Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death Part 35

I do but mention these initial difficulties; I shall not dwell on them here. I speak to men who have determined, whether at the bidding of instinct or of reason, that it is well to be religious; well to approach in self-devoted reverence an infinite Power and Love. Our desire is simply to find the least unworthy way of thinking of matters which inevitably transcend and baffle our finite thought.

And here, for the broad purpose of our present survey, we may divide the best religious emotion of the world in triple fashion; tracing three main streams of thought,--streams which on the whole run parallel, and which all rise, as I believe, from some source in the reality of things.

First, then, I place that obscure consensus of independent thinkers in many ages and countries which, to avoid any disputable t.i.tle, I will here call simply the Religion of the Ancient Sage. Under that t.i.tle (though Lao Tz[)u] is hardly more than a name) it has been set forth to us in brief summary by the great sage and poet of our own time; and such words as Natural Religion, Pantheism, Platonism, Mysticism, do but express or intensify varying aspects of its main underlying conception.

That conception is the coexistence and interpenetration of a real or spiritual with this material or phenomenal world; a belief driven home to many minds by experiences both more weighty and more concordant than the percipients themselves have always known. More weighty, I say, for they have implied the veritable nascency and operation of a "last and largest sense"; a faculty for apprehending, not G.o.d, indeed (for what finite faculty can apprehend the Infinite?), but at least some dim and scattered tokens and prefigurements of a true world of Life and Love.

More _concordant_ also; and this for a reason which till recently would have seemed a paradox. For the mutual corroboration of these signs and messages lies not only in their fundamental agreement up to a certain point, but in their inevitable divergence beyond it;--as they pa.s.s from things felt into things imagined; from actual experience into dogmatic creed.

The Religion of the Ancient Sage is of unknown antiquity. Of unknown antiquity also are various Oriental types of religion, culminating in historical times in the Religion of Buddha. For Buddhism all interpenetrating universes make the steps upon man's upward way; until deliverance from illusion leaves the spirit merged ineffably in the impersonal All. But the teaching of Buddha has lost touch with reality; it rests on no basis of observed or of reproducible fact.

On a basis of observed facts, on the other hand, Christianity, the youngest of the great types of religion, does a.s.suredly rest. a.s.suredly those facts, so far as tradition has made them known to us, do tend to prove the superhuman character of its Founder, and His triumph over death; and thus the existence and influence of a spiritual world, where men's true citizenship lies. These ideas, by common consent, lay at the origin of the Faith. Since those first days, however, Christianity has been elaborated into codes of ethic and ritual adapted to Western civilisation;--has gained (some think) as a rule of life what it has lost as a simplicity of spirit.

From the unfettered standpoint of the Ancient Sage the deep concordance of these and other schemes of religious thought may well outweigh their formal oppositions. And yet I repeat that it is not from any mere welding of these schemes together, nor from any choice of the best points in existing syntheses, that the new synthesis for which I hope must be born. It must be born from new-dawning knowledge; and in that new knowledge I believe that each great form of religious thought will find its indispensable--I may almost say its predicted--development. Our race from its very infancy has stumbled along a guarded way; and now the first lessons of its early childhood reveal the root in reality of much that it has instinctively believed.

What I think I know, therefore, I am bound to tell; I must give the religious upshot of observation and experiment in such brief announcement as an audience like this[212] has a right to hear, even before our discoveries can be laid in full before the courts of science for definite approval.

The _religious upshot_, I repeat:--for I cannot here reproduce the ma.s.s of evidence which has been published in full elsewhere. Its general character is by this time widely known. Observation, experiment, inference, have led many inquirers, of whom I am one, to a belief in direct or telepathic intercommunication, not only between the minds of men still on earth, but between minds or spirits still on earth and spirits departed. Such a _discovery_ opens the door also to _revelation_. By discovery and by revelation--by observation from without the veil, and by utterance from within--certain theses have been provisionally established with regard to such departed souls as we have been able to encounter. First and chiefly, I at least see ground to believe that their state is one of endless evolution in wisdom and in love. Their loves of earth persist; and most of all those highest loves which seek their outlet in adoration and worship. We do not find, indeed, that support is given by souls in bliss to any special scheme of terrene theology. Thereon they know less than we mortal men have often fancied that we knew. Yet from their step of vantage-ground in the Universe, at least, they see that it is good. I do not mean that they know either of an end or of an explanation of evil. Yet evil to them seems less a terrible than a slavish thing. It is embodied in no mighty Potentate; rather it forms an isolating madness from which higher spirits strive to free the distorted soul. There needs no chastis.e.m.e.nt of fire; self-knowledge is man's punishment and his reward; self-knowledge, and the nearness or the aloofness of companion souls.

