To many of the
readers of the following notes, the suggestions therein
contained will come with no sort of novelty; but, perhaps,
to some few hesitating on the banks, drawn this way by
an irrepressible desire for large thinking, yet restrained
by the fear of being unscientific, this essay may appeal,
and to these I venture to suggest that they give a casting
vote for Occultism. For the way to Occultism lies through
a certain ground, common to it and to science; and standing
hereon, we can look backward or forward. It is said that
the man who could realize the hour of his death would in
that moment die, and a corresponding paralysis must overtake
our investigative efforts when we come within sight of the
point from which no further avenues of knowledge open. When
we see ourselves hemmed in by the blank wall of the unknowable,
we shall never take the trouble to reach it. We are being
dragged by science within sight of a line of finality; we
must show that line to be the reflection upon creation of
a self-limited mind that knows not its own depth. From the
things that it knows, science claims to cast the horoscope
of the knowable; we must show its data
to be too few for the strain.
The first glimpse of a new law whereon previously discrete
facts can be smoothly strung, and under which they become
coherent, gives the highest pleasure that can be reached;
belief in the existence of a vast underlying network of such
laws, the most potent of stimuli; belief that they are illimitable,
range behind range, for ever more general; and belief in
the correspondingly expanding powers of man to comprehend;
such only can make life worth living, and the modes of expansion
the only worthy study. And if to this we can add a conception
of ourselves as individuals returning again and again to
life with added or developed faculties and ranges of conscious
comprehension, and of such wide comprehension as includes
within itself the highest morality — with
such beliefs we attain a platform of equanimity, and motives
for action and aspiration from which we shall not be disturbed [Page 9]
But Contrary beliefs and conceptions yield a contrary result.
In opposition to this great creed, it is held that human
powers and faculties will never alter in kind, and but measurably
in degree; that a time will come when the broad scheme of
things, so far as it is knowable, will be known, and that
nothing can then remain but to turn back and make more lists
of the details whose principles are fixed, complete tables
of dead facts; that selfishness and altruism will find a
respectable equilibrium for jogging along till the sun goes
out and the worlds get even in temperature; finally, and
worst, that at death the individuality dissolves for ever,
and the personality gets split among the children. To the
extent that the former beliefs lead to a large and enjoyed
life full of motive for high action and thinking, does the
latter to a small and dark one; a life weighted with the
background consciousness of iron limitations. The proportion
of suicides rises steadily year by year in nearly every country
in Europe. Along with the obscuration of hope and the gathering
belief in the extinction of self at some time, comes the
determination to extinguish it now. Evolution is a widening
of consciousness till it includes that of others; a growing
belief in the impossibility of the extinction of consciousness;
an increasing intuitive comprehension of a man's unity with
the laws of things.
The possibility of suicide is the negation of evolution.
A man's acts are swayed according to the key-note of his
octave, according to his point of arrival in the scale of
evolution. If he be dead drunk, or the subject of apoplexy,
his acts are but little more than those of a vegetable; advanced
nerve-diseases will leave him but the functions of an animal;
selfishness is frequently the premonitory symptom of insanity;
certain alcohols render the impulse to suicide irresistible.
Therefore, by the presence of disease, a man can be pushed
down the scale of being and evolution, through all the grades
of selfishness, up which in the course of development he
has come, till he becomes scarcely, and then not at all,
conscious of the existence of others, from that point at
which the existence of others is as important to him as his
own. Suicide is the consummation of selfishness, and it is
this which modern thinking produces as its cream.
Taking now two aspects of Evolution, we shall say that it
is an increasing loss of the dominant sense of self, an increasing
share in the consciousness of others; and in the second,
that it is an increasing consciousness of relationship to
the forces and planes of nature. There is, as has been pointed
out, no sufficient and logical reason for placing the birth
of consciousness anywhere in the great scale. In all the
advance in complicity both as regards grouping of cells in
ganglia and other groups, and in the arrangement and number
of atoms in molecules, in all this line from the mineral
to the cerebral grey matter there does not seem any such
suddenness in change as should entitle us to say — "herewith
enters consciousness". If reaction to stimuli be the
test of consciousness, then the ameba is conscious,
the yeast ferment is conscious, the micro-organism of disease
is conscious, and the solution of copper that takes the opportunity
to [Page 10] precipitate about
the introduced knife is conscious. If it be said that the
animal would alone be conscious, what of the little microscopic
world that is equally animal and vegetable ? If consciousness
be called a function of nerve-matter, at what point in its
specialization does the previously unspecialized embryonic
cell acquire this function ?
