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< A Theory of Mediumship (continued from page 8-342) >
consideration of Spiritualists of all shades and sects. Instead of regarding the action, power, or energy of a medium as exerted on and originating changes in the phenomenal thing, which would be simply treating the subject at once as a branch of physical science, I will begin by saying that it is just as maintainable a position that the changes originate in the thing-in-itself (which underlies the phenomenon, and is therefore external to consciousness), and which thing-in-itself we have a right to assume to be as equally related to all the onlookers as the phenomenal thing is, and to be thereby capable of affecting the phenomenal Ego in each and every instance when it, the thing-in-itself, is reached on through the physical peculiarities of the organism of any one of the members witnessing a given disturbance from the ordinary course of events. The machinery of sense thought in the medium being known to behave some-what differently at different times, the resultant product may not unnaturally be expected to vary. In other words, there may be a change in the loom, and not alone in the fabric. But the variation of the product being established experimentally, if the relation of machinery and manufactured article be acknowledged, the universality of the change in the product, i.e., its identical appearance to all men, implies the unopposed and free integration between that which I have typified as a loom and all other similar machines. In other words, that which becomes true for one man must remain so for all; a new possibility having been opened up for one, all equally avail themselves of it, from the very fact of their functional identity. It is, in fact, a functional revelation, and therefore one universal in its character, which I am trying to indicate under the imagery of mechanical actions, where an influence sufficiently strong (or special) to affect any one member of a I linked series is necessarily propagated through the whole chain when once it makes an impression any-where.
A doctrine of correspondence was not long since put forward by the late Professor IV. Kingden Clifford (See Mind, No. IX.), in which the thing-in-itself, or the reality which underlies phenomenon, is regarded as of the nature of mind, or, in fact, composed of the elements of feeling which underlie and enter into the composition of the woven something, which is to us our consciousness. Wherever there is motion of matter elemental mind stuff exists; and these elements, to use Professor Clifford’s own words, “are connected together in their sequence and coexistence by counterparts of the physical laws of matter. For otherwise the correspondence could not be kept up.”
This is, in my opinion, such a view of the relation existing between mind and matter, as we must adopt in endeavoring to bring the subject of mediumship down to the level of everyday science.
After being satisfied of the reality of manifestations produced by mediums, I was for years obliged to rest content with the bare acknowledgments of the matter of fact from the difficulty I felt in finding an answer to the question, How is it that the external reality is necessarily a reality for the whole world, as well as for the medium, whose life is the sine qua non in its manifestation, if it is merely by effort, analogous to will, conscious or unconscious, that the medium is the active agent in its production? This difficulty lay not so much in an answer to the above question as in that to the far more formidable question, How is it that external reality in general is a consequence of effort of the unconscious type?—for this appeared to me to be the necessary sequel to the former, if the mediumistic manifestation be taken as a specimen of the construction of the real in space. The difficulty was insurmountable to me, for I was convinced from experience of the extraordinary that the store of physical energy in the medium’s body, however determined to produce results in definite directions, was drawn upon during all manifestations without, necessarily, the slightest intention to deceive on the part of the medium regarded as a conscious moral being; of course, I mean in the respectable instances which we have all met with in our investigations. It is not till such a theory as that of Professor Clifford is advanced as the foundation from which to operate that these questions at all assume a soluble aspect. According to that view of correspondence all changes in the nervous system (and therefore the abnormal as well as the normal) have corresponding to them elements outside or below consciousness, but which, in certain instances, may, when manufactured into a complex structure, appear in consciousness as object. According to this view, when a change takes place in the objective order, or in the object or phenomenon, we must suppose the change to originate in what I may call the process of secretion, or in that of manufacture, or in both together, of that raw material of feeling which afterwards becomes organised into the matter of experience. As that which corresponds to an ultimate beyond consciousness and below matter is a mere nerve motion, we have in the abnormal objective order merely abnormal nerve activity, and this is the ground where the investigator must begin his labours, and where, I believe, I have already made some observations worth recording. Wherever there is a spiritual manifestation, so-called, i.e., a something contrary to the usual order of affairs, there is corresponding to it nervous activity out of the common course; but as it has produced its results as certified to by the real change on the phenomenal side, it may become a subject of experimental inquiry under improved methods of research. Manifestations are thus the certificates that there exists in connection with them abnormal nerve activity.
It would appear to the worker in the field of modern Spiritualism, who adopts Professor Clifford’s view of the nature of the material universe, that the possibility of constructing new objects and strangely affecting old ones, or to use a more general term, interfering with the objective order, arises from the fact that “eject-elements ” underlying consciousness can be supplied from a strange source, for that then the habit of grouping previously experienced elements from previously experienced sources is not present, to exert a guardian influence as it docs in maintaining the stability of the ordinary.
It may further be supposed, in the case of progressively developing manifestations, that new elements from new sources group themselves under certain available forms, which becoming integrated into the complex that underlies phenomenon, establish at the same time habits through which the corresponding feeling is easily reproduced; hence the <... continues on page 8-344 >