From Matter to Spirit. By C. D. With a preface by A. B.[339] London, 1863, 8vo.
This is a work on Spiritual Manifestations. The author upholds the facts for spiritual phenomena: the prefator suspends his opinion as to the cause, though he upholds the facts. The work begins systematically with the lower class of phenomena, proceeds to the higher class, and offers a theory, suggested by the facts, of the connection of the present and future life. I agree in the main with A. B.; but can, of course, make none but horrescent reference to his treatment of the smaller philosophers. This is always the way with your paradoxers: they behave towards orthodoxy as the thresher fish behaves towards the whale. But if true, as is said, that the drubbing clears the great fish of parasites which he could not otherwise get rid of, he ought to bear no malice. This preface retorts a little of that contempt which the "philosophical world" has bestowed with heaped measure upon those who have believed their senses, and have drawn natural, even if hasty, inferences. There is philosophercraft as well as priestcraft, both from one source, both of one spirit. In English cities and towns, the minister of religion has been tamed: so many weapons are bared against him when he obtrudes his office in a dictatory manner, that, as a rule, there is no more quiet and modest member of society than the urban clergyman. Domination over religious belief is reserved for the exclusive use of those who admit the right: the rare exception to this mode of behavior is laughed at as a bigot, or shunned as a nuisance. But the overbearing minister of nature, who snaps you with _unphilosophical_ as the clergyman once frightened you with _infidel_, is still a recognized member of society, wants taming, and will get it. He wears the priest's cast-off {195} clothes, dyed to escape detection: the better sort of philosophers would gladly set him to square the circle.
The book just named appeared about the same time as this Budget began in the _Athenaeum_. It was commonly attributed, the book to my wife, the preface to myself. Some time after, our names were actually announced by the publisher, who ought to know. It will be held to confirm this statement that I announce our having in our possession some twenty reviews of different lengths, and of all characters: who ever collects a number of reviews of a book, except the author?
A great many of these reviews settle the matter _a priori_. If there had been spirits in the matter, they would have done this, and they would not have done that. Jean Meslier[340] said there could be no God over all, for, _if_ there had been one, He would have established a universal religion. If J. M. _knew_ that, J. M. was right: but if J. M. did not know that, then J. M. was on the "high priori road," and may be left to his course. The same to all who know what spirits would do and would not do.
A. B. very distinctly said that he knew some of the asserted facts, believed others on testimony, but did not pretend to know whether they were caused by spirits, or had some unknown and unimagined origin. This he said as clearly as I could have said it myself. But a great many persons cannot understand such a frame of mind: their own apparatus is a kind of spirit-level, and their conclusion on any subject is the little bubble, which is always at one end or the other. Many of the reviewers declare that A. B. is a secret believer in the spirit-hypothesis: and one of them wishes that he had "endorsed his opinion more boldly." According to this reviewer, any one who writes "I boldly {196} say I am unable to choose," contradicts himself. In truth, a person who does say it has a good deal of courage, for each side believes that he secretly favors the other; and both look upon him as a coward. In spite of all this, A. B. boldly repeats that he feels assured of many of the facts of _spiritualism_, and that he cannot pretend to affirm or deny anything about their cause.
The great bulk of the illogical part of the educated community--whether majority or minority I know not; perhaps six of one and half-a-dozen of the other--have not power to make a distinction, cannot be made to take a distinction, and of course, never attempt to shake a distinction. With them all such things are evasions, subterfuges, come-offs, loopholes, etc. They would hang a man for horse-stealing under a statute against sheep-stealing; and would laugh at you if you quibbled about the distinction between a horse and a sheep. I divide the illogical--I mean people who have not that amount of natural use of sound inference which is really not uncommon--into three classes:--First class, three varieties: the Niddy, the Noddy, and the Noodle. Second class, three varieties: the Niddy-Noddy, the Niddy-Noodle, and the Noddy-Noodle. Third class, undivided: the Niddy-Noddy-Noodle. No person has a right to be angry with me for more than one of these subdivisions.
The want of distinction was illustrated to me, when a boy, about 1820, by the report of a trial which I shall never forget: boys read newspapers more keenly than men. Every now and then a bench of country magistrates rather astonishes the town populations, accustomed to rub their brains[341] against one another. Such a story as the following would, {197} in our day, bring down grave remarks from above: but I write of the olden (or Eldon[342]) time, when nothing but conviction in a court of record would displace a magistrate. In that day the third-class amalgamator of distinct things was often on the bench of quarter-sessions.