The complex responses of a frog to the stimuli of life are
presumably conscious; why not his simpler responses when
his cord is severed ? why not the still simpler electric
responses of his individual muscles when their nerves are
cut ? why not the magnetic responses of the iron molecules
therein ? To draw a line anywhere in all the motions of being
is warranted by nothing. Yet consciousness may perhaps be
assumed to advance
in degree as at distant points to appear distinct in kind;
and the advance in degree is in the direction of synthesis.
The stone loses nothing of its characters on being split
in two; there are simply two stones. But the lopped-off branch
of a tree “dies" — that is, descends nearer
in the scale to a mineral; and subsequent mutilations produce
but two sticks instead of one, no longer changing its mode
of life; with the descent in mode of life should go a descent
in complexity and coherence of its consciousness. In man
is reached consciousness of himself — self-consciousness,
so far, the completest unification. Must the process stop
now? May there not be another mode as far above this, as
this above that of the tree, and the tree above that of the
mineral ? We therefore conceive of the growth of consciousness
as a synthesis of unit consciousnesses.
If molecules live in a stone as individuals and in man as
a whole, may not men, thinking and feeling now as units,
grow at last to a coherence wherein they think and feel as
one, overhung by and taking common share in the common consciousness
of life ? So far, then, evolution is loss of selfish consciousness,
and to make an attempt to realize this now would be to take
rank as allies with the evolving purpose of Nature.
Parallel
with this line of advance, and necessarily concomitant therewith,
is an increased delicacy and perfection of response, and
conscious response, to all the plans of forces. For there
are new forces that only take action after every new degree
of the fusion of units, after every step in advance up the
evolutionary grades. A ray of light affects a stone slowly,
simply, invisibly, or scarcely at all; it affects a flower
visibly in an hour; an electric current acts most obviously
upon the highly complex molecules of protoplasm; emotion
sways the lives and determines the deaths of men. What are
the forces which, affecting the lower worlds slowly, simply,
or not at all, affect men quickly and obviously, and what
is the ultimate tendency of the effects they produce ? In
another aspect of the same question, what planes are superimposed
upon the brute to make him a man, and what upon man to make
him a god ? We cannot see in the study of the universe any
warrant for any limit to expansion drawn anywhere. Wherever
we find a seed, we cannot but expect the fruit.
Appeal has
here to be made to certain bodies of evidence to which as
yet [Page 11] science, or orthodox
science, attaches little weight, or which it ignores.
There is an unconscious and self-deceptive fraud which is
apt to obtain with all of us, and which is being at this
day displayed by the leaders in science towards a set of
groups of facts. When we have fixed our modes of thinking
and grown crusted in our places, it is useless to set before
us new facts that seem to overthrow our old and somewhat
time-tried principles. Of the truth of these latter we are
certain, and though the new facts seem, perhaps, to inflict
with them a little awkwardly, they must obviously come in
ultimately under the accepted systems; meantime they can
quite well stand in the cold, disregarded. The more obtrusive
they become, the more studiously are they avoided, but fifty
years' steady growth of spiritualistic belief is fifty years'
activity of toes in large boots, and continuous deception
thereby on the part of millions, who must all take rank under
the two banners of the defrauders and the defrauded. This
seems absurd; but the sacred repose of the theories must
not be profaned. Old bottles must hold old wine. The modes
of scientific investigation rest at last upon the dicta of
the senses and assume, with certain corrections, the validity
of sense; but the point is as to whether all knowledge
has this basis, whether
there be not some transcending the field of sense.
The senses give dicta only concerning the qualities of things,
not the thing possessing the qualities. Were there a hundred
senses, we should know but a hundred qualities, remaining
still ignorant of the substance. Are, then, all our ideas
at bottom based on the
evidences of the senses, recombined in ever-increasing range
of abstractness? Is thought simply comparison. Are our conceptions
of Time and Space simply conceptions of things respectively
sequent and extended with the things disregarded, and hence
derived from the senses ? If this be maintained, where did
we get our conception attaching to the word consciousness
? This cannot be an idea arising from qualities. It cannot
have entered through any of the avenues of sense, or have
been abstracted from knowledge so entering. All modes of
thinking and observing must assume a mental region wherein
rules another lord than sense, and wherein certain primary
ideas arise. In one philosophical view Space and Time are
modes in which phenomena are by our own minds compelled to
clothe themselves for us, are innate pre-existent ideas,
arising in an occult mental region, which is not that of
ordinary consciousness. The problem, then, to be solved is
whether or not there be any evidence that consciousness can
be shifted back into this; whether from that region it is
ever possible to think.
