Hours with the Ghosts or, Nineteenth Century Witchcraft: Illustrated Investigations into the Phenomena of Spiritualism and TheosophyEvans, Henry Ridgely
Religion
Hours with the Ghosts or, Nineteenth Century Witchcraft: Illustrated Investigations into the Phenomena of Spiritualism and Theosophy
Evans, Henry Ridgely
Blavatsky, H. P. (Helena Petrovna), 1831-1891; Spiritualism; Theosophy
"'The point which the investigations of the Society for Psychical Research
have already reached creates a question of transcendent interest, no
matter what the solution of it may be, and will stimulate in the near
future an amount of psychological and theological speculation of the most
hasty and crude sort, which it will require the profoundest knowledge of
mental phenomena, normal and abnormal, and the best methods of science to
counteract, and to keep within the limits of sober reason. The hardly won
conquests of intellectual freedom and self-control can easily be
overthrown by a reaction that will know no bounds and which it will be
impossible to regulate. Though there may be some moral gain from the
change of beliefs, as will no doubt be the case in the long run, we have
too recently escaped the intellectual, religious, and political tyranny of
the Middle Ages to contemplate the immediate consequences of the reaction
with any complacency. But no one can calculate the enormous effect upon
intellectual, social, and political conditions which would ensure upon the
reconciliation of science and religion by the proof of immortality."
IV. CONCLUSIONS.
In my investigations of the physical phenomena of modern spiritualism, I
have come to the following conclusion: While the majority of mediumistic
manifestations are due to conjuring, there is a class of cases not
ascribable to trickery, namely, those coming within the domain of psychic
force--as exemplified by the experiments of Gasparin, Crookes, Lodge,
Asakoff and Coues. In regard to the subjective phenomena, I am convinced
that the recently annunciated law of telepathy will account for them. _I
discredit the theory of spirit intervention._ If this be a correct
conclusion, is there anything in mediumistic phenomena that will
contribute to the solution of the problem of the immortality of the soul?
I think there is. The existence of a subjective or subliminal
consciousness in man, as illustrated in the phenomena mentioned, seems to
indicate that the human personality is really a spiritual entity,
possessed of unknown resources, and capable of preserving its identity
despite the shock of time and the grave. Hudson says: "It is clear that
the power of telepathy has nothing in common with objective methods of
communications between mind and mind; and that it is not the product of
muscle or nerve or any physiological combination whatever, but rather sets
these at naught, with their implications of space and time.... When
disease seizes the physical frame and the body grows feeble, the objective
mind invariably grows correspondingly weak.... In the meantime, as the
objective mind ceases to perform its functions, the subjective mind is
most active and powerful. The individual may never before have exhibited
any psychic power, and may never have consciously produced any psychic
phenomena; yet at the supreme moment his soul is in active communication
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