The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 by Various

V >> Various >> The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17

Lorde god, what incomparable swetnesse of wordes and mater shall
he finde in the saide warkes of Plato and Cicero; wherin is ioyned
grauitie with dilectation, excellent wysedome with diuine
eloquence, absolute vertue with pleasure incredible, and euery
place is so infarced [crowded] with profitable counsaile, ioyned
with honestie, that those thre bokes be almoste sufficient to make
a perfecte and excellent gouernour.

There is no need to dwell on this aspect of the classics. He who cares to
follow their full working in this direction, as did our English humanist,
may find it exhibited in Plato's political and ethical scheme of
self-development, or in Aristotle's ideal of the Golden Mean which
combines magnanimity with moderation, and elevation with self-knowledge.
If a single word were used to describe the character and state of life
upheld by Plato and Aristotle, as spokesmen of their people, it would be
_eleutheria_, _liberty_: the freedom to cultivate the higher part of a
man's nature--his intellectual prerogative, his desire of truth, his
refinements of taste--and to hold the baser part of himself in subjection;
the freedom, also, for its own perfection, and indeed for its very
existence, to impose an outer conformity to, or at least respect for, the
laws of this inner government on others who are of themselves ungoverned.
Such liberty is the ground of true distinction; it implies the opposite of
an equalitarianism which reserves its honors and rewards for those who
attain a bastard kind of distinction by the cunning of leadership, without
departing from common standards--the demagogues who rise by flattery. But
it is, on the other hand, by no means dependent on the artificial
distinctions of privilege, and is peculiarly adapted to an age whose
appointed task must be to create a natural aristocracy as a _via media_
between an equalitarian democracy and a prescriptive oligarchy or
plutocracy. It is a notable fact that, as the real hostility to the
classics in the present day arises from an instinctive suspicion of them
as standing in the way of a downward-levelling mediocrity, so, at other
times, they have fallen under displeasure for their veto on a contrary
excess. Thus, in his savage attack on the Commonwealth, to which he gave
the significant title _Behemoth_, Hobbes lists the reading of classical
history among the chief causes of the rebellion. "There were," he says,
"an exceeding great number of men of the better sort, that had been so
educated as that in their youth, having read the books written by famous
men of the ancient Grecian and Roman commonwealths concerning their polity
and great actions, in which books the popular government was extolled by
that glorious name of liberty, and monarchy disgraced by the name of
tyranny, they became thereby in love with their forms of government; and
out of these men were chosen the greatest part of the House of Commons; or
if they were not the greatest part, yet by advantage of their eloquence
were always able to sway the rest." To this charge Hobbes returns again
and again, even declaring that "the universities have been to this nation
as the Wooden Horse was to the Trojans." And the uncompromising monarchist
of the _Leviathan_, himself a classicist of no mean attainments, as may be
known by his translation of Thucydides, was not deceived in his
accusation. The tyrannicides of Athens and Rome, the Aristogeitons and
Brutuses and others, were the heroes by whose example the leaders of the
French Revolution (rightly, so far as they did not fall into the opposite,
equalitarian extreme) were continually justifying their acts:

There Brutus starts and stares by midnight taper,
Who all the day enacts--a woollen-draper.

And again, in the years of the Risorgimento, more than one of the
champions of Italian liberty went to death with those great names on their
lips.

So runs the law of order and right subordination. But if the classics
offer the best service to education by inculcating an aristocracy of
intellectual distinction, they are equally effective in enforcing the
similar lesson of time. It is a true saying of our ancient humanist that
"the longer it continueth in a name or lineage, the more is nobility
extolled and marvelled at." It is true because in this way our imagination
is working with the great conservative law of growth. Whatever may be in
theory our democratic distaste for the insignia of birth, we cannot get
away from the fact that there is a certain honor of inheritance, and that
we instinctively pay homage to one who represents a noble name. There is
nothing really illogical in this: for, as an English statesman has put it,
"the past is one of the elements of our power." He is the wise democrat
who, with no opposition to such a decree of Nature, endeavors to control
its operation by expecting noble service where the memory of nobility
abides. When last year Oxford bestowed its highest honor on an American,
distinguished not only for his own public acts but for the great tradition
embodied in his name, the Orator of the University did not omit this
legitimate appeal to the imagination, singularly appropriate in its
academic Latin:

... Statim succurrit animo antiqua illa Romae condicio, cum non
tam propter singulos cives quam propter singulas gentes nomen
Romanum floreret. Cum enim civis alicujus et avum et proavum
principes civitatis esse creatos, cum patrem legationis munus apud
aulam Britannicam summa cum laude esse exsecutum cognovimus; cum
denique ipsum per totum bellum stipendia equo meritum, summa
pericula "Pulcra pro Libertate" ausum,... Romanae alicujus
gentis--Brutorum vel Deciorum--annales evolvere videmur, qui
testimonium adhibent "fortes creari fortibus," et majorum exemplis
et imaginibus nepotes ad virtutem accendi.

Is there any man so dull of soul as not to be stirred by that enumeration
of civic services zealously inherited; or is there any one so envious of
the past as not to believe that such memories should be honored in the
present as an incentive to noble emulation?

Well, we cannot all of us count Presidents and Ambassadors among our
ancestors, but we can, if we will, in the genealogy of the inner life
enroll ourselves among the adopted sons of a family in comparison with
which the Bruti and Decii of old and the Adamses of to-day are veritable
_new men_. We can see what defence against the meaner depredations of the
world may be drawn from the pride of birth, when, as it sometimes happens,
the obligation of a great past is kept as a contract with the present;
shall we forget to measure the enlargement and elevation of mind which
ought to come to a man who has made himself the heir of the ancient Lords
of Wisdom? "To one small people," as Sir Henry Maine has said, in words
often quoted, "it was given to create the principle of Progress. That
people was the Greek. Except the blind forces of Nature, nothing moves in
this world which is not Greek in its origin." That is a hard saying, but
scarcely exaggerated. Examine the records of our art and our science, our
philosophy and the enduring element of our faith, our statecraft and our
notion of liberty, and you will find that they all go back for their
inspiration to that one small people, and strike their roots into the soil
of Greece. What we have added, it is well to know; but he is the
aristocrat of the mind who can display a diploma from the schools of the
Academy and the Lyceum, and from the Theatre of Dionysus. What tradition
of ancestral achievement in the Senate or on the field of battle shall
broaden a man's outlook and elevate his will equally with the
consciousness that his way of thinking and feeling has come down to him by
so long and honorable a descent, or shall so confirm him in his better
judgment against the ephemeral and vulgarizing solicitations of the hour?
Other men are creatures of the visible moment; he is a citizen of the past
and of the future. And such a charter of citizenship it is the first duty
of the college to provide.

I have limited myself in these pages to a discussion of what may be called
the public side of education, considering the classics in their power to
mould character and foster sound leadership in a society much given to
drifting. Of the inexhaustible joy and consolation they afford to the
individual, only he can have full knowledge who has made the writers of
Greece and Rome his friends and counsellors through many vicissitudes of
life. It is related of Sainte-Beuve, who, according to Renan, read
everything and remembered everything, that one could observe a peculiar
serenity on his face whenever he came down from his study after reading a
book of Homer. The cost of learning the language of Homer is not small;
but so are all fair things difficult, as the Greek proverb runs, and the
reward in this case is precious beyond estimation.

Nor need we forget another proverb from Greece, with its spirit of
"accommodation"--that the half is sometimes greater than the whole. Even a
moderate acquaintance with the language, helped out by good translations
(especially in such form as the Loeb Classics are now offering, with the
original and the English on opposite pages), will go a surprising length
towards keeping a man, amid the exactions of a professional or otherwise
busy life, in possession of the heritage to which our age has grown so
perilously indifferent.

HYPNOTISM, TELEPATHY, AND DREAMS

A good many good judges find the world more out of joint, and moving with
a more threatening rattling, than at any previous time since the French
Revolution, and think that this is largely because the machine has lost
too much of that regulation it used to get from the religions. Much of the
regulation came from an interest in things wider than those directly
revealed by sense.

