HPB-SB-14-56

H. P. Blavatsky Scrapbooks

from Adyar archives of the International Theosophical Society

T i

vol. 14, p. 56	volume 14, page 56 vol. title: vol. period: 1882 pages in vol.: 174
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eng • рус

< Notes by the Way. (continued from page 14-55) >

before her, and she hid her face. They picked out each letter as she fixed her mind on it, and so spelled out words which were always thought of by another person. They thus put together such words as Pfeifchen, Entschuldigen, Preghiera, and many others equally difficult. Out of the 59 letters composing certain words “they picked out 46 right at first trial, 11 at second, and 4 at third, making only one failure.”

The elder boy’s account of the process is that, in guessing a card, the picture of it comes into his mind, and the name of a town appears in print. In choosing an object fixed on, both say that “their eyes wander over the whole number before them, until their attention is arrested by and fixed on a particular one, which they generally feel certain to be the right one, when it is so.” They never imagine the sound of a name. It is instructive to know that this corresponds to the way the writer visualizes for them, always by look, and not by sound.

Again, only one of the boys has the faculty of receiving a purely mental picture. Neither of them is able to guess numbers. Why is this? What is the difference between a mental picture of, for instance, three figures and three letters? What between a vividly conceived imaginative picture and the mental picture of an object in some one’s pocket?

Here, again, I take it, there is some law if we could only get at it. The paper concludes with a striking case of transference of thought. The writer had in her mind a vivid picture of the Falls of Lora, which she had been to visit when some distant friends were in distress and trouble. She had allegorized the scene, and had connected it with the woes of her friends, and the idea had taken hold on her mind and become vividly present to her. Probably it was conceived with much force of imagination. Her maid, who slept in a room immediately over her mistress, dreamed that she was “in the midst of water rushing over rocks and the most dreadful whirlpools,” from which she was trying to save people. Being questioned, she gave as full and minute a description of the Falls of Lora as could be found in a local guide book. She had never seen them, nor photograph, nor picture of them. Here it is to be noted that there was no intention to convey the scene to the woman’s mind; no willing; no concentration of thought. On the contrary, the mind of the writer was deeply stirred, and her imagination was vividly excited. The deep stirring of mind probably sufficed to set the creative force of imagination at work, and reached a sympathetic mind that was in daily rapport with it. It is a striking case, and the whole paper is valuable.

M. A. (Oxon.)

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PROCEEDINGS OF THE SOCIETY FOR
PSYCHICAL RESEARCH.

Vol. I., Part I. London: Trubner and Co., 1882.

This first official publication of the work of the Society for Psychical Research is devoted to the question of Thought-reading, and is by far the most important contribution to the literature of the subject which has yet appeared. A considerable portion of the matter contained in it has already been before the public in our own columns and in the pages of the Nineteenth Century, but there is much that will be new and interesting, and the value is greatly enhanced by the whole mass of experimental evidence, and the comments thereon, being carefully edited and brought together in a compact form.

We will quote only one paragraph, the concluding one, which forms an admirable finish, shewing as it does most conclusively, what a wide and unexplored field is open to the investigator, one in which persevering work is sure to be amply rewarded. The paragraph is from the “Appendix to Report on Thought-reading,” by Professor Barrett.

“The following letter from Canon Wilberforce, which I have permission to publish, reached me after the foregoing was in print:—

“‘The experiment most interesting to myself was this. I took from my pocket a shilling, read the date, replaced the shilling in my pocket, made a mental picture of the date, which Mr. Bishop thereupon wrote in chalk upon a black board. A still more striking experiment with a £5 note was made as follows:—Sir John Lubbock, who happened to be staying here, took from his pocket a £5 note, and having privately observed the number, replaced the note in his pocket-book. Mr. Bishop correctly inscribed the number upon the slate, with the exception of the second figure, which he afterwards corrected.

“ ‘Basil Wilberforce.

