Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death E-Book

F. W. H. Myers

• Herausgeber: F. W. H. Myers
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

The question for man most momentous of all is whether or no he has an immortal soul; or—to avoid the word immortal, which belongs to the realm of infinities—whether or no his personality involves any element which can survive bodily death. In this direction have always lain the gravest fears, the farthest-reaching hopes, which could either oppress or stimulate mortal minds.

Leseprobe

F. W. H. Myers

Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death

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Table of contents

PREFACE

GLOSSARY

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER II DISINTEGRATIONS OF PERSONALITY

CHAPTER III GENIUS

CHAPTER IV SLEEP

CHAPTER V HYPNOTISM

CHAPTER VI SENSORY AUTOMATISM

CHAPTER VII PHANTASMS OF THE DEAD

CHAPTER IX TRANCE, POSSESSION, AND ECSTASY

CHAPTER X EPILOGUE

APPENDICES TO CHAPTER II

APPENDICES TO CHAPTER IV

APPENDICES TO CHAPTER V

APPENDICES TO CHAPTER VI

APPENDICES TO CHAPTER VII

APPENDICES TO CHAPTER VIII

APPENDICES TO CHAPTER IX

FOOTNOTES:

PREFACE

THE book which is now at last given to the world is but a partial presentation of an ever-growing subject which I have long hoped to become able to treat in more adequate fashion. But as knowledge increases life rolls by, and I have thought it well to bring out while I can even this most imperfect text-book to a branch of research whose novelty and strangeness call urgently for some provisional systematisation, which, by suggesting fresh inquiries and producing further accumulation of evidence, may tend as speedily as possible to its own supersession. Few critics of this book can, I think, be more fully conscious than its author of its defects and its lacunæ; but also few critics, I think, have yet realised the importance of the new facts which in some fashion the book does actually present.Many of these facts have already appeared in Phantasms of the Living; many more in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research; but they are far indeed from having yet entered into the scientific consciousness of the age. In future years the wonder, I think, will be that their announcement was so largely left to a writer with leisure so scanty, and with scientific equipment so incomplete.Whatever value this book may possess is in great measure due to other minds than its actual author's. Its very existence, in the first place, probably depends upon the existence of the two beloved friends and invaluable coadjutors to whose memory I dedicate it now.The help derived from these departed colleagues, Henry Sidgwick and Edmund Gurney, although of a kind and quantity absolutely essential to the existence of this work, is not easy to define in all its fulness under the changed circumstances of to-day. There was indeed much which is measurable;—much of revision of previous work of my own, of collaborative experiments, of original thought and discovery. Large quotations purposely introduced from Edmund Gurney indicate, although imperfectly, how closely interwoven our work on all these subjects continued to be until his death. But the benefit which I drew from the association went deeper still. The conditions under which this inquiry was undertaken were such as to emphasise the need of some intimate moral support. A recluse, perhaps, or an eccentric,—or a man living mainly with his intellectual inferiors, may find it easy to work steadily and confidently at a task which he knows that the bulk of educated men will ignore or despise. But this is more difficult for a man who feels manifold links with his kind, a man whose desire it is to live among minds equal or superior to his own. It is hard, I say, for such a man to disregard altogether the expressed or implied disapproval of those groups of weighty personages to whom in other matters he is accustomed to look up.I need not say that the attitude of the scientific world—of all the intellectual world—then was very much more marked than now. Even now I write in full consciousness of the low value commonly attached to inquiries of the kind which I pursue. Even now a book on such a subject must still expect to evoke, not only legitimate criticism of many kinds, but also much of that disgust and resentment which novelty and heterodoxy naturally excite. But I have no wish to exalt into a deed of daring an enterprise which to the next generation must seem the most obvious thing in the world. Nihil ausi nisi vana contemnere will certainly be the highest compliment which what seemed to us our bold independence of men will receive. Yet gratitude bids me to say that however I might in the privacy of my own bosom have 'dared to contemn things contemptible,' I should never have ventured my amateurish acquirements on a publication of this scale were it not for that slow growth of confidence which my respect for the judgment of these two friends inspired. Their countenance and fellowship, which at once transformed my own share in the work into a delight, has made its presentation to the world appear as a duty.My thanks are due also to another colleague who has passed away, my brother, Dr. A. T. Myers, F.R.C.P., who helped me for many years in all medical points arising in the work.To the original furnishers of the evidence my obligations are great and manifest, and to the Council of the S.P.R. I also owe thanks for permission to use that evidence freely. But I must leave it to the book itself to indicate in fuller detail how much is owing to how many men and women:—how widely diffused are the work and the interest which have found in this book their temporary outcome and exposition.The book, indeed, is an exposition rather than a proof. I cannot summarise within my modest limits the mass of evidence already gathered together in the sixteen volumes of Proceedings and the nine volumes of the Journal of the S.P.R., in Phantasms of the Living and other books hereafter referred to, and in MS. collections. The attempt indeed would be quite out of place. This branch of knowledge, like others, must be studied carefully and in detail by those who care to understand or to advance it.What I have tried to do here is to render that knowledge more assimilable by co-ordinating it in a form as clear and intelligible as my own limited skill and the nature of the facts themselves have permitted. I have tried to give, in text and in Appendices, enough of actual evidence to illustrate each step in my argument:—and I have constantly referred the reader to places where further evidence will be found.In minor matters I have aimed above all things at clearness and readiness in reference. The division of the book into sections, with Appendices bearing the same numbers, will, it is hoped, facilitate the use both of syllabus and of references in general. I have even risked the appearance of pedantry in adding a glossary. Where many unfamiliar facts and ideas have to be dealt with, time is saved in the end if the writer explains precisely what his terms mean.

