Spiritualism : Part 8

Modern Religious Cults and Movements
by Gaius Glenn Atkins

(Page 18 of 21)

There is one test here which, if it were really made under absolutely dependable conditions, conditions, that is, in no wise open to suspicion or misunderstanding, might be final. If a message written before death and so sealed as to be unknown to any one save the one who wrote it, could be correctly reported, it would have, everything else being right, an immense force. (Though even here clairvoyance - for which, on the whole, there is a pretty dependable evidence - might afford the true explanation.) F.W.H. Myers left such a message as this.

In January, 1891, he sent Sir Oliver Lodge a "sealed envelope, in the hope that after his death the communication contained in the envelope would be able to be given by means of a medium. Many different messages obtained by a well-known medium, Madame Verrall, and coming supposedly from Frederick Myers, led them to believe that they represented this communication. The envelope was opened in December, 1904, and 'it was found that there was no resemblance between its actual contents and what was alleged by the script to be contained in it.'" If there is any authentic case of this final test being successfully maintained, the writer does not know it. There are instances of hidden articles discovered, but these tests by no means possess the same force of testimony.

We may assume, then, that we have no absolute demonstration of spirit communication. We have only a very complex group of phenomena capable of varying explanations. Any fair-minded student of the whole subject must recognize that men who have had ample opportunity for first hand investigation, not hasty in their conclusions and in some instances of very great intellectual force, have taken an opposite view. They have felt the testimony to be both sound and sufficient.

There is an inescapable personal equation here which probably finally determines divergent attitudes. As has been said before, those generally who have accepted the spiritual explanation have been led to do so through communications in which they discovered some personal note or touch, to which they themselves would be hospitably susceptible and which would have far less weight with those whose affections and previous associations were not therefore involved. This does not necessarily prove their conclusions to have been false. Perhaps just this personal element is necessary to give final meaning to what otherwise is so perplexing and even contradictory. The dogmatism which shuts the door squarely in the face of spiritualism is as unreasonable, as unscientific, as the credulity which opens the door wide and accepts everything which comes through.

The Influence of Spiritualism Upon Its Adherents

There are other considerations which bear more or less indirectly upon this difficult matter, but which have their weight. In general, those who have whole-heartedly accepted spiritualism have been unable thereafter to maintain the balanced detachment which they urge upon others. They tend to become unduly credulous; they force their explanation beyond its necessary limits; they tend to become people of the idée fixe type; they become sponsors for extravagant stories, and, in general, lead those who are influenced by their position or name far beyond the limits which impartial investigation, even on the part of those sympathetic, has as yet justified. Those descriptions of the discarnate state, moreover, which reach us through mediums are undependable.

There is a machinery of planes and spheres and emanations and reincarnations which is not at all peculiar to spiritualism but belongs to the fringes of the occult in every manifestation of it, which is perpetually recurrent in modern spiritualistic literature. We are on the frontiers of a region where the reason which steadies us in the practical conduct of life and guides us in an order with which we are familiar through age-old inheritances, has no value at all. Our very terminology ceases to have any meaning. A generous creative imagination may build for itself what cities it will of habitation, furnish them as it desires and try to conceive, as it has power, the experiences and progressions of the discarnate, but to invest these imaginations with evidential accuracy is to break down all the limits between the dependable and the undependable.

And finally, though this is rather a commonplace observation than an aspect of our investigation, there is little to be gained in the necessary business of solid living by such an interweaving of the two worlds as spiritualism carries with it. One life at a time is plainly enough all that we are equal to. Those who surrender themselves to such conclusions and inquiries are in very great danger of being so detached from the actualities of the present order as to become themselves errant and eccentric spirits, finding their true interests in endless séances and investigations which have no practical bearing upon life as it now is.

The Real Alternative to Spiritualism

The writer's observation of the effect of much going to mediums upon those whom he has personally known leads him to distrust the whole matter and possibly to react too strongly against it. A discriminating critic has said that Spiritualism is not Spiritualism at all, but a subtle materialism, in that it is the effort to verify the reality of the spiritual in terms of the material. It is, therefore, just one more unexpected aspect of the hard skepticism of the time, which trusts nothing it cannot hear, or see, or touch. A faith which is not solidly established in reason, which does not continue and complete in its own regions what we know and understand, is a cloud-built faith, but a faith, on the other hand, which refuses to adventure beyond the limits of the senses is a faith too largely empty of any noble content.

If the phenomena under examination, then, cannot be explained in terms of animism and if the spiritual hypothesis is gravely open to question, what explanation is left? In what follows the writer has been greatly influenced by the suggestion of the students of abnormal personality generally, and partly by the work of certain Frenchmen who, with French logic and brilliancy of insight, are working toward far-reaching psychological restatements and even to recasting of the accepted scientific understandings of matter and force.

Copyright 1923 by Fleming H. Revell Company