s*^ L /^ m ■^. ,/ - i r THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES ii ?^ V •N> w / r ^' <^ \ \ \ / 3% ^« s SCIENTIFIC KELIGION "©as ei3iS''l^tiblid)Z Sidjt uns Ijtnan." — Faust. SCIENTIFIC RELIGION OR HIGHER POSSIBILITIES OF LIFE AND PRACTICE THROUGH THE OPERATION OF NATURAL FORCES BY LAURENCE OLIPHANT WITIf AX APPEXDIX BY A CLERGYMAX OF THE CHURCH OF EXGLAXD ^Dublisi^ctJ for tfje Slut^or bg WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS EDINBURGH AND LONDON MDCCCLXXXVIIl All />,V,7./ = 1/ t ^ ids' P E E r A C E. In the last volume which I published, called 'Episodes in a Life of Adventure,' I said in the concluding chapter that the reason why I could not continue the records of my life beyond the year 1865, was because my attention, which had previously to that date been for some years directed to what is called " spiritualism," now became absorbed in a new and higher phase of investigation, which compelled me to abandon the pursuits and ambitions of the life I was leading, and retire from the world in order to surround myself by the most favourable conditions I could find under which to " pro- secute my researches into the more hidden laws which govern human action and control events ; " and I went on to say, that "although from time to time I have been suddenly forced from retirement into some of the most stirring scenes which have agitated Europe, the reasons which compelled me to participate in them were closely connected with the investigation in which I was engaged, the nature of which is so absorbing, and its results so encouraging, that it would not be possible for me now to abandon it, or to relinquish the hope which it has inspired, that a new moral future is dawn- ing upon the Imman race — one, certainly, of which it stands much in need." I did not then anticipate the possiljility of my Ijcing 2000142 vi • PREFACE, SO soon called upon to publish my grounds for expressing this hope; but during a withdrawal of five months last summer, into the solitudes of Mount Carmel, I have felt myself irresistibly impelled to write the following pages, and they furnish the only answer I can give to my numerous critics who are kind enough to regret that I should have left the paths of diplomatic and political adventure " to wander amidst the phantoms and mirages of the occult science." Only those who have tried both are in a position to judge where the phantoms and mirages really are. As, however, access to books of reference, with which to support the con- clusions at which I had arrived, was limited in so remote a spot, it was necessary for me to come to England, and my researches have more than fulfilled my expectations. It has been impossible for me to do justice to the subject without intruding my own personality to an extent which would have been in the highest degree repellent to me, were it not that the results reached, seem to me of such general paramount importance as to supersede all other considera- tions, and that the experimental process by which they have been obtained, is a necessary prelude and explanation of them. Excepting, however, where personal allusions are unavoid- able, I have dispensed with them ; while I earnestly trust that, in some minds at all events, the convictions which are here embodied as the result of long and arduous struggle and effort, may meet with a response. LAURENCE OLIPHANT. April 1888. POSTSCRIPT TO THE PREFACE. I FEEL impelled at the last moment to say one word with regard to the conditions under which this book was written. I had hesitated to do so until it was actually in the hands of the binder ; but the problems of psychology are forcing them- selves so strongly upon public attention, that I do not think that any experience which may throw light upon them should be withheld. I became conscious on my arrival at Haifa last spring that a book, the plan of which I could nut determine, was taking form in my mind, and pressing for external expression, and at once sat down to write it. I found the attempt to be vain ; the ideas refused to arrange themselves, and I was strongly impressed that they could not do so, unless I went to a summer-house I have built in a remote part of Mount Carmel, and made the room from which the spirit of my wife had passed into the unseen, a little more than a year before, my private study, religiously preserving it from intrusion. I had no sooner taken my pen in hand under these circum- stances, than the thoughts which find expression in the fol- lowing pages were projected into my mind with the greatest rapidity, and irrespective of any mental study or prearrange- ment on my part, often overpowering my own preconceptions, and still more often presenting tlie subject treated of in an Vlll^ _ POSTSCRIPT TO THE PREFACE. entirely new light to myself. On two or three occasions they ceased suddenly. I then found it was useless to try and formu- late them l)y any effort of my brain, and at once abandoned the attempt to write for the day. The longest interval of this kind was three days. On the fourth I was again able to write with facility, and though always conscious of the effort of composition, it was never so severe as to cause me to pause for more than one or two minutes. At the same time there was nothing, so far as I could judge, abnormal in my mental or physical condition. I was unaffected by trifling interruptions, and the ideas as they pre- sented themselves seemed to be my own mingled with others projected from an unseen source, or new ideas struggling with and overpowering old ones with force that I could not resist. This must be my apology for a tone of authority which I should otherwise have been reluctant to impart to this book. CONTENTS. PAET I. INTRODUCTION. PAGE Revolutionary tendency of modern thought — Its bearing upon theological dogma — Doubts and unsatisfied moral aspirations the result of spiritual quickening — The impending psychic crisis, and the moral and physical conflict which will result therefrom — Organic changes in man now in progress, . . 