GLOSSARY

Note.—The words and phrases here included fall under three main heads:—(1) Words common only in philosophical or medical use.(2) Words or phrases used in psychical research with some special significance.(3) A few words, distinguished by an asterisk, for which the author is himself responsible.Aboulia.—Loss of power of willing.After-image.—A retinal picture of an object seen after removing the gaze from the object.Agent.—The person who seems to initiate a telepathic transmission.Agraphia.—Lack of power to write words.Alexia or Word-blindness.—Lack of power to understand words written.Anæsthesia, or the loss of sensation generally, must be distinguished from analgesia, or the loss of the sense of pain alone.Analgesia.—Insensibility to pain.Aphasia.—Incapacity of coherent utterance, not caused by structural impairment of the vocal organs, but by lesion of the cerebral centres for speech.Aphonia.—Incapacity of uttering sounds.Automatic.—Used of mental images arising and movements made without the initiation, and generally without the concurrence, of conscious thought and will. Sensory automatism will thus include visual and auditory hallucinations. Motor automatism will include messages written and words uttered without intention (automatic script, trance-utterance, etc.).Automnesia.—Spontaneous revival of memories of an earlier condition of life.Autoscope.—Any instrument which reveals a subliminal motor impulse or sensory impression, e.g., a divining rod, a tilting table, or a planchette.Bilocation.—The sensation of being in two different places at once, namely where one's organism is, and in a place distant from it.Catalepsy.—"An intermittent neurosis producing inability to change the position of a limb, while another person can place the muscles in a state of flexion or contraction as he will." (Tuke's Dictionary of Psychological Medicine.)Centre of Consciousness.—The place where a percipient imagines himself to be. The point of view from which he seems to himself to be surveying some phantasmal scene.Chromatism.—See Secondary Sensations.Clair-audience.—The sensation of hearing an internal (but in some way veridical) voice.Clairvoyance (Lucidité).—The faculty or act of perceiving, as though visually, with some coincidental truth, some distant scene.Cænesthesia.—That consensus or agreement of many organic sensations which is a fundamental element in our conception of personal identity.Control.—This word is used of the intelligence which purports to communicate messages which are written or uttered by the automatist, sensitive or medium.*Cosmopathic.—Open to the access of supernormal knowledge or emotion.Cryptomnesia.—Submerged or subliminal memory of events forgotten by the supraliminal self.*Dextro-cerebral (opposed to *Sinistro-cerebral) of left-handed persons as employing preferentially the right hemisphere of the brain.Diathesis.—Habit, capacity, constitutional disposition or tendency.Dimorphism.—In crystals the property of assuming two incompatible forms: in plants and animals, difference of form between members of the same species. Used of a condition of alternating personalities, in which memory, character, etc., present themselves at different times in different forms in the same person.Discarnate.—Disembodied, opposed to incarnate.Disintegration of Personality.—Used of any condition where the sense of personality is not unitary and continuous: especially when secondary and transitory personalities intervene.Dynamogeny.—The increase of nervous energy by appropriate stimuli, often opposed to inhibition.Ecmnesia.—Loss of memory of a period of time.*Entencephalic.—On the analogy of entoptic: of sensations, etc., which have their origin within the brain, not in the external world.Eugenics.—The science of improving the race.Falsidical.—Of hallucinations delusive, i.e., when there is nothing objective to which they correspond. The correlative term to veridical.Glossolaly.—"Speaking with tongues," i.e., automatic utterance of words not belonging to any real language.Hallucination.—Any sensory perception which has no objective counterpart within the field of vision, hearing, etc., is termed a hallucination.Heteræsthesia.—A form of sensibility decidedly different from any of those which can be referred to the action of the known senses.Hyperboulia.—Increased power over the organism,—resembling the power which we call will when it is exercised over the voluntary muscles,—which is seen in the bodily changes effected by self-suggestion.Hyperæsthesia.