Section 15

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phere, and which, if not a purely subjective existence to my own self as a percipient, is irrefutably a subjective existence to some- thing else ? To what else ? What are muscles and bones and brains but matter ? What is atmosphere but matter ? What is any- thing that eye can behold or ear hear but matter ? What is mat- ter? No learning, as I well know, has yet illuminated the world which affords the slightest idea of the meaning of matter outside of what is to be appreciated of it through phenomena.
" Aristotle, as I remember, differentiates men from brutes ; un- wisely, however, as it must be agreed, in according reasoning faculties to the former which he denies the latter. Will it not be a happy thing to accept as brute or as simple man what has been seen and heard as realities, interfering not with the con- soling sights and sounds by cold inquiries ?
" February 8. Last night I was awakened out of sleep, behold- ing my dressing-bureau draped by a white lambrequin, which dressing continued in place for a length of time, which enabled me to view it curiously and closely with eyes which a good rub- bing assured me were wide open. The disappearance of this drapery was after the manner of a dissolving view."
Forms human and forms general exist with the immaterial more truly than with the material : " Image and substance are not essence."
" February 9. While lying awake shortly after going to bed on this date, two young girls robed in red suddenly appeared standing by the side of the window, the exact spot being that occupied on his different visits by my Indian materialization. This apparition permitted me a reasonably satisfactory inspection, the figures vanishing only after I had concentrated the most earnest gaze on them.
" May 5. An interval of three months, in which I have found myself excluded from all relations with the new-found. Yester- day evening saw a cat staring at me from a chair immediately after my getting into bed. The chair stood in front of the window. A little later caught a momentary glance of the robed figure of a woman.
" May 6. Saw this night the tall person of a woman emerge out
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of the darkness, and disappearing after that short space of time which admitted of her making a bow.
" May lo. Went to bed at nine o'clock. Awakened suddenly out of sleep to behold, standing near, a person of small stature, the color of whose skin and the general appearance indicated a Hindoo.
" November 5. This long interim. To-night, after being in bed for perhaps an hour, unable to sleep, the seated form of a woman, dressed in cross-barred stuff, appeared near the bed, disappearing only after I had obtained a good view of it. There was nothing at all familiar in the face.
^^ Friday, vtidnight, November 25. Spent the evening with friends in conversation on the subject of apparitions. Went to bed at eleven o'clock. Lay awake, thinking of matters described here on preceding pages. I feel reasonably certain that I had at no time given way to sleep. Suddenly there appeared the stoop- ing form of a well-grown child running from the direction of the foot of the bed toward the west wall of the room. The interim between appearance and disappearance was only sufficient to admit notice of the fact that the dress was a quiet cross-bar. Quickly succeeding, three other forms showed themselves in succession, each permitting, however, but a flash-like glance.
*' Sunday night, November 27. As in the case preceding, I get up and light the gas, writing down the experience at the time of its occurrence, that mistake shall not creep in. Spent the evening out, the record runs, returning home a few minutes after eleven o'clock and going directly to bed. Awakened out of sleep to be- hold standing in the middle of an entrance-door the fully-dressed form of a young, matronly-looking woman, who held something between her hands, the apparition impressing me at the moment as representing a person caught in the act of watching, or rather of viewing, a sleeping person. The disappearance was precisely as would be witnessed in the jumping back of a watching person so discovered. Later on in the same night I was again aroused into wakefulness to perceive a man dressed in gray pantaloons standing directly at my bedside. Why I did not reach out with a view to touch this form I am at a loss to understand. Certainly, 13*
'SO
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time enough was allowed. The disappearance was with the char- acteristic rapidity. The quick lifting of a slide from a magic lantern represents it.
*' November 27. On this night saw two bunches of grapes ; these I distinguished, however, as existing after the manner of a dream. A vision and a dream have come to be separated to my under- standing by a line of demarcation that is absolute.
^^ December 13. This night I had no sooner turned off the gas than small lights appeared in whatever direction of the chamber the eyes were turned. These lights, individual at first and not larger singly than a pea, soon assumed motion, passing from point to point in the room. Occasionally two would rush impulsively as if intent on accomplishing a purpose, a beautiful but evan- escent picture being the result."
These phenomena were watched until weariness denied further obsei"vation, and I turned reluctantly away.
" December 28. This night had an experience out of which has grown the present book. What this experience was is to be left to the matter of a succeeding chapter. Suffice it here to state that it has had found in it the culmination of a life spent in study. It has discovered a long-sought ground of certitude; it has afforded to him who writes the summum bonum. Since this night (December 28, 18 — ) I have had but a single vision, and this related with the experience just alluded to. I have been shut up, as it were, with myself and with what I recognize as my ordinary every-day intelligence. Between the vision and what is the real commencement of these pages, as shortly to be under- stood, a full year elapsed, during which a sign lay in stillness without unfolding itself."
