temperamental requirement which it would be foolish not to gratify. Professor G. with his concertina added variety to a programme which would otherwise have been furnished only by a music-box that played one single and not even very pleasing tune.
The room was still lighted by ordinary white electricity, by which the Baron put the finishing touches to his arrangements. A little table stood in our circle, not precisely in the middle, rather nearer to our host than to the medium, from whom it was some five feet distant. The Baron measured the distance with a yardstick, and then placed several objects upon it: a lamp in a red shade, the table-bell, a plate of flour, a little slate and piece of chalk. A sizable wastepaper-basket stood upside-down by the table, with a music-box on it; not the one that was to play (that stood on a shelf behind the Baron’s chair), but a smaller affair on which Herr Willy’s powers were to be displayed. The typewriter the Baron set somewhere on the carpet near himself; then he strewed felt rings about the floor within the circle. They were luminous, like the ribbons on Willy’s clothes, and to one or two of them was attached a longish, luminous string. Furthermore, all the larger objects, so far as was practicable, the waste-paper-basket, the music-box, the table-bell, were marked with luminous ribbons as well. These ribbons were the Baron’s own invention, he rather prided himself on them and used them in profusion.... The light went out.
But it was turned on again; for Willy, sitting there in my arrest and still in his waking senses, had remembered something. “The pins, Herr Baron,” he said. He referred, did this honourable youth, to another precautionary measure which had been overlooked. The Baron bestuck the sleeves and skirt of the velvet dressing-gown with pins that had thick, white, illuminated heads. Others of the same kind already stuck in the curtains, right and left of the opening, so that every movement in their folds must betray itself. Once more the white light was turned off. The only illumination now was a dark red shimmer from the shrouded ceiling light, and from the little lamp on the table, which was likewise shaded. For the unadjusted eye rather a scanty illumination. But the Baron assured us that it was the best he could do. His utmost efforts had not succeeded in securing a greater toleration for light. “I struggle,” he said, “for every ray, but this is all I can get, up to now.” However, Willy himself gave out light; so did the felt rings, the bands on the other objects, and the pins in the curtains. After all, the field of operations was visible; and after a little while the top of the table seemed really quite well lighted. We were asked for a little silence, in which the music-box performed its single number, a clear and childish tune with a brief recurring melody and a tinkling accompaniment. We waited. I in particular waited, with Willy’s hands in mine, neither too tight nor too loose.
Suddenly, after two or three minutes, he shivered. A shudder ran through him, and his arms, taking mine along, began to perform pumping and thrusting motions. His breath came short and thick.
“Trance,” announced my experienced assistant.
So the chap had fallen into a trance under my hands! I had never observed this state before, and gave it my profoundest attention, convinced as I am that it is a condition of the most far-reaching implications. While it lasts, Willy’s ego is divided into two symbolic persons, for the purposes of his dream-performance, a male and a female. He calls them Erwin and Minna. Childishness. Hocus-pocus. Nobody takes Erwin and Minna seriously; but for the sake of the business in hand we are fain to humour the whim: from now on we ignore Willy’s existence and stick to these two, who have a simple way of making clear which is which. Erwin is a lout. He manifests himself by the vigour with which Willy lays about him, but seldom does anything worth seeing; leaving the serious business to his milder and more efficient sister. My assistant thought it was Minna who was now shaking us and pumping with our arms.
“Is Minna there?” asked the Baron.
Yes, she was there. I receive one quick, firm pressure of Willy’s hand; that is Minna’s way of saying yes. For no there is a sideways motion of the hands and torso, to and fro. Moreover, the somnambulist will speak to the controls; his voice is a quick, loud, thick-tongued whisper, with a certain intensity in it.
The Baron greets Minna. “Good-evening, Minna. There are good friends here, most of them you know, a few are new, but you don’t mind that, do you?”
A to-and-fro movement in denial.
“Today the control is a very sympathetic man, full of the most cordial interest in you and your powers. I hope you will show him something nice.”
A squeeze of my hand, a short forward thrust of Willy’s torso. Yes, she promises—absurdly enough, one involuntarily says “she.”
“Well then, Minna, do your best.”