An attorney was charged with having been out at night poaching. A clear _alibi_ was established; and perjury had certainly been committed. The whole gave reason to suspect that some ill-willers thought the bench disliked the attorney so much that any conviction was certain on any evidence. The bench did dislike the attorney: but not to the extent of thinking he could snare any partridges in the fields while he was asleep in bed, except the dream-partridges which are not always protected by the dream-laws. So the chairman said, "Mr. ----, you are discharged; but you should consider this one of the most fortunate days of your life." The attorney indignantly remonstrated, but the magistrate was right; for he said, "Mr. ----, you have frequently been employed to defend poachers: have you been careful to impress upon them the enormity of their practices?" It appeared in a wrangling conversation that the magistrates saw little moral difference between poaching and being a poacher's professional defender without lecturing him on his wickedness: but they admitted with reluctance, that there was a legal distinction; and the brain of N^3 could no further go. This is nearly fifty years ago; and Westernism was not quite extinct. If the present lords of the hills and the valleys want to shine, let them publish a true history of their own order. I am just old enough to remember some of the last of the squires and parsons who protested against teaching the poor to read and write. They now write books for the working classes, give them lectures, and the like. There is now no class, as a class, more highly educated, broadly educated, and deeply educated, {198} than those who were, in old times, best described as partridge-popping squireens. I have myself, when a boy, heard Old Booby speaking with pride of Young Booby as having too high a spirit to be confined to books: and I suspected that his dislike to teaching the poor arose in fact from a feeling that they would, if taught a little, pass his heir.
A. B. recommended the spirit-theory as an hypothesis on which to ground inquiry; that is, as the means of suggestion for the direction of inquiry. Every person who knows anything of the progress of physics understands what is meant; but not the reviewers I speak of. Many of them consider A. B. as _adopting_ the spirit-hypothesis. The whole book was written, as both the authors point out, to suggest inquiry to those who are curious; C. D. firmly believing, A. B. as above. Neither C. D. nor A. B. make any other pretence. Both dwell upon the absence of authentications and the suppression of names as utterly preventive of anything like proof. And A. B. says that his reader "will give him credit, if not himself a goose, for seeing that the tender of an anonymous cheque would be of equal effect, whether drawn on the Bank of England or on Aldgate Pump." By this test a number of the reviewers are found to be geese: for they take the authors as offering proof, and insist, against the authors, on the very point on which the authors had themselves insisted beforehand.
Leaving aside imperceptions of this kind, I proceed to notice a clerical and medical review. I have lived much in the middle ages, especially since the invention of printing; and from thence I have brought away a high respect for and grateful recollection of--the priest in everything but theology, and the physician in everything but medicine. The professional harness was unfavorable to all progress, except on a beaten road; the professional blinkers prevented all but the beaten road from being seen: the professional reins were pulled at the slightest attempt to quicken pace, even on the permitted path; and the {199} professional whip was heavily laid on at the slightest attempt to diverge. But when the intelligent man of either class turned his attention out of his ordinary work, he had, in most cases, the freshness and vigor of a boy at play, and like the boy, he felt his freedom all the more from the contrast of school-restraint.
In the case of medicine, and physics generally, the learned were, in some essential points, more rational than many of their present impugners. They pass for having put _a priori_ obstacles in the way of progress: they might rather be reproved for too much belief in progress obtained by _a priori_ means. They would have shouted with laughter at a dunce who--in a review I read, but without making a note--declared that he would not believe his senses except when what they showed him was capable of explanation upon some known principle. I have seen such stuff as this attributed to the schoolmen; but only by those who knew nothing about them. The following, which I wrote some years ago, will give a notion of a distinction worth remembering. It is addressed to the authorities of the College of Physicians.
