Evidence As To... Communication With The Dead

by: James H. Hyslop, Ph.D., LL.D

SOME years ago a well-known college president thought to put an end to psychic research with the public by calling it a return to fetishism. He has lived long enough to learn that calling names does not refute facts, and we no longer need to apologize for the subject. When the work of investigation was first organized, no man's reputation was safe unless be joined in with the persiflage of the Philistine or the skepticism of the scientific world generally. It is easy to understand the accusation that psychic research is connected with fetishism, for its fundamental interest is in a doctrine that had its origin in what is known as animism, which is the spiritualism of savages, among whom it even took the form of regarding inorganic objects as animate. But the attempt to throttle investigation by invoking the contempt heaped on primitive minds was hasty and ill advised. Those who think it dignified to study folklore certainly cannot consider it undignified to pursue inquiries into the real causes of animism. But culture always has its antagonisms, and none is stronger than that which exists in the intellectual classes against ideas supposed to be wholly barbaric. That feeling I myself at one time shared, but I did not purpose to ignore facts in the opinions that I might hold. Prejudice had to be overcome in the face of what was indisputable, or so widespread as to demand explanation. Primitive minds may have been wrong in their theories, but they seem to have had facts which require consideration, even though we go no further than fraud or hysteria to account for them; and to find these facts is to discover their kinship with those of modern times.

But true psychic research took its origin not from any sympathy with the ideas of savages nor from any consciousness that the two stages of culture are connected. It was a very concrete set of incidents that exacted of fairminded men the examination of the facts. Even the types of phenomena did not present themselves clearly at the outset. The most prominent were those claiming to embody some form of communication with the dead; but types of unusual phenomena were soon found that could lay no claim to this character, and as they seemed less clearly to contravene the accepted laws of nature, they offered a ground for compromise between orthodox science and the claims of the supernatural. Among such phenomena were telepathy or mind-reading, dousing, hypnosis, suggestion, muscle-reading, and perhaps a few others. They opened a field for discussion that made the consideration of spiritualism unnecessary, at least for the time, since they were possibly susceptible of (natural) explanation.

It was a mistake of scientific skepticism to invoke any preconceived ideas about the explanation of things in order to eliminate the consideration of psychic phenomena. The question of fact, not of explanation, is the first concern of science. In selecting his course, however, the skeptic "posed himself to all the reactions which follow the proof of what he doubts or denies; and we are to-day reaping the harvest of his imprudence. The public is running off into every imaginable philosophy and religion, because of the trust of believer and skeptic alike in religious and philosophic traditions. Sympathy would have given the skeptic the leadership in a course in which he has been outrun; he now appears as the hindrance to knowledge instead of its supporter. A man should never be required to choose between doubt and belief. He should be able to intermingle both in due proportions. The spirit of open-mindedness and impartiality is to the intellectual world what brotherhood is to the ethical world. Woe betide the man who does not see this elementary truth, for he is sure to fall into one dogmatism or the other.

The facts that led to the conception of psychic research were a set of phenomena which, at least superficially, appeared to be inexplicable by the ordinary theories of science. They were taboo to normal psychology and psychologists, for no scientific man was prepared to reinstate the traditional idea of the supernatural. The opposition between the natural and the supernatural was so fixed that it was necessary to avoid misunderstanding of the latter term in order to pacify the orthodox psychologist. Hence the terms "psychic research" and "psychic phenomena" were chosen to denominate a borderland set of phenomena that might possibly be resolved into recognized types of events which, though unusual, would not necessitate a revision of orthodox beliefs. Abnormal psychology had come to accept many extraordinary things, but only as exhibitions of acute sensibility or as phenomena of coincidence. It was therefore necessary to make one's peace with this attitude and not to rush off prematurely into the regions of the miraculous. Psychic research thus became a compromise offered by one school of recognized scientists to another in the hope that some means might be found to extend tolerance to certain persistent facts that would not disappear at the command of conjurer or skeptic.

The three types of phenomena which gave most offense were telepathy, apparitions, and mediumship. Hypnotism had won recognition, though only after meeting opposition hardly less bitter than that which these more inexplicable facts encountered. Muscle-reading and phenomena due to hyperaesthesia, or acute sensibility, lay on the borderland, and offered to the conservative mind a natural explanation of the facts to which they were relevant. Fraud, coincidence, and suggestion were explanations which further limited or refuted the claims of the supernormal and the supernatural.

