HPB-SB-10-336: Difference between revisions
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{{Style P-HPB SB. Title continued |A Voice from Laodicea|10-335}} | {{Style P-HPB SB. Title continued |A Voice from Laodicea|10-335}} | ||
... | {{Style P-No indent|break on the following Tuesday. In the interval the parents had been repeatedly written to, but no reply had been received. That night, or rather between 12 and 1 a.m. on the following day, the lady was lying awake in bed, when she heard the sound of rapid wheels on the road leading to the house. She listened and heard the sound stop, as it appeared at the gate of the drive. She then woke her husband, telling him that the long expected parents of the dead boy were come. But on looking out of the window, they saw no carriage then. The lady learnt in the morning, that all the other inmates of the house had heard the noise of the same mysterious arrival, and that one or two had like herself looked out and seen nothing. It appeared afterwards, that at that very day and hour, the father, who had been absent from home in a remote part of Ireland, had received by special messenger the letters which conveyed the tidings of his child’s desperate illness. Also that at the hour of his death on the Tuesday morning, the form of the child had been seen by his brother in Ireland, who had told others at the time what he had seen. I will attempt to define accurately my state of mind with regard to this narrative. At the time that I heard it from my informant’s lips, I probably believed it. At the time that I am setting down this account of it on paper, I feel a faint revival of that belief. But ordinarily, this, and a hundred incidents like this, do not form part of my mental constitution at all. I build nothing on such records, I draw no conclusions from them. They have ceased to impress me by the pure wonder of them, and they make no other impression in its stead. The mind reflects, but does not photograph them. Like the memory of dead virtues, they are writ in water, not in brass.}} | ||
{{Style S-HPB SB. Continues on|10-337}} | Now it seems to me that this utter incapacity for belief, is a phenomenon quite as marvellous as any other of the marvels which cluster round Spiritualism, and will probably at least as fully repay an attentive study of it. Here are men, who have cast aside all prejudices which might stand in the way of their receiving the facts of Spiritualism. They are willing, nay anxious, if not to believe, at least to hear the evidence fully, and decide upon it fairly. And when the evidence which they asked for is supplied to them, overwhelming in quantity, and unimpeachable in quality, they find themselves almost unaffected by it. Inspirational addresses are to them utterances in an unknown tongue, and the thousand works on Spiritualism affect them as little as treatises on technical chemistry, or on the subdivisions of the micro-lepidoptera. | ||
These are men rejected by the one side, and half welcomed by the other. Sometimes they succeed in almost breaking away from Spiritualism, they mix with the world, imbibe the world’s opinions, and become almost of the world, until a chance conversation, a casual memory reduces them again to their unwilling thraldom. At other times, they become almost Spiritualists; they have been reading a good deal perhaps, or been thrown much with those of that way of thinking, and they congratulate themselves that certainty is at last within their reach, and prepare to enter the race for a martyr’s crown, by preaching an unpopular and unwelcome truth. And then, after the lapse of a few quiet weeks, comes the next great “exposure,” and more deadly still, the comments on that exposure by a certain class of Spiritualists, and the explanations of it. And the fabric which had been so toilsomely reared topples over in a moment. And the whirlwind of doubt not only carries down in ruin the superstructure, but shakes the very foundations. Of course this is illogical, and not as it should be. The diamonds which a jeweller has, and has proved, are not the less diamonds because he is for once taken in, and gives a hundred guineas for a brilliant of paste. Mr. Sludge when left to himself is caught playing the ghost with a sheet, and some phosphorised oil; but the fact that a few days before, when Mr. Sludge’s hands were fast held, my arm-chair danced a hornpipe in the corner of the room, is not thereby disproved. If I deemed my tests sufficient at any time to guard against fraud, they are sufficient still. If they were not sufficient, I ought never to have believed at all. To discredit my chair’s saltatory performance only now, argues a want of scientific accuracy in the past, or of logical acumen in the present. We come back, then, to the point from which we started. Believing the testimony to many of these phenomena to be logically indisputable, and believing in the evidence of my own senses in their favour, I ought to believe in the actual occurrence of the phenomena called Spiritualistic. Very good, but I don’t believe, and if put on my defence I can only cry “Peccavi.” | |||