—Unusual acuteness of the senses.Hypermnesia.—"Over-activity of the memory; a condition in which past acts, feelings, or ideas are brought vividly to the mind, which, in its normal condition, has wholly lost the remembrance of them." (Tuke's Dict.)*Hyperpromethia.—Supernormal power of foresight.Hypnagogic.—Illusions hypnagogiques (Maury) are the vivid illusions of sight or sound—"faces in the dark," etc.—which sometimes accompany the oncoming of sleep. To similar illusions accompanying the departure of sleep, as when a dream-figure persists for a few moments into waking life, I have given the name *hypnopompic.Hypnogenous zones.—Regions by pressure on which hypnosis is induced in some hysterical persons.*Hypnopompic.—See Hypnagogic.Hysteria.—"A disordered condition of the nervous system, the anatomical seat and nature of which are unknown to medical science, but of which the symptoms consist in well-marked and very varied disturbances of nerve-function" (Ency. Brit.). Hysterical affections are not dependent on any discoverable lesion.Hysterogenous zones.—Points or tracts on the skin of a hysterical person, pressure on which will induce a hysterical attack.Ideational.—Used of impressions which display some distinct notion, but not of sensory nature.Induced.—Of hallucinations, etc., intentionally produced.Levitation.—A raising of objects from the ground by supposed supernormal means; especially of living persons.Medium.—A person through whom communication is deemed to be carried on between living men and spirits of the departed. It is often better replaced by automatist or sensitive.Message.—Used for any communication, not necessarily verbal, from one to another stratum of the automatist's personality, or from an external intelligence to the automatist's mind.Metallæsthesia.—A form of sensibility alleged to exist which enables some hypnotised or hysterical subjects to discriminate between the contacts of various metals by sensations not derived from their ordinary properties of weight, etc.Metastasis.—Change of the seat of a bodily function from one place (e.g., brain-centre) to another.*Metetherial.—That which appears to lie after or beyond the ether: the metetherial environment denotes the spiritual or transcendental world in which the soul may be supposed to exist.*Methectic.—Of communications between one stratum of a man's intelligence and another.Mirror-writing (écriture renversée, Spiegel-schrift).—Writing so inverted, or, more exactly, perverted, as to resemble writing reflected in a mirror.Mnemonic chain.—A continuous series of memories, especially when the continuity persists after an interruption.Motor.—Used of an impulse to action not carrying with it any definite idea or sensory impression.Negative hallucination or systematised anæthesia.—Signifies the condition of an entranced subject who, as the result of a suggestion, is unable to perceive some object or to hear some sound, etc.Number forms.—See Secondary sensations.Objectify.—To externalize a phantom as if it were a material object; to see it as a part of the waking world.*Panmnesia.—A potential recollection of all impressions.Paræsthesia.—Erroneous or morbid sensation.Paramnesia.—All forms of erroneous memory.Paraphasia.—The erroneous and involuntary use of one word for another.Percipient.—The correlative term to Agent; the person on whose mind the telepathic impact falls; or, more generally, the person who perceives any motor or sensory impression.Phantasm and Phantom.—Phantasm and phantom are, of course, mere variants of the same word; but since phantom has become generally restricted to visual hallucinations, it is convenient to take phantasm to cover a wider range, and to signify any hallucinatory sensory impression, whatever sense—whether sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste, or diffused sensibility—may happen to be affected.Phantasmogenetic centre.—A point in space apparently modified by a spirit in such a way that persons present near it perceive a phantasm.Phobies.—Irrational restricting or disabling preoccupations or fears; e.g., agoraphobia, fear of open spaces.Photism.—See Secondary sensations.Point de repère.—Guiding mark. Used of some (generally inconspicuous) real object which a hallucinated subject sometimes sees as the nucleus of his hallucination, and the movements of which suggest corresponding movements of the hallucinatory object.Polyzoism.