For this reason psychic research appropriated for its territory all phenomena that might be explained by hyperaesthesia, whether visual, auditory, or tactual: the nature and limits of guessing and.chance coincidence; hypnotism; hallucinations, whether subjective or veridical; apparitions, whether visual or auditory; mediumistic phenomena of all types; the physical phenomena of spiritualism, including raps or knockings, table-tippings, and telekinesis, or the movement of physical objects without contact, as well as the so-called materializations of common fame.

Not all of these are of equal value in the study of the problem which came easily to the front; namely, the problem of the existence of discarnate spirits. The theory of spirit agency had been advanced from time immemorial to cover the whole field; but it was the first task of investigators to discriminate among the phenomena and to determine their evidential values. For instance, neither telepathic coincidences nor the movement of objects without physical contact is in itself evidence of spirit agencies. The field had to be mapped out for scientific scrutiny on the basis that many people were not discriminating in the explanation of the facts. Only apparitions and mediumistic phenomena presented any immediately apparent evidence for discarnate spirits.

The others, however they might ultimately be explained, offered no manifest evidence for such a hypothesis. But all of them were related at least as unusual phenomena hitherto not explained by ordinary causes, and so constituted a group of facts that had been disregarded by orthodox science. Psychic research simply claimed the field as a new country, possibly like the old, but not superficially so. It challenged science to apply its methods to the facts and, if possible, to reduce them to some sort of natural order.

In all ages the discovery of any new fact which is either not easily or not at all reducible to the normal has excited speculations of all kinds. The discovery of galvanic electricity roused all Europe to an interest in metaphysics; even Humboldt wrote a book, which he afterward regretted, that proclaimed magnetic forces to be the basis of cosmic causality. The discovery of radium started a revolution in science, though by this time scientists usually took discoveries of the kind more cautiously. But any new fact alters the perspective of previous knowledge, even when it does not revolutionize it.

Psychic research was well adapted to rouse curiosity on the subject of the supersensible. Even telepathy so threatened the stability of materialism that skepticism was irreconcilably opposed to it, though telepathy did not involve spirit agencies. But phenomena that even looked like evidence in favor of spirits excited the most rabid skepticism, because they seemed to threaten all the conquests of physical science over the supernatural. Their recognition seemed to affect the laboriously built fabric of natural science as well as to offer hope and consolation to the human mind. No one objected to the latter, but the sacred structure of physical science must not be touched by hands soiled 'by the supernatural. Consequently, the interest of two opposing parties was strongly aroused by the claims in behalf of the supernormal in so far as these seemed to open the way into a transcendental world, one of support, because of an emotional satisfaction, and the other of hostility, because of the disturbance to the materialism of many years.

It was at least impossible to evade the discussion of the doctrine of spiritualism in the face of its claims. No matter what our decision about telepathy, dousing, telekinesis, and hypnotism, the apparent meaning of apparitions and mediumistic phenomena required further consideration; and whether we believed or disbelieved in the spiritistic interpretation, we had to face the issue. The practical and ethical interests of man concentrated attention on this one question and subordinated all others, no matter how vigorously was urged the need of cool scientific investigation. Spiritualism, therefore, gained prominence, and in the course of time challenged any defender of materialistic science to meet it in the arena.

Skepticism was asked to consider evidence, and to offer some practical and desirable' alternative to death without resurrection or survival. Skepticism was handicapped in such a debate. It might insist on natural laws, but it was always menaced by the prospect of contending with human needs, which have as much influence in determining many beliefs as any of the rigid standards of evidence that will have nothing to do with the ethical ideals of man.

The importance of a belief in survival after death depends partly on the conditions of the age and partly on the conceptions we have of that life. There have been ages in which the idea of immortality exercised little influence on the ethical and social life, and there have been ages and races in which it was central, determining even political institutions. In all cases its value depends on the existing state of knowledge and on belief in many other things.

If man's moral nature is rightly developed without the belief in immortality, proof will be more an intellectual than an ethical concern; but in an age when the affections are highly developed, and the intellect has adopted conceptions which virtually nullify the influence of the affections, it will be a matter of some importance to learn whether nature is as careful of personality as it is of atoms and matter. We may play the part of Stoics in this respect when we have no grounds for belief, but Stoicism itself is in most cases a tribute to that which it concedes cannot be obtained. Few natures can live a purely Stoical life.

The most ethical impulses are not cast in that mold; and we welcome that attitude only when it conforms to what the affections teach, though it has given up the beliefs that fostered them. It is true that we have to submit if we do not have evidence for either faith or knowledge; but the loss will not be compensated by Stoicism, and most people will seek for light beyond a horizon which seems to hide the future from us. At least there is something to be said for the hope that consciousness may be prolonged beyond the grave. It is as natural and rational as the impulse toward self-preservation.

