The Making of Religion

rical

d out the right answer, but various easy methods of fraud at once occur to the mind. However, the procedure of Croesus, if he took certain precautions, was relatively scientific. Relatively scientific also was the inquiry of Porphyry, with whose position our own is not unlikely to be compared. Unable, or reluctant, to accept Christianity, Porphyry ‘sought after a sign’ of an element of supernormal truth in Paganism. But he began at the wrong end, namely at Pag

oises heard in ‘haunted houses’ were not mere hallucinations of the sense of hearing. But all these early writers, like Cardan, were very careless of first-hand evidence, and, indeed, preferred ghosts vouched for by classical authority, Pliny, Plutarch, or Suetonius. With the Rev. Joseph Glanvil, F.R.S. (circ. 1666), a more careful examination of evidence came into use. Among the marvels of Glanvil’s and other tracts usually published together in his ‘Sadducismus Triumphatus’ will be found letters which show that he and his friends, like Henry More and Boyle, laboured to collect first-hand evidence for second sight, haunted houses, ghosts, and wraiths. The confessed object was to procure a ‘Whip for the Droll,’ a reply to the laughing scepticism of the Restoration. The result was

n and study of what he called ‘Miracles,’ in the field of experience, and he looked for an a priori argument which would for ever settle the question without examination of facts. In an age of experimental philosophy, which derided a priori methods, this was Hume’s great contribution to knowledge. His famo

ith the wise and learned, be an everlasting check to all kinds of superstiti

e as he will deign to admit; while he excludes, without examination, all evidence for experience of the absence of such uniformity. That kind of experience cannot be considered. ‘There must be a uniform experience against every miraculous event, otherwise the event would not merit that appellation.’ If there be any experience in favour of the event, that experience does not count. A miracle is counter to universal experience, no event is counte

d integrity, as to place them beyond all suspicion of any design to deceive others; of such credit and reputation in the eyes of mankind, as to have a great deal to lose in case of their being detected in any falsehood; and at the sa

ed every assertion which he had made in the passage just cited;

he miracles were immediately proved upon the spot, before judges of unquestioned integrity, attested by witnesses of credit and distinction, in a learned age, and on the most eminent theatre that is now in the world. Nor is this all. A relation of them was published and dispersed everywhere; nor were the Jesuits, though a learned body, supported by the civil magistrate, and determined enemies to those opinions, in whose favour th

hostile to his idea of the possible, and dismisses all testimony to other experience, even when it reaches his standard of evidence. He is remote indeed from Virchow’s position ‘that what we call the laws of nature must vary according to our frequent new experiences.’3 In his note, Hume buttresses and confirms his evidence for the Jansenist miracles. They have even a martyr, M. Montgeron, who wrote an account of the events, and, says Hume lightly, ‘is now said to be somewhere in a dungeon on account of his book.’ ‘M

wisdom of not giving his own theory this chance of a triumph. The cataleptic seizures were of the sort now familiar to science. These have, therefore, emerged from the miraculous. In fact, the phenomena which occurred at the tomb of the Abbé Paris have emerged almost too far, and now seem in danger of being too readily and too easily accepted. In 1887 MM. Binet and Féré, of the school of the Salpêtrière, published in English a popular

Mlle. Coirin — has been caref

s proposed, but Madame Coirin, believing the disease to be radically incurable, refused her consent. Paralysis of the left side set in (1718), the left leg shrivelling up. On August 9, 1731, Mlle. Coirin ‘tried the off chance’ of a miracle, put on a shift that had touched the tomb of Pari

French authorities and one American. ‘Under the physical [psychical?] influence brought to bear by the application of the shift

of the faith cure.’ He certainly cannot explain everything which claims to be of supernatural origin in the faith cure

hings in heaven a

eamt of in yo

, somehow, cures them. And what is the ‘mind’? As my object is to give savage parallels to modern instances better vouched for. I quote a singular Red Indian cure by ‘suggestion.’ Hearne, travelling in Canada, in 1770, met a native who had ‘dead palsy,’ affecting the whole of one side. He was dragged on a sledge, ‘reduced to a mere skeleton,’ and so was placed in the magic lodge. The first step in his cure was the public swallowing by a conjurer of a board of wood, ‘about the size of a barrel-st

allowing a cradle. The Indians explain that the barrel staves apparently swallowed are merely dematerialised by ‘spirits,’ leaving onl

the fingers and toes of the side that had been so long dead. . . . At the end of six weeks he went a-hunting for his family’ (p. 219). Hearne kept up his acquaintance, and adds, what is very curious, that he developed almost a secondary personality. ‘Before that dre

