During the correction of the previous chapters I have read Lombroso’s final and posthumous work, and I feel that it is expedient to append a brief account of Lombroso’s dealings with the spiritualists, which were, indeed, characteristic of his peculiar personality, but are without significance in relation to his more important investigations—those which interest us and will interest posterity.
It was about the year 1890 that throughout Europe the investigations of psychiatrists, neurologists, and psychologists into the subject of hypnotism attained their acme. During the years 1885 to 1890 there was an unceasing current of hypnotic experiments. Almost every clinic had its own mediums; and soon some of these mediums, of whom not a few attended more than one clinic, produced occult phenomena, such as the action of medicaments at a distance (Bourru and others), the polarizing effect of magnets, thought-transference, and thought-reading, in addition to the phenomena of the hypnotic sleep and hypnotic suggestion. Not infrequently such séances as these, instituted by serious men of science, closely resembled the phenomena of the “animal magnetism” of the first third of the nineteenth century and the séances of the spiritualists during the middle third of the century. Men who, unquestionably, were well experienced in observation and in rigorous experiment—such men as Charcot, Richet, Preyer, Forel, and Zöllner—believed in the reality of the occult phenomena which gradually made their appearance in the hypnotic mediums.
In the year 1888, Lombroso published a series of exhaustive experiments, dealing more especially with the limits of suggestion in the waking state, and the influence of a permanent magnet upon suggested sensations. It was most remarkable that this positivist investigator, a man whose habit it had been to confine himself to objective investigation, and to consider subjective phenomena as entirely subsidiary and to deal with them with extreme caution, should concern himself with matters so little accessible to objective observation as the reaction to hypnotic procedures and the examination of suggested ideas in hypnotized and hysterical subjects, and while engaged in this path of study to associate, ultimately, more and more intimately with thought-readers, spiritualists, and other thaumaturgists.
It was, indeed, a result of his overwhelming conviction, at once of the objectivity and of the materiality of the performances of hypnotized persons, associated with a reluctance to accept the explanation of such phenomena by purely subjective factors—viz., their explanation solely by means of ideas—that led Lombroso to the credulous assumption that there existed a peculiar material condition of the brain-substance as the cause of all these categories of phenomena.
The fact that the mediums themselves either coquetted in a most equivocal manner with the possibility of associated immaterial processes, or else introduced the absurd doctrines of spiritualism for the explanation of the phenomena occurring at their séances, did not discourage Lombroso from the continually renewed study of thought-readers, calculating wonders, telepathists, and teleurgists (persons who claimed the power of giving rise to mechanical changes in remote objects), for he believed in the genuineness of different forms of “trance”; and his honourable capacity for belief, his disinclination to explain anything that was new as the result of deception merely because it was an unusual experience, frequently delivered him over to the devices of cheats.
I can explain here that, from my own experience, his most important medium, Eusapia Palladino, whom, in April, 1894, in association with Lombroso, Enrico Ferri, the psychologist Luigi Ferri, the physiologist Richet, the anthropologist Sergi, and the painter Siemiradzki, I observed in several séances, was, indeed, a “miracle”—i.e., a miracle of adroitness, false bonhomie, well-simulated candour, naïveté, and artistic command of all the symptoms of hystero-epilepsy. In Rome, where the séances were held, she had at her disposal certain extremely adroit male mediums, who were associated in all her tricks. These mediums behaved irreproachably. During the séances, in consequence of emotional excitement and superstitious terror, they suffered publicly from hysterical paroxysms; and they were clever enough to charm Siemiradzki by arranging that “from the fourth dimension” a sheet of writing-paper should fall into his lap, upon which was inscribed in isolated Polish words[51] a prophecy of the speedy restoration of the kingdom of Poland. I took an exact transcript of this manifestation, and must repeat to-day what I said sixteen years ago, that if (as the mediums asserted, though I do not myself believe it) the spirit of Kosciuszko really wrote these hopeful words—instead of prophesying finis Poloniæ—then “in the fourth dimension” the spelling and grammar of the Polish language must have been very badly preserved. (Charles Dickens made the same observation in respect to English spelling as exhibited by “spirits.”)
