Memories and Studies

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Such personal examples will convert no one, and of course they ought
not to. Nor do I seek at all in this article to convert any one to
belief that psychical research is an important branch of science. To
do that, I should have to quote evidence; and those for whom the
volumes of S. P. R. "Proceedings" already published count for nothing
would remain in their dogmatic slumber, though one rose from the dead.
No, not to convert readers, but simply to _put my own state of mind
upon record publicly_ is the purpose of my present writing. Some one
said to me a short time ago that after my twenty-five years of dabbling
in "Psychics," it would be rather shameful were I unable to state any
definite conclusions whatever as a consequence. I had to agree; so I
now proceed to take up the challenge and express such convictions as
have been engendered in me by that length of experience, be the same
true or false ones. I may be dooming myself to the pit in the eyes of
better-judging posterity; I may be raising myself to honor; I am
willing to take the risk, for what I shall write is _my_ truth, as I
now see it.

I began this article by confessing myself baffled. I _am_ baffled, as
to spirit-return, and as to many other special problems. I am also
constantly baffled as to what to think of this or that particular
story, for the sources of error in any one observation are seldom fully
knowable. But weak sticks make strong faggots; and when the stories
fall into consistent sorts that point each in a definite direction, one
gets a sense of being in presence of genuinely natural types of
phenomena. As to there being such real natural types of phenomena
ignored by orthodox science, I am not baffled at all, for I am fully
convinced of it. One cannot get demonstrative proof here. One has to
follow one's personal sense, which, of course, is liable to err, of the
dramatic probabilities of nature. Our critics here obey their sense of
dramatic probability as much as we do. Take "raps" for example, and
the whole business of objects moving without contact. "Nature," thinks
the scientific man, is not so unutterably silly. The cabinet, the
darkness, the tying, suggest a sort of human rat-hole life exclusively
and "swindling" is for him the dramatically sufficient explanation. It
probably is, in an indefinite majority of instances; yet it is to me
dramatically improbable that the swindling should not have accreted
round some originally genuine nucleus. If we look at human imposture
as a historic phenomenon, we find it always imitative. One swindler
imitates a previous swindler, but the first swindler of that kind
imitated some one who was honest. You can no more create an absolutely
new trick than you can create a new word without any previous
basis.--You don't know how to go about it. Try, reader, yourself, to
invent an unprecedented kind of "physical phenomenon of spiritualism."
When _I_ try, I find myself mentally turning over the regular
medium-stock, and thinking how I might improve some item. This being
the dramatically probable human way, I think differently of the whole
type, taken collectively, from the way in which I may think of the
single instance. I find myself believing that there is "something in"
these never ending reports of physical phenomena, although I have n't
yet the least positive notion of the something. It becomes to my mind
simply a very worthy problem for investigation. Either I or the
scientist is of course a fool, with our opposite views of probability
here; and I only wish he might feel the liability, as cordially as I
do, to pertain to both of us.

I fear I look on Nature generally with more charitable eyes than his,
though perhaps he would pause if he realized as I do, how vast the
fraudulency is which inconsistency he must attribute to her. Nature is
brutal enough, Heaven knows; but no one yet has held her non-human side
to be _dishonest_, and even in the human sphere deliberate deceit is
far rarer than the "classic" intellect, with its few and rigid
categories, was ready to acknowledge. There is a hazy penumbra in us
all where lying and delusion meet, where passion rules beliefs as well
as conduct, and where the term "scoundrel" does not clear up everything
to the depths as it did for our forefathers. The first automatic
writing I ever saw was forty years ago. I unhesitatingly thought of it
as deceit, although it contained vague elements of supernormal
knowledge. Since then I have come to see in automatic writing one
example of a department of human activity as vast as it is enigmatic.
Every sort of person is liable to it, or to something equivalent to it;
and whoever encourages it in himself finds himself personating someone
else, either signing what he writes by fictitious name, or, spelling
out, by ouija-board or table-tips, messages from the departed. Our
subconscious region seems, as a rule, to be dominated either by a crazy
"will to make-believe," or by some curious external force impelling us
to personation. The first difference between the psychical researcher
and the inexpert person is that the former realizes the commonness and
typicality of the phenomenon here, while the latter, less informed,
thinks it so rare as to be unworthy of attention. _I wish to go on
record for the commonness_.