For in that world love is actually self-preservation; the Communion of Saints not only adorns but const.i.tutes the Life Everlasting. Nay, from the law of telepathy it follows that that communion is valid for us here and now. Even now the love of souls departed makes answer to our invocations. Even now our loving memory--love is itself a prayer--supports and strengthens those delivered spirits upon their upward way. No wonder; since we are to them but as fellow-travellers shrouded in a mist; "neither death, nor life, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature," can bar us from the hearth-fire of the universe, or hide for more than a moment the inconceivable oneness of souls.

And is not this a fresh instalment, or a precursory adumbration, of that Truth into which the Paraclete should lead? Has any world-scheme yet been suggested so profoundly corroborative of the very core of the Christian revelation? Jesus Christ "brought life and immortality to light." By His appearance after bodily death He proved the deathlessness of the spirit. By His character and His teaching He testified to the Fatherhood of G.o.d. So far, then, as His unique message admitted of evidential support, it is here supported. So far as He promised things unprovable, that promise is here renewed.

I venture now on a bold saying; for I predict that, in consequence of the new evidence, all reasonable men, a century hence, will believe the Resurrection of Christ, whereas, in default of the new evidence, no reasonable men, a century hence, would have believed it. The ground of this forecast is plain enough. Our ever-growing recognition of the continuity, the uniformity of cosmic law has gradually made of the alleged _uniqueness_ of any incident its almost inevitable refutation.

Ever more clearly must our age of science realise that any relation between a material and a spiritual world cannot be an ethical or emotional relation alone; that it must needs be a great structural fact of the Universe, involving laws at least as persistent, as identical from age to age, as our known laws of Energy or of Motion. And especially as to that central claim, of the soul's life manifested after the body's death, it is plain that this can less and less be supported by remote tradition alone; that it must more and more be tested by modern experience and inquiry. Suppose, for instance, that we collect many such histories, recorded on first-hand evidence in our critical age; and suppose that all these narratives break down on a.n.a.lysis; that they can all be traced to hallucination, misdescription, and other persistent sources of error;--can we then expect reasonable men to believe that this marvellous phenomenon, always vanishing into nothingness when closely scrutinised in a modern English scene, must yet compel adoring credence when alleged to have occurred in an Oriental country, and in a remote and superst.i.tious age? Had the results (in short) of "psychical research" been purely negative, would not Christian evidence--I do not say Christian _emotion_, but Christian _evidence_--have received an overwhelming blow?

As a matter of fact,--or, if you prefer the phrase, in my own personal opinion,--our research has led us to results of a quite different type.

They have not been negative only, but largely positive. We have shown that amid much deception and self-deception, fraud and illusion, veritable manifestations do reach us from beyond the grave. The central claim of Christianity is thus confirmed, as never before. If our own friends, men like ourselves, can sometimes return to tell us of love and hope, a mightier Spirit may well have used the eternal laws with a more commanding power. There is nothing to hinder the reverent faith that, though we be all "the Children of the Most Highest," He came nearer than we, by some s.p.a.ce by us immeasurable, to That which is infinitely far.

There is nothing to hinder the devout conviction that He of His own act "took upon Him the form of a servant," and was made flesh for our salvation, foreseeing the earthly travail and the eternal crown. "Surely before this descent into generation," says Plotinus,[213] "we existed in the intelligible world; being other men than now we are, and some of us G.o.ds; clear souls, and minds unmixed with all existence; parts of the Intelligible, nor severed thence; nor are we severed even now."