And a general conversation begins. It has to begin, the medium exacts it. “Talk,” he babbles in my ear, and I pass the word on. The company have formed a chain and are sitting hand in hand. This may be a vestige of spiritualistic parlour games, it may be an organic necessity. Hard to tell. Anyway, Willy insists on it, and keeps whispering us to keep the chain firm. My neighbour on the left is in touch with me too, his right hand rests on my shoulder and arm. We talk into the darkness, saying anything that comes into our heads, scarcely knowing to whom. It is not easy. The subject-matter dwindles, the forced conversation keeps breaking off or dying away, for our real attention is not upon it. But we are warned against watching too eagerly for phenomena. Our leader recommends a hovering attitude, a mood of suspension, which may be evoked by the music that now mingles with our loud, artificial voices. The zoology professor has struck up behind us on his concertina, wheezing out a brisk succession of lively marches. His resources are apparently endless; and when he falters, the music-box takes up the strain with its tinkling little tune.
A fantastic setting. It is not hard to see why science, which sets store by exact values, is at home in the dry, objective air of the laboratory and used to purely abstract work with apparatus and prepared subjects, should feel put off with this all too human kind of experimentation. It is the same with the layman. He has come keyed up to a suggestive atmosphere and a mood of consecration and mystery. He is disappointed to find himself in a situation which probably disgusts him both intellectually and æsthetically, suggesting as it does the mawkish revival methods of the Salvation Army. This impression is strengthened by the shouts with which the audience keeps encouraging the medium—or, rather, the officiating Minna: “Hullo, Minna, are you there? Buck up, show us what you can do! Get on with it, Minna!” The one mystical thing about the situation—and that not in any spiritual sense, but with reference to organic mysteries, primitive and affecting at once—is the medium himself, as he tosses and threshes with his arms, whispering in quick groans and pants: he is the primary object of my curiosity. His condition and actions quite strikingly and unmistakably remind me of the act of parturition. The head is now thrown far back, now it sinks on my shoulder or on our hands, which are so wet with perspiration that I constantly need to renew my grip. His efforts come at intervals, like throes; the pauses between are times of complete rest and inaccessibility, during which he sleeps, the head drooping sideways on the chest, and assembles new powers. This is deep trance, from which he rouses himself to resume his procreative labour.
A masculine lying-in, in a reddish darkness, amid chatter and shoutings and jazz. It was like nothing else in the world. I reflected that it would have been quite worth seeing even if nothing else were to happen. And really it looked as though nothing else would. The “child” did not come. Nothing supernatural felt inclined to show itself. True, some of our audience, in their eagerness to see things, anticipated them. Two of the illuminated pins had come out of Willy’s dressing-gown, though they had been stuck in deep and firmly. They lay on the floor, one of them rather far off him. The eager said they had been taken; but it was quite possible if not probable that Willy’s writhings had forced them out. But then, what about the two lighted rings which had lain immediately in front of the curtain? They had originally been visible in all their circumference, not partly hidden by the hangings; but in the course of the last few minutes their position had changed, you could see only about a third of them now; either the curtain had moved forward or the rings back, while the next time you looked, see, they were once more entirely visible, free of the curtain and not beneath it. And that was a manifestation. A poor, uncertain one, but it had to suffice. And had I not felt the breath of cooler air the medium exhaled—that always heralded new phenomena? No, to be frank, I should have welcomed any breath of cooler air, but I had noticed nothing of the sort.
And time passes. It is hard to judge how much has passed already; perhaps three-quarters of an hour. Evidently the medium is having a hard time. They ask if this is the case, but he denies it and goes on struggling. They ask if everything is in order, and the answer is yes. But I don’t believe him. Privately I take on myself the blame for our lack of success. From the first I had doubted whether my nature would be helpful to the good Willy at his work; and now I am certain that there in his beyond he shares my doubts. He denies it, of course; that is the merest politeness—however odd it may sound to speak of somnambulistic politeness. So far as I can observe, it is by no means impossible that civilized and personal considerations have a hampering effect in this condition; nor did Willy absolutely deny that this was so. He said in a whisper: “Do you want the phenomena to come faster?” Well? And what then? Silence. Did he want a pause? Still silence. Then he began to kick with his feet; the Baron counted. Fifteen times. A fifteen-minute pause, then. Good. We stop, temporarily.
The medium is given time to come to before the light is turned on. He made wonderful preparations: scraping motions of hand and arm at his side, which, in his fancy at least, served to draw in the organic forces which had been sent out but not yet manifested. He woke in a series of starts and blinked stupidly at the light. We betook ourselves into the next room.