In Herbert Spencer's view Space and Time are considered to
be abstract ideas, arising from things of sense, and, therefore,
not innate, being abstract extension and sequence; that is
to say, in the one case, the idea of size abstracted from
the thing possessing size, and in the other that of succession
abstracted from the events that succeed each other. Yet he
postulates an underlying reality to appearances, a noumenon
to phenomena, a possessor of qualities, presenting itself
to, or “welling up” in consciousness by a path
other [Page 12] than that through
the senses, or into a mental region not dominated by sense.
Our problem, therefore, remains. Can the ordinary location
of consciousness in the parts of the mind accessible along
the avenues of sense be shifted into that inner occult sanctum
wherein wells up this primary conception? As it is impossible
to help postulating such a region, can we make use of our
belief in it to get there ? We must study the conditions
under which thinking would transact itself if effected from
this standpoint. There must be
a ratio between the activities of this inner and the ordinary
outer mind. Thought withdrawn entirely from the latter and
concentrated in the former would leave the man apparently
unconscious, really unconscious as regards the outer world,
intensely conscious to the inner, and it is at once suggested
that this is the effect of anaesthetics. Sir Humphrey
Davy, recovering from anaesthesia, found himself exclaiming, “The
world is ideas; ideas are the only reality".
Moreover, the knowledge now open from this vantage-ground
would have no relation to words, and not be expressible therein,
for words deal with ideas arising out of the objective world.
And if we accept the first view of Space and Time, consciousness
will now have got behind their source, and will be independent
of them; will, in fact, be dealing with that which is; not
what will be, nor has been. To perfect forevision there could
be no time, for all the to-come would be the now; we, limited
in purview, seeing the universal picture in bits successively,
reflect our limitation and call it Time. To get behind Time
is to get behind limitation. Our very sense of personality
comes only from living in bits of things, and to live in
the All, to be co-extensive with possibility, to conceive
with the universal conception, is to reach Nirvana and to
know that space, time, motion, and personality are all illusion.
There is no state for embodiment in words; the intenser the
thinking the less can the thinker bring from his trance his
thoughts. But if in the future of evolution there be held
in store for man any such state as this, any such widening
and deepening of consciousness, there must be some indications
or evidences of the rudiments.
Occultism claims that mind has the potentiality of harmony,
plane for plane, with Nature, and if this be true its correspondence
with some at any rate of the psychic planes must prevail
now. We must be able to show some of the steps towards this
philosophically postulated indestructible conception of the
noumenon behind phenomena. And it would seem obvious that
this peremptory appeal from this real to the deepest recesses
of mind can rest only on the fact that it is mind, appealing
to its like. Forces act on their own plane,
and the fact that they effect changes in mind shows that
behind them, indicated crudely and clothed by them, the heart
and reality of them is mind.
That any new discoveries of
groups of facts fell in at once with existing scientific
theories would simply prove their want of value in the dispensation
of knowledge, for any theories that fail to formulate all
possible facts must ultimately get killed by those that lie
outside its range. “When the report of [Page
13] the
Paris Commission on Mesmerism of 1831 was read before the
Medical Academy of Paris, an academician named Castel rose
and protested against the printing thereof, because, he said,
if the reported facts were true, half of our physiological
science would be destroyed.” [ V. a clear review
of Du Prel’s
book in March “Theosophist,” the “Philosophie
der Mystik," also T.P.S. pamphlet No. 3]. It
would seem that the reported facts were true, and many more
of an equally destructive character. The facts of mesmerism
are getting too stalwart, and they are accordingly about
to be received into the true fold; but the Castels are uprising
in the usual disgust to offer the usual protests against
the facts of spiritualism and clairvoyance.
