Cock Lane and Common-Sense

But, it may reasonably be urged, ‘the natural familiar facts of life, death, sleep, waking, dreams, breath, and shadows, are all versæ causæ, do undeniably exist, and, without the aid of any of your abnormal facts, afford basis enough for the animistic hypothesis. Moreover, after countless thousands of years, during which superstition has muttered about your abnormal facts, official science still declines to hear a word on the topic of clairvoyance or telepathy. You don’t find the Royal Society investigating second sight, or attending to legends about tables which rebel against the law of gravitation.’

These are cogent remarks. Normal facts, perhaps, may have suggested the belief in spirits, the animistic hypothesis. But we do not find the hypothesis (among the backward races) where abnormal facts are not alleged to be matters of comparatively frequent experience. Consequently we do not know that the normal facts, alone, suggested the existence of spirits to early thinkers, we can only make the statement on a priori grounds. Like George Eliot’s rural sage we ‘think it sounds a deal likelier’. But that, after all, though a taking, is not a powerful and conclusive syllogism.

Again, we certainly do not expect to see the Royal Society inquiring into second sight, or clairvoyance, or thought transference. When the Royal Society was first founded several of its members, Pepys, F.R.S.; Mr. Robert Boyle, F.R.S.; the Rev. Joseph Glanvill, F.R.S., went into these things a good deal. But, in spite of their title, they were only amateurs. They had no professional dignity to keep up. They were well aware that they, unlike the late Mr. Faraday, did not know, by inspiration or by common-sense, the limits of the possible. They tried all things, it was such a superstitious age. Now men of science, or the majority of them, for there are some exceptions, know what is, and what is not possible. They know that germs of life may possibly come down on meteorites from somewhere else, and they produced an argument for the existence of a bathybius. But they also know that a man is not a bird to be in two places at once, like Pythagoras, and that nobody can see through a stone wall. These, and similar allegations, they reckon impossible, and, if the facts happen, so much the worse for the facts. They can only be due to imposture or mal-observation, and there is an end of the matter. This is the view of official science. Unluckily, not many years ago, official science was equally certain that the ordinary phenomena of hypnotism were based on imposture and on mal-observation. These phenomena, too, were tabooed. But so many people could testify to them, and they could be so easily explained by the suggestive force of suggestion, that they were reluctantly admitted within the sacred citadel. Many people, sane, not superstitious, healthy, and even renowned as scientific specialists, attest the existence of the still rarer phenomena which are said, in certain cases, to accompany the now more familiar incidents of hypnotism. But these phenomena have never yet been explained by any theory which science recognises, as she does recognise that suggestion is suggestive. Therefore these rarer phenomena manifestly do not exist, and cannot be the subject of legitimate inquiry.

These are unanswerable observations, and it is only the antiquarian who can venture, in his humble way, to reply to them. His answer has a certain force ad hominem, that is, as addressed to anthropologists. They, too, have but recently been admitted within the scientific fold; time was when their facts were regarded as mere travellers’ tales. Mr. Max Müller is now, perhaps, almost alone in his very low estimate of anthropological evidence, and, possibly, even that sturdy champion is beginning to yield ground. Defending the validity of the testimony on which anthropologists reason about the evolution of religion, custom, manners, mythology, law, Mr. Tylor writes: —

‘It is a matter worthy of consideration that the accounts of similar phenomena of culture, recurring in different parts of the world, actually supply incidental proof of their own authenticity… The test of recurrence comes in… The possibility of intentional or unintentional mystification is often barred by such a state of things as that a similar statement is made in two remote lands by two witnesses, of whom A lived a century before B, and B appears never to have heard of A.’

If for ‘similar phenomena of culture’ here, we substitute ‘similar abnormal phenomena’ (such as clairvoyance, wraiths, unexplained disturbances), Mr. Tylor’s argument in favour of his evidence for institutions applies equally well to our evidence for mysterious ‘facts’. ‘How distant are the countries,’ he goes on, ‘how wide apart are the dates, how different the creeds and characters in the catalogue of the facts of civilisation, needs no further showing’ – to the student of Mr. Tylor’s erudite footnotes. In place of ‘facts of civilisation’ read ‘psychical phenomena,’ and Mr. Tylor’s argument applies to the evidence for these rejected and scouted beliefs.