Cigarettes were lighted. Willy smoked too, sitting on the sofa in his costume. The position was discussed. It was far from being discouraging. A temporary hitch. The need of rest was not unusual. An absolutely negative sitting occurred very seldom with our Willy. Nothing was lost. Willy’s foster-mother diverted us with tales of their domestic experiences. They would probably have to move into another apartment. People objected to the uncalled-for things that were always happening, wherever Willy was: spontaneous phenomena, signs and wonders. Fists knocked on the walls. Hands did things nobody told them to. A spook had showed itself most unexpectedly at the dining-room door. The cook had seen it, and fled with a shriek. All that was to the good. However, as for us we had so far drawn a blank. The young clinician took a new measurement with his blood-pressure apparatus, for purposes of comparison, and discussed its result with Dr. von Schrenck. Fifteen minutes. The Baron signed for the renewal of the sitting.
I felt sure that Willy had contrived the pause in order to get the control changed, and so I insisted on giving up my office. But our host would not hear to it. No, no. We must not give way to all Minna’s little whims. For the sake of the impression I should get, it was necessary I should have the medium in my personal charge. But I might take the second place, Frau P.’s, and give the first to someone else, either Herr Reicher or Herr von K. Better Herr von K. “Come on, Herr von K. You always manage to get it out of her.”
Von K. was the Polish painter, the man with the gruff and hearty voice. He was a direct and vigorous character and the medium’s favourite control. When a session seemed likely to be a failure, they always called on him. He held Willy’s hands and encouraged him with a geniality of which he alone possessed the secret; and almost always something happened. “Grüss’ Gott, Minna! Old friends together again, that’s fine, I think, and surely you think the same? You do, eh? Right-oh—but listen to me, not so hard! You’ll pull my shoulder out. Minna, is that the way you love me?” Like that. Willy requires this sort of thing, and almost always responds to it. Soon after the red light went on again, he had fallen into the magnetic trance. The music-box rippled, the concertina took its turn. The lying-in went on.
My position was awkward, bent over as I was, without anything to lean on; but I clutched Willy’s wrists oblivious of all else, and was shaken by his wrestling. He pulls us to and fro, he pumps and trembles, tosses and writhes, whispers with foaming lips: “Talk, talk!” “The chain, the chain!” “The chain,” repeats the devoted von K. “Surely my Minna may ask that the circle be properly closed!” The longer we sit, the harder we have to try to keep the dwindling conversation going. The Baron encourages us. “Talk, gentlemen. Professor G., you are going to sleep. Herr Mann, are you talking?” “Yes, Baron, I am talking as hard as I can.” The audience pulls itself together and utters the sheerest twaddle into the dark. Reicher, the actor, helps himself out with a sonorous “Rhabarber, Rhabarber!” The music is painful. We are weary to tears of the music-box’s one tinkling little tune, but when the concertina sets in, with wheezing and puffing, then we want the harmless tinkling back again. If it is hard for Willy, it is not easy for us. Almost another hour has passed since the intermission. My back aches, but I ignore it. The medium starts out of deep trance. He gives a violent jerk, and seems to be trying to expel something by means of lurches and lunges. “Brava, Minna,” von K. cajoles her. “You’re on the way, we can all see that. You’ve only to take hold, it will be wonderful, I’ll like you twice as much.” In vain. Not a sign. Even Herr von K.’s blandishments are without result. Resignation glides into all our hearts. For my part, I feel I have no luck with the mysteries. I shall go on as before, granting the possibility of all sorts of things; but I shall have seen nothing. Well, so much the worse for me. Dyed-in-the-wool materialists have spent evenings here. So have open enemies, protesting that the whole thing was a trick. So have irascible physicists with their insistence on the laws of nature. And one and all have come and seen and gone away with their so-called scepticism shaken. Whereas my scepticism, which by comparison with theirs is belief, a faith in nothing and everything—what name shall I give it?—will have proved essentially unproductive, nihilistic. A slight, unmistakable bitterness comes over me. Well, anyhow, the impressions of the evening have been worth taking away.
Our host tries a last expedient. He takes a high tone, and speaks: “Now, Minna, let’s be fair. We have been sitting here over two hours, you cannot say we have been impatient. But everything has its limits. We’ll give you another five or ten minutes, and then if nothing happens we will call a halt, and these gentlemen will go home and some of them will certainly think that you can do nothing. They will have no faith in your powers and they will say so, and the sceptics will be pleased.”—“No, no,” says von K., and seconds the Baron while seeming to contradict him. “No, Herr Baron, don’t talk like that—isn’t she just on the point of doing it? She knows best what she is about, does my Minna; she puts out her little arm, and when she has stretched it far enough—eh, what did you say? Want the music stopped? What did you say, Minna darling?”
