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NOT only is physiology the basis of the greater portion of our psychology, but the physiological processes of the material body have much to do with the peculiar phenomena of psychics and neurotics. It therefore becomes necessary in our study of abnormal psychology to give considerable attention to the physiology of the brain and nervous system—to the physical basis of sensations and emotions—as factors of mind.
In the mind of the primitive savage it constitutes but a short step in reasoning from his dream experiences to the belief that his “consciousness” could be absent from the body, traveling about the world or roaming the universe; and so these two ideas put together—or rather the one growing out of the other—lead the primitive mind to believe in “consciousness” separate and apart from the physical body, and thus the foundation is securely laid for a belief in spiritism. Dreams seem to endow the mind with a power that is quite independent of time and space, and the fancies of the dream-world are not wholly unlike the extraordinary claims and superstitions of the spirit medium.
As far as physiology is concerned—or any of the other physical sciences—there is no spirit. Spiritual forces are not able to manifest themselves to the instruments employed in scientific investigation. They are immaterial, and science deals only with the material.
The scientist therefore, finds it difficult to believe in spirits, whose very existence, according to the psychical researchers, would seem to be for the purpose of nullifying the laws of Nature. Our universe is pretty well regulated by more or less rigid and dependable physical laws, and yet it seems to be the purpose of spirits, as revealed by the claims of spiritualism, to break these laws—to defy the precepts of Nature—and otherwise to show their superiority over the natural order.
I do not doubt the existence of spiritual forces, but I believe that they are engaged in operating in the spiritual realm, and that their time is not occupied with trivial intrusion into the materialistic realm-intrusion, apparently, with no more serious mission than the performance of marvels for the mystification of mortal minds.[1] At least, so far as science has been able to test spiritualistic performances, they have not as yet demonstrated their ability to suspend the known physical laws governing the material universe.
Science comes more and more to look upon that which lays claim to being supernatural, or spiritual, in the performance of spirit mediums, as being an emanation from the unconscious realms of the medium’s own mind; and to explain the entire performance by the laws of physiology, on the one hand, and of psychology, on the other. The very nature of the content of the majority of these spirit messages and revelations is sufficient to brand them as wholly human, in every way very ordinary, and utterly devoid of any ear-marks of that [p. 286] superiority which would serve to identify them as supernatural.
Even the spiritualists themselves recognize that both good and bad, as judged by human standards, emanate from the mind of the medium as exercised and controlled in the séance room. Science prefers to explain these good and bad messages by the ordinary operation of the human brain—even as we recognize in our daily affairs both good and evil proceeding from the creative centers and the imaginative spheres of the human intellect—rather than to resort to good and evil spirits in order to explain them.
The primitive mind of man tends to project its own mental images into the external world about him, and thus these “spirits” of his own creation come to inhabit not only people and animals, but also rivers, trees, and mountains. And since it is the undisciplined mind that indulges in this sort of “spirit” projection, it is not strange that the spirits thus conceived should be characteristically infantile and juvenile in their attributes and conduct.
The psychologic basis for these spirit concepts seems to be largely dominated by the pleasure-pain instinct of the race. The most primitive soul desires to avoid pain and experience pleasure; and so, whether it be the Happy Hunting Ground of the savage or the exquisite Paradise of the orthodox Christian, the spirit world is supposed to be one affording its sojourner almost unlimited pleasure. Pain is banished, sorrow and death find no place in the Heaven of Happiness which is the final attainment and abode of redeemed spirits. And, as a rule, the pleasures which we conceive as being ours to enjoy on the other side are the very ones for which we most long during our sojourn in this world.
As already remarked, the biology of spiritualism is rooted in the pain-pleasure complex of the human mind and nervous system. For numerous reasons, the primitive mind fears death. Death is usually preceded or accompanied by pain and suffering. Death spells the extinction of all possibility of pleasure-enjoyment, and therefore death becomes the culminating symbol of pain. On the basis of the wish to avoid pain and experience pleasure, therefore, the primitive mind desires in every way possible, in its effort to rise above the fear of death, to prove the unreality—the non-existence—of death.