There are door-steps leading to the Spiritus Sanctus ; here is a second one.
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DISILLUSIONS.
What has been offered is known to almost everybody as being the foundation, or ground of certitude, of the spiritistic or so- called new faith. " I have seen, I have heard," is the assevera- tion. " Shall a man not believe that he sees what he sees, or may he doubt that he has heard what he has heard?"
When the pessimistic lady alluded to in the preceding chapter had concluded her story of the black crape to be seen everywhere, an immediate answer consisted in dropping a trifle of a solution of sulphate of atropia into her eyes. Atropia placed in an eye enlarges the pupil of the organ to its greatest extent, thus afford- ing a free, open window through which, under proper illumination, one may see all that is on the inside quite as plainly as is beheld what is on the outside.
To light up the inside of an eye the person to be examined is placed with the back to an Argand burner, when the operator catches the flame upon and reflects it in focalized form from the face of a mirror pertaining to an ophthalmoscope.
The centre of the ophthalmoscopic mirror is a very small hole, and by applying the eye close to the back face of this an ex- aminer is saved the glare of the returned rays, while at the same time he finds himself looking into a chamber that is brilliantly lighted. Examination of the eyes of the person under considera- tion, made by use of the means described, revealed that the bulk of the inside, in place of being jelly-like, as is natural, had be- come fluid as water, while, floating in great freedom in this fluid, were quantities of thread-like black bodies which had originated out of the pigment of an inflamed layer of the tunics. It is quickly recognized that the streamers of crape had explanation in shadows cast by these threads of pigment upon the retina, and as well is it recognized that nineteenth-century sense (the ophthal- moscope is a recent invention) resolved quickly a phenomenon showing wholly as occult to common sense.
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The man attended so complacently and happily by a spirit revealed, under the same form of examination, a similar liquid condition of the vitreous humor. In place, however, of the pig- ment threads there was to be seen a floating particle of choles- terine in one of his eyes, having a dumb-bell form, and this of such likeness with the human body that a much less vivid imag- ination than was possessed by the gentleman would have converted it, as did its possessor, into an attendant spirit.
The lady whose letter describes the apparitions seen upon the stair-landing and in other places is without other disease of the eye than what oculists call myopia, or short sight, but she is at this very moment of writing encased in an unyielding plaster jacket with a view to the cure of excessive irritability residing with the brain and spinal cord.
What the writer saw are of a character of vision associated with vaso-constriction of the nerve-centre of equilibration, and the continuance of such sight admonishes a physician of danger. It is not to be denied that there is a wonderful attraction about the phenomena, and that, not unlikely, an infatuation may de- velop in the connection which opposes investigation. Spite of this, a little pathology quickly resolves ghosts into nothings j a multitude of ghosts, at any rate.
Let us here delay our pace and go slowly. Is a seer of visions to be classed as a sick man always, or only sometimes, or how, or when ?
Out of nothingness it is found possible that something may come. The little oval of an egg, failing everybody else as a support, turns into a table for Columbus.
As a poet is apt to be deemed akin with a madman, so, after a manner, the seer of visions may be put in a category with sick men ; after a manner, truly.
Who will follow closely in what is now written ?
There must exist difference of condition in what the physiologist calls the cerebro- spinal system, a modification of equilibrium, if distinction hold between what is known as a genius and an ordinary man. By equilibrium is implied harmony. A musician, paradoxical as it seems to say so, is a man who is out of harmony.
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A poet, while full of song, is out of harmony. So, too, an architect, while full of proportion, is out of harmony. Harmony implies that no one sense preponderates its fellows. Perception is with the thing that perceives. A deaf ear hears nothing at all. The ear of a musician is constantly ringing with sounds. Architects see construction when looking into vacancy. The poet is over- whelmed by beauty beheld where nothing is seen by an ordinary man. Can any one affirm that the poet makes beauty, the musician song, or the architect buildings? And if one cannot affirm this must he not necessarily accept that these things are existences in themselves ? being, however, essences or ideas of what have to find illustration in words or notes or stone in order that ordinary men get cognizance of them.