—The property, in a complex organism, of being composed of minor and quasi-independent organisms. This is sometimes called "colonial constitution," from animal colonies.Possession.—A developed form of motor automatism, in which the automatist's own personality disappears for a time, while there appears to be a more or less complete substitution of personality, writing or speech being given by another spirit through the entranced organism.Post-hypnotic.—Used of a suggestion given during the hypnotic trance, but intended to operate after that trance has ceased.Precognition.—Knowledge of impending events supernormally acquired.Premonition.—A supernormal indication of any kind of event still in the future.*Preversion.—A tendency to characteristics assumed to lie at a further point of the evolutionary progress of a species than has yet been reached; opposed to reversion.*Promnesia.—The paradoxical sensation of recollecting a scene which is only now occurring for the first time; the sense of the déjà vu.*Psychorrhagy.—A special idiosyncrasy which tends to make the phantasm of a person easily perceptible; the breaking loose of a psychical element, definable mainly by its power of producing a phantasm, perceptible by one or more persons, in some portion of space.*Psychorrhagic diathesis.—A habit or capacity of detaching some psychical element, involuntarily and without purpose, in such a manner as to produce a phantasm.Psycho-therapeutics.—"Treatment of disease by the influence of the mind on the body." (Tuke's Dict.)Reciprocal.—Used of cases where there is both agency and percipience at each end of the telepathic chain, so that A perceives P, and P perceives A also.*Retrocognition.—Knowledge of the past, supernormally acquired.Secondary personality.—It sometimes happens, as the result of shock, disease, or unknown causes, that an individual experiences an alteration of memory and character, amounting to a change of personality, which generally seems to have come on during sleep. The new personality is in that case termed secondary, in distinction to the original, or primary, personality.Secondary sensations (Secunddrempfindungen, audition colorée, sound-seeing, synæsthesia, etc.).—With some persons every sensation of one type is accompanied by a sensation of another type; as for instance, a special sound may be accompanied by a special sensation of colour or light (chromatisms or photisms). This phenomenon is analogous to that of number-forms,—a kind of diagrammatic mental picture which accompanies the conception of a progression of numbers. See Galton's Inquiries into Human Faculty.Shell-hearing.—The induction of hallucinatory voices, etc., by listening to a shell. Analogous to crystal-gazing.Stigmatisation.—The production of blisters or other cutaneous changes on the hands, feet, or elsewhere, by suggestion or self-suggestion.Subliminal.—Of thoughts, feelings, etc., lying beneath the ordinary threshold (limen) of consciousness, as opposed to supraliminal, lying above the threshold.Suggestion.—The process of effectively impressing upon the subliminal intelligence the wishes of some other person. Self-suggestion means a suggestion conveyed by the subject himself from one stratum of his personality to another, without external intervention.*Supernormal.—Of a faculty or phenomenon which transcends ordinary experience. Used in preference to the word supernatural, as not assuming that there is anything outside nature or any arbitrary interference with natural law.Supraliminal.—See Subliminal.Synæsthesia.—See Secondary Sensations.Synergy.—A number of actions correlated together, or combined into a group.Telekinesis.—Used of alleged supernormal movements of objects, not due to any known force.*Telepathy.—The communication of impressions of any kind from one mind to another, independently of the recognised channels of sense.*Telæsthesia.—Any direct sensation or perception of objects or conditions independently of the recognised channels of sense, and also under such circumstances that no known mind external to the percipient's can be suggested as the source of the knowledge thus gained.*Telergy.—The force exercised by the mind of an agent in impressing a percipient,—involving a direct influence of the extraneous spirit on the brain or organism of the percipient.Veridical.—Of hallucinations, when they correspond to real events happening elsewhere and unknown to the percipient.