The next thing I wish to go on record for is _the presence_, in the
midst of all the humbug, _of really supernormal knowledge_. By this I
mean knowledge that cannot be traced to the ordinary sources of
information--the senses namely, of the automatist. In really strong
mediums this knowledge seems to be abundant, though it is usually
spotty, capricious and unconnected. Really strong mediums are
rarities; but when one starts with them and works downwards into less
brilliant regions of the automatic life, one tends to interpret many
slight but odd coincidences with truth as possibly rudimentary forms of
this kind of knowledge.

What is one to think of this queer chapter in human nature? It is odd
enough on any view. If all it means is a preposterous and inferior
monkey-like tendency to forge messages, systematically embedded in the
soul of all of us, it is weird; and weirder still that it should then
own all this supernormal information. If on the other hand the
supernormal information be the key to the phenomenon, it ought to be
superior; and then how ought we to account for the "wicked partner,"
and for the undeniable mendacity and inferiority of so much of the
performance? We are thrown, for our conclusions, upon our instinctive
sense of the dramatic probabilities of nature. My own dramatic sense
tends instinctively to picture the situation as an interaction between
slumbering faculties in the automatist's mind and a cosmic environment
of _other consciousness_ of some sort which is able to work upon them.
If there were in the universe a lot of diffuse soul-stuff, unable of
itself to get into consistent personal form, or to take permanent
possession of an organism, yet always craving to do so, it might get
its head into the air, parasitically, so to speak, by profiting by weak
spots in the armor of human minds, and slipping in and stirring up
there the sleeping tendency to personate. It would induce habits in
the subconscious region of the mind it used thus, and would seek above
all things to prolong its social opportunities by making itself
agreeable and plausible. It would drag stray scraps of truth with it
from the wider environment, but would betray its mental inferiority by
knowing little how to weave them into any important or significant
story. This, I say, is the dramatic view which my mind spontaneously
takes, and it has the advantage of falling into line with ancient human
traditions. The views of others are just as dramatic, _for the
phenomenon is actuated by will of some sort anyhow_, and wills give
rise to dramas. The spiritist view, as held by Messrs. Hyslop and
Hodgson, sees a "will to communicate," struggling through inconceivable
layers of obstruction in the conditions. I have heard Hodgson liken
the difficulties to those of two persons who on earth should have only
dead-drunk servants to use as their messengers. The scientist, for his
part, sees a "will to deceive," watching its chance in all of us, and
able (possibly?) to use "telepathy" in its service.

Which kind of will, and how many kinds of will are most inherently
probable? Who can say with certainty? The only certainty is that the
phenomena are enormously complex, especially if one includes in them
such intellectual flights of mediumship as Swedenborg's, and if one
tries in any way to work the physical phenomena in. That is why I
personally am as yet neither a convinced believer in parasitic demons,
nor a spiritist, nor a scientist, but still remain a psychical
researcher waiting for more facts before concluding.

Out of my experience, such as it is (and it is limited enough) one
fixed conclusion dogmatically emerges, and that is this, that we with
our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest.
The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves, and
Conanicut and Newport hear each other's fog-horns. But the trees also
commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also
hang together through the ocean's bottom. Just so there is a continuum
of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but
accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a
mother-sea or reservoir. Our "normal" consciousness is circumscribed
for adaptation to our external earthly environment, but the fence is
weak in spots, and fitful influences from beyond leak in, showing the
otherwise unverifiable common connection. Not only psychic research,
but metaphysical philosophy, and speculative biology are led in their
own ways to look with favor on some such "panpsychic" view of the
universe as this. Assuming this common reservoir of consciousness to
exist, this bank upon which we all draw, and in which so many of
earth's memories must in some way be stored, or mediums would not get
at them as they do, the question is, What is its own structure? What
is its inner topography? This question, first squarely formulated by
Myers, deserves to be called "Myers' problem" by scientific men
hereafter. What are the conditions of individuation or insulation in
this mother-sea? To what tracts, to what active systems functioning
separately in it, do personalities correspond? Are individual
"spirits" constituted there? How numerous, and of how many hierarchic
orders may these then be? How permanent? How transient? And how
confluent with one another may they become?

