|
WE HAVE lost another distinguished member of our body - not in this case one who
was associated very closely with our work, but one, nevertheless, who by the
lustre of his name added dignity to our proceedings, and who might, had his life
been spared, have largely helped us, I believe, in experimental investigations -
I allude to Professor Hertz, a corresponding member of our body. As those of you
will know who have had the opportunity of following recent developments of
physical science, he was the fortunate individual who demonstrated
experimentally the identity of light and of certain electro-magnetic phenomena.
This identity, had been divined, and elaborated on the side of theory, by one of
the greatest of English, I ought perhaps to say of Scotch, men of science, Clerk
Maxwell, but it had never been conclusively proved until Professor Hertz, about
five years ago, startled Europe by the experimental identification of these
physical forces. The extraordinary interest and the far-reaching importance of a
discovery like this will not perhaps be appreciated by every one of my audience,
but all of those who take an interest in such subjects will see that by this
stroke of experimental genius a very large stride has been made towards
establishing the unity of the great physical powers of nature.
The mention of a great physical discovery like this, made by one of our own
body, naturally suggests reflections as to our actual scientific position. What,
we feel tempted to ask, is at the present time the relation of such results as
we have arrived at to the general view which hitherto science has taken of that
material universe in which we live? I must confess that, when I call to mind the
history of these relations in the past, the record is not one on which we can
dwell with any great satisfaction. Consider, for example, the attitude
maintained by the great body of scientific opinion, whether medical or physical,
towards the phenomena which used to be known as mesmeric, but which have now
been re-baptised, with Braid's term, as hypnotic.
There were, I believe, no less than two or three Commissions of inquiry - three,
I think, - instituted in France alone, one in Mesmer's lifetime, and the other
two, unless my memory deceives me, after his death. The amount of evidence
collected, at all events by one of those Commissions, composed of some of the
most eminent scientific men in France, should have been enough to call the
attention of all Europe to the new problems thus raised. The report which
embodied this evidence was, nevertheless, allowed to lie unnoticed upon the
shelf; and it has only been by a gradual process of re-discovery, a constant and
uphill fight on the part of the less prejudiced members of the community, that
the truths of hypnotism, as far as they are yet attained, have reached something
like general recognition; even now, perhaps, their full importance - whether
from a therapeutic or a psychological point of view - has not been sufficiently
acknowledged.
What I have just very briefly and rudely sketched out to you is the history of
an investigation into one small section of these alleged phenomena which fall
outside the ordinary field of scientific investigation. If we took it by itself
we should say that scientific men have shown in connection with it a bigoted
intolerance, an indifference to strictly scientific evidence, which is, on the
face of it, discreditable. I, however, do not feel inclined to pass any verdict
of so harsh a character upon the action of the great body of scientific men. I
believe that, although the course they pursued was not one which it is very easy
rationally to justify, nevertheless there was a great deal more of practical
wisdom in it than might appear at first sight. I have always been impressed by
the lesson taught us by the general course of history, that you cannot expect,
either of any single nation or of any single age, that it will do more than the
special work which happens, so to speak, to be set before it at the moment. You
cannot expect men, being what they are, to labour effectively in more than one
relatively restricted field at the same time; and if they insist on diffusing
their energies over too wide a surface, the necessary result, as I believe, will
be that their labours will prove unfruitful. Now just consider what it is that
men of science have done in the century which has elapsed since the first French
Commission investigated Mesmer's discoveries. I do not believe it would be going
too far to say that the whole body of the sciences, with the exception of
mechanics, especially mechanics as applied to celestial motions - that the whole
body of the sciences outside that limited sphere has been reconstructed from top
to bottom. Our leading ideas in chemistry, our leading ideas in physics, the
theory of light, the theory of sound, the whole of geology, the great
generalisation known as the conservation of energy, and all the speculations and
extensions which have succeeded that great generalisation, the whole theory of
natural selection and of biological evolution, are all the birth of the hundred
years which have elapsed since first Mesmer made hypnotic phenomena notorious
through Europe. I think if scientific men, looking back upon the past, choose to