Possibly a revival of such an interest may be promised by the recent
indications of a range of our forces, both physical and psychic, far wider
than previous experience has indicated. This leads us to invite attention
to some unusual psychic phenomena evinced by persons of exceptional
sensibilities not yet as well understood, or even as carefully
investigated, as perhaps they deserve to be. The physical phenomena are
outside of our present purpose.

There are hundreds of well authenticated reports of super-usual visions.
The vast majority of them, however, were experienced when the percipients
were in bed, but believed themselves awake. But almost everybody has often
believed himself awake in bed, when he was only dreaming. Hence the
probability is overwhelming that most of these super-usual experiences
were had in dreams.

But it is certain that not all were, at least in dreams as ordinarily
understood; but there seems to be a waking dream state. Foster's visions
virtually all came while he was awake, and they were generally at once
described by him as if he were describing a landscape or a play. At times
he very closely identified himself with some personality of his visions,
and acted out the personality, just as Mrs. Piper has habitually done. The
following is an approximate instance, quoted by Bartlett (_The Salem
Seer_, p. 51 f.):

Says a writer in the New York _World_, Dec. 27, 1885:

... While we were talking one night, Foster and I, there came a
knock at the door. Bartlett arose and opened it, disclosing as he
did so two young men plainly dressed, of marked provincial
aspect.... I saw at once that they were clients, and arose to go.
Foster restrained me.

"Sit down," he said. "I'll try and get rid of them, for I'm not in
the humor to be disturbed...."

Foster hinted that he had no particular inclination to gratify
them then and there, but they protested that they had come some
distance, and, with a characteristically good-natured smile, he
gave in....

Then follows an account of a fairly good seance--taps on the
marble table, reading pellets, describing persons, etc., until I
thought Foster was tired of the interview and was feigning sleep
to end it. All of a sudden he sprang to his feet with such an
expression of horror and consternation as an actor playing Macbeth
would have given a good deal to imitate. His eyes glared, his
breast heaved, his hands clenched....

"Why did you come here?" cried Foster, in a wail that seemed to
come from the bottom of his soul. "Why do you come here to torment
me with such a sight? Oh, God! It's horrible! It's horrible!... It
is your father I see!... He died fearfully! He died fearfully! He
was in Texas--on a horse--with cattle. He was alone. It is the
prairies! Alone! The horse fell! He was under it! His thigh was
broken--horribly broken! The horse ran away and left him! He lay
there stunned! Then he came to his senses! Oh! his thigh was
dreadful! Such agony! My God! Such agony!"

Foster fairly screamed at this. The younger of the men ... broke
into violent sobs. His companion wept, too, and the pair of them
clasped hands. Bartlett looked on concerned. As for me, I was
astounded.

"He was four days dying--four days dying--of starvation and
thirst," Foster went on, as if deciphering some terrible
hieroglyphs written on the air. "His thigh swelled to the size of
his body. Clouds of flies settled on him--flies and vermin--and he
chewed his own arm and drank his own blood. He died mad. And my
God! he crawled three miles in those four days! Man! Man! that's
how your father died!"

So saying, with a great sob, Foster dropped into his chair, his
cheeks purple, and tears running down them in rivers. The younger
man ... burst into a wild cry of grief and sank upon the neck of
his friend. He, too, was sobbing as if his own heart would break.
Bartlett stood over Foster wiping his forehead with a
handkerchief....

"It's true," said the younger man's friend; "his father was a
stock-raiser in Texas, and after he had been missing from his
drove for over a week, they found him dead and swollen with his
leg broken. They tracked him a good distance from where he must
have fallen. But nobody ever heard till now how he died." ...

Now it is hardly to be supposed that the young visitor could ever have had
this scene in his mind as vividly as Foster had. In that case where and
how did Foster get the vividness and emotion? How do we get them in
dreams? He dreamed while he was awake.

As Bartlett quotes this, and as it declares him to have been present, he
of course attests it by quoting it. So in each of Bartlett's quoted cases,
the original witness is the reporter in the newspaper, and Bartlett, who
was present (he was Foster's traveling companion and business agent) thus
confirms it. We know Mr. Bartlett personally, and have thorough confidence
in his sanity and sincerity. We have also been at the pains to learn that
he commands the confidence and respect of his fellow townsmen in Tolland,
Connecticut, where he is passing a green old age. Moreover, he does not
interpret these phenomena by "spiritism."

