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vol. title: vol. period: 1881 pages in vol.: 439 |
A Philosophy of Materialisation
For the last five-and-twenty years attention has been particularly turned to classes of natural facts which the history of Philosophy, embracing one hundred times that period, proves to have been ignored by the vulgar as oi any practical importance, though it is evident to a dose student that the Masters and Teachers of the race were very well acquainted with their value, as instruments of instruction, and indeed of subjugation, lie study of the nature of these facts has unfortunately, up to the present, been pursued by but a limited class of the community, who have called themselves Spiritualists, on the ground that they are entitled to do so from their belief that the spirits of the dead are active agents in co-operation with mundane bodies in the production of the said results, which include the whole range of uncommon human activities, from knowledge of events before they have occurred to the most trivial disturbance of a nervous system, with an external expression of the same in terms of disorder; the prophet and the cup-tosser who divines by the aid of tea-leaves being the extreme poles of the graduated series of human agents on the mental or immaterial side, while the chain is extended from certain slightly disturbed hysterical girls back to the powerful medium who can, like the Witch of Endor, call up the simulacrum of our departed dead, whose image faithfully cherished and not forgotten, bears comparison with that of the presentation with which it is so far outwardly identical.
The records of the twenty-five centuries that have rolled over the struggling mass of thinking men have carried forward the same, the very same, unsolved problems and unanswered questions, Whence? What? Whither P from generation to generation; but only in our day has it been given to man to attack them and attempt their solution in terms of himself from the experimental and scientific side. They were solved long ago from the moral side for all time in terms of Himself; the eastern races which founded philosophy possessing sufficient inherent vitality to bring it to its crown and efflorescence before the process of ethnic decay set in, with its retrograde changes, and I suppose neglect of speculative truth.
We have now been given us the task of solving the physical problem of the universe in terms of our own nature, and, in the disorder presented, we have to look for the data which will enable us to find not so much the law of disturbance as the law of that which is disturbed. Assuming in man a parallel constancy to the laws of nature, essentially unvarying, we have in the discussion of the disturbances observed to find the key to that assumed parallelism, and in that the recognition of the metaphysical truth that the universe is what it appears to be because man is what he is—that the universe is moulded for and by man just as man’s physical body is the outcome of universally acting influences.
I cannot conceive a more general solution of the problem of the universe than the establishment on unassailable grounds of the fact that Man and the Universe have grown up together in and for one another, the relation being one of reciprocity existing through the common possession of that universe by the Race, the individuals of which can discuss it on equal grounds, its surest claim to stability resting upon their unquestioning acknowledgment of a common possession; and per contra, man’s firmest ground of faith in himself and the reality of his own efforts being found in the sympathy of his fellow-men, and their acknowledgement that, things being equal, they must have behaved in a similar manner to him under the guidance of similar influencing causes, originating either from without or within, but derived from that common possession which is Universe in one aspect and Subject in the other; that is to say as Thing or Thought is arbitrarily chosen as the qualitative standard of definition of the Real.
The disturbances called Spiritualistic with a physiological side to them ever and always, though sometimes difficult to identify, afford ample scope to the methods of modern science for their application towards the reduction, within the domain of order, of classes of events of paramount importance to be understood, if either a quiet indifference, a blatant nihilism or a rampant Spiritualism is not, for the next generation or two, to overcloud the religion which is dear to us from association, and which we hope to see remain the unchallenged birthright of our children.
I proceed to consider some of these typical disturbances, but at first mainly after the method of physical analogy.
There are two classes of facts which at once strike the investigator into the phenomena of Spiritualism as presenting features so absolutely unrelated to all appearance that their reduction under a single generalisation is never seriously attempted, but is handed over to the metaphysician as a matter which relates to words and to words only. I allude to those manifestations in which the natural body of the medium is, in its modifications, a part or the whole of the phenomenon presented, and to those manifestations in which the so-called external world is to a greater or lesser extent influenced, the medium being apparently unchanged in any way.
The typical example of the former is the construction of a part or the whole of a duplex body, and the typical example of the latter is the knotting of an endless cord.
The salient feature of these two natural occurrences is that the former leaves no permanent record while the latter does or may do so, which is quite as good for our purpose. The first is typical of the essentially fleeting nature of individual life; the second of the permanence of matter under varying aspects.
Two quite different schools of thought in their attempts to solve such mysteries have adopted on the one side the common-sense and rather dogmatic method, while the physico-mathematical critical and also dogmatic method has been followed by the other.
The paramount importance of the physiological-analogical method has not been officially recognised by either.
In the Spiritualist of May 30th, 1879, reference is made in the first page to a theory put forward some time since by Mr. W. H. Harrison, which appears to offer an easy solution to the difficulty of the duplication of form, freeing from bonds and other physical manifestations of related character. As Mr. Harrison’s idea is bold and sweeping, and though crude may be supposed to derive support from such part of the modus operandi of physical manifestations as have come under the eyes of good observers, some remarks upon the subject will not be out of place here. After putting Mr. Harrison’s views in his own words, which will show that his explanation, or rather suggestion towards an explanation, has no recognised ground on which to rest from the known analogies of physical science, an attempt will be made to bring the phenomena of physical mediumship within the domain of law, startling, though the applications of the principles involved may doubtless appear to Spiritualists and Materialists alike.
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Editor's notes
- ↑ A Philosophy of Materialisation by John E. Purdon, M.B., London Spiritualist, No. 486, December 16, 1881, pp. 295-99
Sources
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London Spiritualist, No. 486, December 16, 1881, pp. 295-99