Recognition is alone through means. A limpid stream which, to the natural eye, is crystal in its purity and cleanliness, is found changed, to him who uses a microscope, into an ocean filled with monsters, hideous and frightful to look on. All life is habitation to some other life. Nothing in the universe shows what it is. Men walking about in freedom are not conscious, as knowledge of the great multitude is concerned, that they live in the bottom of a sea forty miles in depth, and that their bodies are kept from falling off into space or from flying to pieces by a weight which presses them with a power of some fifteen pounds to every square inch. I am to ask myself if, being able to explain the unreality of one spirit, sufficiency of skill, as to perception, would not afford explanation of unreality in all ? Finding out, however, what I have about disgusting and frightful-looking fringed monsters which live by thousands in a glass of water, and knowing that in drops of vinegar a multitude of serpents are met with, I may wisely hesitate and not be over-ready with a reply to the query.
Common sense is little better than no sense at all. Common sense, which is the sense of animals at large, shows neither fringed monsters nor vinegar-eels ; monsters and eels which are as much realities as anything in the universe is to be accepted as real. Forming a judgment out of analogies, I am led to see that science itself leads to an inference, that the apparently empty at- mosphere may be a world of life, separated from ordinary human
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observation simply by reason of senses not applicable, by reason of coarseness, or crudeness, to purposes of intercourse. Out of the processes of exclusion I may draw and accept an inference that men are associated with spiritual things which are seeable by him alone who is able to see.
Out of harmony means simply out of, or apart from, common sense. Every musician and every poet and every architect differs from " common-sense" people, otherwise these would be just like everybody else and not that which distinguishes them from the others. Acuteness of sense is of nature or of education. The Bibles of all religions are filled with accounts of visions seen and voices heard. As the Christian's Bible is concerned, these ex- amples are too familiar to require special reference. How were these visions seen, or were they not visions at all, but halluci- nations ?
Here we recur in few and simple words to conditions referred to as Objective and Subjective.
A thing of objective signification finds illustration in a com- pany of beasts surrounding a man when he visits a menagerie. A thing of subjective signification has like illustration in a herd of imps or a group of angels seen by a man when he lies upon his bed in an attack of fever. The first is appreciated is a reality ; the latter is understood as unreality. These two are dis- tinctions made by common sense.
Every so-called reality is but the expression, through relation with material, of an ideal. A body, so to speak, is an idea ma- terialized. Truly it is, and always has been the case, that idea of a thing precedes construction ; hence idea is the real thing, and construction is simply the representation of a thing done in what- ever may be the material used. Accepting this indisputable truth, which are we to receive as the real, the beasts of the menagerie or the imps and angels of a sensitized brain ?
A system of philosophy known as Idealism places all exist- ences in a condition known as percipient ; that is to say, the sweet- ness or sourness of a particular fruit is not in the fruit itself, but in a tongue that tastes. Music is nowhere but in an ear that hears. Grandeur exists only with him who has grandeur. Beauty
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is not in a face looked at, but in eyes which look. This is an expressive, embracive, and wide-covering philosophy. Who that has ever visited a menagerie, and suffered from fever, but recalls the equal reality as to impression of surroundings associated with the different occasions ? John, when at the island of Patmos, saw a vision. The word of the Lord comes to Hosea and Habakkuk and to Haggai and to Zechariah. Poetry, music, and architecture come to poet, musician, and architect. Are not poetry, music, and architecture existences ? Are they not existences before find- ing expression, or materialization, in words, note, or stone ? Are words, notes, or stones anything save environments ?
John certainly saw, and Hosea and Habakkuk and Haggai and Zechariah certainly received. In like manner seeing and re- ceiving have been going on and will continue to go on. The matter is as to quality and signification. Many in number are the poets, the singers, and the architects ; but the words and the songs and the structures that are of concern to others besides the indi- vidual are few indeed. What are we to say, on the other hand, of words which enlarge by the reading, of notes that intensify in the singing, of buildings that grow greater as looked on ? We may say only as to quality ; source is the same. Wine is wine whether found in water-jars or in grape-skins.
Swedenborg sees visions. Jacob Behmen sees unfolded the inner meaning of sticks, stones, and grass. The tinker, John Bunyan, sees lying out before him a road leading to a holy city. Do I need faith to believe in these things? I know their re- ality in knowing of a oneness which relates objective and sub- jective.
I explain these and all visions in explaining my own. A sub- jective sight or object is a consciousness arising out of or existing within one's self. Then it has nothing to do with any influence existing externally ? But what about music and poetry and archi- tecture ? I saw visions. A state of mental activity, begotten of much thinking about and relation with psychical matters, placed the brain-cells in a state of superexcitability. How my visions were created and seen finds illustration in fixing the gaze for one or two minutes on the flame of a candle burning in one end of a