What then is the nature of belief? From what, if not from reason, does it proceed? By what laws, other than those of logic, does it act? The analysis of a few instances, where {{Style S-HPB SB. Continues on|10-337}} | |||
Latest revision as of 10:55, 12 December 2025
< A Voice from Laodicea (continued from page 10-335) >
break on the following Tuesday. In the interval the parents had been repeatedly written to, but no reply had been received. That night, or rather between 12 and 1 a.m. on the following day, the lady was lying awake in bed, when she heard the sound of rapid wheels on the road leading to the house. She listened and heard the sound stop, as it appeared at the gate of the drive. She then woke her husband, telling him that the long expected parents of the dead boy were come. But on looking out of the window, they saw no carriage then. The lady learnt in the morning, that all the other inmates of the house had heard the noise of the same mysterious arrival, and that one or two had like herself looked out and seen nothing. It appeared afterwards, that at that very day and hour, the father, who had been absent from home in a remote part of Ireland, had received by special messenger the letters which conveyed the tidings of his child’s desperate illness. Also that at the hour of his death on the Tuesday morning, the form of the child had been seen by his brother in Ireland, who had told others at the time what he had seen. I will attempt to define accurately my state of mind with regard to this narrative. At the time that I heard it from my informant’s lips, I probably believed it. At the time that I am setting down this account of it on paper, I feel a faint revival of that belief. But ordinarily, this, and a hundred incidents like this, do not form part of my mental constitution at all. I build nothing on such records, I draw no conclusions from them. They have ceased to impress me by the pure wonder of them, and they make no other impression in its stead. The mind reflects, but does not photograph them. Like the memory of dead virtues, they are writ in water, not in brass.
Now it seems to me that this utter incapacity for belief, is a phenomenon quite as marvellous as any other of the marvels which cluster round Spiritualism, and will probably at least as fully repay an attentive study of it. Here are men, who have cast aside all prejudices which might stand in the way of their receiving the facts of Spiritualism. They are willing, nay anxious, if not to believe, at least to hear the evidence fully, and decide upon it fairly. And when the evidence which they asked for is supplied to them, overwhelming in quantity, and unimpeachable in quality, they find themselves almost unaffected by it. Inspirational addresses are to them utterances in an unknown tongue, and the thousand works on Spiritualism affect them as little as treatises on technical chemistry, or on the subdivisions of the micro-lepidoptera.
These are men rejected by the one side, and half welcomed by the other. Sometimes they succeed in almost breaking away from Spiritualism, they mix with the world, imbibe the world’s opinions, and become almost of the world, until a chance conversation, a casual memory reduces them again to their unwilling thraldom. At other times, they become almost Spiritualists; they have been reading a good deal perhaps, or been thrown much with those of that way of thinking, and they congratulate themselves that certainty is at last within their reach, and prepare to enter the race for a martyr’s crown, by preaching an unpopular and unwelcome truth. And then, after the lapse of a few quiet weeks, comes the next great “exposure,” and more deadly still, the comments on that exposure by a certain class of Spiritualists, and the explanations of it. And the fabric which had been so toilsomely reared topples over in a moment. And the whirlwind of doubt not only carries down in ruin the superstructure, but shakes the very foundations. Of course this is illogical, and not as it should be. The diamonds which a jeweller has, and has proved, are not the less diamonds because he is for once taken in, and gives a hundred guineas for a brilliant of paste. Mr. Sludge when left to himself is caught playing the ghost with a sheet, and some phosphorised oil; but the fact that a few days before, when Mr. Sludge’s hands were fast held, my arm-chair danced a hornpipe in the corner of the room, is not thereby disproved. If I deemed my tests sufficient at any time to guard against fraud, they are sufficient still. If they were not sufficient, I ought never to have believed at all. To discredit my chair’s saltatory performance only now, argues a want of scientific accuracy in the past, or of logical acumen in the present. We come back, then, to the point from which we started. Believing the testimony to many of these phenomena to be logically indisputable, and believing in the evidence of my own senses in their favour, I ought to believe in the actual occurrence of the phenomena called Spiritualistic. Very good, but I don’t believe, and if put on my defence I can only cry “Peccavi.”
What then is the nature of belief? From what, if not from reason, does it proceed? By what laws, other than those of logic, does it act? The analysis of a few instances, where <... continues on page 10-337 >