set up for themselves this defence, that after all only one thing can be done at
a time, that they were occupied in co-ordinating within certain lines the
experimental data then available, and that, in harmony with a given conception
of the material world, they were laying deep the foundations of that vast and
imposing fabric of modern science, I for one should accept the plea as a bar to
further proceedings. For the men who did that work could not have done it, I
believe, unless they had rigidly confined themselves to one particular
conception of the world with which they had to deal. If they had insisted on
including in their survey not merely the well-travelled regions of everyday
experience, but the dark and doubtful territories within which our labours lie,
their work would have been worse, not better; less, not more complete. They may
have been narrow; but their narrowness has been our gain. They may have been
prejudiced; but their prejudices have been fruitful, and we have reaped the
harvest. I have often thought that when, on looking back over the history of
human speculation, we find some individual who has anticipated the discoveries
of a later age, but has neither himself been able to develop those discoveries
nor yet to interest his contemporaries in them, we are very apt to bestow on him
an undue meed of honour. 'Here,' we say, 'was a man before his time. Here was a
man of whom his age was not worthy.' Yet such men do very little indeed for the
progress of the world of which at first sight they would appear to be among the
most distinguished citizens. There is no use in being before your age after such
a fashion as this. If neither you nor those to whom you speak can make use of
the message that you thus prematurely deliver, so far as the development of the
world is concerned, you might as well have not lived at all. When, therefore, we
are asked to put our hands in our pockets and subscribe towards the erection of
memorials to half-forgotten worthies like these, by all means let us do it. It
is natural and even praiseworthy. But do not let us suppose that those whom we
thus honour really stand out among the benefactors of our species. They are
interesting; but hardly useful.
This, however, is merely a parenthetical reflection, to which I do not ask your
agreement, and which, after all, has nothing to do with the general drift of the
argument that I desire to lay before you. The question I now wish you to
consider is: Granting to men of science that they had, if not a theoretical and
speculative excuse, still a practical justification, for the course they have
adopted in regard to these obscure psychical phenomena during the last hundred
years, is that justification still valid? For myself, I think it is not. I think
the time has now come when it is desirable in their own interests, and in our
interests, that the leaders of scientific thought in this country and elsewhere
should recognise that there are well-attested facts which, though they do not
easily fit into the framework of the sciences, or of organised experience as
they conceive it, yet require investigation and explanation, and which it is the
bounden duty of science, if not itself to investigate, at all events to assist
us in investigating.
I am, of course, aware that there are necessarily connected with our work
difficulties and obstructions in the way of experiment with which scientific men
are not familiar, and which not unnaturally rouse in their minds both dislike
and suspicion. To begin with, there is the difficulty of fraud. The ordinary
scientific man no doubt finds the path of experimental investigation strewn with
difficulties, but at least he does not usually find among them the difficulty
presented by human fraud. He knows that, if he is misled in any particular, it
is the fault of the observer, and not the fault of the observed. He knows that,
if his cross-examination of nature fails to elicit anything, it is because he
has not known how to cross-examine, not because nature when put in the
witness-box tells untruths. But unfortunately in the matters with which we have
to deal this is not the case. We have come across, and it is inevitable that we
should come across, cases where either deliberate fraud or unconscious deception
makes observation doubly and trebly difficult, and throws obstacles in the way
of the investigator which his happier brother in the region of material and
physical science has not to contend with.
And there is yet another difficulty in our work from which those who cultivate
physical science are happily free. They have, as the ultimate sources of their
knowledge, the 'five senses' with which we are all endowed, and which are the
only generally recognised inlets through which the truth of external nature can
penetrate into consciousness. But we of this Society have perforce to deal with
cases in which not merely the normal five or six senses, but some abnormal and
half-completed sense, so to speak, comes into play; in which we have to work,
not with the organisations of an ordinary and normal type, but with certain
exceptional organisations who can neither explain, account for, nor control the
abnormal powers they appear to possess.