At that time it was my impression that in these séances Lombroso’s interest was in the spiritualists, not in the “spirits,” and, in the next place, in the abnormal trance-state of the mediums. This was undoubtedly so at that time; but his subsequent publications have shown that at a later date he went much further than this, and ascribed to the brain-substance the faculty of exercising a powerful influence beyond the periphery of the body (although, according to the dominant and still unshaken opinion, the function of the brain-substance is subject to the law of isolated nervous conduction). For example, in the Annales des Sciences Psychiques, 1892, p. 146 et seq., Lombroso wrote as follows:
“Not one of these facts (which we must admit to be facts, since we cannot deny that which we have seen with our own eyes) is of a nature to render it necessary to suppose for its explanation the existence of a world different from that admitted by neuropathologists to exist. I see nothing inadmissible in the supposition that in hysterical and hypnotized persons the stimulation of certain centres, which become powerful owing to the paralyzing of all the others, and thus give rise to a transposition and transmission of psychical forces, may also result in a transformation into luminous or motor force. In this way we can understand how the force, which I will call cortical or cerebral, of a medium can, for example, raise a table from the floor, pluck someone by the beard, strike him or caress him—very frequent phenomena in these séances. In certain conditions, which are very rare, the cerebral movement which we call thought is transmitted to distance, sometimes small, sometimes very considerable. Now, in the same way in which this force is transmitted, it may also become transformed, and the psychic force may manifest itself as a motor force. Do we not see the magnet give rise to a deflection of the compass-needle without any visible intermediary?”
We must not without further consideration dismiss this idea as absurd, because a very simple experiment suffices to show that the well-known and continuous heat-radiation from the living body—that is to say, the dispersal from the body of ultra-red etheric undulations—undergoes notable and easily measurable changes, in association with every change in the intellectual or emotional equilibrium, just as the arterial pulse, which changes under the influence of emotional disturbance, gives rise to varying oscillations in the air. But we do not possess sense-organs adequate to detect either these atmospheric or these etheric undulations. We were unable to establish their existence until physiology had given us Mosso’s plethysmograph and Zamboni’s dry battery.
There was a very powerful subjective reason why Lombroso did not apply a strenuous criticism to the occult phenomena of Eusapia, of Pickmann, etc. His own most important ideas had at first encountered doubt from the learned world, and in many cases contempt and ridicule. For this reason he was free from the tendency, traditional in academic circles, towards an extreme reserve in relation to completely new facts and theories contrary to the dominant views, and therefore dangerous to those advocating them. On the contrary, to doubt the good faith of those who were producing the new hypnotic and other mediumistic phenomena was not only contrary to his natural disposition, incapable of any pettiness and indisposed to mistrust anything that was unusual, but it also conflicted with the tendencies resulting from his own personal experiences.
In the year 1872, when he brought before the Medical Academy of Milan his experiments and investigations regarding the etiology of pellagra through the consumption of spoilt maize, he was accused by the surgeon Porta, Dean of the medical faculty of Pavia and an advocate of the interests of the great landlords, of having falsified his experiments, and of having artificially induced lesions in the animals he experimented on—the result being that the whole matter was turned to ridicule, and he and his pellagrous chickens were made fun of at the next carnival.
Lombroso was accustomed to quote a verse from Dante, “Io non piangea, si dentro impetrai” (“I did not weep, but my heart was turned to stone”), in order to explain the impression left upon him by this experience. The controversies about pellagra continued for about thirty years, until at length, in the year 1902, official recognition was given to his theory by the legislation carried in that year for the prevention of the disease.[52] The déclassé, the Jew, the self-taught man, could not be allowed to take an equal rank in the university life amongst the sons of the well-to-do classes of Northern Italy, so closely allied with the landed interest; and for this reason the most distinguished and influential member of the academic circle described his laborious and tedious researches as falsified. It was this experience which made it psychologically impossible for him, when he came to study occult phenomena, to take into consideration the possibility of fraud.