And so the unconscious mind even of the savage reaches out with persistent longing to the belief of spirit survival after death, seeking to prove that death is but an illusion—but the vestibule to another and higher life.
We come thus to the place where we are able clearly to recognize that the key to spiritualism—that is, to the non-fraudulent, non-mate rialistic phases of it—is to be found in the physiology and psychology of the unconscious. Here, in this mysterious realm of the human intellect, are locked up the secrets and mysteries of mediumship, clairvoyance, trances, automatic writing, and the rest of the real and respectable manifestations of spiritualism.
Physiology is the key that will open the psychological lock which will enable us to continue our exploration of the secret birthplace, and abode of the phenomena of modern spiritualism.
What, then, is spirit? I would offer two definitions:
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The spirits, then, that we deal with so largely in the study of spiritualism, exist within the human body, and from the realms of the unconscious centers of the mind project themselves outw ard for the production of their phenomena. They do not exist outside the body and come in to possess the body, and thus work upon the mind as an extraneous spiritual force. In brief, the spirits that operate in connection with occult manifestations, function only in connection with the body, and science thus far has not been brought face to face with any such phenomena that cannot be adequately explained on this hypothesis, or that cannot be reproduced by psychic manipulations and in accordance with physiological law.
Science, therefore, makes two challenges to the spiritualist, as follows:
Science is in every way willing to admit the possibility, perhaps even the probability, of spirits being present in our bodies. The human being exhibits phenomena of higher intellectual activity that enormously stretch our present knowledge of physiological law and psychological conduct adequate ly to explain. While science can not recognize or demonstrate the existence of a spirit indwelling the human form, a vast number of scientists-if not a majority, certainly a very respectable minority-do believe more or less in the prese nce of a spirit as a part of man’s equipment as a moral being. But, it should be remembered, we simply [p. 288] believe in the existence of this spirit—we offer no proof of it, and have thus far discovered no means of obtaining scientific proof of the existence of such a postulated spiritual entity.
As a scie ntist, the refore, I must limit my belief in spirits to a belief in my own possession of such a force or entity; assuming, of course, that other men, like myself, recognize that they also probably have such individual spirits within them. But the spiritualists and the psychical researchers ask us to believe in spirits that exist without bodies, that can act in defiance of natural law, and that operate in the physical world without visible forms. In fact, they go one step farther, and ask us to believe that these spirits are just like the spirits that dwell within us while we are living, and that they can visit us in the physical world after the bodies in which they have sojourned have long ceased to exist as such.
I have also observed that spiritualists are not, as a rule, the stoical, philosophical, phlegmatic type; they are usually persons of a more or less nervous temperament, often educated types that are capable of enjoying a high degree of pleasure. We are, therefore, brought back face to face with our primitive pain-pleasure instincts. Not only do our spiritualist friends want to avoid the thoughts of pain, suffering, death, extinction, annihilation, etc.; but they are likewise keenly alive to the desire to experience pleasure. Since pleasure is the opposite of pain and the antithesis of death, and since their central fear is that of death with its association of pain, the central complex for them—the very center of the solar system of pleasure complexes—becomes the “complex of life,” life never-ending.
And so the emotions of pleasure, which we all so much enjoy, and which certain types of individuals particularly enjoy, come to be clustered around, and associated with, the immortality complexes of the human mind; and thus the spiritualist is enabled to experience the highest degree of psychic exhilaration, the most profound enjoyment of mental and nervous pleasure, by indulging his unwavering belief in life and immortality; all the while seeking to strengthen such a mental attitude by the affirmation of his disbelief in death.