This is not only a special difficulty with which we have to contend; it is the
basis of a serious objection, in the eyes of many scientific men, to the
admission of the subject-matter of our researches into the sphere of legitimate
investigation. These critics seem to think that because we cannot repeat and
verify our experiments as we will and when we will because we cannot, as it
were, put our phenomena in a retort and boil them over a spirit lamp and always
get the same results - that therefore the phenomena themselves are not worth
examining. But this is, I venture to say, a very unphilosophic view of the
question. Is there, after all, any inherent a priori improbability in there
being these half-formed and imperfectly developed senses, or inlets of external
information, occasionally and sporadically developed in certain members of the
human race? Surely not. I should myself be disposed to say that if the theory of
development be really sound, phenomena like these, however strange, are exactly
what we should have expected. For what says the theory of natural selection? Why
this, among other things: that there has gradually been elaborated by the
slaughter of the unfit and the survival of the fit, an organism possessed of
senses adapted to further its success in the struggle for existence. To suppose
that the senses elaborated in obedience to this law should be in correspondence
with the whole of external nature, appears to me to be not only improbable, but,
on any rational doctrine of probability, absolutely impossible. There must be
countless forms of being, countless real existences which, had the line of an
evolution gone in a different direction, or had the necessities of our primitive
ancestors been of a different kind, would have made themselves known to us
through senses the very character of which we are at present unable to imagine.
And, if this be so, is it not in itself likely that here and there we should
come across rudimentary beginnings of such senses; beginnings never developed
and probably never to be developed by the operation of selection; mere
by-products of the great evolutionary machine, never destined to be turned to
any useful account? And it may be - I am only hazarding an unverifiable guess - it
may be, I say, that in these cases of the individuals thus abnormally endowed we
really have come across faculties which, had it been worth Nature's while, had
they been of any value or purpose in the struggle for existence, might have been
normally developed, and thus become the common possession of the whole human
race. Had this occurred, we should have been enabled to experiment upon
phenomena, which we now regard as occult and mysterious, with the same
confidence in the sources of our information that we now enjoy in any of our
ordinary inquiries into the laws of the material world. Well, if there be, as I
think, no great antecedent improbability against there being these occasional
and sporadic modifications of the organism, I do not think that men of science
ought to show any distrustful impatience of the apparent irregularity of these
abnormal phenomena, which is no doubt one of their most provoking
characteristics.
But there is another and a real difficulty, from the point of view of science,
attaching to the result of our investigations, which is not disposed of by the
theory which I have suggested of imperfectly developed senses. Such senses, if
they exist at all, may evidently be of two kinds, or may give us two kinds of
experience. They may give us a kind of experience which shall be in perfect
harmony with our existing conception of the physical universe, or they may give
us one which harmonises with that conception imperfectly or not at all. As an
example of the first I might revert to the discovery, previously referred to, of
Professor Hertz. He, as I have already told you, has experimentally proved that
electro-magnetic phenomena are identical, as physical phenomena, with ordinary
light. Light consists, as you all know, of undulations of what is known as the
luminiferous ether; well, electro-magnetic waves are also undulations of the
same ether, differing from the undulations which we call light only in their
length. Now it is easy to conceive that we might have had a sense which would
have enabled us to perceive the long undulations in the same way as we now
perceive the short ones. That would be a new sense, but, though new, its
deliverances would have fitted in with the existing notions which scientific men
have framed of the universe. But unfortunately in our special investigations we
seem to come across experiences which are not so amenable. We apparently get
hints of the existence of facts, which, if they be well established, as they
appear to be, cannot, so far as I can judge, by any amount of squeezing or
manipulation be made to fit into the interstices of our accepted view of the
physical world; and, if that be so, then we are engaged in a work of prodigious
difficulty indeed, but of an importance of which the difficulty is only a
measure and an indicator. For we should then be actually on the threshold, so to
speak, of a region ordered according to laws of which we have at present no
cognisance, and which do not appear to harmonise - I do not say they are in
contradiction to, but at least they do not appear to harmonise - with those which
govern the regions already within our ken.
Let me dwell on this point a little more, as it is one of central interest to
all who are engaged in our special investigations. What I am asserting is that
the facts which we come across are very odd facts; and by that I do not mean
merely queer and unexpected: I mean 'odd' in the sense that they are out of
harmony with the accepted theories of the material world. They are not merely
dramatically strange, they are not merely extraordinary and striking, but they
are 'odd' in the sense that they will not easily fit in with the views which
physicists and men of science generally give us of the universe in which we
live.