The medium has interrupted him in a whisper. The music is still, we are all still. There comes again, in a painful stammer: “The handkerchief!”
“The handkerchief,” repeats Herr von K. authoritatively. “She knows just what she is about; she is going to do it for us, is my little Minna!”
“By all means,” says the Baron. “If that’s all, here is the handkerchief.” He takes a large fresh one out of his pocket, holds it by one corner, and drops it on the floor near the table, where it lies, a white gleam in the twilight. We all lean over and stare at it.
“Push the table further back,” Willy whispers. His face is lying on his hands. Is that right? “No, not that way.” He cannot see, but in his dream he knows what is going on, and that something is not as he would have it. Impatiently, just as though he saw, he tells the Baron what to do. He wants the table further over, first somewhat to the left and then nearer to our host. There. That is right. There is now more space between the table and the handkerchief. “The circle,” whispers Willy; we squeeze each other’s hands. “Talk,” he whispers, and we hasten to comply. I begin to utter some nonsense to my neighbour the Pole, I have turned my head and begun to speak, when I hear somebody say, with artificial calm: “It’s coming.” I jerk my head round.
You know the place in Lohengrin, in the first act, after Else’s prayer, when the chorus begins in unison: “Seht! Welch seltsam Wunder!” It was just like that. The handkerchief had got up. It rose from the floor. Before all our eyes, with a swift, assured, vital, almost beautiful movement it rose out of the shadow into the rays of light, which coloured it reddish; I say rose, but rose is not the word. It was not that it was wafted up, empty and fluttering. Rather it was taken and lifted, there was an active agency in it, like a hand, you could see the outline of the knuckles, from which it hung down in folds; it was manipulated from the inside, by some living thing, compressed, shaken, made to change its shape, in the two or three seconds during which it was held up in the lamplight. Then, moving with the same quiet assurance it returned to the floor.
It was not possible—but it happened. May lightning strike me if I lie. Before my uncorrupted eyes, which would have been just as ready to see nothing, in case nothing had been there, it happened. Indeed, it presently happened again. Scarcely had the handkerchief reached the floor when it came back up again into the light, this time faster than before; plainly and unmistakably we saw something clutching it from within, the members of something that held it—it looked to be narrower than a human hand, more like a claw. Down, and up again, for the third time up. The handkerchief was violently shaken by the something inside it, and tossed toward the table, with a poor aim, for it hung by one corner and then fell to the floor.
Loud shouts of applause and vivas for Minna. Several times the Baron leaned over to ask me if I saw, if I could see everything quite clearly. I certainly did; how could I have helped it, unless I had shut my eyes? And I had never kept them wider open in my life. I had seen greater things on this earth, more beautiful, more worthy of admiration. But never before had I seen the impossible happening despite its own impossibility; and so I kept saying in rather a shaken voice: “Very good, very good!” though for my own part I felt anything but good. Here I sat, holding in my very own hands Willy’s wrists in their tricot sleeves; while immediately next to me I saw his knees in the custody of the Pole. Not a thought, not a notion, not the shadow of a possibility that the boy sleeping here could have done what was happening there. And who else? Nobody. And still it was done. It gave me a queasy feeling.
The lifting of the handkerchief, I heard said round me, was regularly the introductory phenomenon. The spell was broken. The medium, who had been strangely still during these events, sat up with a shiver and whispered: “Put away the music-box. The bell.” “The bell,” cries von K., all enthusiasm. “Where is my Minna’s bell? The bell, on the basket! Good, now we’re off again!” The Baron obeys. He takes away the music-box and puts the bell on the wastepaper-basket, its ribbons gleaming in the dusk, and the metal shining redly. Willy carries his hands and ours to his brow. He sighs. Then the bell is taken—impossible, of course, but it is taken—by a hand, for what else can take a bell by the handle? Taken, lifted up, held high and slanting, rung violently, carried in a curve through the air, rung again, and then with a swing and a clatter flung under the chair of one of the audience.