"The ignominy of the word _empiric_ dates from the ages in which scholastic philosophy deduced physical consequences _a priori_;--the ages in which, because a lion is strong, rubbing with lion's fat would have been held an infallible tonic. In those happy days, if a physician had given decoction of a certain bark, only because in numberless instances that decoction had been found to strengthen the patient, he would have been a miserable empiric. Not that the colleges would have passed over his returns because they were empirical: they knew better. They were as skilful in finding causes for facts, as facts for causes. The president and the elects of that day would have walked out into the forest with a rope, and would have pulled heartily at the tree which yielded the bark: nor would they ever have left it until they had pulled out a legitimate {200} reason. If the tree had resisted all their efforts, they would have said, 'Ah! no wonder now; the bark of a strong tree makes a strong man.' But if they had managed to serve the tree as you would like to serve homoeopathy, then it would have been 'We might have guessed it; all the _virtus roborativa_ has settled in the bark.' They admitted, as we know from Moliere, the _virtus dormitiva_[343] of opium, for no other reason than that opium _facit dormire_.[344] Had the medicine not been previously _known_, they would, strange as it may seem to modern pharmacopoeists, have accorded a _virtus dormitiva_ to the new _facit dormire_. On this point they have been misapprehended. They were prone to infer _facit_ from a _virtus_ imagined _a priori_; and they were ready in supplying _facit_ in favor of an orthodox _virtus_. They might have gone so far, for example, under pre-notional impressions, as the alliterative allopath, who, when maintenance of truth was busy opposing the progress of science called _vaccination_, declared that some of its patients coughed like cows, and bellowed like bulls; but they never refused to find _virtus_ when _facit_ came upon them, no matter whence. They would rather have accepted Tenterden steeple than have rejected the Goodwin Sands. They would have laughed their modern imitators to scorn: but as they are not here, we do it for them.
"The man of our day--the _a priori_ philosopher--tries the question whether opium can cause sleep by finding out in the recesses of his own noddle whether the drug can have a dormitive power: Well! but did not the schoolman do the same? He did; but mark the distinction. The schoolman had recourse to first principles, when there was no opium to try it by: our man settles the point in the same way _with a lump of opium before him_. The schoolman shifted his principles with his facts: the man of our drawing-rooms will fight facts with his principles, just as an old {201} physician would have done in actual practice, with the rod of his _Church_ at his back.
"The story about Galileo--which seems to have been either a joke made against him, or by him--illustrates this. _Nature abhors a vacuum_ was the explanation of the water rising in a pump: but they found that the water would not rise more than 32 feet. They asked for explanation: what does the satirist make the schoolmen say? That the stoppage is _not_ a fact, because nature abhors a vacuum? No! but that the principle should be that nature abhors a vacuum as far as 32 feet. And this is what would have been done.
"There are still among us both priests and physicians who would have belonged, had they lived three or four centuries ago, to the glorious band of whom I have spoken, the majority of the intelligent, working well for mankind out of the professional pursuit. But we have a great many who have helped to abase their classes. Go where we may, we find specimens of the lower orders of the ministry of religion and the ministry of health showing themselves smaller than the small of other pursuits. And how is this? First, because each profession is entered upon a mere working smack of its knowledge, without any depth of education, general or professional. Not that this is the whole explanation, nor in itself objectionable: the great mass of the world must be tended, soul and body, by those who are neither Hookers[345] nor Harveys[346]: let such persons not venture _ultra crepidam_, and they are useful and respectable. But, secondly, there is a vast upheaving of thought from the depths of commonplace learning. I am a clergyman! Sir! I am a medical man! Sir! and forthwith the nature of things is picked to pieces, and there is a race, with the last the winner, between Philosophy mounted on Folly's donkey, and Folly mounted on Philosophy's donkey. How fortunate {202} it is for Law that her battles are fought by politicians in the Houses of Parliament. Not that it is better done: but then _politics_ bears the blame."
I now come to the medical review. After a quantity of remark which has been already disposed of, the writer shows Greek learning, a field in which the old physician would have had a little knowledge. A. B., for the joke's sake, had left untranslated, as being too deep, a remarkably easy sentence of Aristotle, to the effect that what has happened was possible, for if impossible it would not have happened. The reviewer, in "simple astonishment,"--it was simple--at the pretended incapacity--I was told by A. B. that the joke was intended to draw out a reviewer--translates:--He says that this sentence is A. B.'s summing up of the evidence of Spiritualism. Now, being a sort of _alter ego_[347] of A. B., I do declare that he is not such a fool as to rest the evidence of Spiritualism--the _spirit explanation_--upon the occurrence of certain facts proving the possibility of those very facts. In truth, A. B. refuses to receive spiritualism, while he receives the facts: this is the gist of his whole preface, which simply admits spiritualism among the qualified candidates, and does not know what others there may be.
