146 



NATURE 



[June i8, 1903 



tific ' I signify an authority to which I submit myself — 

 not a standard which I claim to attain. Any science 

 of which I can here speak as possible must be a 

 nascent science— not such as one of those vast systems 

 of connected knowledge which thousands of experts 

 now steadily push forward in laboratories in every 

 land — but such as each one of those great sciences was 

 in its dim and poor beginning, when a few monks 

 groped among the properties of ' the noble metals,' or 

 a few Chaldean shepherds outwatched the setting 

 stars." 



As an illustration of the temper of mind which 

 Myers brings to bear, and conceives ought always to 

 be brought to bear, to the understanding of obscure 

 phenomena, I will take the case of witchcraft, and 

 quote as follows : — 



" The lesson which witchcraft teaches with regard to 

 the validity of human testimony is" the more remark- 

 able because it was so long and so completely mis- 

 understood. The belief in witches long passed — as 

 well it might — as the culminant example of human 

 ignorance and folly ; and in so comparatively recent a 

 book as Mr. Lecky's ' History of Rationalism,' the sud- 

 den decline of this popular conviction, without argu- 

 ment or disapproval, is used to illustrate the irresistible 

 melting away of error and falsity in the ' intellectual 

 climate ' of a wiser age. Since about 1880, however, 

 when French experiments especially had afforded con- 

 spicuous examples of what a hysterical woman could 

 come to believe under suggestion from others or from 

 herself, it has begun to be felt that the phenomena of 

 witchcraft were very much what the phenomena of the 

 Saltpetri^re would seem to be to the patients themselves, 

 if left alone in the hospital without a medical staff. 

 And in ' Phantasms of the Living,' Edmund Uurney, 

 after subjecting the literature of witchcraft to a more 

 careful analysis than anyone till then had thought it 

 worth while to apply, was able to show that practi- 

 cally all recorded first-hand depositions (made apart 

 from torture) in the long story of witchcraft may quite 

 possibly have been true, to the best belief of the de- 

 ponents ; true, that is to say, as representing the con- 

 viction of sane (though often hysterical) persons, who 

 merely made the almost inevitable mistake of confusing 

 self-suggested hallucinations with waking fact. Nay, 

 even the insensible spots on the witches were no 

 doubt really anaesthetic — involved a first discovery of 

 a now familiar clinical symptom — the zones anal- 

 gdsiques of the patients of Pitres or Charcot. Witch- 

 craft, in fact, was a gigantic, a cruel psychological and 

 pathological experiment conducted by inquisitors upon 

 hysteria ; but it was conducted in the dark, and when 

 the barbarous explanation dropped out of credence much 

 of possible discovery was submerged as well." 



Myers's attitude to the in some quarters prevalent 

 creed called spiritualism has been frequently misunder- 

 stood, but it is illustrated by the following extract : — 



" A large group of persons have founded upon these 

 and similar facts a scheme of belief known as Modern 

 Spiritualism, or Spiritism. Later chapters in this book 

 will show how much I owe to certain observations 

 made by members of this group — how often my own 

 conclusions concur with conclusions at which they have 

 previously arrived. And yet this work of mine is in 

 large measure a critical attack upon the main Spiritist 

 position, as held, say, by Mr. A. R. Wallace, its most 

 eminent living supporter — the belief, namely, that all 

 or almost all supernormal phenomena are due to the 

 action of the spirits of the dead. By far the larger 

 proportion, as I hold, are due to the action of the still 

 embodied spirit of the agent or percipient himself. 

 Apart from speculative differences, moreover, I alto- 



NO. 1755, VO^- 6^1 



gether dissent from the conversion into a sectarian 

 creed of what I hold should be a branch of scientific 

 inquiry, growing naturally out of our existing know- 

 ledge. It is, I believe, largely to this temper of un- 

 critical acceptance, degenerating often into blind 

 credulity, that we must refer the lack of progress in 

 Spiritualistic literature, and the encouragement which 

 has often been bestowed upon manifest fraud— so often, 

 indeed, as to create among scientific men a strong in- 

 disposition to the study of phenomena recorded or ad- 

 vocated in a tone so alien from Science." 



He then relates the rise of a society for investigating 

 psychical matters in a new fashion, among eminent 

 men at Cambridge, who felt that the time was ripe 

 for an attack on superstition and on world-old legendary 

 tradition concerning an unseen world and occult in- 

 fluences — the subject-matter, in fact, of all religion 

 — by purely scientific terrestrial methods, and in the 

 conviction 



" that no adequate attempt had yet been made even to 

 determine whether anything could be learnt as to an 

 unseen world or no; for that if anything were know- 

 able about such a world in such fashion that Science 

 could adopt and maintain that knowledge, it must be 

 discovered by no analysis of tradition, and by no mani- 

 pulation of metaphysics, but simply by experiment and 

 observation^ — simply by the application to phenomena 

 within us and around us of precisely the same methods 

 of deliberate, dispassionate, exact inquiry which have 

 built up our actual knowledge of the world which we 

 can touch and see. I can hardly even now guess to how 

 many of my readers this will seem a truism, and to how 

 many a paradox. Truism or paradox, such a thought 

 suggested a kind of effort, which, so far as we could 

 discover, had never yet been made. For what seemed 

 needful was an inquiry of quite other scope than the 

 mere analysis of historical documents, or of the origines 

 of any alleged revelation in the past. It must be an 

 inquiry resting primarily, as all scientific inquiries in 

 the stricter sense now must rest, upon objective facts 

 actually observable, upon experiments which we can 

 repeat to-day, and which we may hope to carry further 

 to-morrow. It must be an inquiry based, to use an 

 old term, on the uniformitarian hypothesis ; on the 

 presumption, that is to say, that if a spiritual world 

 exists, and if that world has at any epoch been manifest 

 or even discoverable, then it ought to be manifest or 

 discoverable now." 



As to the objection frequently urged against psychical 

 investigation, on the ground of the asserted triviality 

 and apparent worthlessness of some of the faculties \ 

 which are the object of study, Myers says : — ; 



" In investigating those faculties we have been in 

 no wise deterred by the fact of the apparent useless- 

 ness of some of them for our waking ends. Useless 

 is a pre-scientific, even an anti-scientific term, which 

 has perhaps proved a greater stumbling-block to re- 

 search in psychology than in any other science. In 

 science the use of phenomena is to prove laws, and the 

 more bizarre and trivial the phenomena, the greater 

 the chance of their directing us to some law which 

 has been overlooked till now." 



Before embarking on his long and laborious 

 quest — the enumeration and dissection of instances, 

 and the finding of a hypothesis that should fit and weld 

 them all together — he concludes this part of his intro- 

 duction with the following modest claim : — 



" The truest success of this book will lie in its rapid 

 supersession by a better. For this will show that at 