It is not thus to less of reverence that man is summoned, but to more.

Let him keep hold of early sanct.i.ties; but let him remember also that once again "a great sheet has been let down out of heaven"; and lo!

neither Buddha nor Plato is found common or unclean.

Nay, as to our own soul's future, when that first shock of death is past, it is in Buddhism that we find the more inspiring, the truer view.

That Western conception of an instant and unchangeable bliss or woe--a bliss or woe determined largely by a man's beliefs, in this earthly ignorance, on matters which "the angels desire to look into"--is the bequest of a pre-Copernican era of speculative thought. In its Mahomedan travesty, we see the same scheme with outlines coa.r.s.ened into grotesqueness;--we see it degrade the cosmic march and profluence into a manner of children's play.

Meantime the immemorial musings of unnumbered men have dreamt of a consummation so far removed that he who gazed has scarcely known whether it were Nothingness or Deity. With profoundest fantasy, the East has pondered on the vastness of the world that now is, of the worlds that are to be. What rest or pasture for the mind in the seven days of Creation, the four rivers of Paradise, the stars "made also"? The farther East has reached blindly forth towards astronomical epochs, sidereal s.p.a.ces, galactic congregations of inconceivable Being. Pressed by the inc.u.mbency of ancestral G.o.ds (as the Chinese legend tells us), it has "created by one sweep of the imagination a thousand Universes, to be the Buddha's realm."

The sacred tale of Buddha, developed from its earlier simplicity by the shaping stress of many generations, opens to us the whole range and majesty of human fate. "The destined Buddha has desired to be a Buddha through an almost unimaginable series of worlds." No soul need ever be without that hope. "The spirit-worlds are even now announcing the advent of future Buddhas, in epochs too remote for the computation of men." No obstacles without us can arrest our way. "The rocks that were thrown at Buddha were changed into flowers." Not our own worst misdoings need beget despair. "Buddha, too, had often been to h.e.l.l for his sins." The vast complexity of the Sum of Things need not appal us. "Beneath the bottomless whirlpool of existences, behind the illusion of Form and Name," we, too, like Buddha, may discover and reveal "the perfection of the Eternal Law." Us, too, like Buddha, the cosmic welcome may await; as when "Earth itself and the laws of all worlds" trembled with joy "as Buddha attained the Supreme Intelligence, and entered into the Endless Calm."

I believe that some of those who once were near to us are already mounting swiftly upon this heavenly way. And when from that cloud encompa.s.sing of unforgetful souls some voice is heard,--as long ago,--there needs no heroism, no sanct.i.ty, to inspire the apostle's ?p????a e?? t? ??a???a?, the desire to lift our anchor, and to sail out beyond the bar. What fitter summons for man than the wish to live in the memory of the highest soul that he has known, now risen higher;--to lift into an immortal security the yearning pa.s.sion of his love? "As the soul hasteneth," says Plotinus,[214] "to the things that are above, she will ever forget the more; unless all her life on earth leave a memory of things done well. For even here may man do well, if he stand clear of the cares of earth. And he must stand clear of their memories too; so that one may rightly speak of a n.o.ble soul as forgetting those things that are behind. And the shade of Herakles, indeed, may talk of his own valour to the shades, but the true Herakles in the true world will deem all that of little worth; being transported into a more sacred place, and strenuously engaging, even above his strength, in those battles in which the wise engage." Can we men now on earth claim more of sustainment than lies in the incipient communion with those enfranchised souls? What day of hope, of exaltation, has dawned like this, since the message of Pentecost?

Yet a durable religious synthesis should do more than satisfy man's immediate aspiration. It should be in itself progressive and evolutionary; it should bear a promise of ever deeper holiness, to answer to the long ages of heightening wisdom during which our race may be destined to inhabit the earth. This condition has never yet been met.

No scheme, indeed, could meet it which was not based upon recurrent and developing facts. To such facts we now appeal. We look, not backward to fading tradition, but onward to dawning experience. We hope that the intercourse, now at last consciously begun--although as through the mouth of babes and sucklings, and in confused and stammering speech--between discarnate and incarnate souls, may through long effort clarify into a director communion, so that they shall teach us all they will.