e of those which Professor Russell Reynolds has classified under the head of “paralysis dependent on ide

a mere coincidence with the dicta of our Lord, ‘Thy faith hath made thee whole. . . . I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel.’ There are cures, as there are maladies

act, and, therefore, not a miracle at all.8 Mr. James remarks: ‘As so often happens, a fact is denied till a welcome interpretation comes with it. Then it is admitted readily enough, and evidence quite insufficient to back a

alse. If so, where, precisely, ends its power of carrying facts? Thus considered, the kinds of marvellous events recorded in the Gospels, for example, are no longer to be dismissed on a priori grounds as ‘mythical.’ We cannot now discard evidence as necessarily false because it clashes with our present ideas of the possible, when we have to acknowledge that the very same evidence may safely convey to us facts which clashed with our

be miraculous, not to examine the evidence, said Hume, was the policy of ‘all reasonable people.’ The result was to deprive Science of the best sort of record of facts which she welcomes as soon as she thinks she can explain them.10 Examples of the folly of a priori negation are common. The British Association refused to hear the essay which Braid, the inventor of the word ‘hypnotism,

at, without examination. They were not facts, and could not be, he said. Now to M. Guyau’s mind they are facts, and therefore are not miracles. He includes ‘mental suggestion taking place even at a distance.’ A man ‘can transmit an almost compulsive command, it appears nowadays, by a simple tension of his will.’ If this be so, if ‘will’ can affect matter from a distance, obviously the relations of will and matter are not

nforming themselves of the particular facts.’ The wise and learned are applauded for their scientific attitude. Again, miracles destroy each other, for all religions have their miracles, but all religions cannot be true. This argument is no longer of force with people who look on ‘miracles’ as = ‘X phenomena,’ not as divine

or by the interposition of some invisible agent.’ We reply that what Hume calls a ‘miracle’ may result from the operation of some as yet

r example, and that he could not be expected to answer, by anticipation, ideas not current in his day. But he remains guilty of den

es of Swedenborg’s successes. Madame Harteville, widow of the Dutch envoy in Stockholm, was dunned by a silversmith for a debt of her late husband’s. She believed that it had been paid, but could not find the receipt. She therefore asked Swedenborg to use his renowned gifts. He promised to see what he could do, and, three days later, arrived at the lady’s house while she was giving a tea, or rather a coffee, party. To the assembled society Swedenborg remarked, ‘in a cold-blooded way, that he had seen her man, and spoken to him.’ The late M. Harteville declared to Swedenborg that he had paid the bill, seven months before his decease: the receipt was in a cupboard upstairs. Madame Harteville replied that the cupboard had been thoroughly searched t

egri som

tur sp

is m

t-story; like Scott he was canny enough to laugh, publicly, at them and at himself for his interest in them. Yet both would take trouble to inquire. As Kant vainly wrote to Swedenborg and others — as he vainly spent 7￡. on ‘Arcana

its.’ On page 73 he pleasantly remarks, ‘Now we shall understand that all said hitherto is superfluous,’ and he wi

se admissions are eagerly welcomed by Du Prel in his ‘Philosophy of Mysticism;’ but they are only part of Kant’s joke, and how far they are serious, Kant himself does not know. If spiritualists knew their own business, they would translate and publish Kant’s first seventy pages of ‘Tr?ume.’ Something like telepathy, action of spirit, even discarnate, on spirit, is alluded to, but the idea is as old as Lavaterus at least (p. 52). Kant has a good deal to say, like Scott in his ‘De

asks for psych

no evidence, only assertion. Kant ends, having pleased nobody, he sa

ely unknown topic to British psychologists. ‘So ist das Feld dunkler Vorstellungen das gr?sste in Menschen.’ He has a chapter on ‘The Divining Faculty’ (pp. 89–93). He will not he

en he had to deliver a judgment on the phenomena described by himself and as to which he had made inquiry [i.e. in his letter re Swedenborg to Mlle. de Knobloch], and the very decided opinions he e

f ‘thought-transference’ (not through known channels of sense) occurred between the patient and the magnetiser, and he also believed that he had witnessed cases of ‘clairvoyance,’ ‘lucidity,’ vue à distance, in which the patient apparently beheld places and events remote in space. These things would now be explained by ‘unconscious suggestion’ in the more sceptical schools of psychological science. The Revolution interrupted scientific study in France to a great degree, but ‘somnambulism’ (the hypnotic sleep) and ‘magnetism’ were eagerly examined in Germany. Modern manuals, for some reason, are apt to overlook these German researches and speculations. (Compare Mr. Vincent’s ‘Elements of Hypnotism,’ p. 34.) The Schellings were

