Spiritualism and the New Psychology: An Explanation of Spiritualist Phenomena and Beliefs in Terms of Modern Knowledge — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
Spiritualism and the New Psychology: An Explanation of Spiritualist Phenomena and Beliefs in Terms of Modern Knowledge
John Stuart Mill · en
The realisation of these facts saves the physiologist from being
deceived, either by fraudulent tricks or those natural chances of human
occurrence which occasion the belief of the credulous in telepathy. He
recognises that the human nervous system is built on a common plan, and
that it is to be expected that the sensory stimuli received from a given
environmental condition will often arouse the same train of thought in
two or more people, standing together, especially in those who
habitually associate. Such coincidences of thought, which astonish the
ignorant, are due to natural law. Human experience shows that
judgements of fundamental importance which would, if transmittable to
another at a distance by telepathy, win a fortune, save a defeat, etc.,
are never so transmitted. The Stock Exchange and the army in the field
must have their telephone and telegraph systems and messengers. No more
concentrated will to send information, which might bring succour, say
from the artillery, could be given than by men in peril of their lives
in the trenches, when the enemy came swarming over the top, but we know
that with the wires cut and the human messengers killed no succour came.
Neither does it come to the liner which, in full proud course with its
freight of thousands of souls strikes an iceberg, unless the wireless
mechanism be installed and operated so that the S.O.S. signal is
despatched. Otherwise it sinks without trace, as the Germans advised
their 'U' boats to let their victim merchant ships sink.
The phenomena of wireless telegraphy and of radio-active elements have
led people to think that some direct means of communication of energy
from one brain to another may be possible, that is without intervention
of the special senses. There is not the least evidence in favour of this
view; the evolution of the senses is wholly against it. It is true that
all vital activity is accompanied by electrical change--by a flow of
electrons--in the living matter, the nervous impulse itself may be so
transmitted. Such electrical change by a special evolution of structure
is magnified in the electric organ of certain fishes and used by them as
a weapon of offence. It is then sensed just as an electric shock from a
battery is sensed, and the intensity of the shock lessens inversely as
the square of the distance. There is no evidence that the minute
electrical changes accompanying nervous action in man are transmittable
to a distance through space; the nerves are evolved to confine and
convey these as nerve impulses to suitable receivers within their body
whereby function is co-ordinated.