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vol. title: vol. period: 1879-1880 pages in vol.: 577 |
An Oracular Standard
The Evening Standard constantly gives valuable psychological information in an indirect way, nor did it depart from its custom last Tuesday night, when in a leaderette it declared:—
A gentleman named Purdon—Mr. John E. Purdon, M. B.— has lately been investigating a couple of spiritualistic mediums, and has obtained results which he and the conductors of journals devoted to the Cause consider exceedingly important. One of the two subjects had a “slight febrile cold, which prevented the usual display of his mediumistic abilities,” but Mr. Purdon was not going to let his studies be disturbed by an occasional sneeze. Health however, is, Mr. Purdon thinks, very important, though we should hardly have expected to find spirits refusing to come at the medium’s call simply because he had a cold in his head. A great deal depends upon the presence in the medium—we are always quoting Mr. Purdon—of “a nitrogenised principle derived from the incomplete combustion of albumenoid matter. Its origin in the body can hardly be attributed to other than retrograde metamorphosis of built up tissues, notwithstanding its direct production by oxidation from nitrogenised food in the blood, is well within the limits of possibility.” Mr. Purdon’s investigation tended to show that the nitrogenised principle decreased while the medium was engaged in his performances, and this the extraordinarily scientific personage quoted says, is “primarily due to some interference with the nervous supply of the voluntary muscles, having its origin in the central ganglia of the brain, whereby the muscular system was thrown out of gear, leaving the will free to externalise potential energy through some other agency.” Mr. Purdon has an enormous advantage in making assertions as to what he discovered from the two mediums. As no one on earth can possibly have the faintest idea what he means, it is impossible to contradict him and show that he is wrong.
The “no one on earth” in the preceding sentence, means “the Editor of The Standard,” the language being that which is commonly applied to elementary scientific principles of wide application, and such as the President of the Royal Society might any day, for the sake of simplicity, apply to common popular subjects. There is nothing pedantic or unavoidably abstruse in the phraseology; it is only sufficiently technical to save time, on the assumption that the readers of the remarks do not wish the mental energy of intelligent writers taken up by beating out every point to the elementary School Board level. Surely a clever and well-known army surgeon like Dr. Purdon has a right to assume a minimum of receptive capacity in his listeners. He might, had he chosen, have led his readers into the highest regions of German metaphysics, but he wisely preferred to make his utterances studiously simple—“milk for babes,” in fact.
The Standard, further says:—
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Editor's notes
- ↑ An Oracular Standard by Carter Blake, C., Spiritualist Newspaper, The, No. 404, May 21, 1880, pp. 241-42
Sources
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London Spiritualist, No. 404, May 21, 1880, pp. 241-42