Thus the life-death conflict is built up in the human experience. Evidences group themselves on one side tending to prove death, annihilation, the eternal doom, the darkness of the grave. The scientific, materialistic teachings of the age tend to group themselves around these complexes. On the other hand, in conflict with this, the opposite complexes of life and immortality are fostered by the teachings of orthodox religion, and by the seeming evidences of modern spiritualism; and thus the mind seeks to gather—quite naturally, because of the greater pleasure associated therewith—evidence to prove that life, not death, is the goal of human existence. Spiritualism has on its side, and in its favor, the biologic urge of human instinct, the physiologic hunger and thirst for mortal pleasure, and the psychologic tendencies which unfailingly and instinctively lead the organism to seek out the paths of mental pleasure, while studiously avoiding the avenues of pain.
It is entirely true that in many individuals the fear of death is not the hub around which the ir pain-fears are grouped. It may be, as it is with many people, some other form of fear; but [p. 289] it has its opposite set off against it as the hub of the pleasure sensations. Life and death are not the homologues of pain and pleasure in all individuals, but they are, certainly, in the vast majority of the present generation.
The brain is the organ of the mind. Whenever we experience a feeling or emotion, record a sensation, or indulge in a thought, some actual change takes place in the brain. Every bit of mental activity is accompanied by some sort of physical process in the brain. Everything we experience leaves a permanent impress of some sort on the cells or neurons of the organ of mentality. It is also true that the same series of physical phenomena will recur when its corresponding series of mental processes are reawakened or otherwise resurrected into consciousness. In other words, as one specialist puts it, “Physical brain processes or experiences are correlated with corresponding mind processes or experiences, and vice versa.”
We come to see, then, that every mental experience leaves behind a residue-some actual change in the neurons of the brain. This actual change becomes “the physical register of mental experience.” Psychologists believe that this physical register is very largely preserved in the subconscious mind, so that the unconscious activity of the medium has at its disposal all that vast wealth of experience, sensation, and emotion which has been accumulated throughout an entire lifetime. Memory is but the consciousness of the restimulation, or awakening, of these physical registries of past experience.
Whether neurograms are chemical or physical is not material to this discussion. The brain cells may become chemically sensitized so as repeatedly to react to the conscious recalling of an experience, the same as they acted in the original experience. This we can easily understand when we come to recognize how sensitive the human organism may be to the chemical action of internal secretions, or the hay-fever patient to an infinitesimal amount of pollen stimulation. On the other hand, the brain may effect its registry of experience by means of a physical process—by having an experience stenciled, as it were, on its physical structure—and then be able, for purposes of memory, to recall past experiences somewhat after the fashion in which a stenciled bit of paper, when run through a player-piano, reproduces music.
No matter what may be the exact nature, theoretically, of these changes produced on the cells of the brain by our experiences, they are there; they constitute a residue of some sort which can be tapped and used variously by different individuals. Whatever they are, we can perhaps do no better than to adopt the term suggested by Prince and call them “neurograms.” That the mind and body do thus reciprocally behave is shown by the experience of Pawlaw, the Russian physiologist, in the so-called “sham feeding” of dogs. His experiments serve to show the parallelism between mind and body: how the mind can start the body to acting and
the body can start the mind to acting: how images can pass in through the eye, and sounds through the ear, to arouse the mind: and how the “neurograms,” or memory register, of these same images and sounds can be resurrected and start out through the mind, so to impress the eye and ear with their reality as to lead mediums and psychics to believe that they have [p. 290] actually seen and heard these phenomena—to deceive themselves into accepting, as real images and sounds from the spirit world, the resurrected memories of their own consciousness.
We find that the subconscious residue of the mind is capable not only of practising deception in the realm of spiritualism, but also of producing apparent disease disturbances of the body—actually of deranging the behavior of the organism. This is aptly shown in the case of various forms of hysteria. For instance, through purely mental sources and through the agency of the nervous system, an individual may become more or less color-blind. Violet, blue, and green seem to vanish first, red appearing to be the most persistent color. This has often been given as the explanation why most hysterics are fond of red. They perhaps prefer to dress in showy colors because these are the only ones they can see continuously. In hysteria, the so-called visual field may be modified in a very definite and regular manner, the visual field for blue becoming smaller than that for red. In certain cases of hysteria the whole field of vision is greatly narrowed concentrically. It will suffice to state the fact here and avoid going into the technical explanation of what is meant by the field of vision.