The countries from which ‘ghosts’ and ‘wraiths’ and ‘clairvoyance’ are reported are ‘distant’; the dates are ‘wide apart’; the ‘creeds and characters of the observers’ ‘are ‘different’; yet the evidence is as uniform, and as recurrent, as it is in the case of institutions, manners, customs. Indeed the evidence for the rejected and abnormal phenomena is even more ‘recurrent’ than the evidence for customs and institutions. Polyandry, totemism, human sacrifice, the taboo, are only reported as existing in remote and semi-civilised countries. Clairvoyance, wraiths, ghosts, mysterious disturbances and movements of objects are reported as existing, not only in distant ages, but today; not only among savages or barbarians, but in London, Paris, Milan. No ages can be more wide apart, few countries much more distant, than ancient Egypt and modern England: no characters look more different than that of an old scribe under Pharaoh, and that of a distinguished soldier under Queen Victoria. Yet the scribe of Khemi and General Campbell suffer from the same inexplicable annoyance, attribute it to the same very abnormal agency, and attempt (not unsuccessfully) to communicate with that agency, in precisely the same way.

This, though a striking, is an isolated and perhaps a casual example of recurrence and uniformity in evidence. Mr. Tylor’s Primitive Culture is itself a store-house of other examples, to which more may easily be added. For example, there is the old and savage belief in a ‘sending’. The medicine-man, or medium, or witch, can despatch a conscious, visible, and intelligent agent, non-normal, to do his bidding at a distance. This belief is often illustrated in the Scandinavian sagas. Rink testifies to it among the Eskimo, Grinnell among the Pawnees: Porphyry alleges that by some such ‘telepathic impact’ Plotinus, from a distance, made a hostile magician named Alexander ‘double up like an empty bag,’ and saw and reported this agreeable circumstance. 190 Hardly any abnormal phenomenon or faculty sounds less plausible, and the ‘spectral evidence’ for the presence of a witch’s ‘sending,’ when the poor woman could establish an alibi for her visible self, appeared dubious even to Cotton Mather. But, in their Phantasms of the Living, Messrs. Gurney and Myers give cases in which a visible ‘sending’ was intentionally emitted by Baron Schrenck Notzing, by a stock-broker, by a young student of engineering, and by a French hospital nurse, to take no other instances. The person visited frequently by the ‘sendings’ in the last cases was a French physician engaged in the hospital, who reports and attests the facts. All the cases are given at first hand on the testimony of the senders and of the recipients of the sendings. Bulwer Lytton was familiar with the belief, and uses the ‘shining shadow’ in A Strange Story. Now here is uniform recurrent evidence from widely severed ages, from distant countries, from the Polar North, the American prairie, Neoplatonic Egypt and Greece, England and New England of the seventeenth century, and England and Germany of today. The ‘creeds and characters of the observers’ are as ‘different’ as Neoplatonism, Shamanism, Christianity of divers sects, and probably Agnosticism or indifference. All these conditions of unvarying testimony constitute good evidence for institutions and customs; anthropologists, who eagerly accept such testimony in their own studies, may decide as to whether they deserve total neglect when adduced in another field of anthropology.

Turning from ‘sendings,’ or ‘telepathy’ voluntarily brought to bear on one living person by another, we might examine ‘death-bed wraiths,’ or the telepathic impact – ‘if that hypothesis of theirs be sound’ – produced by a dying on a living human being. A savage example, in which a Fuegian native on board an English ship saw his father, who was expiring in Tierra del Fuego, has the respectable authority of Mr. Darwin’s Cruise of the Beagle. Instances, on the other hand, in which Australian blacks, or Fijians, see the phantasms of dead kinsmen warning them of their decease (which follows punctually) may be found in Messrs. Fison and Howitt’s Kamilaroi and Kurnai.