The reviewer speaks of Aristotle as "that clear thinker and concise writer." I strongly suspect that his knowledge of Aristotle was limited to the single sentence which he had translated or got translated. Aristotle is concise in _phrase_, not in book, and is powerful and profound in thought: but no one who knows that his writing, all we have of him, is the very opposite of clear, will pretend to decide that he thought clearly. As his writing, so probably was his thought; and his books are, if not anything but clear, at least anything good but clear. Nobody thinks them clear except a person who always clears difficulties: which I have no doubt was the reviewer's habit; that is, if he ever took the field {203} at all. The gentleman who read Euclid, all except the As and Bs and the pictures of scratches and scrawls, is the type of a numerous class.
The reviewer finds that the word _amosgepotically_, used by A. B., is utterly mysterious and incomprehensible. He hopes his translation of the bit of Greek will shield him from imputation of ignorance: and thinks the word may be referred to the "obscure dialect" out of which sprung _aneroid_, _kalos geusis sauce_, and _Anaxyridian trousers_. To lump the first two phrases with the third smacks of ignorance in a Greek critic; for [Greek: anaxuridia], _breeches_, would have turned up in the lexicon; and _kalos geusis_, though absurd, is not obscure. And [Greek: amosgepos], _somehow or other_, is as easily found as [Greek: anaxuridia]. The word _aneroid_, I admit, has puzzled better scholars than the critic: but never one who knows the unscholarlike way in which words ending in [Greek: eides] have been rendered. The _aneroid barometer_ does _not_ use a column of air in the same way as the old instrument. Now [Greek: aeroeides]--properly _like_ the atmosphere--is by scientific non-scholarship rendered having to do with the atmosphere; and [Greek: anaeroeides]--say _anaeroid_--denies having to do with the atmosphere; a nice thing to say of an instrument which is to measure the weight of the atmosphere. One more absurdity, and we have _aneroid_, and there you are. The critic ends with a declaration that nothing in the book shakes his faith in a _Quarterly_ reviewer who said that suspension of opinion, until further evidence arrives, is justifiable: a strange summing up for an article which insists upon utter rejection being unavoidable.[348] The expressed aim of both A. B. and C. D. was to excite inquiry, and get further evidence: until this is done, neither asks for a verdict.
Oh where! and oh where! is old Medicine's learning gone! There _was_ some in the days of yore, when Popery {204} was on! And it's oh! for some Greek, just to find a word upon! The reviewer who, lexicon in hand, can neither make out _anaxyridical_, _amosgepotical_, _kalos geusis_, nor distinguish them from _aneroid_, cannot be trusted when he says he has translated a sentence of Aristotle. He may have done it; but, as he says of spiritualism, we must suspend our opinion until further evidence shall arrive.
We now come to the theological review. I have before alluded to the faults of logic which are Protestant necessities: but I never said that Protestant argument had _nothing but_ paralogism. The writer before me attains this completeness: from beginning to end he is of that confusion and perversion which, as applied to interpretation of the New Testament, is so common as to pass unnoticed by sermon-hearers; but which, when applied out of church, is exposed with laughter in all subjects except theology. I shall take one instance, putting some words in italics.
_A. B._ _Theological Critic._
My state of mind, which refers ... he proceeds to argue that the whole _either_ to unseen he himself is outside its intelligence, _or something sacred pale because he refers which man has never had any all these strange phenomena to conception of_, proves me to _unseen spiritual be out of the pale of the intelligence_. Royal Society.
The possibility of a _yet unimagined_ cause is insisted on in several places. On this ground it is argued by A. B. that spiritualists are "incautious" for giving in at once to the spirit doctrine. But, it is said, they may be justified by the philosophers, who make the flint _axes_, as they call them, to be the works of men, because no one can see _what else they can be_. This kind of adoption, _condemned_ as a conclusion, is _approved_ as a provisional theory, suggestive of direction of inquiry: experience having shown that {205} inquiry directed by a _wrong_ theory has led to more good than inquiry without any theory at all. All this A. B. has fully set forth, in several pages. On it the reviewer remarks that "with infinite satisfaction he tries to justify his view of the case by urging that there is no other way of accounting for it; after the fashion of the philosophers of our own day, who conclude that certain flints found in the drift are the work of men, because the geologist does not see what else they can be." After this twist of meaning, the reviewer proceeds to say, and A. B. would certainly join him, "There is no need to combat any such mode of reasoning as this, because it would apply with equal force and justice to any theory whatever, however fantastic, profane, or silly." And so, having shown how the reviewer has hung himself, I leave him funipendulous.