We also had a sitting with Foster, in which he undoubtedly showed abundant
telepathy, and satisfied us that he was fundamentally honest, though not
always discriminating between his involuntary impressions, and his natural
impulses to help out their coherence and interest.

* * * * *

Those who explain these things by denying their existence, were at least
excusable thirty, or even twenty, years ago, but since the carefully
sifted and authenticated and recorded evidence of recent years, especially
that gathered by the Society for Psychical Research, the makers of such
explanations simply put themselves in the category of those who, in
Schopenhauer's day, denied the telopsis which is now quite generally
recognized. He said their attitude should not be called skeptical, but
merely ignorant. This brings to mind an excellent very practical friend
who read the first number of this REVIEW, and praised it, but said: "Don't
fool any more with Psychical Research and Simplified Spelling." We
refrained from saying that we had not known that he had ever studied
either, and we would not say it here if we were not confident that his
aversion from the subject will prevent his reading this.

To return to the manifestations: here are some other cases where Foster
identified himself with a personality of his vision. (Bartlett, _op.
cit._, 93.)

From Sacramento _Record_, December 8, 1873:

Foster at one time seized A.'s hand, explaining, "God bless you,
my dear boy, my son. I am thankful I at last may speak to you. I
want you to know I am your father, who loved you in life and loves
you still. I am near to you; a thin veil alone separates us.
Good-by. I am your father, Abijah A----"

"Good heavens!" exclaimed A----, "that was my father's name, his
tone, his manner, his action."

"And," said Foster, "it was a good influence; he was a man of
large veneration."

The above indicates what we will provisionally call Possession. But it is
not possession to the extent of complete expulsion of the original
consciousness, as in the trances of Home, Moses, and Mrs. Piper.

And which is the following? (Bartlett, _op. cit._, 103):

[Letter to editor, written Nov. 30, 1874]

New York _Daily Graphic_: ... He told me he saw the spirit of an
old woman close to me, describing most perfectly my grandmother,
and repeating: "Resodeda, Resodeda is here; she kisses her
grandson." Arising from his chair, Foster embraced and kissed me
in the same peculiar way as my grandmother did when alive.

But here the Possession seems complete (Bartlett, _op. cit._, 140). From
the Melbourne _Daily Age_:

Mr. Foster ... in answer to the question, What he died of?
suddenly interrupted, "Stay, this spirit will enter and possess
me," and instantaneously his whole body was seized with quivering
convulsions, the eyes were introverted, the face swelled, and the
mouth and hands were spasmodically agitated. Another change, and
there sat before me the counterpart of the figure of my departed
friend, stricken down with complete paralysis, just as he was on
his death-bed. The transformation was so life-like, if I may use
the expression, that I fancied I could detect the very features
and physiognomical changes that passed across the visage of my
dying friend. The kind of paralysis was exactly represented, with
the palsied hand extended to me to shake, as in the case of the
original. Mr. Foster recovered himself when I touched it, and he
said in reply to one of my companions that he had completely lost
his own identity during the fit, and felt like waves of water
flowing all over his body, from the crown downwards.

Now for some tentative explanation of these rather unusual proceedings. It
is generally known that a hypnotized person will imagine things and do
things willed by the hypnotizer, that the sensibility of persons to
hypnotism varies, and that persons frequently hypnotized become
increasingly susceptible to the influence.

Now what is ordinarily called thought transference has all these symptoms,
and the combined indications seem to be that persons who readily
experience thought-transference are specially susceptible to hypnotic
influence, and get the transferred thought from almost anybody, just as
the recognized hypnotic subject gets it from his hypnotizer; and that
persons of excessive sensibility, like Foster, Home, Mrs. Holland, Mrs.
Piper and mediums generally--the genuine ones,--simply get their
impressions hypnotically from their sitters.

