DeDanaan

Filed by Aine MacDermot

THE PRESENT POSITION OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

Sir William Crookes, the well-known English authority in physical science, was almost the first scientist to become seriously interested in psychics, and in Part III of Notes of an Enquiry into the Phenomena called Spiritual, during the Years 1870-1873 (London), boldly affirms :– ‘It will be (p. 478) seen that the facts are of the most astounding character, and seem utterly irreconcilable with all known theories of modern science. Having satisfied myself of their truth, it would be moral cowardice to withhold my testimony because my previous publications were ridiculed by critics and others.’ And this conclusion reached forty years ago has not been reversed, but has been confirmed by one after another of learned scientists on both sides of the Atlantic.

In 1908, Sir Oliver Lodge, Principal of the University of Birmingham, and at present one of the best known of scientists concerned with the study of spiritual phenomena, stated his position thus :– ‘On the whole, I am of those who, though they would like to see further and still stronger and more continued proofs, are of opinion that a good case has been made out, and that as the best working hypothesis at the present time it is legitimate to grant that lucid moments of intercourse with deceased persons may in the best cases supervene. . . . The boundary between the two states — the known and the unknown — is still substantial, but it is wearing thin in places; and like excavators engaged in boring a tunnel from opposite ends, amid the roar of water and other noises, we are beginning to hear now and again the strokes of the pickaxes of our comrades on the other side.” In 1909, Sir Oliver Lodge published The Survival of Man, in which, after a careful exposition, covering over three hundred pages, of the definite results of much scientific experimentation by the best scientists of Europe and America, in such psychical phenomena as Telepathy or Thought Transference, Telepathy and Clairvoyance, Automatism and Lucidity, the following tentative conclusion is reached :– ‘The first thing we learn, perhaps the only thing we clearly learn in the first instance, is continuity. There is no such sudden break in the conditions of existence as may have been anticipated; and no break at all in the continuous and conscious identity of genuine character and personality.’ 1 And his personal conviction is that ‘Intelligent (p. 479) co-operation between other than embodied human minds than our own … has become possible’. 1

William James, who was one of the chief psychical researchers in the United States, published his conclusions in October 1909; and of psychical phenomena he wrote ‘As to there being such real natural types of phenomena ignored by orthodox science, I am not baffled at all, for I am fully convinced of it.’ Of ‘mediumship’, he postulated the very interesting theory of a universally diffused ’soul-stuff’, which elsewhere (p. 254) we have referred to as the scientific equivalent to the Polynesian Mana: ‘My own dramatic sense tends instinctively to picture the situation as an interaction between slumbering faculties in the automatist’s mind and a cosmic environment of other consciousness of some sort which is able to work upon them. If there were in the universe a lot of diffuse soul-stuff, unable of itself to get into consistent personal form, or to take permanent possession of an organism, yet always craving to do so, it might get its head into the air, parasitically, so to speak, by profiting, by weak spots in the armour of human minds, and slipping in and stirring up there the sleeping tendencies to personate.’ Expanding this theory into a ‘pan-psychic’ view of the universe and assuming a ‘mother-sea’ of consciousness, a bank upon which we all draw, James asked these questions about it, which educated Celtic seers ask themselves about the Sidhe or Fairy-World and its also collective consciousness or life: What is its own structure? What is its inner topography? . . . What are the conditions of individuation or insulation in this mother-sea? To what tracts, to what active systems functioning separately in it, do personalities correspond? Are individual “spirits” constituted there? How numerous, and of how many hierarchic orders may these then be? How permanent? How transient? And how confluent with one another may they become? 2 We should ask the reader to compare this scientific attitude with the almost identical attitude taken up with respect to the (p. 480) Sidhe Races and the constitution of their world and life by the Irish mystic and seer (pp. 60 ff.).

M. Camille Flammarion, the well-known French astronomer, is another of the pioneer psychical researchers; and in his psychic studies, entitled, as translated in an English edition, The Unknown, recently announced these definite conclusions :– ‘(1) The soul exists as a real entity independent of the body. (2) It is endowed with faculties still unknown to science. (3) It is able to act at a distance, without the intervention of the senses.’ And in his Mysterious Psychic Forces (Boston, 1907, pp. 452-3), he says :– ‘The conclusions of the present work concord with those of the former (The Unknown). . . . I may sum up the whole matter with the single statement that there exists in nature, in myriad activity, a psychic element the essential nature of which is still hidden from us.’

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