Slight seasickness. Profound wonderment, with a tinge, not of horror, but of disgust. Minna’s praises resound, loud and unceasingly. “Unbelievable!” one of the novices cries out. Her head—what am I saying? I mean his head, Willy’s head—leans toward mine, like a little child he lays his temple against mine. Good lad, nice lad! You have done marvels. Shaken and respectful, I let his head rest against mine. But the Baron says:
“Here, Minna, is something new for you. You haven’t seen it yet, but it is quite easy to use. It is a bell. You press it, strike on it from above, you see. Like this. Then it rings. You do it, Minna. Here is the bell.”
And he sets it on the basket. Tense expectation. At once we hear a feeling round the bell, as though fingers were touching it uncertainly. They take it up, shake it slightly; it rings, but not in the right way.
“Not like that,” says the Baron. “You don’t understand. Let me show you. There, that’s how it’s done.” He strikes the button. “The circle,” whispers Willy, quivering, against my cheek. But the Baron cannot make the circle and strike the bell both at the same time. He asks Minna to realize this. Hardly has he resumed his seat when the fingering and touching begin again. At last the trick is successful. The fingers strike the bell from above, weakly, like a child; but the task is definitely performed. The clapper sounds.
“Brava, Minna,” shouts the audience. “Fantastic!” somebody says. But we have no time to surrender to our sensations; for more follows. Hardly has the Baron taken away the bell, when the basket begins to move. Something knocks it, it totters and tips over; then it is lifted from the floor and held high in the air. It hangs there askew and unsteady in the red light, outlined by its illuminated ribbons, for three or four seconds long, then tumbles to the floor.
“Did you see that? Did you see that?” asks the Baron, pridefully. We admit that we are impressed. Willy hangs sideways from his chair, in deep trance. Certainly a man must stand in need of profound and dreamless sleep, after so intense a dream that the events of it are actually projected outside of him! Wait. Let me think. Let me withdraw within myself and try to divine where may be the point, when the magical moment, in which a dream-picture objectivates itself and becomes a spatial reality, before the eyes of other people. Nausea. Clearly this point does not lie within the plane of our consciousness, or of the laws of knowledge as we know them. If anywhere, it is located in that state in which I see this lad now before me, and which is certainly a gate—whither? Behind the house, behind the world?... But I admit that this is not thinking at all—only a mild form of seasickness.
To set things going again, the Baron starts up the music-box. He also makes a change in the control. Von K. and I are released. I grope my way in the dark to the other end of the chain and find a seat beside Reicher, who sits next my host. I have the little table before me. And scarcely have I taken my chair, and my neighbours’ hands, when a fingering begins at the music-box on the table. The Baron hastens to stop the music. And in the stillness, before my eyes, that see nothing whatever, there is a scratching, rustling, and mysterious feeling-about over the handle of the instrument, a trying to turn it. Ah, you deep and immemorially light-shy creature, compact of dream and matter, what are you doing there in front of our noses? Crick, the handle is turned, the works go round. “Tell it to stop,” says the Baron. At my command it stops. “Go on,” I say. And the music plays. This happens several times. You sit there, bending forward, you command the impossible, and you are obeyed, by a spook, a panic-striken little monster from behind the world....
A pause. Then arises a varied activity among the light rings on the floor. They are shoved to and fro, tossed from place to place. One rises from the floor with its gleaming string hanging down. It is held up, carried through space, brought to the table, where it wants to be put down, and is, with a clumsiness which might lead one to think that its motive force was blind. But probably the thing is timid, afraid of being seen, afraid of venturing too far into the circle of lamplight on the table. The ring is moved to the nearest corner of the table, by a kind of stealthy shove that makes the felt scrape along the wood. It just balances. At the same time the thing, in its blind, clumsy trepidation, knocks so hard against the table that it shakes. Tut, tut, you hole-and-corner fish out of water, why, and with what monstrous knuckles, are you knocking like that on our good table, before our face and eyes? Just as I am thinking this, plop, a ring flies into my face. Something has flung it at me, it drops on my knee and thence at my feet. What a playful monster! We all laugh. But it is not amusement we feel, rather a sort of sinking sensation at the chilling arrogance of this something or other which is perhaps only a distressingly complicated kind of humbug. But, as I said, a civilized. It did not throw the music-box in my face, but tactfully chose one of the soft little rings. People have had their ears boxed, and other practical jokes have been played, such as unlacing boots. Somebody had his wristwatch taken off and carried about the room. But nobody, it is unanimously affirmed, has ever suffered any serious harm from these powers, and that is an indication of good sense and decent feeling. On the other hand, they do unmistakably tend to become demoralized, to play silly tricks and make unmotivated displays of strength. The need of constant oversight, guidance, and direction is plain—as, for instance, when the agency now set to work, with a good deal of persistence, to upset the music-box standing on the table. The Baron was alarmed for his instrument, and begged Minna to spare him the heart-breaking annoyance which any kind of repair work costs in these days. In vain. “It” obstinately persisted in overturning the box, on which lay the slate and slate-pencil, likewise in danger of breaking.
