Spiritualism and Modern Culture
Mr. President, Ladies, and Gentlemen:—In human society two antagonistic forces are ceaselessly at work, the one employed in building up, the other in pulling down, The disintegrating power sweeps away institutions when they become effete and corrupt, and sometimes does so before that stage is reached; the constructive power erects good and bad institutions in the face of opposition, and sometimes preserves those which are injurious to the community at large. The extreme representatives of these two classes are not usually of the highest mental capacity; the one extreme section can only tear down without being able to erect anything with efficiency; the other stubbornly resists every attempt at improvement, and does so from a senseless antipathy to reasonable change. The march of civilisation and culture is along the line which divides these two opposing powers, and the great men who publicly represent each of the two great sections of thought are never extreme in their views, or they would be too far from the central line along which alone the movement of the general body politic is practicable. That such is the case will be brought home to the consciousness of those who make a study of the British Legislature and its constituent elements, and these same building up and pulling down forces are at work inside Spiritualism, as well as everywhere else.
The work of building up is more noble than that of disintegration. True it is that no human institution is perfect, and that he who erects any mental or material structure soon sees within it certain faults, which he would take care to avoid if ever he had to perform the same work over again. These faults are glaringly visible to those whose function it is to destroy, and who survey the defects in all useful work, through magnifying glasses of a green colour. One of the objects, therefore, of the present paper, is to show that the greatest services rendered to Spiritualism do not come from those in our ranks who would like to see Westminster Abbey razed to the ground and a circus erected on its site, and who would rejoice to see a flood of Vandalism overflowing a culture, the outcome of the growth of ages. Another object is to show that for Spiritualism to progress with strength, it must do so by methods which ages of human experience have proved to be sound.
Spiritualism is expected by many of us to effect in course of time great revolutions in human thought, and so, in my opinion, it will, but not in the way that some of us expect. Not by preaching or by sending tracts from house to house will the anticipated result be attained, not by singing hymns or by listening, in a state of psychological semi-intoxication, to utterances from the mouths of the garrulous, which utterances, in nineteen cases out of twenty, are of inferior religious and intellectual value to the writings of those of our best thinkers who deal with the same subjects. By preaching and singing, the area of the movement may, indeed, be extended, as has been done in America, but the finest and the governing minds in the nation will remain untouched by such methods.
Science did not reach its present state of culture by the talking and dreaming of its votaries, but by the step-by-step hewing of granite blocks, in the shape of new truths, from the great storehouse of nature, in the midst of the ridicule of those who saw no use in each freshly-cut stone, and who found it easy to look on and condemn whilst others laboured, Thus, in the midst of opposition from the populace and from the Church were the sciences of astronomy and geology built up so strongly, that they are now safe from further injury from the turbulent sea of ignorance around. The firmest and strongest development of Spiritualism must be made in the same way, by the careful observation of its facts and the unravelling of its laws, until we are able to say to the intellectual world outside—u We have studied the mental and physical phenomena in our midst; wehave classified them, and can tell you their natureand their laws. Wecan show you where they fit on to your previously-acquired branches of knowledge. We can demonstrate the uses of that which we are prepared to teach, and give you a new philosophy of the healing of the sick, the curing of the insane, the ultimate constitution of matter, and the evolution of religious ideas. We can also offer you evidence, adapted to the thoughtful mind, of the reality of a life immortal for man.”
In the days of old, before the printing-press and the electric telegraph had begun their work, the establishment of new truths was a slow process, and the fruits of the shedding of the blood of martyrs were recognised centuries after their work had been accomplished, when their memories were publicly honoured by statues of stone, but privately lived in the hearts of the people. Now, the march of events is quicker. Harvey, as Professor Huxley pointed out a few nights ago, was in his day manifestly bringing some great truth into the world, as proved by the rancour displayed against him by the contemporary press, but he lived to see his scientific revelation established in the public mind. When I heard these sentiments uttered, it occurred to me that the speaker might have read some letters of his own in the report of the Dialectical Society, with advantage. He added that Darwin had lived to see his theory established. With these and other precedents as a guide, it would seem that the popular abuse of Spiritualism will not reign more than three or four years longer. But this is a digression.
The position already mentioned which we should take in relation to the cultured world, will not be firmly established without much step-by-step, plodding, prosaic hard work. If the ancient Egyptians and the Chaldean shepherds who first thoughtfully observed the motions of the heavenly bodies, had contented themselves with prayers and praises, with giving way emotionally to the instinctive reverence for the unknown which is a characteristic of simple-minded people, astronomy would not have progressed as it did in those early times. But they began the laborious work of recording the facts, mapped the apparent paths of heavenly bodies, and laid a good foundation for the more efficient cultivation of astronomical science at the hands of Timocharis, Arystillus, and Hipparchus. The fixed stars were catalogued, and in course of time the Ptolemaic theory was evolved, to be overthrown by that of Copernicus when more facts had been collected. The telescope was invented; by laborious processes, by the study of fact after fact, it was made achromatic, and in the same hard plodding way improvement after improvement was introduced, until by means of good instruments, micrometrical measurements, the logical use of mathematics and observed facts, an altitude has now been reached which could never have been gained by drawing upon the inner consciousness. Sun and system, and myriads of stellar worlds are familiar to the man who reigns as high priest in a modem observatory. He can tell of suns unnumbered moving through space with attendant worlds at velocities which the mind cannot grasp, and of distances so great that some of the stars in the heavens which we observe to-night may have been blotted out of existence one or two years ago, because the light from them which reaches our eyes, has been more than that time travelling to our little earth—our little grain of mustard-seed in the universe—at a speed of 186,000 miles a second.
What revelations by man’s inner consciousness could have demonstrated so much of the glory of God, as these results of slow honest work? The German poet tells how God <... continues on page 5-42 >
* A paper read on Thursday, last -week, before the Brixton Psychological Society.
Editor's notes
- ↑ Spiritualism and Modern Culture by Harrison, William H., London Spiritualist, No. 287, February 22, 1878, pp. 85-7
London Spiritualist, No. 287, February 22, 1878, pp. 85-7