In order to illustrate this distinction I will take a very simple instance. I
suppose everybody would say that it would be an extraordinary circumstance if at
no distant date this earth on which we dwell were to come into collision with
some unknown body travelling through space, and, as the result of that
collision, be resolved into the original gases of which it is composed. Yet,
though it would be an extraordinary, and even an amazing, event, it is, after
all, one of which no astronomer, I venture to say, would assert the
impossibility. He would say, I suppose, that it was most unlikely, but that if
it occurred it would not violate, or even modify, his general theories as to the
laws which govern the movements of the celestial bodies. Our globe is a member
of the solar system which is travelling I do not know how many miles a second in
the direction of the constellation Hercules. There is no a priori ground for
saying that in the course of that mysterious journey, of the cause of which we
are perfectly ignorant, we shall not come across some body in interstellar space
which will produce the uncomfortable results which I have ventured to indicate.
And, as a matter of fact, in the course of the last two hundred years,
astronomers have themselves been witness to stellar tragedies of incomparably
greater magnitude than that which would be produced by the destruction of so
insignificant a planet as the world in which we happen to be personally
interested. We have seen stars which shine from an unknown distance, and are of
unknown magnitude, burst into sudden conflagration, blaze brightly for a time,
and then slowly die out again. What that phenomenon precisely indicates, of
course, we cannot say, but it certainly indicates an accident of a far more
startling and tremendous kind than the shattering of our particular world, which
to us would, doubtless, seem extraordinary enough.
This, then, is a specimen of what I mean by a dramatically extraordinary event.
Now I will give you a case of what I mean by a scientifically extraordinary
event, which as you will at once perceive may be one which at first sight, and
to many observers, may appear almost common-place and familiar. I have
constantly met people who will tell you, with no apparent consciousness that
they are saying anything more out of the way than an observation about the
weather, that by the exercise of their will they can make anybody at a little
distance turn round and look at them. Now such a fact (if fact it be) is far
more scientifically extraordinary than would be the destruction of this globe by
some such celestial catastrophe as I have imagined. How profoundly mistaken,
then, are they who think that this exercise of will-power, as they call it, is
the most natural and most normal thing in the world, something that everybody
would have expected, something which hardly deserves scientific notice or
requires scientific explanation. In reality it is a profound mystery if it be
true, or if anything like it be true; and no event, however startling, which
easily finds its appropriate niche in the structure of the physical sciences
ought to excite half so much intellectual curiosity as this dull, and at first
sight common-place, phenomenon.
Now do not suppose that I want you to believe that every gentleman or lady who
chooses to suppose him or herself exceptionally endowed with this so-called
will-power is other than the dupe of an ill-regulated fancy. There is, however,
quite apart from the testimony of such persons, a vast mass of evidence in
favour of what we now call telepathy; and to telepathy the observations I have
been making do in my opinion most strictly apply. For, consider! In every case
of telepathy you have an example of action at a distance. Examples of real or
apparent action at a distance are of course very common. Gravitation is such an
example. We are not aware at the present time of any mechanism, if I may use the
phrase, which can transmit gravitational influence from one gravitating body to
another. Nevertheless, scientific men do not rest content with that view. I
recollect it used to be maintained by the late Mr. John Mill that there was no
ground for regarding with any special wonder the phenomenon of action at a
distance. I do not dogmatise upon the point, but I do say emphatically that I do
not think you will find a first-rate physicist who is prepared to admit that
gravity is not a phenomenon which still wants an explanation. He is not ready,
in other words, to accept action at a distance as an ultimate fact, though he
has not even got the first clue to the real nature of the links by which the
attracting bodies mutually act upon one another.
But though gravitation and telepathy are alike in this, that we are quite
ignorant of the means by which in either case distant bodies influence one
another, it would be a great mistake to suppose that the two modes of operation
are equally mysterious. In the case of telepathy there is not merely the
difficulty of conjecturing the nature of the mechanism which operates between
the agent and the patient, between the man who influences and the man who is
influenced; but the whole character of the phenomena refuses to fit in with any
of our accepted ideas as to the mode in which force may be exercised from one
portion of space to another. Is this telepathy action an ordinary case of action
from a centre of disturbance? Is it equally diffused in all directions? Is it
like the light of a candle or the light of the sun which radiates equally into
space in every direction at the same time? If it is, it must obey the law - at
least, we should expect it to obey the law-of all other forces which so act
through a non-absorbing medium, and its effects must diminish inversely as the
square of the distance. It must, so to speak, get beaten out thinner and thinner
the further it gets removed from its original source. But is this so? Is it even
credible that the mere thoughts, or, if you please, the neural changes
corresponding to these thoughts, of any individual could have in them the energy
to produce sensible effects equally in all directions, for distances which do
not, as far as our investigations go, appear to have any necessary limit? It is,
I think, incredible; and in any case there is no evidence whatever that this
equal diffusion actually takes place. The will-power, whenever will is used, or
the thoughts, in cases where will is not used, have an effect, as a rule, only
upon one or two individuals at most. There is no appearance of general
diffusion. There is no indication of any disturbance equal at equal distances
from its origin, and radiating from it alike in every direction.
