< Introduction to an Experiment Research (continued from page 11-290) >
courage any rashly enthusiastic frame of thought which would rest satisfied with a mere sensuous gratification of our longing to be at rest with Christ.
Work has been given to each of us to do, and we must do our part, or rest condemned in the consciousness of duty unfulfilled. Such feelings as these guard us against vague longings for a repetition of that which has been already accomplished.
The true Second Coming will be in the recognition of the work He has left His brethren to accomplish; in the application of the principles of the law of order to the establishment of the truths which He announced, and which are scoffed at as fables, or smiled at as paradoxes, by the high priests of a science that has dared to fetter the souls of men to the worm-eaten rook of an earth-to-earth annihilation.
Prometheus still suffers, and is still defiant. The lightnings of science and the thunder of its portents will play round man’s hoary head, but he will live to see the triumph of that belief in immortality, the denial of which a limping science, coolly postulating a knowledge of what Time, Cause, Substance, Life, Force, and Matter are not, dares to offer as a fair deduction from established principles. If their vaunted molecules should desert them, and be proved to be the “manufactured articles,” in a psychical workshop which a great philosopher believed they were, where would their laboured structure of negation tumble to? Chaos? No. To the limbo of false teaching and lying dogmatism.
How weakened would their so-called science show itself to be should the “Laws of Nature,” upon which they lean so heavily, prove themselves to possess a greater flexibility than they imagine.
There is at present a sharp line of demarcation between the scientific and religious creeds of even professing believers in the most heart-satisfying of all religions. Their judgment and their affections are in perpetual combat, for in their innermost souls they feel the dead lock at which they have arrived, and know whenever they venture to face the question that the breach of continuity remains unhealed, and that if not filled up in a legitimate vital process, the chasm must sooner or later engulf either the intellectual or the emotional side of Human Nature, as far as they are related to the great question of faith in God and Futurity either in their own persons or those of their descendants.
It remains therefore for us in a spirit of reverent enquiry to study those cases we meet in practice either as physicians or psychologists, which bear a resemblance to certain miracles as related in Scripture, not with the view of explaining them away, but of justifying our belief in them by demonstrating the possibility of their occurrence, through the discovery of the physical basis on which they rest.
An Experimental research
I shall now give a brief account of some cases of my own where the intervention of a physical machinery of some kind must be allowed, whether involving tensions through which strains were propagated or represented by free motions, complex in character, playing the part of messages between nerve centres, if the description of the cases, for the accuracy of which I vouch, be acknowledged to represent matters of fact.
Ten years ago, when I seriously turned my attention to the subject of mesmerism with the view of reducing its apparent vagaries within the limits of law, the first case upon which I tried an experiment was one which from the beginning gave me a datum sufficiently comprehensive to overthrow a great deal of the foregone conclusion which I had accepted with thousands of the medical profession, namely, that in the case of subjects easily affected with the mesmeric influence, we were only dealing with pure hysterical catalepsy.
An unmarried lady, over thirty years of age, on a visit with my family, then staying at the seaside, had often expressed a wish to be mesmerised, and I, to please her, had promised to do so, putting the operation off from time to time, however, as I knew little or nothing at all about it or its effect.
One afternoon, when she was asleep on the sofa, while I was sitting at the opposite side of the room, the notion came into my head to try the effect of passes and an effort of will in inducing the hypnotic state. In a very short time I saw her mouth twitch in a manner which I afterwards found to be characteristic whenever she was thrown into the same condition as that which speedily resulted from the operation. Believing that the mesmeric influence had been exerted upon her, I beckoned my wife, through the window, to come in and attempt to rouse her. This she entirely failed to do, though she called her loudly and shook her also, if I remember rightly.
I awoke the young woman by making transverse passes on the forehead, and told her that she had been mesmerised while in her sleep, a fact which she would by no means accept, though we were intimate friends. To convince her, I at once caused her to fall into the trance condition again and lifting up the loose sleeve of her dress passed a needle through a fold of skin at the back of the wrist, drawing down the sleeve again so as to hide the needle. When <... continues on page 11-292 >
Editor's notes
- ↑ An Experimental research by Purdon, John E., London Spiritualist, No. 484, December 2, 1881, pp. 271-75
Sources
-
London Spiritualist, No. 484, December 2, 1881, pp. 271-75