Science, then, need be no longer fettered by the limitations of this planetary standpoint; nor ethics by the narrow experience of a single life. Evolution will no longer appear as a truncated process, an ever-arrested movement upon an unknown goal. Rather we may gain a glimpse of an ultimate incandescence where science and religion fuse in one; a cosmic evolution of Energy into Life, and of Life into Love, which is Joy. Love, which is Joy at once and Wisdom;--we can do no more than ring the changes on terms like these, whether we imagine the transfigurement and apotheosis of conquering souls, or the lower, but still sacred, destiny which may be some day possible for souls still tarrying here. We picture the perfected soul as the Buddha, the Saviour, the _aurai simplicis ignem_, dwelling on one or other aspect of that trinal conception of Wisdom, Love, and Joy. For souls not yet perfected but still held on earth I have foretold a growth in _holiness_. By this I mean no unreal opposition or forced divorcement of sacred and secular, of flesh and spirit. Rather I define holiness as the joy too high as yet for our enjoyment; the wisdom just beyond our learning; the rapture of love which we still strive to attain. Inevitably, as our link with other spirits strengthens, as the life of the organism pours more fully through the individual cell, we shall feel love more ardent, wider wisdom, higher joy; perceiving that this organic unity of Soul, which forms the inward aspect of the telepathic law, is in itself the Order of the Cosmos, the Summation of Things. And such devotion may find its flower in no vain self-martyrdom, no cloistered resignation, but rather in such pervading ecstasy as already the elect have known; the Vision which dissolves for a moment the corporeal prison-house; "the flight of the One to the One."

"So let the soul that is not unworthy of that vision contemplate the Great Soul; freed from deceit and every witchery, and collected into calm. Calmed be the body for her in that hour, and the tumult of the flesh; ay, all that is about her, calm; calm be the earth, the sea, the air, and let Heaven itself be still. Then let her feel how into that silent heaven the Great Soul floweth in.... And so may man's soul be sure of Vision, when suddenly she is filled with light; for this light is from Him and is He; and then surely shall one know His presence when, like a G.o.d of old time, He entered into the house of one that calleth Him, and maketh it full of light." "And how," concludes Plotinus, "may this thing be for us? Let all else go."[215]

These heights, I confess, are above the stature of my spirit. Yet for each of us is a fit ingress into the Unseen; and for some lesser man the memory of one vanished soul may be beatific as of old for Plotinus the flooding immensity of Heaven. And albeit no historical religion can persist as a logical halting-place upon the endless mounting way--that way which leads unbroken from the first germ of love in the heart to an inconceivable union with the Divine--yet many a creed in turn may well be close inwrought and inwoven with our eternal hope. What wonder, if in the soul's long battle, some Captain of our Salvation shall sometimes seem to tower unrivalled and alone?--???? ??? ???et? ????? ??t??. And yet in no single act or pa.s.sion can that salvation stand; far hence, beyond Orion and Andromeda, the cosmic process works and shall work for ever through unbegotten souls. And even as it was not in truth the great ghost of Hector only, but the whole nascent race of Rome, which bore from the Trojan altar the hallowing fire, so is it not one Saviour only, but the whole nascent race of man--nay, all the immeasurable progeny and population of the heavens--which issues continually from behind the veil of Being, and forth from the Sanctuary of the Universe carries the ever-burning flame: _A eternumque adytis effert penetralibus ignem_.

APPENDICES

TO

CHAPTER II

II. A. It is well known that a great variety of slight causes--hunger, fatigue, slight poisoning by impure air, a small degree of fever, etc.--are sometimes enough to produce a transient perturbation of personality of the most violent kind. I give as an instance the following account of a feverish experience, sent to me by the late Robert Louis Stevenson, from Samoa, in 1892 (and published in _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. ix. p. 9). In Stevenson's paper on his own dreams, alluded to in Chapter III, we have one of the most striking examples known to me of that helpful and productive subliminal uprush which I have characterised as the mechanism of genius. It is therefore, interesting to observe how, under morbid conditions, this temperament of genius--this ready permeability of the psychical diaphragm--transforms what might in others be a mere vague and ma.s.sive discomfort into a vivid though incoherent message from the subliminal storm and fire. The result is a kind of supraliminal duality, the perception at the same time of two personalities--the one rational and moral, the other belonging to the stratum of dreams and nightmare.