1 CHAPTER I. Uncertainty attending all revelation purporting to be divine — Causes of this uncertainty^The responsilnlity of every man as the final judge of revelation — None of the most ancient revelations attempted to grapple with social and economic prob- lems — Substitution almost immediately after Christ's death of a desire for personal salvation, in lieu of the practice of daily life inculcated by him — Theosophy, occultism, and mysticism, offer no remedy for the world's malady — Nature of Biblical in- spiration examined — Later inspirational writings, . . 10 CHAPTER II. Recent examination into tlie nature of the forces latent in the human organism — Hypnotic experiments in France, and the Psychical Research Society in J]ngland, familiarising tlie scien- tific mind with forces formerly ignored — Their origin in the unseen universe — Fonner conception of matter modified by recent discoveries — Sir Henry Roscoe on atoms — Inseparability Vlll CONTENTS. of matter and force — Dynaspheric force — Scientific facts valu- able, conclusions misleading — Hypnotic expei'iments witnessed by me in Paris — Hypnotism recognised by the medical faculty in France as dangerous — Spiritual insight necessary to discover the nature and origin of these forces, and to qualify the oper- ator to deal with them, . . . . . .28 CHAPTER III. The interlocking of the invisible atoms of the seen and unseen worlds form a single system of animate nature — Glimpses into the invisible, conditioned on the moral state of the observer — Deatli a liberation of grosser atoms from those more sublimated — Material particles, the vehicles of force, constantly assuming new phases — Anima mundi — Interdependence of all created nature — Psychical experience attending the composition of " Sympneumata" — Duplex cerebral action — Vital atomic inter- action between the living and the dead — Method of cerebral impregnation — Inspirations which do not grapple with the earth- malady, worthless — Christ, a radiative centre of healing force — The discipline of absolute self-sacrifice essential as a preparation to the highest inspiration — Defect in the Eastern systems of asceticism, . . . . . . .49 CHAPTER IV. Introduction to the House-book ; a treatise on domestic living, by the late Mrs Oliphant — Reasons why households should be formed to secure the advent of ideal good — Manner of life to be neither lavish nor parsimonious — Reasons for this — Religion now to be the possession of each man — All born to enact, what was formerly taught — Family groups, a machinery for social service — Necessity for the protection and nourishment of a home — All artificial distinctions of rank, occupations, and creeds abolished — Makers and maintainers of the family respon- sible for its development — The qualities required for social re- demption — All to stand in sympathy with the laws of society, but not to be subjugated by them — Angelic co-operation with men — Division of responsibilities — Assistance in labour — Subordination to authority — Notes of expenditure, . . 64 CHAPTER V. Insufiiciency of the natural reason as a guide to divine truth, be- cause it cannot divest itself of the ideas of time and space — CONTENTS. IX Hence theology and science both blind guides — Man the arena of conflictiag atomic forces — Transmutation of material forces by conversion of moral particles — Methods and manifestations of infestation — Atomic constitution of moral atmosphere — Phenomena of heredity— Astrology — Will-force under specific influence — Faith-healing — Elixir of life — Radiation of divine life depends on magnetic conditions — Sufi'ering involved thereby — Religion iiseless as a means to a personal end — "World - regeneration to be accomplished by a radiation of divinely inspired human affection — Inspiration threefold : through union with God, man, and nature — Pollution of its current threefold: by pride, by selfishness, by apathy — Its force depends upon its concentration upon groups animated by the same motive, ....... 84 CHAPTER VI. History of the early Christian Church, a record of swift demoralisa- tion ; partly owiag to desire to make converts, and partly to the substitution of a future life for present practice— Conflict between Rome and the East — Extinction of Gnostic sects de- structive of mixch of the deeper truth — Compilation of the present canon of Scripture untrustworthy — Apocryphal gospels and epistles — "The teaching of the Twelve Apostles" — The Book of Enoch — The Church of England on the verge of a great moral revolution — The confessions of a parish priest — Need of a reformed Christianity, .... 