A proper study of mesmerism will serve to indicate for us
the possibility of the displacement of consciousness. It
is abundantly verified in the experiments, among others,
of Charcot at Paris, that a primary effect of mesmerism is
to produce anaesthesia. The numerous surgical operations
of Elliottson upon patients thus anaesthetized show
the same thing. But, so far from being helpless, the body
is more than ever under the control of the will. In an instance
reported by two of Charcot's colleagues, the hypnotized subject
was made by a simple act of will to produce all the obvious
and successive phenomena of a burn upon her
chest, without the application of heat, and after recovery.
Organic bodily changes are not only caused thus, but, if
existent, may undergo cure. Complex muscular responses are
rendered to magnets held about the head and over the body,
and small changes of heat, normally unrecognizable, distinguished.
If the subject promise, or be desired to effect it, certain
avenues of sense can be kept closed. He may wake blind, or
blind as concerns anyone person or thing. In touch with the
operator, the subject can be silently or by word led into
his state of mind, and the most varying emotions roused and
dominated, each producing its appropriate actions. Promises
concerning future performance made under this condition remain
after waking as residua outside the condition of waking consciousness,
coming duly thereafter at the promised time to fruitage as
acts.
According to promise, he may wake with one limb or half his
body paralyzed or anaesthetized. [ Further
details concerning these and like experiments may be found
in the "International Scientific" volume (Binet)
already referred to; and among innumerable others in the
studies of Heidenhain, Reichenbach, and in Professor Gregory's
book.]. Therefore, by some mesmeric process,
consciousness is displaced to a mental area, not that of
waking life, wherein bodily functions not ordinarily under
the control of the will pass into its control, and wherein
there is a new and increased susceptibility to the finer
forces of magnetism and electricity. A deeper state is within
the personal knowledge of many; further back from the frontiers
of mind, and responding to yet subtler forces. Herein arise
the powers of clairvoyance and psychometry. The limitations
of distance are more and more completely transcended, and
for the moment scenes remote in space and time are lived
in. [Page 14] None of these
powers are necessarily limited to the trance condition. Reichenbach
found that a certain amount of sensitivity to some of the
occult qualities of things can be developed in a few hours
by anyone who will remain in darkness and without food. Pyramidal
columns of light can be seen about the poles of magnets,
and chemical bodies recognised by the quality of the sensations
they impart. Gurney and Myers have placed on record evidence
enough that, in the ordinary waking state, minds are deeply
linked, without regard to space, and scenes and states of
one may be transferred to another, so that all the surroundings
of a man, and the emotions arising out of them, may be equally
vividly the property of his distant friend. And this most
often at the approach of some violent death, when, with the
passion of the scene, the whole mind is strung to an unwonted
intensity, and the picture powerfully projected upon some
sensitive imagination.
So also with the
barriers of time. We are all sometimes psychometrists; not
always seeing, but often feeling the phantom photographs
about us; re-thinking old thoughts; reclothing, like Denton's
wife, the old fossils with the life and colour they once
moved in: the haunted houses of psychical research are but
one of a thousand ways in which the past has written its
pictured records, and the vagaries of dreams are not all
our own. The current catalogue
of human faculties is incomplete. The generation waits before
a mass of new facts, wishing to see reason to believe them,
yet held back by the “second toe in boots" theorists.
But the facts are getting too uproarious to be ignored, though
to recognise them is to invite a revolution. Spiritualism,
mesmerism, clairvoyance and psychometry herald either a whirlwind
of changing thought and deepening knowledge, or a stupendous
and growing epidemic of credulous idiocy.
It is held, then, by the Occultist that the reasoners of
science are occupied with the part instead of the whole;
with secondaries instead of primaries. May it not be that
the transactions of the séance-room, wherein the pictures
of some vivid mind are forced by will to take objective form
and colour, palpable to all may be the epitome of a greater
process, and all the universe be the clothed ideas of a
mind behind the veil ? And it is no valid objection to this,
even were it true, to urge that the pictures of the séance-room
are an illusion common to all the spectators. Perhaps, also,
the world is an illusion common to mankind. There must be
a reality behind the illusion, in the greater, as in the
lesser process, and sensitives to the greater, as to the
lesser persistent ideas, only we call the former adepts,
seers, and prophets. And inasmuch as the strong will and
imagination can, in the séance-room, create the pictures
of which the sensitives or medium or all the circle are conscious,
it is held that this also is a type or epitome of and ultimately
to be evolved into the larger cosmic volition and ideation
which is creation. To this, at present rudimentary, receptive
and creative mental region, the region whence take origin
the conceptions of time and space, [Page
15] the region
wherein arises cognition of the ultimates of things, words
have no relation. It is only when its rays have filtered
down through the thick strata below that they take narrow
forms, and fill verbal frameworks.
