< Notes by the Way (continued from page 12-151) >
are possible is disgraceful to us as a nation. I have always regarded the national tendency to “go out and kill something” by way of sport as a survival of savagery among an indifferently civilised, unspiritual, and coarsely selfish people. Fox-hunting and coursing, from any point of view that a thinking man, not given up to sporting, can entertain, are purely cruel. The animals that are slaughtered in millions to provide man with food (and, as I believe, with food necessary and suitable for him), are too often grossly tortured before death puts an end to their sufferings. (Dr. B. W. Richardson, I may say, is doing excellent service by drawing attention to this matter.) But all minor horrors fade out of sight in comparison with the selected atrocities which Mrs. Kingsford lays, on evidence that is, I must suppose, complete, to the charge of certain experimentalists, whose moral sense and higher sympathies have been apparently extirpated by a long indulgence in these detestable experiments on dumb animals. I have been hitherto disposed to think that there has been much exaggeration in details of recorded cases, and a not inconsiderable amount of rather hysterical writing against vivisection. But nothing can palliate or make tolerable such brutality as I read of in Mrs. Kingsford’s paper; nor can any efforts be misplaced that have for their object the wiping away of this national shame.
The St. James’s Gazette (February 10th) has a very curious article on “Faces in the Dark.” Mr. Francis Galton published some time ago a paper on “The Visions of Sane Persons,” in which he went so far as to admit that a man who thought that he saw “strange apparitions in the dark” might not be positively insane, though he hinted that a good many experts would say that he was. Indeed, I have heard that an eminent person whose duty leads him to decide on such cases has expressed his belief that “to hear voices” is unquestionable evidence of insanity. He would have dealt summarily with Peter when he saw the vision and heard the voice urging him to slay and eat! It is good that his powers are limited. The writer in the St. James’s gives a graphic account of what with him has been a regular experience, the seeing with closed eyes of a great variety of faces, which are living and individual in character, and which appear at a distance of four or five feet as though traced in chalk on a black ground; their “general aspect being as if their substance were of pale smoke.” The most remarkable thing about them to the writer is “that while they are always of a strikingly distinctive character, they are like none that I can ever remember to have seen in life or in pictures.” “Only one have I ever seen in profile, all the rest confront the vision, and this one was singular in bearing a certain resemblance to some one whom I knew in real life.” They are much more often men than women. They are all “extremely interesting (when they can be endured) because they look like the fleeting embodiments of some passion or mood of the mind; usually not the best of moods. . . . Grief the most despairing, scorn, pride, hatred, greed, cunning inquiry, envious or triumphant mockery”—these are the passions depicted. “I have never seen amongst them the mask of pity, or love, or of any tender emotion.” The writer is so used to this that till he read Mr. Galton’s article he seems to have imagined that his were common experiences. To me they are familiar enough, though his experiences are individualised by some little peculiarities. Are such visions not usual with those whose “eyes are open” (as Balaam’s were), and who see with the inner vision? Is not the writer what is commonly known as a medium? And are not those “strikingly distinctive” faces, so natural, yet so little like, what he ever sees in the flesh, which gaze at him “with a profoundly meaning, or appealing, or revealing look,” just the faces of Spirits who are attracted within his magnetic sphere?
Mrs. Penny’s valuable papers furnish in more places than one an answer to the crude theories often put forward by the Re-Incarnationists. It is assumed that a child dying prematurely is perforce bereft of some training, and must return here to get it. But why? Is this earth God’s only school? It is alleged that those who pass through this world unprofited must return to make a second trial. But why? Is it then likely that a school whose training had been in a particular case a failure, should be tried again and again in hope of success at last? I entirely demur to this philosophy, which seems to me to err from want of breadth of view, and to be self-confessed as of a very human origin. I have never heard it denied that some (as Mrs. Penny well puts it) “should so long for the old corporeal husk as to seek and gain re-admission to a former phase of being,” though I suspect the cases are rare, and form the exceptions that establish the rule to the contrary. But surely it is a poverty-stricken conception of the infinite resources of the Infinite, that “the human body, as we now wear it, is the only possible vehicle that ascendant Spirits can exist in for repeated terms of probation.” “J. H. G.” hardly grasps the full philosophy that I have learned. It is, as a broad principle, better to have lived out the full experience of a long life: but they who fail of it are provided for in some of God’s other schools. The designs of Infinite Love are not frustrated by any accident, as man deems it. There are spheres of education other than this, and it may even be that the removal of a spirit, which to us seems premature or accidental, may be the result of a far-seeing wisdom and the working out of an orderly design. Mrs. Penny quotes from J. Pierrepoint Greaves an expression curiously parallel to what I have often been told:—“Man has seven stages of existence, here or elsewhere, and in the eighth he will be perfected.” I have learned that there are seven states, or stages, or spheres of probation through which the spirit passes with various degrees of rapidity, until, purged of the dross, and emancipated from the earthly and material, it passes into the state from which it does not emerge—the Heaven of Contemplation—the Nirvana of the perfected. But this earth is by no means the only road to that haven of rest; nor are “the eternal issues irrevocably decided in this brief flash of existence.”
Jacob Behmen
Sir,—In a letter from “C. C. M.,” in your impression of the 11th inst., there appears the following passage, extracted from “Böhme”:—“After the departure of the body the soul is naked, and especially if it be without a new body.” This is a striking instance of the inaccuracy and undevelopment which characterise the writings of Jacob Behmen.
The soul is never naked except by its own act or the act of its comrades. During existence in this life every human being is surrounded by an aura or spiritual atmosphere. When at death the soul leaves the body, this atmosphere clings about the soul and becomes its garment, sometimes forming the most beautiful covering. The soul is never without a body, either spiritual or material. In this life it is the spiritual body.
Why this writer should be called “Böhme” I do not understand. His name is spelt BŒHM, but he is commonly known as Jacob Behmen, and it would be better to adhere to this recognised form. I cannot help thinking that his writings are a most profitless study.—I am, &c.,
Editor's notes
- ↑ Jacob Behmen by Trident, Light, v. 2, No. 59, February 18, 1882, p. 81
Sources
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Light, v. 2, No. 59, February 18, 1882, p. 81