102 CHAPTER VII. Moral pall which shrouds earth's surface — Deterioration of moral atmosphere under invasion of Western civilisation — Christ's Christianity diametrically opposed to that of the Churches — False system of religious and secular education — Christendom : its politics, commerce, and finance, all on an infernal basis- Corruption of its Churches — Blindness and indifterence of so- called Christians to the inconsistencies of their lives — Christian ethics buried under anti-Christian dogmas — A quickening of conscience taking place among the clergy — Canon Fremantle on the " New Reformation," . . . . .117 CHAPTER VIII. The effect of dogmatic theology upon modern thought — The preju- dices which it excites — The conflict between science and reli- X CONTENTS. gioii to wliich it has given rise — Intolerance both of theologians and men of science — Bigotry of the latter — Contradictions in which they have become involved — Facts of nature, discovered by superficial investigations, valuable — Empirical science in- competent to arrive at the divine truths in nature — This can only be achieved by development of inner faculties in man- Hence all scientific conjectures and hypotheses worthless — Con- flicting utterances and conclusions of Professors Huxley and Tyndall illustrate this, . . . . . .131 CHAPTER IX. Eeligious systems : their uses and abuses — Aspiration demands in- spiration — Religions extracted from the husk, instead of the kernel of revelation — Impossibility of demonstrating to the superficial reason, truths discovered by the inner faculties — Various channels and methods of inspiration — Development of subsurface consciousness — Magnetic condition of unseen world as related to ours — Attraction and repulsion depends on moral atomic affinities — Groups in the unseen with which every indi- vidual in the visible world is affiliated — So also with all Churches, religions, and sects — Christian, Buddhist, Moslem, and other religious organisations exist in the unseen, and in- spire those here — Hence divergency of inspiration and religious • intolerance, . . . . . . .143 CHAPTER X. Force inconceivable except in connection with matter as a trans- mitting medium — The psyche or " spiritual body," the abode of the pneuma or "spirit" — Christ's birth and death established a new atomic relation between the seen and the unseen — The or- ganisms of the seen and the unseen man described — Their rela- tion to each other, and the methods of their interaction — The phenomena of spiritualism, occultism, hypnotism, telepathy, faith-healing, and thought-reading accounted for and explained under the operation of natural law — Phenomena unreliable as a guide to truth— Craving for it unwholesome and attended with danger — Insanity explained — Philosophy of death — Disease not an unmixed evil — Popular ideas of heaven, hell, purgatory, erroneous — Magnetic contact established between Christ and the world, the channel of a new moral reconstructive potency — The human and spiritual magnetic batteries now charged, and the consummation at hand — Qualities refjuired in those who would co-operate in bringing it about, . . . .159 CONTENTS. XI CHAPTER XL The relation of man towards God, Christ, and the unseen world, here set forth, confirmed by the inner sense of the Bible — All sacred books have their hidden sense — Teaching of the Kab- balah and of the Fathers on this point — Inner sense of Christ's teaching has been lost, and the symbols and externals alone re- main ; hence superstition, bigotry, and hypocrisy — Frequent allusions to the " mystery " in the New Testament — St Paul's apprehension of it — The most ancient religions contain it in their universal conception of God, as an infinite paternal and maternal principle, pervading, animating, and sustaining all things by the " Word "^Judaism, which was an improved ren- dering of the Egyptian and Chaldean religions, contained it concealed in the Mosaic law, of which Christ was the fulfilment — Genesis composed and compiled under a most powerful in- spiration — Mysticism : its uses and abuses, . . . 184 CHAPTER XII. Masculine and feminine atomic elements — Sentient and non-sen- tient atoms — The Deity of the Bible, as well as of former sacred records, masculine and feminine — Effect of the divine mater- nity on man — Revelation by the Spirit, which is feminine, a personal one — This mystery contained in the hidden sense of both Old and New Testaments, . . . . .201 PART II. CHAPTER XIII. The generation of universes — First chapter of Genesis descj-ibcs the creation by emanation of a previous universe — Analysis of its hidden meaning— The rebellion of Lucifer— Archangels or Seraphim, ami arch-demons or Siddini — The first Adam, or Adam Cadmon, . . . . . • .219 CHAPTER XIV. Second chapter of Genesis describes creation by emanation of our world — Analysis of its hidden meaning — The birth of bi- sexual man— Ancient beliefs in liis androgynous nature — Story of his fall — And separation into two distinct sexes — Structural changes consec^uent thereon, . . . . • 229 xii CONTENTS. CHAPTER XV. The origin of evil — Mixed conditions in the genesis of earth — Evolution of the first forms of life, under the opposing influ- ences of Seraphim and Siddim— The Garden of Eden — Man's mission — Method of its accomplishment — The earth-malady caused by the pollution of its sex-life — Its purification possible — Nature of the struggle for purity thus involved, . . 