One instance more, and I have done. A reviewer, not theological, speaking of the common argument that things which are derided are not _therefore_ to be rejected, writes as follows:--"It might as well be said that they who laughed at Jenner[349] and vaccination were, in a certain but very unsatisfactory way, witnesses to the possible excellence of the system of St. John Long."[350] Of course it _might_: and of course it _is_ said by all people of common sense. In introducing the word "possible," the reviewer has hit the point: I suspect that this word was introduced during revision, to put the sentence into fighting order; hurry preventing it being seen that the sentence was thus made to fight on the wrong side. Jenner, who was laughed at, was right; therefore, it is not impossible--that is, it is _possible_--that a derided system may be right. Mark the three gradations: _in medio tutissimus ibis_.[351]
{206}
_Reviewer._--If a system be derided, it is no ground of suspense that derided systems have turned out true: if it were, you would suspend your opinion about St. John Long on account of Jenner.--_Ans._ You ought to do so, as to _possibility_; and _before examination_; not with the notion that J. proves St. J. _probable_; only _possible_.
_Common Sense._--The past emergence of truths out of derided systems proves that there is a practical certainty of like occurrence to come. But, inasmuch as a hundred speculative fooleries are started for one truth, the mind is permitted to approach the examination of any one given novelty with a bias against it of a hundred to one: and this permission is given because so it will be, leave or no leave. Every one has licence not to jump over the moon.
_Paradoxer._--Great men have been derided, and I am derided: which proves that my system ought to be adopted. This is a summary of all the degrees in which paradoxers contend for the former derision of truths now established, giving their systems _probability_. I annex a paragraph which D [e &c.] inserted in the _Athenaeum_ of October 23, 1847.
"_Discoverers and Discoveries._
"Aristotle once sent his servant to the cellar to fetch wine:--and the fellow brought him back small beer. The Stagirite (who knew the difference) called him a blockhead. 'Sir,' said the man, 'all I can say is, that I found it in the cellar.' The philosopher muttered to himself that an affirmative conclusion could not be proved in the second figure,--and Mrs. Aristotle, who was by, was not less effective in her remark, that small beer was not wine because it was in the same cellar. Both were right enough: and our philosophers might take a lesson from either--for they insinuate an affirmative conclusion in the second figure. Great discoverers have been little valued by established {207} schools,--and they are little valued. The results of true science are strange at first,--and so are their's. Many great men have opposed existing notions,--and so do they. All great men were obscure at first,--and they are obscure. Thinking men doubt,--and they doubt. Their small beer, I grant, has come out of the same cellar as the wine; but this is not enough. If they had let it stand awhile in the old wine-casks, it might have imbibed a little of the flavor."
There are better reviews than I have noticed; which, though entirely dissenting, are unassailable on their own principles. What I have given represents five-sixths of the whole. But it must be confessed that the fraction of fairness and moderation and suspended opinion which the doctrine of _Spirit Manifestations_ has met with--even in the lower reviews--is strikingly large compared to what would have been the case fifty years ago. It is to be hoped that our popular and periodical literatures are giving us one thinker created for twenty geese double-feathered: if this hope be realized, we shall do! Seeing all that I see, I am not prepared to go the length of a friend of mine who, after reading a good specimen of the lower reviewing, exclaimed--Oh! if all the fools in the world could be rolled up into one fool, what a reviewer he would make!
Calendrier Universel et Perpetuel; par le Commandeur P. J. Arson.[352] Publie par ses Enfans (Oeuvre posthume). Nice, 1863, 4to.
I shall not give any account of this curious calendar, with all its changes and symbols. But there is one proposal, which, could we alter the general notions of time--a thing of very dubious possibility--would be convenient. The week is made to wax and wane, culminating on the Sunday, {208} which comes in the middle. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, are ascending or waxing days; Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, are descending or waning days. Our six days, lumped together after the great distinguishing day, Sunday, are too many to be distinctly thought of together: a division of three preceding and three following the day of most note would be much more easily used. But all this comes too late. It may be, nevertheless, that some individuals may be able to adjust their affairs with advantage by referring Thursday, Friday, Saturday, to the following Sunday, and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, to the preceding Sunday. But M. Arson's proposal to alter the names of the days is no more necessary than it is practicable.
