III. Third Series:- Phenomena Claimed As Spiritually Controlled

(1) Subliminal Consciousness, Discerning And Influenced By Disembodied Spirits In A Spiritual World; Who Co-Operate In Producing Objective Phenomena

And here at last we have reached the point where we should begin to reap the benefit of this long introduction. In entering on the third of our parallel series - that to which the other two have been intended to lead up, - our scheme, that is to say, of vital faculty as observed under the control of some spiritual agency, we are not now plunging into a chaos of entirely new problems. Most of those problems, although of course not solved, have at least been already stated, in some similar form; and at each point we shall be taking up a line of thought on which we have made some beginning.

We have, then, to deal with the human spirit under new conditions; as brought into immediate relations with the spiritual world. We shall be concerned primarily with the subliminal consciousness; for it is in that region that the link of union lies; and many of the phenomena are discernible to the "purged eye" of so-called clairvoyance alone. But nevertheless this commerce with disembodied spirits, like commerce with embodied spirits, affects man's whole being; and we shall have to discuss many phenomena of an absolutely objective kind.

In one way, indeed, to get on to direct spirit-intercourse from the obscure subliminal phenomena which we have till now been discussing is a sort of emergence into a clearer air. What we have dimly inferred is now plainly asserted; what we have conjectured among contending possibilities is now set plainly before us. We are in the position in which a tadpole would be who had learned theoretically that what he was breathing in his pond was not the water but the oxygen dissolved therein; and who then should have it granted to him to raise his head above water, and to perceive frogs and other animals respiring the translucid air. So, for us too, the metetherial element has thus far been dissolved amid material things; we are now to come in contact with beings for whom that hypothetical environment is the natural and predestined home.

Before we go into detail, let us reflect for a moment on the fact that such intercourse should be possible. Given the fact of telepathy, need this be a surprise? We have seen that the existence of such a form of metetherial energy involved in human life, though it cannot actually prove the spirit's survival, yet suggests it so strongly that evidence to survival from other quarters need no longer seem hard to reconcile with the known scheme of things. And if survival there be, then the fact that spirits should influence men will certainly not in itself be surprising. It will seem now no isolated or unique phenomenon, but the inevitable deduction from a universal law. That law is the direct transmission of thought and emotion from mind to mind, and the telergy - to use here a word more active in its connotation than telepathy - the telergy by which this transmission is effected may be as universally diffused in the metetherial world as heat in the material.

(2) Physical Nutrition Modified By Spirit-Control

(A) Spirit-Suggestion; Psycho-Therapeutics

To the limiting conditions under which this energy reaches the chosen sensitive among the mass of men, we shall have to return hereafter. It will be well to proceed first to trace some of the effects of that "control," or intercourse, under the same series of headings which we have now twice already pursued.

First, then, as to the effects of spirit-control on bodily nutrition. Obviously if we are agreed in thinking that the suggestion of a living hypnotiser is virtually nothing more than a hint somehow conveyed to the self-suggestive powers of the patient, it will not be easy to be sure that a spirits alleged command or benediction, or promise of cure, is really operating otherwise than as a similar stimulus to something which is really done by the patient himself. In Mr. Moses' case there were assurances given that his physical condition was often benefited by spirit-power; but in the few definite instances which he records of a healing effect, it is to actual touches and strokings - like mesmeric passes - that the benefit is ascribed. Similar experiences are attributed to D. D. Home. We shall have something more to say of this mesmerisation later on; and also of that form of psycho-therapeutic which consists in a clairvoyant diagnosis alleged to be given by a spirit, and followed perhaps by advice avowedly based upon a recollection of earthly learning.

(B) Stigmatisation

The agency of spirits in the production of stigma-tisation is open to the same kind of doubt. Religious stigmata, indeed, as following upon more intense feeling than mere experimental stigmata (such as suggested blisters resembling some letter of the alphabet) seem even more manifestly connected with the workings of the addolorata's own spirit. Mr. Moses has three curious cases. In one of them the mere written suggestion of a spirit is followed by the appearance of letters on his arm, - resembling, apparently, the linear wheals which follow a line drawn with the finger-nail in some cases of nettlerash, and which depend on a slight diffusion of serum beneath the skin. In another case an erythematous patch on the forehead follows on a perhaps imaginary touch during a dream or vision. In a third case what seems to have been a real touch at a seance breaks the skin, and leaves an inflamed wound.