VAILIMA PLANTATION, UPOHO, SAMOAN ISLANDS, _July 14th, 1892_.

DEAR MR. MYERS,--I am tempted to communicate to you some experiences of mine which seem to me (ignorant as I am) of a high psychological interest.

I had infamous bad health when I was a child and suffered much from night fears; but from the age of about thirteen until I was past thirty I did not know what it was to have a high fever or to wander in my mind. So that these experiences, when they were renewed, came upon me with entire freshness; and either I am a peculiar subject, or I was thus enabled to observe them with unusual closeness.

Experience A. During an illness at Nice I lay awake a whole night in extreme pain. From the beginning of the evening _one part of my mind_ became possessed of a notion so grotesque and shapeless that it may best be described as a form of words. I thought the pain was, or was connected with, a wisp or coil of some sort; I knew not of what it consisted nor yet where it was, and cared not; only I thought, if the two ends were brought together, the pain would cease. Now all the time, with _another part of my mind_, which I venture to think was _myself_, I was fully alive to the absurdity of this idea, knew it to be a mark of impaired sanity, and was engaged with _my other self_ in a perpetual conflict. _Myself_ had nothing more at heart than to keep from my wife, who was nursing me, any hint of this ridiculous hallucination; the _other_ was bound that she should be told of it and ordered to effect the cure.

I believe it must have been well on in the morning before the fever (or _the other fellow_) triumphed, and I called my wife to my bedside, seized her savagely by the wrist, and looking on her with a face of fury, cried: "Why do you not put the two ends together and put me out of pain?"

Experience B. The other day in Sydney I was seized on a Sat.u.r.day with a high fever. Early in the afternoon I began to repeat mechanically the sound usually written "mhn," caught myself in the act, instantly stopped it, and explained to my mother, who was in the room, my reasons for so doing. "That is the beginning of the mind to wander," I said, "and has to be resisted at the outset." I fell asleep and woke, and for the rest of the night repeated to myself mentally a nonsense word which I could not recall next morning. I had been reading the day before the life of Swift, and all night long one part of my mind (_the other fellow_) kept informing me that I was not repeating the word myself, but was only reading in a book that Swift had so repeated it in his last sickness. The temptation to communicate this nonsense was again strongly felt by _myself_, but was on this occasion triumphantly resisted, and my watcher heard from me all night nothing of Dean Swift or the word, nothing but what was rational and to the point.

So much for the two consciousnesses when I can disentangle them; but there is a part of my thoughts that I have more difficulty in attributing. One part of my mind continually bid me remark the transrational felicity of the word, examined all the syllables, showed me that not one was in itself significant, and yet the whole expressed to a nicety the voluminous distress of one in a high fever and his annoyance at and recoil from the attentions of his nurses. It was probably the same part (and for a guess _the other fellow_) who bid me compare it with the nonsense words of Lewis Carroll as the invention of a lunatic with those of a sane man. But surely it was _myself_ (and myself in a perfectly clear-headed state) that kept me trying all night to get the word by heart, on the ground that it would afterwards be useful in literature if I wanted to deal with mad folk. It must have been myself, I say, because _the other fellow_ believed (or pretended to believe) he was reading the pa.s.sage in a book where it could always be found again when wanted.

Experience C. The next night _the other fellow_ had an explanation ready for my sufferings, of which I can only say that it had something to do with the navy, that it was sheer undiluted nonsense, had neither end nor beginning, and was insusceptible of being expressed in words. _Myself_ knew this; yet I gave way, and my watcher was favoured with some references to the navy. Nor only that; _the other fellow_ was annoyed--or _I_ was annoyed--on two inconsistent accounts: first, because he had failed to make his meaning comprehensible; and second, because the nurse displayed no interest. _The other fellow_ would have liked to explain further; but _myself_ was much hurt at having been got into this false position, and would be led no further.