But this explanation (?) by no means covers the whole situation. In the
first place, it does not cover the vividness and the emotional content
often displayed by the sensitive. The sitter is very seldom conscious of
anything approaching it. It comes nearer to, in fact almost seems
identical with, the frequent vividness and intensity of dreams. But where
do dreams come from, whether in sleep, or in a waking "dream state" like
that of Foster and many other sensitives? They don't come from any
assignable "sitter." This present scribe dreams architecture and
bric-a-brac finer than any he ever saw, or than any ever made. Yet he is
no architect, or artist of any kind. Where does it all come from?

Dreams, moreover, are filled with memories of forgotten things. Where do
they come from? Dreams, too, are by no means devoid of truths not
previously known to the dreamer, or, it would sometimes seem, to anybody
else. Where do they come from?

Du Prel and his school say they come from a "subliminal self," and Myers
picks up the term and spreads it through Anglo-Saxondom. But those queer
dreams frequently include persons who oppose the self--argue with it, and
even down it, sometimes very much for its information, regeneration and
increased stability. That does not seem like a house divided against
itself; such an one, we have on very high authority, is apt to fall.
James, cornered by his studies in Psychical Research, was inclined to
posit a "cosmic reservoir" of all thoughts and feelings that ever existed,
and of potentialities of all the thoughts and feelings that are ever going
to exist; and under various designations, this cosmic reservoir or,--it
seems a better metaphor--the cosmic soul filling it, and dribbling into
our little souls,--is a guess of virtually all the philosophers from James
back to Plato, and farther still--into the mists.

Moreover this guess is powerfully backed up by another guess: men's
speculations have been reaching back for the beginning of mind, until they
recognize that a consistent doctrine of evolution finds no beginning, and
demands mind as a constituent of the star-dust, and, when it really comes
down to the scratch, is unable to imagine matter unassociated with mind.
This is admirably expressed by James (Psychology I, 140):

If evolution is to work smoothly, consciousness in some shape must
have been present at the very origin of things. Accordingly we
find that the more clear-sighted evolutionary philosophers are
beginning to posit it there. Each atom of the nebula, they
suppose, must have had an aboriginal atom of consciousness linked
with it; and, just as the material atoms have formed bodies and
brains by massing themselves together, so the mental atoms, by an
analogous process of aggregation, have fused into those larger
consciousnesses which we know in ourselves and suppose to exist in
our fellow-animals.

That mind is not limited to this connection with matter, we see proved _a
posteriori_ every day by the appearance from _some_ source, it may be only
from the memories of survivors, of minds whose accompanying matter is long
since dissipated.

Moreover, in life, the matter is changing constantly and
entirely--"renewed once in seven years." Yet not only does the "plan," the
"idea," of the material man remain the same, but his mind grows for forty,
sixty, sometimes eighty years, while the body begins to go down hill at
twenty-eight.

Moreover, we never see the sum of matter in the universe increasing, and
we do see the sum of mind increasing every time two old thoughts coalesce
into a new one, or even every time matter assumes a new form before a
perceiving intelligence, not to speak of every time Mr. Bryan or Mr.
Roosevelt opens his mouth. We cite these last as the extreme examples of
increase--in quantity. We see another sort of increase every time Lord
Bryce takes up his pen--the mental treasures of the world are added
to--the contents of the cosmic reservoir worthily increased--the cosmic
soul greater and more significant than before.

Parts of it farther and farther removed in time and space seem to be
manifesting themselves through the sensitives every day: so the evidence
is increasing that none of it has ever been extinguished. The evidence
that any part has been, is merely the evidence that it has stopped flowing
through each man when he dies. But there are pretty strong indications
that it has welled up occasionally through another man, and yet with the
original individuality apparently even stronger than it was in the first
man--strong enough to make an alien body--Foster's, in the instances
quoted, look and act like the original twin body.

Yet while the cosmic soul idea seems very illuminating, and even
stimulating, as far as it goes, it soon lands us in the swamp of paradox
surrounding all our knowledge. How reconcile it with our
individuality--the individuality as dear as life itself--virtually
identical with life itself? Well, we can't reconcile them, at least just
yet. But we can pull our feet up from the swamp, and make a step that may
be towards a reconciliation. Each of our brains is a network of channels
through which the cosmic soul flows; and there are no two brains
alike--hence our individuality.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17