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must either come through the mind of the psychic or be affected by the mental, physical, and moral habits of the psychic, and as a consequence be affected by these conditions, we shall see that we must always have a source of confirmation for our facts. In the study of personal identity, we have the testimony of the living to determine for us whether the communications are true or not, and our own experience in the physical world enables us to interpret their meaning. We find, too, that even the best messages are extremely fragmentary and confused, so that they are not testimony to the total material that was probably sent on its journey to the living. But subconscious coloring and contributions add immensely to the data that passes for spirit messages and we have to select from the mass those incidents which are clearly not subconscious fabrications, but which are verifiable by the living as supernormal information in spite of distortion by the mediumistic mind or organism through which they come. The fact of distortion suggests that all messages are subject to such influences and that proper discount has to be made for messages reporting the nature of a transcendental world.

It is not necessary to suppose that any purpose exists to distort them. It is inevitable, just as it is inevitable that any mind reporting impressions and narratives must act in accordance with its past experience and habits and express its conceptions in the mold of these prejudices, which we may call them. A bell always rings its own tone, no matter with what it is struck. A piece of wood gives its own sound in response to impact. It is the same with any physical object. A mirror reflects images according to the nature of its surface. A bell will not produce an opera; piece of wood will not ring curfew; a mirror will not sing a song. Each object acts and reacts according to its own nature, and the human mind is no exception

to this law. It must act along the line of its structure and habits. The amount of knowledge which it possesses determines the limits of its power to receive and express ideas. A mind which knows nothing but the commonest sensations cannot be made the vehicle for impressive oratory. It takes a mind of some intelligence to do this. A mediumistic mind must have some qualifications for expressing what comes to it from a transcendental world and its communications with such a world will be limited to its abilities and its experience as a vehicle for ideas of any kind.

If the spiritual world be only a replica of the physical and so expressible in the terms that are intelligible to us in the physical world, the main obstacle will be in getting communications at all. They might be selfexplanatory, if that world could be described in our terms. But suppose it be quite different. The whole process will then encounter difficulties of which people little dream. Some would even go so far as to say that no possible conception of a transcendental world could be obtained, unless it had some points in common with the physical life, and this contention would be hard to refute. Let us take a good analogy.

Suppose that a man born blind but having hearing tried to tell his auditory experiences to a man who had lost his hearing, but retained his vision intact. How would such a person describe his experiences to the blind man? It would be in fact absolutely impossible for him to communicate any intelligible idea of his auditory experiences. There is nothing in common between the sensations of sight and hearing. All that the blind man could say about his auditory sensations, or the deaf man about his visual sensations would convey nothing to the friend who had not the sense which the communicator retained. The only common element in such experiences might be the emotions which each had in his own experience. The visual experiences of

the one might have the same kind of emotions accompanying his visual sensations that the other's hearing had in connection with audition. They could communicate with each other intelligibly only in terms of common emotions. The sensations and their meaning would be wholly absent for each of them, so far as common knowledge is concerned.

The process of communicating anything at all between the living is much the same. We have to possess a common language or we are much isolated from each other as spirits can be supposed to be from the living. Signs, where language does not exist, are no exception to this statement. Language is only an auditory sign as mimicry and imitation are to vision. We have to agree on symbols beforehand in order to communicate at all. Language in that way, combined with imitation on the part of the younger generation, builds up a vast system of symbols of common experiences, where we assume that we are alike in constitution and experiences, and thus we come to be able to symbolize what we know, and the person hearing the symbols can use his own experience for understanding what we mean.

This means that, naturally or normally we cannot communicate with each other at all, even among the living, and that we have had to develop an arbitrary and conventional system of symbols for social and other purposes. And all this is true in spite of the advantages which we enjoy in the possession of a physical organism and sensory relations which do not subsist between the living and the dead. But when a spirit is bodiless, as we know bodies, and without the conditions for producing on the living the same impressions as a living organism and its speech can do, how much more difficult it must be for the dead to communicate with us. It is quite natural to believe it absolutely impossible, but any such belief would be based upon assumptions that might not be true, though we are not familiar

with anything in normal experience to make it impossible. How can a disembodied reality exercise any influence on an embodied one? I do not ask this question to imply a negative answer, but to suggest the difficulty of the problem which the alleged fact of communication creates. But it is certain that the difficulties must be greater than between the living, where we regard it is naturally impossible and achievable only by conventional means.

Now if the transcendental world be totally different from the physical in its essential characteristics, how can we expect any ready commerce of ideas between it and us? Suppose it be a mental world altogether, how can we expect our sensory ideas to represent it? Assuming it to be a purely mental world, we should encounter at least the same difficulties that we meet in our physical life when we try to tell each other what we mean by mental phenomena. Indeed we cannot do it in sensory terms and we have to rely upon symbols of common sensory experiences with the hope that common mental events may become intelligible to each other by association with the sensory. Uniformities of coexistence and sequence between mental and sensory may enable us to suggest to each other what we mean by our mental states, and indeed it has been this very antithesis between the mental and the physical that has given rise to a dualistic philosophy and shown the difficulty of making our inner life intelligible in sensory symbols.

Let me illustrate what I have said. First a man familiar with steam engines could not make clear to an Esquimau what such an engine is, even by the use of the English language, so far as an Esquimau would know it, much less if the Esquimau did not know any English. He might call it a horse with wheels for legs and fire for power, but this would not convey to him a correct conception of it. He might convey some

idea of its motion by comparing this motion with that with which the Esquimau was familiar, by saying for instance, that in so many degrees of movement of the sun it went such and such a distance with which the Esquimau was familiar in his own movements. He would find that the engine had an incredible velocity compared with his own, but this would not help him to any clear conception of what the engine was. It would only give some analogy of its behavior compared with his own. It would not give him a mental picture of what the engine was.

It should be clear therefore, what the difficulties are in trying to form a conception of a transcendental world. If it were completely analogous to the physical world the same language would describe it that describes the physical. But conceding its resemblance to this life, with nothing but the supersensible to distinguish it from our sensory ideas, we should encounter all the difficulties in the process of communication in our effort to obtain a clear idea of it. These difficulties represent or are represented in the fragmentary and confused nature of the messages coming from its inhabitants, in the limitations imposed by subconscious conditions through which the messages have to come, constituted by the experience and prejudices of the medium, and perhaps many other obstacles. Then in addition they lack, at present, the confirmation we desire.

But now suppose that the spiritual world is wholly different from the physical. Suppose that supersensible means more than merely inaccessible to sense perception, though like it in form. Suppose it means a purely mental world in which the forms of time and space, as perceived by sense, do not participate. What probability is there that we can form any intelligible conception of what it is like, even if communication were perfectly easy? Here we would seem to have

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