alled Divining Rod, and Jung Stilling became an early spir

e of a terminology, or scientific language, all his own, it is extremely difficult to make Hegel’s meaning even moderately clear. Perhaps we may partly elucidate it by a s

the hypnotic condition, can consciously, or at least purposefully, affect physiological processes to which the ordinary consciousness is blind — for example, by raising a blister, when it is suggested that a blister must be raised. Again (granting the facts hypothetically and merely for the sake of argument), at the upper

t thwart the consciousness at Hegel’s lower end, which springs from ‘the great soul of nature.’ But that lower end, though it may see for Jeanne d’Arc at Valcouleurs a battle at Rouvray, a hundred leagues away, does not communicate any lofty philosophic truths.14 The phenomena of clairvoyance, in Hegel’s opinion, merely indicate that the ‘material’ is really ‘ideal,’ which, perhaps, is as much as we can ask from them. ‘The somnambulist and clairvoyant see without eyes, and carry their visions directly into regions where the waiting consciousness of orderly intelligence cannot enter’

, he says, has proved that in every conception and idea an image or group of images must be present. These mental images are the recrudescence or recurrence of perceptions. We see a tree, or a man, or a dog, and whenever we have before our minds the conception or idea of any of these things the original perc

d. Open the sense of sight to receive a flash of green colour, and close it again. Apparently, whenever the mind inform

ing all th

hought in a

herefore the idea of a man, dog, or tree once suggested to the hypnotised patient, does become an actual hallucinatio

y competing memories and new sensations, is a suppression of our original, primitive, natural tendencies. Hallucination represents ‘the main trunk of our psychical existence.’15 In Dr. Dessoir’s theory t

ality of the present everyday self, and the old original fundamental Self. Dr. Dessoir refrains from pronouncing a decided opinion as to whether the original, primitive, hallucinated self within us does ‘preside over powers and acti

e accepted interchange of sensations between the hypnotiser and the hypnotised; he believed in the divining rod, and, unlike Kant, even in ‘Scotti

g the narratives, infinitely numerous though they be, and accredited by the education and character of the witnesses, to be mere deception and imposture. Their a priori conceptions are so rooted that no testimony can avail against them, and they have even denied what they have seen with their own eyes,’ and reported under the

s the Academy of Medicine in Paris appointed a Committee to examine the subject in 1825. The Report on ‘Animal Magnetism,’ as it was then styled, was presented in 1831. The Academy lacked the courage to publish it, for the Report was favourable even to certa

Report (1831) attested the development, under ‘magnetism,’ of ‘new faculties,’ such as clairvoyance and intuition, also the production of ‘great changes in the physical economy,’ such as insensibility, and sudden increase of strength. The Report declared i

n both Committees, and this Report was accepted. Later, a number of people tried to read a letter in a box, and failed. ‘This,’ says Mr. Vincent, ‘settled the question with regard to clairvoyance;’ though it might be more logical to say that it se

en, and remains, rather suspect, while on The Continent hypnotism is used both for healing purposes and in the inquiries of experimental psychology. Wide differences of opinion still exist, as to the nature of the hypnotic sleep, as to its physiological concomitants, and as to the limits of the faculties exercised in or out of the slumber. It is not even absolutely certain that the exercise of the stranger faculties — for instance, that the production of anaesthesia and rigidity — are the results merely of ‘suggestion’ and expectancy. A hypnotised patient is told that the middle finger of his left hand will become rigid and incapable of sensation. This occurs, and is explained by ‘suggestion,’ though how ‘suggestion’ produces the astonishing effect is another problem. The late Mr. Gurney, however, made a number of exper

rather point to an element of truth in the old mesmeric hypothesis of some specific influence in the operator. They cannot very well be explained by suggestion and expectancy. But these facts and facts of clairvoyance and thought-transference will be rejected as superstitious delusions

Lloyd Tuckey has well called “a mass of superincumbent rubbish.”’18 Clairvoyance is part of a mass of rubbish, on page 57. On page 67, Mr. Vincent says: ‘There are many interesting questions, such as telepathy, thought-reading, clairvoyance, upon which it would be perhaps rash to give any decided opinion. . . . All these strange psychical conditions present problems of great interest,’ and are on

n of science, they are doubted by others; by others, again, are denied, while most of the journalists and authors of cheap primers, who inspire popular tradition, regard the phenomena as frauds or fables of superstition. But it is plain that these phenomena, like the more ordinary facts of hypnotism, may finally be admitted by science. The scien

t present the serious attention and careful experiment needed for the establishment of the facts are more common among French than among English men of science. When published, these experiments, if they contain any affirmative instances, are denounced as ‘superstitious,’ or criticized