In cases A and C the illusion was amorphous. I knew it to be so, and yet succ.u.mbed to the temptation of trying to communicate it. In case B the idea was coherent, and I managed to hold my peace. Both consciousnesses, in other words, were less affected in case B, and both more affected in cases A and C. It is perhaps not always so: the illusion might be coherent, even practical, and the rational authority of the mind quite in abeyance. Would not that be lunacy?

In case A I had an absolute knowledge that I was out of my mind, and that there was no meaning in my words; these were the very facts that I was anxious to conceal; and yet when I succ.u.mbed to the temptation of speaking my face was convulsed with anger, and I wrung my watcher's wrist with cruelty. Here is action, unnatural and uncharacteristic action, flowing from an idea in which I had no belief, and which I had been concealing for hours as a plain mark of aberration. Is it not so with lunatics?

I have called the one person _myself_, and the other _the other fellow_. It was myself who spoke and acted; the other fellow seemed to have no control of the body or the tongue; he could only act through myself, on whom he brought to bear a heavy strain, resisted in one case, triumphant in the two others. Yet I am tempted to think that I know the other fellow; I am tempted to think he is the dreamer described in my Chapter on Dreams to which you refer. Here at least is a dream belonging to the same period, but this time a pure dream, an illusion, I mean, that disappeared with the return of the sense of sight, not one that persevered during waking moments, and while I was able to speak and take my medicine. It occurred the day after case B and before case C.

Case D. In the afternoon there sprang up a storm of wind with monstrous clouds of dust; my room looked on a steep hill of trees whose boughs were all blowing in the same direction; the world seemed to pa.s.s by my windows like a mill-race. By this turmoil and movement I was confused, but not distressed, and surprised not to be distressed; for even in good health a high wind has often a painful influence on my nerves. In the midst of this I dozed off asleep. I had just been reading Scott's "Life of Dryden," and been struck with the fact that Dryden had translated some of the Latin hymns, and had wondered that I had never remarked them in his works. As soon as I was asleep I dreamed a reason why the sound of the wind and the sight of the flying dust had not distressed me.

There was no wind, it seemed, no dust; it was only Dryden singing his translated hymns in _one direction_, and all those who had blamed and attacked him after the Revolution singing them in _another_. This point of the two directions is very singular and insane. In part it meant that Dryden was continuously flying past yet never pa.s.sing my window in the direction of the wind and dust, and all his detractors similarly flying past yet not pa.s.sing towards the other side. But it applied, besides this, both to the words and to the music in a manner wholly insusceptible of expression.

That was a dream; and yet how exactly it reproduces the method of _my other fellow_ while I was awake. Here is an explanation for a state of mind or body sought, and found, in a tissue of rabid, complicated, and inexpressible folly.--Yours very sincerely.

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

II. B. A good example of the application of true scientific method to problems which doctors of the old school did not think worth their science is Dr. Janet's treatment of a singular problem which the mistakes of brutal ignorance turned in old times into a veritable scourge of our race. I speak of _demoniacal possession_, in which affliction Dr. Janet has shown himself a better than ecclesiastical exorcist.

I give here a typical case of pseudo-possession from _Nevroses et Idees fixes_ (vol. i. pp. 377-389): Achille, as Professor Janet calls him, was a timid and rather morbid young man, but he was married to a good wife, and nothing went specially wrong with him until his return from a business journey in 1890. He then became sombre and taciturn--sometimes even seemed unable to speak--then took to his bed and lay murmuring incomprehensible words, and at last said farewell to his wife and children, and stretched himself out motionless for a couple of days, while his family waited for his last breath.

"Suddenly one morning, after two days of apparent death, Achille sat up in bed with his eyes wide open, and burst into a terrible laugh. It was a convulsive laugh which shook all his limbs; an exaggerated laugh which twisted his mouth; a lugubrious, satanic laugh which went on for more than two hours.

"From this moment everything was changed. Achille leapt from his bed and refused all attentions. To every question he answered, 'There's nothing to be done! let's have some champagne; it's the end of the world!' Then he uttered piercing cries, 'They are burning me--they are cutting me to pieces!'"