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

Maior agit deus, atque opera la maiora remittit. —VIRGIL.IN the long story of man's endeavours to understand his own environment and to govern his own fates, there is one gap or omission so singular that, however we may afterwards contrive to explain the fact, its simple statement has the air of a paradox. Yet it is strictly true to say that man has never yet applied to the problems which most profoundly concern him those methods of inquiry which in attacking all other problems he has found the most efficacious.The question for man most momentous of all is whether or no he has an immortal soul; or—to avoid the word immortal, which belongs to the realm of infinities—whether or no his personality involves any element which can survive bodily death. In this direction have always lain the gravest fears, the farthest-reaching hopes, which could either oppress or stimulate mortal minds.On the other hand, the method which our race has found most effective in acquiring knowledge is by this time familiar to all men. It is the method of modern Science—that process which consists in an interrogation of Nature entirely dispassionate, patient, systematic; such careful experiment and cumulative record as can often elicit from her slightest indications her deepest truths. That method is now dominant throughout the civilised world; and although in many directions experiments may be difficult and dubious, facts rare and elusive, Science works slowly on and bides her time,—refusing to fall back upon tradition or to launch into speculation, merely because strait is the gate which leads to valid discovery, indisputable truth.I say, then, that this method has never yet been applied to the all-important problem of the existence, the powers, the destiny of the human soul.Nor is this strange omission due to any general belief that the problem is in its nature incapable of solution by any observation whatever which mankind could make. That resolutely agnostic view—I may almost say that scientific superstition—"ignoramus et ignorabimus"—is no doubt held at the present date by many learned minds. But it has never been the creed, nor is it now the creed, of the human race generally. In most civilised countries there has been for nearly two thousand years a distinct belief that survival has actually been proved by certain phenomena observed at a given date in Palestine. And beyond the Christian pale—whether through reason, instinct, or superstition—it has ever been commonly held that ghostly phenomena of one kind or another exist to testify to a life beyond the life we know.But, nevertheless, neither those who believe on vague grounds nor those who believe on definite grounds that the question might possibly be solved, or has actually been solved, by human observation of objective facts, have hitherto made any serious attempt to connect and correlate that belief with the general scheme of belief for which Science already vouches. They have not sought for fresh corroborative instances, for analogies, for explanations; rather they have kept their convictions on these fundamental matters in a separate and sealed compartment of their minds, a compartment consecrated to religion or to superstition, but not to observation or to experiment.It is my object in the present work—as it has from the first been the object of the Society for Psychical Research, on whose behalf most of the evidence here set forth has been collected,—to do what can be done to break down that artificial wall of demarcation which has thus far excluded from scientific treatment precisely the problems which stand in most need of all the aids to discovery which such treatment can afford.Yet let me first explain that by the word "scientific" I signify an authority to which I submit myself—not a standard which I claim to attain. Any science of which I can here speak as possible must be a nascent science—not such as one of those vast systems of connected knowledge which thousands of experts now steadily push forward in laboratories in every land—but such as each one of those great sciences was in its dim and poor beginning, when a few monks groped among the properties of "the noble metals," or a few Chaldean shepherds outwatched the setting stars.What I am able to insist upon is the mere Socratic rudiment of these organisms of exact thought—the first axiomatic prerequisite of any valid progress. My one contention is that in the discussion of the deeper problems of man's nature and destiny there ought to be exactly the same openness of mind, exactly the same diligence in the search for objective evidence of any kind, exactly the same critical analysis of results, as is habitually shown, for instance, in the discussion of the nature and destiny of the planet upon which man now moves.