The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams

HUMAN BEHAVIOUR AND THE HUMAN MIND

the pain is felt without any visible marks being left. a

The Roman Catholic Church herself has pronounced some of the cases as impostures ; there is every reason to believe that others have been unconscious impostures, the worshipper inflicting the injuries on herself—or rather having them inflicted on her body by her Unconscious—a not infrequent happening in hystero-epileptic persons. But there remain a number that are apparently genuine. In these it would seem that the Unconscious is again showing its amazing power over bodily functions that are beyond conscious control, just as it does in hysteria by producing mental blindness or lack of memory, in hypnotism by raising blisters or causing temporary paralysis. Stigmatization is the most startling of all such phenomena and can probably only occur when a man or woman is in that exalted mental state called ecstasy by the mystics, or in some approach to it. It is noteworthy that many of the stigmatized (though not all) have been hysterical or have suffered from epilepsy. They have turned their weakness into something which from the religious point of view is of inestimable value.

§ 9

Automatism and Mediumship

Occurrences such as automatic writing, which play so large a part in psychical

research, appear to be only phenomena of

the split mind. Some people with a gift for automatic writing find that they get their best results when, after taking a pencil in their hand, they occupy their conscious attention with talk or a book. Others, on the other hand, find it best to relax, and may pass almost into a trance. In these circumstances the hand with the pencil may write not only voluminously, but often coherently and interestingly. What it writes would appear to be the product of some system of ideas which is denied full access to the normal main consciousness—more or less thoroughly dissociated, repressed, or buried.

An interesting case of this sort was recently reported from the United States. An active stockbroker, who rather despised literature, found that lines of poetry came into his mind in the state between sleeping and waking He was interested and wrote them down. ‘They seemed quite good, so he sent them to a magazine, which accepted them. He now earns regular money by subconsciously composed poems—a product, doubtless, of a normal romanticism which his business life has suppressed.

There is no ground for believing that automatic writing is the work of extraneous “spirits *” ; the recesses of the mind have a sufficient population of partial personalities to account for all the automatic scripts that have been published. The same is true for the well-known phenomenon of “ control ” of a so-called medium. The medium relaxes and sinks into a trance-like state, in many ways resembling that produced by hypnotism ; and after a time he (or, generally, she) begins to speak in an altered voice and manner. The new voice asserts that it belongs to some spirit which has entered into the mind of the medium and so has obtained control over her brain and actions during her trance. The “ control ” will give answers to questions or may volunteer statements of its own accord ; it is, of course, through these channels that the bulk of spiritualistic information is obtained. There are doubtless cases where fraudulent mediums simulate trance and “control”? ; but when all these have been discounted there is an abundance of genuine cases in which a personality distinct from the medium’s waking self does speak and act, and the medium has no knowledge of its words and actions when she comes out of trance.

A well-tried rule in science, as in practical affairs, is what was known to scholastic philosophy as William of Occam’s razor, which, being translated into modern terms, lays down that unnecessary causes should be avoided ; if you can explain your facts with the aid of well-tried principles, do not drag in new ones.

This rule is very much to the point as regards mediums and their “ controls.” All the facts, remarkable as they are, can be explained perfectly well as being due to the activity of secondary systems in the medium’s own mind—repressed ideas, split-off personalities of varying degrees of completeness, deep layers of the Unconscious. ‘Those who doubt this assertion should read the account of the celebrated Héléne Smith, given by Flournoy, Professor of Psychology at Geneva, in his book, Des Indes a la Planéte Mars. Helene Smith was not only an outstanding medium, who was perfectly genuine and believed in the literal truth of her control and its utterances, but one of the very few mediums who have consented to a thorough scientific investigation. She had visions, automatic writing, auditory hallucinations in which she heard messages or even whole poems, and trances in which a romantic and benevolent “‘ spirit,” who called himself Leopold, was the control. Among other

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