What again, are the relations between the cosmic consciousness and
matter? Are there subtler forms of matter which upon occasion may
enter into functional connection with the individuations in the psychic
sea, and then, and then only, show themselves?--So that our ordinary
human experience, on its material as well as on its mental side, would
appear to be only an extract from the larger psycho-physical world?

Vast, indeed, and difficult is the inquirer's prospect here, and the
most significant data for his purpose will probably be just these dingy
little mediumistic facts which the Huxleyan minds of our time find so
unworthy of their attention. But when was not the science of the
future stirred to its conquering activities by the little rebellious
exceptions to the science of the present? Hardly, as yet, has the
surface of the facts called "psychic" begun to be scratched for
scientific purposes. It is through following these facts, I am
persuaded, that the greatest scientific conquests of the coming
generation will be achieved. _Kuehn ist das Muehen, herrlich der Lohn!_

[1] Published under the title "Confidences of a Psychical Researcher"
in the _American Magazine_, October, 1909. For a more complete and
less popular statement of some theories suggested in this article see
the last pages of a "Report on Mrs. Piper's Hodgson-Control" in
_Proceedings of the [Eng.] Society for Psychical Research_, 1909, 470;
also printed in _Proc. of Am. Soc. for Psychical Research_ for the same
year.

[2] T. H. Huxley, "Life and Letters," I, 240.

IX

ON SOME MENTAL EFFECTS OF THE EARTHQUAKE[1]

When I departed from Harvard for Stanford University last December,
almost the last good-by I got was that of my old Californian friend B:
"I hope they'll give you a touch of earthquake while you 're there, so
that you may also become acquainted with that Californian institution."

Accordingly, when, lying awake at about half past five on the morning
of April 18 in my little "flat" on the campus of Stanford, I felt the
bed begin to waggle, my first consciousness was one of gleeful
recognition of the nature of the movement. "By Jove," I said to
myself, "here's B'ssold [Transcriber's note: 'B's old'?] earthquake,
after all!" And then, as it went _crescendo_. "And a jolly good one
it is, too!" I said.

Sitting up involuntarily, and taking a kneeling position, I was thrown
down on my face as it went _fortior_ shaking the room exactly as a
terrier shakes a rat. Then everything that was on anything else slid
off to the floor, over went bureau and chiffonier with a crash, as the
_fortissimo_ was reached; plaster cracked, an awful roaring noise
seemed to fill the outer air, and in an instant all was still again,
save the soft babble of human voices from far and near that soon began
to make itself heard, as the inhabitants in costumes _negliges_ in
various degrees sought the greater safety of the street and yielded to
the passionate desire for sympathetic communication.

The thing was over, as I understand the Lick Observatory to have
declared, in forty-eight seconds. To me it felt as if about that
length of time, although I have heard others say that it seemed to them
longer. In my case, sensation and emotion were so strong that little
thought, and no reflection or volition, were possible in the short time
consumed by the phenomenon.

The emotion consisted wholly of glee and admiration; glee at the
vividness which such an abstract idea or verbal term as "earthquake"
could put on when translated into sensible reality and verified
concretely; and admiration at the way in which the frail little wooden
house could hold itself together in spite of such a shaking. I felt no
trace whatever of fear; it was pure delight and welcome.

"_Go_ it," I almost cried aloud, "and go it _stronger_!"

I ran into my wife's room, and found that she, although awakened from
sound sleep, had felt no fear, either. Of all the persons whom I later
interrogated, very few had felt any fear while the shaking lasted,
although many had had a "turn," as they realized their narrow escapes
from bookcases or bricks from chimney-breasts falling on their beds and
pillows an instant after they had left them.

As soon as I could think, I discerned retrospectively certain peculiar
ways in which my consciousness had taken in the phenomenon. These ways
were quite spontaneous, and, so to speak, inevitable and irresistible.