Something had to be done by way of distraction, and the Baron thought of the typewriting-machine, which stood on the floor in front of the curtain, with paper inserted ready for use. “Write, Minna,” he said. “Do something useful. We will listen to you, and then we shall have the writing, to prove that we are not hypnotized, as some of your enemies say.” The thing seems able to listen to reason, it desists from its efforts at the box. We wait. And, on my honour, the writing-machine begins to click, there on the floor. This is insane. Even after all we have already seen, it is in the highest degree startling, bewildering, ridiculous; the fantasticality of the thing is even fascinating. Who is it writing on the machine? Nobody. Nobody is lying there on the carpet in the dark and playing on the machine, but it is being played on. Willy’s arms and legs are held fast. Even if he could get an arm free, he could not reach the machine with it; and as for his feet, even if they could reach that far they could not touch single types on the machine, they would tread on several at once. No, it is not Willy. But there is nobody else. What else can we do but shake our heads and laugh? The writing is being done with the right touch, a hand is certainly touching the keys—but is it really only one hand? No, if you ask me, there are surely two hands; the sounds are too quick for one, they sound as though proceeding from the fingers of a practised typist; we come to the end of a line, the bell rings, we hear the carriage being drawn back, the new line begins—the sound breaks off and a pause ensues.
Then somewhat further back, in front of the dark background of the curtain, suddenly, swiftly, and fleetingly, the following little apparition. Something appears, a longish something, vague, and whitely shimmering; in size and general shape like a human forearm, with closed fist—but not certainly recognizable as such. It comes and goes, showing itself before our eyes, lighted by a sort of flash of white lightning that issues from its own right side and wholly obscures whatever shape it has—then it is gone.
“There, there is a materialization for you,” says our host, pointing to it. “I’m glad you have seen one. Wait, perhaps it will make an impression for us.” And he pleads with Minna to put her hand into the plate of flour on the table. But I did not for a minute believe that she would, and she did not, we waited in vain. It was quite light on the table, the phantom would have exposed itself all too defencelessly to our view, and to do that did not in the least correspond to the image I had made to myself of the shy, sly, stealthy, equivocal character of our elusive guest: a character too insignificant to have evil intent, on the contrary probably quite well-meaning, but weak-minded and embarrassed.—Nothing further happened. General fatigue, it seemed, had supervened. Willy whispered: “Merry Christmas!” The sitting was over.
It was odd to see in the bald white light the felt ring lying there at my feet where it had no business to be. Remarkable, too, to observe the typed writing on the machine, a perfectly nonsensical jumble of large and small letters; presumably it would have been different if Willy himself knew how to type. He still lay drunk with sleep, leaning sideways across the arm of one of the controls. I went up to him, tapped him on the shoulder, and told him it had been a brilliant sitting. He looked dumbly up at me with his sleepy eyes, and a good-natured, rather sad little smile was on his face.
We moved back by groups into the library, in animated discussion over what we had seen. Tea was served, and did us all much good. The evening finished off with stage stories narrated by Reicher.
Well, now, what had I seen? Two-thirds of my readers will answer: swindle, sleight-of-hand, deception. Some day, when our knowledge of these matters has progressed, the field will be popularized, and they will deny that such was their judgment. Even now, and even if they take me for a credulous and suggestible fad-chaser, the testimony of trained experimenters like the French scholar Gustave Geley ought to make them less glib. Geley closes his report with the categorical statement: “I do not merely say that there was no deception present in these sittings; I say that the possibility of deception was ruled out.” That is absolutely my own position. I am in that intriguing and confounded state of mind in which reason commands us to recognize what reason on the other hand would reject as impossible. The nature of the phenomena I have described makes it inevitable that the idea of deception should afterwards haunt the minds even of those who saw with their own eyes; only to be laid, over and over, by the evidence of the senses, by the reflection that deception was definitely impossible.