This helps us to understand how he came to enter upon these investigations, and how it was that he allowed himself in many cases to be deceived regarding the reality of the processes under observation.
But it was precisely his unmitigated positivism which led him a priori to regard many things as possible and open to discussion, from which others in their specialist narrowness would have (doubtless in this instance more wisely) turned away. In the year 1888, Lombroso believed himself to have proved the influence of the magnet upon suggested colour sensations. With this begins the series of his publications upon occult phenomena (“Studi sull’ ipnotismo e sulla credulità,” Archivio di psichiatria, 1888, ix., pp. 528–546). From these effects of the magnet (whose subjective causation he left an open question) he drew the following inference: “The magnet is an object known to have effect within the physical sphere. If a new result is seen to follow its application, this must also be of a physical character, and cannot be of any other. Thus in the hypnotized person, whose cerebral molecules are in a condition different from that in the brain of the non-hypnotized person, the magnet has given rise to a rearrangement of the cerebral molecules. If the observed effect is purely subjective, we must conclude that the subjective phenomena are dependent upon the physical conditions, and that the rearrangement of the cerebral molecules gives rise to the phenomenon of so-called polarization.”
Psychologically allied with this is Lombroso’s utterance regarding muscle-reading, to the effect that if an act of the will is effective at a distance, this proves that the will, far from being immaterial, is a phenomenon of movement, and is, therefore, a manifestation of matter. Indeed, he expresses his astonishment that thought-transference is so rarely observed: “May it be that in the forms of energy known under the names of electricity, magnetism, heat, light, and sound, there is produced the same thing as in thought; and if one admits this, may it not be that thought is simply a phenomenon of movement.”[53]
At the time when these first experimental studies were published, Lombroso was, however, still sceptical regarding spiritualistic phenomena, as is proved by the following utterance, which I publish here in full because in it we can already detect the psychological tendencies which ultimately led him to capitulate—i.e., to recognize the existence of telepathic phenomena at séances: “Every epoch is unripe for the discoveries which have had few precursors; and if it is unripe it is also unadapted to perceive its own incapacity. The repetition of the same discovery prepares the brain to make it its own, to accept it, and finds minds gradually becoming less hostile to its acceptance. For nearly twenty years the discoverer of the cause of pellagra was regarded throughout Italy as mad; to-day the academic world still laughs at criminal anthropology, at hypnotism, at homeopathy. Who knows whether we, who to-day laugh at spiritualism, may not also be in error? Thanks to the misoneism which lies concealed in us all, we are, as it were, hypnotized against the new ideas, incapable of understanding that we are in error, and like many insane persons, whilst the darkness hides the truth from us, we laugh at those who stand in the light” (“L’ influenza della civiltà e dell’ occasione sui genio,” Fanfulla della Domenica, 1883, Nr. 29).
In the year 1891, when Lombroso, in association with Bianchi and Tamburini, had held the first sittings with Eusapia Palladino, he wrote in a letter to Dr. Ciolfi: “I am ashamed and sorrowful that with so much obstinacy I have contested the possibility of the so-called spiritualistic facts. I say the facts, for I am inclined to reject the spiritualistic theory; but the facts exist, and as regards facts I glory in saying that I am their slave.”
There soon followed other sittings, most of them with Eusapia as medium, conducted by Von Aksakow and Du Prel. (To this period belong all the sittings in which I myself took part with Siemiradzki, and in which there took place Lombroso’s thorough investigation of the trance-state of both the male mediums mentioned above.) From 1896 onwards, after observations made on the “thought reader” Pickmann, Lombroso published in his Archivio di psichiatria a perpetual record of his mediumistic experiments.
His last work of all, published after his death (“Ricerche sui fenomeni ipnotisi e spiritici,” pp. 320, Turin, Unione Editrice, 1910), might be regarded by the credulous as a “Greeting from the Spirit-World.” We, however, who renounce this “Spirit-World,” may well content ourselves with the undying intellectual achievements of the deceased investigator; to our enemies we freely give the Lombroso of senile decay, for the Lombroso of youth, for ever young, is ours.