Excretory Phosphorescence Under Spirit Control

I have already noted, under subliminal phenomena (II. 3. c), the luminous appearance of Mr. Moses' hands, which he records as persisting after a seance. We have also seen reason to suppose that the emanation of scent from Mr. Moses' head was a form of hyperidrosis purposely modified by spirit control. May not the appearance of his hands also have been due to the phosphorescent perspiration of which we have just heard as a symptom after much phosphorus has been taken into the system? The "guides" themselves alleged that many of the lights depended upon phosphorus extracted from the medium's organism. May not the glow on the hands represent an after-effect of this extraction? The sweat glands are, as we know, readily responsive in common life to psychical stimuli, and Dr. Milne Bramwell has found that hyperidroses which have obstinately resisted medication will sometimes yield at once to hypnotic suggestion. We have often observed that supernormal agencies are wont to follow as closely as possible processes familiar to the organisation, whether in health or in disease.

Nor was this glow confined to the hands alone. A kind of luminous cloud, which might be due either to breath or to some subtle cutaneous transpiration, was often observed round Mr. Moses' head and shoulders at seances. And on one marked occasion the phosphoric smoke was dense enough seriously to alarm Mr. Moses himself and Dr. Speer.

The luminosities which we have thus far been discussing have been of the apparent nature of cloudy emanations from the medium or similar collections of cloudy light in his near vicinity. Or if they have shown a tendency to concentration, it has been in the form of "spirit-lights," or apparently solid receptacles of quasi-phosphoric brightness - brightness, however, so steady and permanent as, by Sir William Crookes' own account, to have baffled his skill in imitation.1 Their general appearance has been not inconsistent with the proffered explanation - that they are made from phosphorus extracted from the medium, and perhaps from other members of the circle, and mingled or prepared in some manner beyond our earthly skill.

Vital Photogeny Under Spiritual Control

But we have next to deal with a class of lights whose nature and behaviour seem markedly different. These are lights which are not widely diffused but small and more or less definite, and which concentrate not into solid inert masses, but into hands. Of this ectoplastic formation of hands we must speak in the next section. For the moment I will only point out that these lights seem to be a directly vital phenomenon.

It is, perhaps, "this muddy vesture of decay" which hides from us in common life the glow which is an inseparable attribute of that life itself; and the radiance which at the outset of evolution the ocean-organisms attain in their primitive simplicity is achieved once more when intermediate stages have been passed through, and life and matter are manipulated with the freedom and mastery of the spirit-world.

I trust that as our knowledge increases there may prove to be some usefulness, some reality, in the analogies between normal and supernormal modes of light-production on which I have here dwelt - but I am far from supposing that these analogies cover the whole ground. On the contrary, we see throughout these luminous phenomena a constant tendency towards a transition from objective to subjective light - from the luminosity of excreted phosphorus, or of vital metabolism, to light "which never was on sea or land," and whose discernment seems no longer to depend on earthly vision, nor its source to be akin to any earthly glow. We are introduced, as discussion under a future heading will show, to a metetherial, which is also a luminous state of being - to spirits who are independent of our earthly sources of brightness, solemque suum, sua sidera norunt. If we endeavour to class their fulgent aspect among the headings which our scheme has offered, we should have to speak, I suppose, of metetherial luminescence, and to assume that they re-radiate the incident energy of some supernal world.

1 Crookes' Researches in Spiritualism, p. 91.

Here it is plain that all attempt at terrestrial analogy must cease; and in passing from the discussion of spirit-control over matter and ether to spirit-control over life itself, it seems fitting to remind the reader in clearest terms that no analogies can here be more than suggestive; that no exaltation or sublimation of forces already familiar will really explain the modus operandi of these intimate dealings with seen and unseen things. Even though known laws be at work they must be working in subjection to laws unknown. For the very assumption of a metetherial world, as natural and as uniform as our own, implies that our widest material generalisations can be no more than formulae for special cases - deducible from laws still more fundamental, which must hold good whether matter and ether exist or no. Our world of matter is but a flocculence held in critical suspension, which a touch may dissolve or a touch precipitate. We cannot distinguish among metetherial energies; we can but say that "psychic force," - if that be the least question-begging title that we can find for those energies as they affect mankind, - can form no true part of any mechanical synthesis of the universe which our science knows, and thus if we are asked if psychic force implies any disturbance of our law of the conservation of energy, we must reply that we have no reason to suppose that it does so; but that even this question can scarcely be so expressed as to be capable of definite answer.

If life be regarded, as for example, by Prof. Lodge1 as merely a "directive and guiding force exercised upon matter," and " not affecting the amount of energy in the slightest degree"; then a like predication may be made as to the manifestations of psychic force, - all of them ultimately vital in character, - which we here encounter. But at the same time it is conceivable that energy might be so defined as to show that the production of these phenomena requires the expenditure, in a metetherial world, of some form of energy akin to the so-called "will-power" which we at least appear to ourselves to exercise here on earth, although its true nature, or even its actual existence, is matter of controversy.

1 Nature, vol. xliv. p. 292.

It is to "will-power" that the communicating spirits themselves ascribe their achievements; to some mode of operation quite unexplained,-but even more direct, more fundamental than those imagined molecular powers which I cited to show how men who believed that no "demon" existed found it necessary to invent one.