The necessity of discussing the existence of spirits at various points in this work makes it important here at the outset to dispel certain illusions about that term. It is probable that in earlier writings I did not sufficiently allow for these illusions. But here I shall not permit readers to indulge them without taking the responsibility for them. Nearly all the difficulties of most people, except scientific psychologists, in the matter of believing in spirits depend on their conception of the term. In the ancient discussions about idolatry, and, in fact, during the whole period of controversy with materialism, the believers in spirits assumed and kept in the forefront of the argument the fact that spirits represented supersensible realities beyond the field of sensory perception. Even when they conceived them as quasimaterial, they did not forget their inaccessibility to sensation. But when the exigencies of that controversy passed away and materialism again took the helm, there was a return, largely unconscious, perhaps, to the conception of spirits as quasi-material or as representable in the forms of sensation.

When the church relaxed its hostility to idolatry, it permitted the introduction of art into its temples and started the materialism which gradually undermined its foundations. In modern times esthetic needs and lack of logical thinking resulted in conveying to men's minds the idea that spirits could be represented in the forms of sense perception. The physical phenomena of spiritualism, especially those of materialization, taught men to think of spirits as sensory forms of some kind; and with sensation as the standard of reality, most people take imagination and newspaper representation as indicating what scientific spiritists believe when they say they believe in spirits. It is this inexcusable error which has to be dispelled.

In the present work, as in all that I have written on the subject, as I have often explained in former discussions, the term spirit means nothing more than the stream of consciousness or personality with which we are familiar in every human being. Whether it is accompanied by what is called the "spiritual body" of St. Paul, the "astral body" of the theosophists, or the "ethereal organism" of the Greek materialists and many scientific spiritualists of to-day, is irrelevant to the question, and is not assumed in this work or in any other published work of mine. It may be true that we have "spiritual bodies" not perceptible to sense and only occasionally accessible to supernormal functions of the mind, when conditions are favorable.

I am neither upholding nor denying such a view. It is simply no part of the scientific problem before us. Even if one assumes this spiritual body, one does not necessarily accept the spiritistic theory of the mind. What we want to know is whether that spiritual body is conscious or not, and conscious with the same memory that the person had when living his earthly life. If the spiritual body has no memory of the past, if the stream of consciousness or personality does not survive with it, there is little interest in the fact of survival either as a spiritual body or in the form of reincarnation. The interesting and important thing is the survival of personal identity, which consists wholly in the stream of consciousness with its memory of the past, and not in any spiritual body, no matter how necessary this latter may be to the survival of the mental stream itself.

The existence of spirit in this discussion means the existence and survival of this stream of consciousness or personality in independence of the physical organism, regardless of how it survives. How such a thing is possible is another and separate problem, unaffected by the evidence of the fact of survival. Personal identity is not accessible to sense perception. It is as transcendental as atoms, ether waves, ions, electrons, and other supersensible realities of physical science, if there are such. The problem of spiritism is the collection of evidence to show that consciousness continues after death; its difficulty lies wholly in the strength of the hypothesis that consciousness is a function of the brain and requires some such structure for its existence.

Indeed, the sensory and materialistic conception of it is so strong that many people say to me that they do not see how consciousness can survive without a brain. They are so fixed in the modern theory that consciousness is a mere function or phenomenon of the brain that they cannot conceive of this as an unproved hypothesis. When one makes sense perception the criterion of truth, it is natural to make this assumption, especially when all normal experience shows the constant association of consciousness with a physical organism and reveals no traces of it when the body is dissolved. But the absence of evidence for survival is not evidence of the absence of it; hence only normal experience favors materialism.

Supernormal experience, if proved, suggests a very different interpretation; it brings us in contact with the supersensible. In normal life, consciousness in all its forms is a supersensible reality, even when we suppose it to be wholly dependent on the physical organism. In asking people to believe in spirits we ask them only to suspend the dogmatic assurance that materialism has said the last word on the problem; simply to be as skeptical about materialism as they are about spiritism.

They may then be in a position to discover the illusions which have affected all their thinking on this subject. If they simply try to understand what psychic research is aiming at, and so disregard the question of a spiritual body; the quasi-material conception of the soul, as not the primary question, and acknowledge that we are only trying to ascertain if personal consciousness survives as a fact, and not how it survives, they will find the problem very much simplified.

Consequently, in this work and in all the publications of the Society for Psychical Research the term "spirit" stands for the personal stream of consciousness, whatever else it may ultimately be proved to imply or require; and all the facts bearing on the issue must be conceived as evidence, not necessarily as attesting the nature, or any sensible conception, of spirit.

About the Author

James H. Hyslop, Ph.D., LL.D
Copyright 1919

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