Natural Science and the Spirit World

Modern dialectics is split into 2 extremes.

One is based on natural science which, like the German philosophy of nature, tries to force the objective world into the framework of its subjective thought.

Another is based on mere experience. It disdains thought and prefers the extreme emptiness of thought. This school prevails in England.

Its father was Francis Bacon. He pushed the empirical-inductive method to attain:

• longer life
• rejuvenation
• alteration of stature and features
• transformation of one body into another
• the production of new species
• power over the air
• the production of storms.

He complains that such investigations have been abandoned. In his natural history, he gives recipes for making gold and performing various miracles.

Similarly, Isaac Newton in his old age expounded the revelation of St. John.

This is why English empiricists recently have fallen as hopeless victims to the spirit-seeing imported from America.

The first natural scientist of this kind is Alfred Russell Wallace. He, simultaneously with Darwin, advanced the theory of natural selection.

In On Miracles and Modern Spiritualism of 1875, he says that his first experiences in this branch of natural knowledge was in 1844 when he attended the lectures of Mr. Spencer Hall on mesmerism.

Mr. Hall produced:

• magnetic sleep together with the phenomena of articular rigidity
• local loss of sensation
• confirmed the correctness of Gall’s map of the skull
  • on touching any one of Gall’s organs, the corresponding activity was aroused in the magnetised patient and exhibited by appropriate and lively gestures.

He established that his patient, merely by being touched, partook of all the sensations of the operator; he made him drunk with a glass of water as soon as he told him that it was brandy.

He could make one of the young men so stupid, even in the waking condition, that he no longer knew his own name, a feat, however, that other schoolmasters are capable of accomplishing without any mesmerism. And so on.

I also saw Mr. Spencer Hall in the winter of 1843-4 in Manchester.

He was a very mediocre charlatan, who travelled the country under the patronage of some parsons and undertook magnetico-phrenological performances with a young girl to prove:

• the existence of God
• the immortality of the soul
• the incorrectness of the materialism being preached by the Owenites in all big towns.

The lady was sent into a magnetico-sleep and then, as soon as the operator touched any part of the skull corresponding to one of Gall’s organs, she gave a bountiful display of theatrical, demonstrative gestures and poses representing the activity of the organ concerned.

For instance, for the organ of philoprogenitiveness she fondled and kissed an imaginary baby, etc. Moreover, the good Mr. Hall had enriched Gall’s geography of the skull with a new island of Barataria: right at the top of the skull he had discovered an organ of veneration, on touching which his hypnotic miss sank on to her knees, folded her hands in prayer, and depicted to the astonished, philistine audience an angel wrapt in veneration.

That was the climax and conclusion of the exhibition. The existence of God had been proved.

The effect on me and one of my acquaintances was exactly the same as on Mr. Wallace.

The phenomena interested us. We tried to find out how far we could reproduce them.

A 12 year old boy offered himself as subject. Gently gazing into his eyes, or stroking, sent him without difficulty into the hypnotic condition.

But since we were rather less credulous than Mr. Wallace and set to work with rather less fervour, we arrived at quite different results.

Apart from muscular rigidity and loss of sensation, which were easy to produce, we found also a state of complete passivity of the will bound up with a peculiar hypersensitivity of sensation.

The patient, when aroused from his lethargy by any external stimulus, exhibited very much greater liveliness than in the waking condition. There was no trace of any mysterious relation to the operator; anyone else could just as easily set the sleeper into activity.

To set Gall’s cranial organs into action was the least that we achieved; we went much further, we could not only exchange them for one another, or make their seat anywhere in the whole body, but we also fabricated any amount of other organs, organs of singing, whistling, piping, dancing, boxing, sewing, cobbling, tobacco-smoking, etc., and we could make their seat wherever we wanted.

Wallace made his patients drunk on water, but we discovered in the great toe an organ of drunkenness which only had to be touched in order to cause the finest drunken comedy to be enacted.

But no organ showed a trace of action until the patient was given to understand what was expected of him; the boy soon perfected himself by practice to such an extent that the merest indication sufficed.