“‘The Deanery, Southampton, August 23rd, 1882.’”

The Part also contains the objects, rules, and constitution of the Society, together with a list of members and associates.

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LIFE AFTER DEATH.*

To the translator of this little book every English Spiritualist—in the higher and wider sense—into whose hands it may come will acknowledge an obligation second only to that which will be felt to the author himself by a larger circle of readers. Herr Wernekke has performed the unusual and most acceptable service of giving in a foreign language a clear and elegant version of a native work of great merit, yet of merit not sufficiently notorious to ensure the deserved rewards of such a labour.

To some of the readers of this paper, Fechner will be remembered as an associate of Professor Zöllner in investigations which brought down upon both an intolerant clamour from their scientific colleagues and the Press. Though far from approbation of phenomenal Spiritualism, the venerable Professor of Physics at Leipzig University bravely and honestly authorised the publication of his testimony to the success of the experiments with Slade. But to English students of the higher scientific and philosophical literature of Germany his name is also familiar on account of the many interesting researches to which his long life and great abilities have been devoted. In the translator’s preface to the small volume before us will be found some reference to these works.

In order to appreciate the place and importance of this treatise in Spiritualistic thought, we must advert to ideas and speculations already current among ourselves, and to their relation to more developed, but to us very obscure, conceptions which are found in Eastern philosophy. In a recent review† of Mr. Roden Noel’s “Philosophy of Immortality,” and in a previous article in the Psychological Review,‡ attention was called to the increasing prominence in the literature of Spiritualism of an opinion which is identical, as far as it goes, with the Buddhist doctrine of Karma. Karma is “doing,” which includes the whole psychological and objective activity of a lifetime. Divested of every non-essential element, the doctrine is that this activity constructs the personality, surviving also in all its external results, which remain in indissoluble rapport with the agent. Without entering here upon the vexed question in Buddhism of the identity of the successive personalities constituted by Karma, we have only to bear in mind the essential principle that our “doing” and all its effects are not flung, as it were, into space, there to be dispersed and transformed beyond the possibility of future recognition and appropriation, but are and remain our own in a twofold sense and relation. For as, in the first place, the very personalities representing us have been constructed by our past activity, our total energising, so, secondly, their whole condition or environment, material physical, and otherwise, is determined by the outward effects of this activity, of whatever character they may be and wherever they may have been planted. The first incident of Karma, the self-formative power of habitual voluntary energy, is intelligible enough. The apprehension of it without any conscious recognition of or obligation to the Buddhist doctrine, marks an independent advance of Western thought. The continuity of state, that death leaves the individual just what his past life has made him, and that his future condition is determined by that and not by a Divine judgment, is a principle that is now established in Spiritual opinion and literature, and is justly claimed as an important correction of traditional religious ideas. That is not, however, to say that we have adequately thought out and realised the tremendous import of this aspect of Karma, namely, that we are each of us building up from hour to hour an interior organism by the substantialisation of our psychical activity. And as to the reaction secondly alleged in that doctrine, how effects on the outer world of life and nature retain their personal and identifiable connection with the original agent through all their apparent mutations and combinations; how they are and remain a part of his very self under all these disguises; what is the law and what the process by which they will come back upon him—upon the future embodied or disembodied personality—as an environment and fate—upon all this we are most of us in the dark. Yet the comprehension of it, if true, will constitute by far the most important advance we shall have then made in spiritual or occult science. And though we have to look chiefly to the East for this instruction (and many will grate- <... continues on page 14-57 >

* “Life after Death.” From the German of Gustav Theodor Fechner. By Hugo Wernekke, Head Master of Weimar Realschule. Sampson, Low and Co., 188, Fleet-street, London, 1882.

† “Light,” March 25th, 1882.
‡ Psychological Review, August, 1881. Art. “Karma.”

Editor's notes

Sources

• 

  Light, v. 2, No. 93, October 14, 1882, pp. 454-456