It is noticeable, with regard to what will follow later, that something like actual material contact should sometimes be insisted upon, as appears from Mr. Moses' records, in the production by spirits of a phenomenon which we have seen the subliminal self produce with no material intervention.

(C) Novel And Purposive Metastasis Of Secretion

Except, however, for this insistence on actual touch, the stigmatic phenomena have thus far followed the now well-known type. Yet it may occur to us to ask whether spirits acting thus on the organism, and endowed with the more intimate insight into the molecular constitution of things with which I have credited them, could not go further still, and split up the proteids of the body in some unfamiliar way. These are, of course, complex enough to be split up, not only into the various proximate elements, normal or pathological, which have already been detected in the body, but into an indefinite number of other compounds as well. It may be said, indeed, that novel products of proteid decomposition, even if they could be produced, would escape recognition save by the accomplished chemist. There is, however, one of our senses which in certain directions can even outmatch in delicacy the chemist's skill. And there is in animal bodies an unexhausted reservoir of potential odours capable of stimulating this sense to the full. Where the skunk is possible, all is possible; and it need not be a hopeless task to draw from the human organism fragrances which may bear to skunk or musk-rat the relation which the most delicate tint of mauve bears to the original tar.

On one secretion in particular Professor Ramsay, F.R.S., has favoured me with the following remarks: "Perspiration consists of caproate of glyceryl, mixed with the free acid, I believe. It does not smell nice; but pure caproates are very fragrant if the right alcoholic base is combined. I fancy that woodruffe and verbena are of the nature of turpentine, and have probably the same percentage composition. However, so far as I know, they have not been investigated".

Bearing all this in mind, let us return to certain passages which have perhaps hitherto seemed among the most grotesque and incredible which the records of Mr. Moses' seances contain. I refer to the frequently attested welling or stillation of various "liquid scents," mainly verbena and woodruffe, and on one occasion at least altering on request, from a circumscribed patch on the top of Mr. Moses' head. The guides affirm that this secretion is restorative; and on one occasion especially, when Mr. Moses is tried and depressed by sitting long amidst a rough crowd, it is stated that the scent is produced and evaporated in unusual quantities in order to protect him from the exhausting influence of his surroundings.1

1 I may give here another instance of this phenomenon, contributed by Mr. J. F. Collingwood to Light of November 2nd, 1892. "I was one evening sitting with him," says Mr. Collingwood, "when he complained of not feeling well. I perceived a very sweet perfume, and remarked, as it increased, 'What a delicious scent! Where does it come from?' 'From me, the top of my head,' he replied. I felt the crown, which was wet with a pleasant odorous substance. I dipped the corner of my handkerchief in it, and kept it for months hardly diminished in potency. Mr. Stainton Moses told me that the development of these perfumes was intended as a healing process, and he was often relieved in that way." It may be observed that circumscribed patches of hyperidrosis occasionally occur on the scalp; so that we have here, in my view, an evolutive phenomenon taking the same form as a morbid or dissolutive one. It should be added that in bromidrosis the odour has been in various cases compared to that of various flowers and fruits. - (Hyde's Diseases of the Skin, p. 102).

The reader will readily see the interpretation which, in my view, these facts must receive. I regard the disembodied spirit's influence on the organism as more instructed, so to say, than the influence of the subliminal self; - just as the influence of the subliminal self is more instructed than that of the supraliminal. Where the one can adapt, the other can originate; where the subliminal self can reproduce by a novel method the secretion which the organism has already learnt to form, the other can compose a fresh secretion, with a definite aim.

A definite aim, I say, speaking at present of the odoriferous and recognisable character alone. But it is not impossible that the secretion may have had a therapeutic value as well. It may conceivably have carried off waste products more effectively than the ordinary perspiration of which it seems to have been a modified form.

However this may be, the above brief discussion may have suggested to us that it is by the comparative method here adopted that we have the best chance of bringing these grotesque marvels into some true analogy with experiments already known to science.