First, I personified the earthquake as a permanent individual entity.
It was _the_ earthquake of my friend B's augury, which had been lying
low and holding itself back during all the intervening months, in
order, on that lustrous April morning, to invade my room, and energize
the more intensely and triumphantly. It came, moreover, directly to
_me_. It stole in behind my back, and once inside the room, had me all
to itself, and could manifest itself convincingly. Animus and intent
were never more present in any human action, nor did any human activity
ever more definitely point back to a living agent as its source and
origin.

All whom I consulted on the point agreed as to this feature in their
experience. "It expressed intention," "It was vicious," "It was bent
on destruction," "It wanted to show its power," or what not. To me, it
wanted simply to manifest the full meaning of its name. But what was
this "It"? To some, apparently, a vague demonic power; to me an
individualized being, B's earthquake, namely.

One informant interpreted it as the end of the world and the beginning
of the final judgment. This was a lady in a San Francisco hotel, who
did not think of its being an earthquake till after she had got into
the street and some one had explained it to her. She told me that the
theological interpretation had kept fear from her mind, and made her
take the shaking calmly. For "science," when the tensions in the
earth's crust reach the breaking-point, and strata fall into an altered
equilibrium, earthquake is simply the collective _name_ of all the
cracks and shakings and disturbances that happen. They _are_ the
earthquake. But for me _the_ earthquake was the _cause_ of the
disturbances, and the perception of it as a living agent was
irresistible. It had an overpowering dramatic convincingness.

I realize now better than ever how inevitable were men's earlier
mythologic versions of such catastrophes, and how artificial and
against the grain of our spontaneous perceiving are the later habits
into which science educates us. It was simply impossible for untutored
men to take earthquakes into their minds as anything but supernatural
warnings or retributions.

A good instance of the way in which the tremendousness of a catastrophe
may banish fear was given me by a Stanford student. He was in the
fourth story of Encina Hall, an immense stone dormitory building.
Awakened from sleep, he recognized what the disturbance was, and sprang
from the bed, but was thrown off his feet in a moment, while his books
and furniture fell round him. Then with an awful, sinister, grinding
roar, everything gave way, and with chimneys, floor-beams, walls and
all, he descended through the three lower stories of the building into
the basement. "This is my end, this is my death," he felt; but all the
while no trace of fear. The experience was too overwhelming for
anything but passive surrender to it. (Certain heavy chimneys had
fallen in, carrying the whole centre of the building with them.)

Arrived at the bottom, he found himself with rafters and _debris_ round
him, but not pinned in or crushed. He saw daylight, and crept toward
it through the obstacles. Then, realizing that he was in his
nightgown, and feeling no pain anywhere, his first thought was to get
back to his room and find some more presentable clothing. The
stairways at Encina Hall are at the ends of the building. He made his
way to one of them, and went up the four flights, only to find his room
no longer extant. Then he noticed pain in his feet, which had been
injured, and came down the stairs with difficulty. When he talked with
me ten days later he had been in hospital a week, was very thin and
pale, and went on crutches, and was dressed in borrowed clothing.

So much for Stanford, where all our experiences seem to have been very
similar. Nearly all our chimneys went down, some of them
disintegrating from top to bottom; parlor floors were covered with
bricks; plaster strewed the floors; furniture was everywhere upset and
dislocated; but the wooden dwellings sprang back to their original
position, and in house after house not a window stuck or a door scraped
at top or bottom. Wood architecture was triumphant! Everybody was
excited, but the excitement at first, at any rate, seemed to be almost
joyous. Here at last was a _real_ earthquake after so many years of
harmless waggle! Above all, there was an irresistible desire to talk
about it, and exchange experiences.

Most people slept outdoors for several subsequent nights, partly to be
safer in case of recurrence, but also to work off their emotion, and
get the full unusualness out of the experience. The vocal babble of
early-waking girls and boys from the gardens of the campus, mingling
with the birds' songs and the exquisite weather, was for three or four
days delightful sunrise phenomenon.