Words are the lowest vehicle, the stage-coaches, in the communication
of thought, serving only till the psychic wires are strung
between the inner minds of all men. It is here that the free-will
controversy finds for us its solution. Man finds himself
full from moment to moment of the certainty that he acts
freely; submitting himself to rational distillation, he finds
that he can only act according to the voting-majority of
motives. The indestructible conception must for the higher
mind be the truth, for no motive can be ascribed to the primary
ideative processes. Once the higher lawless region be admitted,
the limits of the lower mind must
not be reflected upon it. The one is the creator; the other
deals only with things created. Reasoning is but the faculty
of one of many planes of consciousness, and will not serve
for the expression of the others. The musician lives nearer
the heart of creation than the logician and knows more of
its meaning, yet save in music he cannot convey it. The ultimate
state of man may be nearer that into which he is now thrown
by the richer blends of sound and colour than that produced
by the wooden grace of rigid syllogisms. In any case the
prevailing psychology can only be sure of one thing, and
that is that its theories are necessarily false, for they
embrace too few facts.
It speaks nothing to the point concerning the great ranges
of emotion arising out of sound, scent, and colour; it knows
nothing of the location of consciousness when the physical
body is unconscious; it knows nothing of the bewildering
thought-probing of the séance-room, nor of any other
of the thousand curious happenings and displays of spiritualism;
and it has not yet taken account of the powers of psychometry
nor of the modes whereby minds are linked through space.
A true psychology must deal with these and more. It must
rise above the lowest manifestations of mind as affected
by the outermost garb of Nature, and bring more to the front
its own dictum that there is a region in mind that cannot
free itself from the deepest reality behind everything. Psychology
must grow by the study rather of disease than of health.
In some insanities there is an entire change in the set characteristics
of the personality; or consciousness may be so split that
the subject views himself as two; Hartley Coleridge as a
child frequently spoke of himself as four distinct entities;
some homicides view their own crimes, whilst performing them,
with the horror of an outsider — the normal volition
and consciousness of the man is not in the acting part of
him, but stands a dismayed critic of the criminal; the psychic
phenomena of hysteria are obscurely linked with the periodicity
of the lunar cycle.
All these things a comprehensive psychology should, yet
does not explain. The law of association of ideas appears
to be absolutely transcended by the action of certain drugs.
In some constitutions Indian hemp arouses vast, vague or
vivid incoherent vistas and sheets of colour, rising and
dissolving with great sounds; or there come [Page
16] great pictures of men and nature beyond number
and time and space. De Quincey speaks of his opium visions
as being cast in a scale of time and space of inconceivable
magnitude. Behind these produced ideas of time and space
is the producing mind, working in a mode that is not reasoning.
Thus, if mind is the producer of the forms of things and
of one substance with what is behind form, psychology includes
all knowledge. Gathering up the threads, it is increasingly
suggested the more they are contemplated that evolution in
its totality comprises the expansion of will; the perfecting
of sensitivity to ideas; the breaking down of the barriers
of individual consciousness; and the slow change of relation
between the inner and outer minds, till the latter merges
in the former; the expansion of the ideative will, till the
pictures that are created no longer flit across the imagination
and vanish, but
are held and fashioned and clothed with or impressed on matter;
the attainment of perfect sensitivity to, or union with,
the great ideas of which objective things are copies till
the perceiver and the perceived are known for one.
So as time moves on, the lives of men must lighten, and the
heavy sense of limit dissolve into wider knowledge and pass
into the limbo of other illusions. All aspects of evolution
converge to one point. The finest force in Nature is thought;
to respond more and more perfectly to the thought of others
is to share their consciousness, and thus, losing the overbearing
sense of self, to become unselfish.
We have tried to show
that there is already in us, if we could but know it and
live in it, a germ of mind subtly linked with its like in
all men and in the moving springs of Nature, and that the
whole course of evolution is to raise the whole thinking
man to this level, into the blinding light of intuition.
.
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