But, it will be objected, three-quarters of all the mediums are swindlers, and have been exposed as such.—That is a fact, a bewildering one; the more so that in many of these cases, I might even say in most of them, the dolus, the intent to deceive, is absent. I am convinced that even our good Willy, if he had had the chance, would have started hocus-pocussing and so have seriously compromised his position; for it is conceivable that in his dream he makes no distinction between what he does with his own hand and what in “other” ways; and being moved by the quite comprehensible desire to produce an effect, he might, if he had been “uncontrolled,” have set to, been discovered, and so discredited the experiments. And this would not have been any evidence whatever against the genuineness of the occult phenomena which were produced when he was in safe arrest.
The whole affair, however trifling it looks on the surface, is serious enough to warrant explanations in a serious and even a solemn key. Having seen what I saw, I consider it my duty to bear witness that in the experiments during which I was present, any mechanical deception or sleight-of-hand tricks were humanly impossible. Some may find such testimony reckless; and our reason even obliges and forces us to do so; for we do immediately twist and turn to find a middle way out, by which we may somehow, even verbally, avoid the alternative of deception or reality. “Delusion” is such a word; its very vagueness helps by preventing us from seeing to the bottom of it. The two conceptions of reality and of deception are mingled in it, and perhaps the mingling has more justification than we know, and is less strange in nature than it is to our downright processes of thought. I will say, then, that what I saw had to do with an occult delusion in the domain of organic life; with bewilderingly deep and sub-human complexes, at once primitive and involved. These, undignified by nature and trivial in their activity as they are, are well calculated to be offensive to our proud æsthetic sense, but to deny their abnormal reality would be nothing less than unreasonable obstinacy.
Furthermore, the scientific investigation of these phenomena is no longer precisely in its infancy. Science has at least got so far as to have invented a terminology, by means of which one can express oneself respectably on the subject. What I saw were “telekinetic” phenomena, phenomena of motion at a distance. This particular medium, young Willy S., is especially strong in the production of this kind of manifestations, which in their origins are closely related with the occult natural phenomenon of materialization—in other words, the temporary organization of energy outside the medial organism, its exteriorization, so to speak. Among reasonable people it is agreed that the agent which performs the tricks I have described, the swinging of the bell, the lifting of the handkerchief, the typing, is not a spiritistic “intelligence” by the name of Minna, neither is it Aristotle or Napoleon, but the partly exteriorized medium himself. But even that does not go far toward making our problem more accessible to the reason. On the contrary, the popular, spiritualistic hypothesis is much clearer and simpler than the scientific one; while as for the problem of exteriorization and materialization, the longer one looks at it, the more it reveals a complexity apparently calculated for the express purpose of making a mock of the human intellect. Which is not surprising—considering that after all it is bound up with the presumably not occult problem of life itself!
“That which governs life,” Claude Bernard wrote, “is neither chemistry nor physics, nor anything of the kind; but the ideal principle of the life-process.” A strangely indefinite saying for a great scientist, he being a Frenchman to boot; a saying that gropes vaguely after a mystery, and shows that it is precisely the great world of scholarship which never loses an inward feeling for the mystery; and that only the rank and file run the danger of scientific darkness, unmindful how very little complete, how much mingled with mystery—and riddles perhaps never-to-be-solved—is all their exact knowledge of nature and life and its functions. It is accepted as an established fact in the world of occultism today that the effective and formative principle at work in the psychological processes does in certain cases assume a “teleplastic” character: in other words, it passes beyond the limits of the organism and operates outside it, “ectoplastically.” That is, it calls into temporary existence, out of the exteriorized, organic basic substance (the appearance and form of which have already been observed with some degree of exactitude), shapes, limbs, bodily organs, particularly hands, which possess all the properties and functions of normal, physiological, biologically living organs. These teleplastic end-organs move apparently free in space, but so far as can be observed have a close physiological and psychological relation with the medium, in such a way that any impression received through the teleplasm has its effect upon the medial organism, and vice versa. Here we see supra-normal physiology vying with the normal to bear witness to the unity of the organic substance. A fluid, in varying degrees of density, leaves the body of the medium as an amorphous, unorganized mass; takes form in various teleplastic organs, hands, feet, heads, and so on; and after a brief existence in this form, during which, however, it displays all the attributes of living substance, dissolves and is reabsorbed into the medial organism. And this fluid, this substance, this substratum of the various organic formations, is uniform, undifferentiated; there is not such a thing as a bone-substance as different from a muscular or visceral or nervous one; there is only the one substance, the basis and substratum of organic life.