Many accurate tests are made to detect this freakish behavior of vision in hysteria, but spiritualistic mediums do not permit us to control matters so as to make such precise scientific tests with them. In the army, when the medical officers feel that a soldier is feigning blindness in the right eye so that he can not become a good marksman, they put him through a simple test which soon shows whether he is telling the truth or not. They use some such tests as the letters of Snellen or the box of Flees. In the former—
On an absolutely dark ground are pasted letters cut out of paper—some blue, others red. To the eye of the subject is applied a pair of eye-glasses, one of the glasses of which is quite of the same blue tint as the letters, and the other of the same red tint. Through the red glass, which lets only the red rays pass through, the red letters on the black ground can be seen, but the blue ones become as black as the background and cannot be distinguished from it. The result is that under these conditions, the right eye can read only one-half of the letters and the left eye the other half. A person who sees with both eyes instinctively complements one eye with the other and reads the whole word without difficulty.
Under these conditions, a one-eyed person can read only a part of the letters. What does our recruit do? With the eye-glasses on his eyes he quickly reads all the letters.
We recognize in hysterical subjects—and many mediums belong to this group—that the voice may be greatly influenced by the state of consciousness. In hysteria sometimes the voice is entirely lost. The mind can so influence the body as to cause a loss of appetite, not to mention serious digestive disturbances—bowel disorders, diarrhea, constipation. Many such sufferers have undergone long courses of medical treatment and subjected themselves to strenuous courses of dieting, all to little or no avail, sometimes subsequently to be cured in a moment by Christian Science or some other newfangled religion—or by treatment of some quack doctor.
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I had a patient who, several years before, had seen her father almost choke to death on a fish-bone. After that fright she was unable to take solid food for years. She was cured of this fear by a few months’ proper teaching. Many common mannerisms, or tics, are also illustrative of the projection of the mind outward on the body, as the result of sensations traveling out over the nerves from the mind. Sighing, sobbing, coughing, hiccoughing, and sneezing are sometimes produced by the outward projection of some element of the consciousness.
That the content of the subconscious may lead to monstrous self-deception and cunningly delude even the wisest of us, is a fact long recognized by the specialists in psycho-pathology—those who deal with abnormal and peculiar minds. One authority in this field (Morton Prince) says:
In one sense, I suppose, we may say that everyone leads a double life. Let me hasten to say to you, I mean this not in a moral but in an intellectual sense. Everyone’s mental life may fairly be said to be divided between those ideas, thoughts, and feelings which he received from and gives out to his social world, the social environment in which he lives, and those which belong more properly to his inner life and the innermost sanctuary of his personality and character. The former include the activities and the educational acquisitions which he seeks to cultivate and conserve for future use. The latter include the more intimate communings with himself, the doubts and fears and scruples pertaining to the moral, religious and other problems of life, and the struggles, and trials and diffic ulties which beset its paths; the internal contests with the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil. The conventionalities of the social organization require that the outward expression of many of these should be put under restraint. Indeed, society insists that some, the sexual strivings, are aspects of life and human nature which are not to be spoken or thought of. Now, of course, this inner life must also leave its neurographic tracings along with the outer life, and must, potentially at least, become a part of our personality, liable to manifest itself in character and in other directions.
More than this, and more important, there is considerable evidence going to show that conserved experiences functioning as subconscious processes take part in and determine the conscious processes of every-day life. On the one hand stored neurograms may undergo subconscious incubation, assimilating the material deposited by the various experiences of life, finally to burst forth in ripened judgments, beliefs, and convictions, as is so strikingly shown in sudden religious conversions and allied mental manifestations. Through a similar incubating process, the stored material needed for the solution of baffling problems is gathered together and oftentimes assimilated and arranged and formulated as an answer to the question. On the other hand, subconscious processes may be but a hidden part of that mechanism which determines our every-day judgment and our points of view, our attitudes of mind, the meanings of our ideas, and the traits of our characters.
See Appendix. ↩︎