The organs produced in this way then retained their validity for later occasions of putting to sleep, as long as they were not altered in the same way. The patient had even a double memory, one for the waking state and a second quite separate one for the hypnotic condition.,

As regards the passivity of the will and its absolute subjection to the will of a third person, this loses all its miraculous appearance when we bear in mind that the whole condition began with the subjection of the will of the patient to that of the operator, and cannot be restored without it. The most powerful magician of a magnetiser in the world will come to the end of his resources as soon as his patient laughs him in the face.

While we with our frivolous scepticism thus found that the basis of magnetico- phrenological charlatanry lay in a series of phenomena which for the most part differ only in degree from those of the waking state and require no mystical interpretation, Mr. Wallace’s “ardour” led him into a series of self-deceptions, in virtue of which he confirmed Gall’s map of the skull in all its details and noted a mysterious relation between operator and patient.[2]

Everywhere in Mr. Wallace’s account, the sincerity of which reaches the degree of naivété, it becomes apparent that he was much less concerned in investigating the factual background of charlatanry than in reproducing all the phenomena at all costs.

Only this frame of mind is needed for the man who was originally a scientist to be quickly converted into an “adept” by means of simple and facile self-deception. Mr. Wallace ended up with faith in magnetico-phrenological miracles and so already stood with one foot in the world of spirits.

He drew the other foot after him in 1865. On returning from his twelve years of travel in the tropical zone, experiments in table-turning introduced him to the society of various “mediums.” How rapid his progress was, and how complete his mastery of the subject, is testified to by the above-mentioned booklet. He expects us to take for good coin not only all the alleged miracles of Home, the brothers Davenport, and other “mediums” who all more or less exhibit themselves for money and who have for the most part been frequently exposed as impostors, but also a whole series of allegedly authentic spirit histories from early times.

The Pythonesses of the Greek oracle, the witches of the Middle Ages, were all “mediums,” and Iamblichus[3] in his De divinatione already described quite accurately “the most astonishing phenomena of modern spiritualism."

Just one example to show how lightly Mr. Wallace deals with the scientific corroboration and authentication of these miracles.

It is certainly a strong assumption that we should believe that the aforesaid spirits should allow themselves to be photographed, and we have surely the right to demand that such spirit photographs should be authenticated in the most indubitable manner before we accept them as genuine.

Now Mr. Wallace recounts on p.187 that in March, 1872, a leading medium, Mrs. Guppy, née Nicholls, had herself photographed together with her husband and small boy at Mr. Hudson’s in Notting Hill, and on two different photographs a tall female figure, finely draped in white gauze robes, with somewhat Eastern features, was to be seen behind her in a pose as if giving a benediction.

“Here, then, one of two things are absolutely certain.[4] Either there was a living intelligent, but invisible being present, or Mr. and Mrs. Guppy, the photographer, and some fourth person planned a wicked imposture and have maintained it ever since.

Knowing Mr. and Mrs. Guppy so well as I do, I feel an absolute conviction that they are as incapable of an imposture of this kind as any earnest inquirer after truth in the department of natural science."[5]

Consequently, either deception or spirit photography. Quite so. And, if deception, either the spirit was already on the photographic plates, or four persons must have been concerned, or three if we leave out as weak-minded or duped old Mr. Guppy who died in January, 1875, at the age of 84 (it only needed that he should be sent behind the Spanish screen of the background).

That a photographer could obtain a “model” for the spirit without difficulty does not need to be argued. But the photographer Hudson, shortly afterwards, was publicly prosecuted for habitual falsification of spirit photographs, so Mr. Wallace remarks in mitigation:

“One thing is clear, if an imposture has occurred, it was at once detected by spiritualists themselves.” Hence there is not much reliance to be placed on the photographer. Remains Mrs. Guppy, and for her there is only the “absolute conviction” of our friend Wallace and nothing more.

Nothing more? Not at all.

The absolute trustworthiness of Mrs. Guppy is evidenced by her assertion that one evening, early in June, 1871, she was carried through the air in a state of unconsciousness from her house in Highbury Hill Park to 69, Lamb’s Conduit Street – three English miles as the crow flies – and deposited in the said house of No. 69 on the table in the midst of a spiritualistic séance.

The doors of the room were closed, and although Mrs. Guppy was one of the stoutest women in London, which is certainly saying a good deal, nevertheless her sudden incursion did not leave behind the slightest hole either in the doors or in the ceiling. (Reported in the London .Echo, June 8, 1871.)

If anyone still does not believe in the genuineness of spirit photography, there’s no helping him.