But if we are to reject this idea, which is the first which ordinary analogies
would suggest, what are we to put in its place? Are we to suppose that there is
some means by which telepathic energy can be directed through space from the
agent to the patient, from the man who influences to the man who is influenced?
If we are to believe this, as apparently we must, we are face to face not only
with a fact extraordinary in itself, but with a kind of fact which does not fit
in with anything we know at present in the region either of physics or of
physiology. It is true, no doubt, that we do know plenty of cases where energy
is directed along a given line, like water in a pipe, or like electrical energy
along the course of a wire. But then in such cases there is always some material
guide existing between the two termini, between the place from which the energy
comes and the place to which the energy goes. Is there any such material guide
in the case of telepathy? It seems absolutely impossible. There is no sign of
it. We cannot even form to ourselves any notion of its character, and yet, if we
are to take what appears to be the obvious lesson of the observed facts, we are
forced to the conclusion that in some shape or other it exists. For to suppose
that the telepathic agent shoots out his influence towards a particular object,
as you shoot a bullet out of a gun, or water out of a hose, which appears to be
the only other alternative, involves us seemingly in greater difficulties still.
Here then we are face to face with what I call a scientifically extraordinary
phenomenon, as distinguished from a dramatically extraordinary one.
If beyond the mere desire to increase knowledge many are animated by a wish to
get evidence, not through any process of laborious deduction, but by direct
observation, of the reality of intelligences not endowed with a physical
organisation like our own, I see nothing in their action to criticise, much less
to condemn. But while there is sufficient evidence, in my judgment, to justify
all the labours of our Society in this field of research, it is not the field of
research which lies closest to the ordinary subjects of scientific study, and,
therefore, this afternoon, when I was led to deal rather with the scientific
aspects of our work, I have deliberately kept myself within the range of the
somewhat unpicturesque phenomena of telepathy. My object has been a very simple
one, as I am desirous above all things of enlisting in our service the best
experimental and scientific ability which we can command. I have thought it best
to endeavour to arrest the attention, and, if possible, to engage the interest
of men of science by pointing to the definite and very simple experiments which,
simple as they are, yet hint at conclusions not easily to be accommodated with
our habitual theories of things. If we can repeat these experiments sufficiently
often and under tests sufficiently crucial to exclude the possibility of error,
it will be impossible any longer to ignore them, and, willingly or unwillingly,
all interested in science will be driven to help, as far as they can, to unravel
the refractory class of problems which this Society is endeavouring to solve.
What success such efforts will be crowned with, I know not. I have already
indicated to you, at the beginning of my remarks, the special class of
difficulties which beset our path. We have not at our command the appropriate
physical senses, we have not the appropriate materials for experiment, we are
hampered and embarrassed in every direction by credulity, by fraud, by
prejudice. Nevertheless, if I rightly interpret the results which these many
years of labour have forced upon the members of this Society and upon others not
among our number who are associated by a similar spirit, it does seem to me that
there is at least strong ground for supposing that outside the world, as we
have, from the point of science, been in the habit of conceiving it, there does
lie a region, not open indeed to experimental observation in the same way as the
more familiar regions of the material world are open to it, but still with
regard to which some experimental information may be laboriously gleaned; and
even if we cannot entertain any confident hope of discovering what laws these
half-seen phenomena obey, at all events it will be some gain to have shown, not
as a matter of speculation or conjecture, but as a matter of ascertained fact,
that there are things in heaven and earth not hitherto dreamed of in our
scientific philosophy.
Note:
The article above was taken from "Arthur James Balfour As Philosopher and
Thinker: A Collection of the More Important and Interesting Passages in his
Non-Political Writings, Speeches, and Addresses, 1897-1912" (Longmans, Green and
Co., 1912) by Wilfred M. Short.
|