From New Zealand Mr. Tylor cites, with his authorities, the following example: 191 ‘A party of Maoris (one of whom told the story) were seated round a fire in the open air, when there appeared, seen only by two of them, the figure of a relative left ill at home. They exclaimed, the figure vanished, and, on the return of the party, it appeared that the sick man had died about the time of the vision.’ A traveller in New Zealand illustrates the native belief in the death-wraith by an amusing anecdote. A Rangatira, or native gentleman, had gone on the war-path. One day he walked into his wife’s house, but after a few moments could not be found. The military expedition did not return, so the lady, taking it for granted that her husband, the owner of the wraith, was dead, married an admirer. The hallucination, however, was not ‘veridical’; the warrior came home, but he admitted that he had no remedy and no feud against his successor. The owner of a wraith which has been seen may be assumed to be dead. Such is Maori belief. The modern civilised examples of death-wraiths, attested and recorded in Phantasms of the Living, are numerous; but statistics prove that a lady who marries again on the strength of a wraith may commit an error of judgment, and become liable to the penalty of bigamy. The Maoris, no statisticians, take a more liberal and tolerant view. These are comparatively scanty examples from savage life, but then they are corroborated by the wealth of recurrent and coincident evidence from civilised races, ancient and modern.

On the point of clairvoyance, it is unnecessary to dwell. The second-sighted man, the seer of events remote in space or not yet accomplished in time, is familiar everywhere, from the Hebrides to the Coppermine River, from the Samoyed and Eskimo to the Zulu, from the Euphrates to the Hague. The noises heard in ‘haunted houses,’ the knocking, routing, dragging of heavy bodies, is recorded, Mr. Tylor says, by Dayaks, Singhalese, Siamese, and Esths; Dennys, in his Folklore of China, notes the occurrences in the Celestial Empire; Grimm, in his German Mythology, gives examples, starting from the communicative knocks of a spirit near Bingen, in the chronicle of Rudolf (856), and Suetonius tells a similar tale from imperial Rome. The physician of Catherine de Médicis, Ambroise Paré, describes every one of the noises heard by the Wesleys, long after his day, as familiar, and as caused by devils. Recurrence and conformity of evidence cannot be found in greater force.

The anthropological test of evidence for faith in the rejected phenomena is thus amply satisfied. Unless we say that these phenomena are ‘impossible,’ whereas totemism, the couvade, cannibalism, are possible, the testimony to belief in clairvoyance, and the other peculiar occurrences, is as good in its way as the evidence for the practice of wild customs and institutions. There remains a last and notable circumstance. All the abnormal phenomena, in the modern and mediæval tales, occur most frequently in the presence of convulsionaries, like the so-called victims of witches, like the Hon. Master Sandilands, Lord Torphichen’s son (1720), like the grandson of William Morse in New England (1680), and like Bovet’s case of the demon of Spraiton. 192

The ‘mediums’ of modern spiritualism, like Francis Fey, are, or pretend to be, subject to fits, anæsthesia, jerks, convulsive movements, and trance. As Mr. Tylor says about his savage jossakeeds, powwows, Birraarks, peaimen, everywhere ‘these people suffer from hysterical, convulsive, and epileptic affections’. Thus the physical condition, all the world over, of persons who exhibit most freely the accepted phenomena, is identical. All the world over, too, the same persons are credited with the rejected phenomena, clairvoyance, ‘discerning of spirits,’ powers of voluntary ‘telepathic ‘and ‘telekinetic’ impact. Thus we find that uniform and recurrent evidence vouches for a mass of phenomena which science scouts. Science has now accepted a portion of the mass, but still rejects the stranger occurrences. Our argument is that their invariably alleged presence, in attendance on the minor occurrences, is, at least, a point worthy of examination. The undesigned coincidences of testimony represent a great deal of smoke, and proverbial wisdom suggests a presumption in favour of a few sparks of fire. Now, if there are such sparks, the animistic hypothesis may not, of course, be valid, – ‘spirits’ may not exist, – but the universal belief in their existence may have had its origin, not in normal facts only, but in abnormal facts. And these facts, at the lowest estimate, must suggest that man may have faculties, and be surrounded by agencies, which physical science does not take into account in its theory of the universe and of human nature.

We have already argued that the doctrines of theism and of the soul need not to be false, even if they were arrived at slowly, after a succession of grosser opinions. But if the doctrines were reached by a process which started from real facts of human nature, observed by savages, but not yet recognised by physical science, then there may have been grains of truth even in the cruder and earlier ideas, and these grains of gold may have been disengaged, and fashioned, not without Divine aid, into the sacred things of spiritual religion.

The stories which we have been considering are often trivial, sometimes comic; but they are universally diffused, and as well established as universally coincident testimony can establish anything. Now, if there be but one spark of real fire to all this smoke, then the purely materialistic theories of life and of the world must be reconsidered. They seem very well established, but so have many other theories seemed, that are long gone the way of all things human.