Now turn to San Francisco, thirty-five miles distant, from which an
automobile ere long brought us the dire news of a city in ruins, with
fires beginning at various points, and the water-supply interrupted. I
was fortunate enough to board the only train of cars--a very small
one--that got up to the city; fortunate enough also to escape in the
evening by the only train that left it. This gave me and my valiant
feminine escort some four hours of observation. My business is with
"subjective" phenomena exclusively; so I will say nothing of the
material ruin that greeted us on every hand--the daily papers and the
weekly journals have done full justice to that topic. By midday, when
we reached the city, the pall of smoke was vast and the dynamite
detonations had begun, but the troops, the police and the firemen
seemed to have established order, dangerous neighborhoods were roped
off everywhere and picketed, saloons closed, vehicles impressed, and
every one at work who _could_ work.

It was indeed a strange sight to see an entire population in the
streets, busy as ants in an uncovered ant-hill scurrying to save their
eggs and larvae. Every horse, and everything on wheels in the city,
from hucksters' wagons to automobiles, was being loaded with what
effects could be scraped together from houses which the advancing
flames were threatening. The sidewalks were covered with well-dressed
men and women, carrying baskets, bundles, valises, or dragging trunks
to spots of greater temporary safety, soon to be dragged farther, as
the fire kept spreading!

In the safer quarters, every doorstep was covered with the dwelling's
tenants, sitting surrounded with their more indispensable chattels, and
ready to flee at a minute's notice. I think every one must have fasted
on that day, for I saw no one eating. There was no appearance of
general dismay, and little of chatter or of inco-ordinated excitement.

Every one seemed doggedly bent on achieving the job which he had set
himself to perform; and the faces, although somewhat tense and set and
grave, were inexpressive of emotion. I noticed only three persons
overcome, two Italian women, very poor, embracing an aged fellow
countrywoman, and all weeping. Physical fatigue and seriousness were
the only inner states that one could read on countenances.

With lights forbidden in the houses, and the streets lighted only by
the conflagration, it was apprehended that the criminals of San
Francisco would hold high carnival on the ensuing night. But whether
they feared the disciplinary methods of the United States troops, who
were visible everywhere, or whether they were themselves solemnized by
the immensity of the disaster, they lay low and did not "manifest,"
either then or subsequently.

The only very discreditable thing to human nature that occurred was
later, when hundreds of lazy "bummers" found that they could keep
camping in the parks, and make alimentary storage-batteries of their
stomachs, even in some cases getting enough of the free rations in
their huts or tents to last them well into the summer. This charm of
pauperized vagabondage seems all along to have been Satan's most
serious bait to human nature. There was theft from the outset, but
confined, I believe, to petty pilfering.

Cash in hand was the only money, and millionaires and their families
were no better off in this respect than any one. Whoever got a vehicle
could have the use of it; but the richest often went without, and spent
the first two nights on rugs on the bare ground, with nothing but what
their own arms had rescued. Fortunately, those nights were dry and
comparatively warm, and Californians are accustomed to camping
conditions in the summer, so suffering from exposure was less great
than it would have been elsewhere. By the fourth night, which was
rainy, tents and huts had brought most campers under cover.

I went through the city again eight days later. The fire was out, and
about a quarter of the area stood unconsumed. Intact skyscrapers
dominated the smoking level majestically and superbly--they and a few
walls that had survived the overthrow. Thus has the courage of our
architects and builders received triumphant vindication!

The inert elements of the population had mostly got away, and those
that remained seemed what Mr. H. G. Wells calls "efficients." Sheds
were already going up as temporary starting-points of business. Every
one looked cheerful, in spite of the awful discontinuity of past and
future, with every familiar association with material things
dissevered; and the discipline and order were practically perfect.

As these notes of mine must be short, I had better turn to my more
generalized reflections.

Two things in retrospect strike me especially, and are the most
emphatic of all my impressions. Both are reassuring as to human nature.

The first of these was the rapidity of the improvisation of order out
of chaos. It is clear that just as in every thousand human beings
there will be statistically so many artists, so many athletes, so many
thinkers, and so many potentially good soldiers, so there will be so
many potential organizers in times of emergency. In point of fact, not
only in the great city, but in the outlying towns, these natural
ordermakers, whether amateurs or officials, came to the front
immediately. There seemed to be no possibility which there was not
some one there to think of, or which within twenty-four hours was not
in some way provided for.

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