Probably all reasoned thinking and talking in this highly speculative field of facts is today premature and can only seem to clarify without doing so. But one thing is certain: we shall be thinking and talking most inadequately about the phenomena of materialization, as about the riddle of life in general, if we regard them from the physical and material side alone, and not from the psychical as well. It was Hegel who said that the idea, the spirit, is the ultimate source of all phenomena; and perhaps supra-normal physiology is more apt than normal to demonstrate his statement. Yes, it undertakes to place the philosophic demonstration of the primacy of the idea, of the ideal origin of all reality, alongside the biological demonstration of the unity of all organic life.
Quite uninstructed, and on my own responsibility, I explained the telekinetic phenomena as the medium’s magically objectivated dreams. And the literature of the subject confirms my explanation; with an awe-inspiring display of technical terms, it explains that the idea of the phenomenon, present in the subconsciousness of the somnambulist, mingled moreover with that of the other persons present, is by the aid of psychophysical energy “ectoplastically” moved, by a biopsychical projection, to a certain distance, and imprinted—that is to say, “objectivated.” In other words, we call to aid an uninvestigated ideoplastic faculty possessed by the medial constitution. Ideoplastic—a word, and a conception, of Platonic power and charm, not without flattering unction to the artist’s ear, who will be ready from now on to characterize, not only his own work, but universal reality as ideoplastic phenomena. Yet a word, and a conception, of quite as turbid depths as the word “delusion” itself, and, by virtue of its maddening mixture of elements of the real and the dream, leading straight to the morbid and the preposterous.
Let me give in closing one single but striking example. We are repeatedly assured that the ideoplastic formations, for the time during which they are present, possess all the characteristics of actual life. When they have been in a good mood they have not only let themselves be seen and touched, and their objective reality established by photography and apparatus which registered their telekinetic activities; but plaster casts have been made, hands of transcendental origin having been persuaded to dip themselves into basins of warm water with melted wax floating on top. In this way a mould has been formed about the spirit member, and hardened by exposure to air. Out of such a mould no human hand could get free without breaking the mould. But the teleplastic organ frees itself by dematerialization, and the experimenters pour plaster of Paris into the wax glove and thus obtain a cast of the materialized organ, which should correspond to it in all particulars. It is to be noted that the casts thus obtained show no resemblance in shape or lines to the hands of the medium, or to those of anyone else present. Now at one of Willy’s sittings the following perfectly lunatic thing occurred (and not the only one of its kind). The medium being under the most careful control, a shape like a hand appeared, coming from above and behind, and showed itself above a piece of grey clay on the little table. It had a forearm, and was lighted by a rosy light, and it hovered about over the surface of the clay; on which, after the sitting, six flat impressions were found, on the previously smooth surface. But at the base of Willy’s little finger on his left hand, and on the back of the fourth finger of the same hand, there were traces of clay.
Now I ask of nature and spirit, I inquire of reason and of logic on her throne: How, when, and from where came the clay on Willy’s fingers?
No, I will not go to Herr von Schrenck-Notzing’s again. It leads to nothing, or at least to nothing good. I love that which I called the moral upper world, I love the human fable, and clear and humane thought. I abhor luxations of the brain, I abhor morasses of the spirit. Up to now, indeed, I have seen but a few stray sparks from the infernal fires—but that must suffice me. I should like of course to hold, as others have held, a hand like that, a metaphysical delusion made of flesh and blood, in mine. And perhaps there might appear to me, as it has to others, Minna’s head, above the shoulder of the sleeping Willy: the head of a charming girl, Slavic in type, with lively black eyes. That, however uncanny, must be a wonderful experience.... After all, I will have another try or so with Herr von Schrenck-Notzing; two or three times, not more. That much could do me no harm; and I know myself, I am a man of ephemeral passions; I shall take care that it leads to nothing, and put the whole thing out of my mind for ever after. No, I will not go two or three times, I will only go once, just once more and then not again. I only want to see the handkerchief rise up into the red light before my eyes. For the sight has got into my blood somehow, I cannot forget it. I should like once more to crane my neck, and with the nerves of my digestive apparatus all on edge with the fantasticality of it, once more, just once, see the impossible come to pass.
1923