243 CHAPTER XVI. The first period of the race — Esoteric sense of the conflict between Cain and Abel — The mark of Cain — The introduction of physiological birth — Of polygamy — The fate of the Lamech races — Invasion of the planet by the Siddim — Their mixed progeny— The Book of Enoch — The deluge — Earliest cosmo- gonic traditions— The golden age, .... 256 CHAPTER XVII. The Noachic race — The guardians of the mystery — Transmitted to the Abramic— Magnetic conditions of the Holy Land — The Divine Trinity of the early religions — Analogy of the religion of Accad with that of the Jews — The secret contained in the law of Moses— The fulfilment of the law— Effect of modern criti- cism on Judaism, . . . . . • .271 CHAPTER XVIII. The mission of the Jews— The mystery of the Divine Feminine con- fided to them — The vision of Isaiah — The Divine Feminine enfolded in Christ — The method of His birth — Jewish belief in the Messiah — The Virgin Mary — Nature of the descent of the feminine principle — Covenants with the Jews — Reasons why they should recognise in this principle their Messiah, . . 290 CHAPTER XIX. The true position of woman — The false position assigned her by civilisation — Her new fvmctions in life — The descent of the Divine Feminine through her — The co-operative struggle of the sexes for purity — Woman's rights — The true higher education of woman, ...... 314 CONTENTS. Xlll CHAPTER XX. Method of the descent of the Divine Feminine — And of its recep- tion by woman — The Sympneiima — Introduction of the Divine Feminine into the world, through the birth, life, death, resur- rection, and ascension of Christ — The outpouring on the dis- ciples on the Day of Pentecost — The sympneumatic conscious- ness, ........ .326 CHAPTER XXI. The sympneumatic descent — Its infernal simulation — The func- tion of bisexual atoms — Contact with pneumatic centres — Social conventionalities impede male and female co-operation — Insane delusions — The relation of Christ to man through woman illustrated by St Paul — Kabbalistic interpretations, . . 340 CHAPTER XXII. The twelfth and thirteenth chapters of the Book of Revelation in- terpreted — The effect of Christ's mission to earth upon the upper invisible region of our world — Concealment of the Divine Feminine — The two witnesses — The functions of John the Bap- tist — His relation to Christ — Temporary triumph of the Infer- nal Feminine — The Beast, Anti-Christendom, or the Gentile Church — The mark of the Beast, the false cross — Man's pres- ent relation to Christ, ...... 362 CHAPTER XXIII. The fourteenth and following chapters of Revelation interpreted — Collision on earth between the sympneumatic and anti-sym- pneumatic forces — Catastrophic changes in consequence — The fate of the Siddim — The triumph of the saints — The Second Advent, and the descent of the Bride — Recapitulation, . . 379 Appendix I., extracts from the Kabbalali, .... .391 Appendix II., by a Clergyman of tlie Cliurch of England, . 401 EEEATA. Page 165, line 2 from top, /or "dialectric" read "dielectric. !r 235, line 2 from foot, for " Salvine " read " Salome." PAET I. SCIENTIFIC RELIGION; OR, HIGHER POSSIBILITIES OF LIFE AND PRACTICE THROUGH THK OPERATION OF NATURAL FORCES. INTRODUCTION. REVOLUTIONARY TENDENCY OF MODERN THOUGHT — IT.S BEARING UPON THEOLOGICAL DOGMA — DOUBTS AND UNSATISFIED MORAL ASPIRA- TIONS THE RESULT OF .SPIRITUAL QUICKENING — THE IMPENDING PSYCHIC CRISIS, AND THE MORAL AND PHYSICAL CONFLICT WHICH WILL RESULT THEREFROM — ORGANIC CHANGES IN MAN NOW IN PROGRESS. It would be supertiuous here to do more than cursorily allude to the remarkable moral and intellectual movement which has characterised the la.st half-century; it has been resumed in the literature of the jubilee year. The great ])roblems of life are assuming a new form, as the theo- logical landmarks are gradually fading away beneath the Hood of light which has been let into them by theological research, antiquarian discovery, scientific investigation, and ])Sychiciil ]»henomena ; and men in their trouble arc. peering earnestly into the new region whicli is being thus illumin- ated, for a new order which they may substitute for the old — some vital tnitb-]»rincipl(' wliicli sliall conduce to a purer A 2 • SCIENTIFIC KELIGION. ami nobler social life; for, though the dogmas crumble away one after the other, and the dry-rot of ecclesiasticism be- comes daily more apparent, the religious instinct is more quickened than ever, and in proportion as men under its intluence emancipate themselves from what they now per- ceive to be the ignorance, prejudice, or superstition of a dark age, do their aspirations strain after something higher and better, while their belief in the possible realisation of ideals, hitherto deemed unattainable, grows stronger. Nevertheless, this yearning for, and searching after, higher truth by the more advanced minds of the age, is attended by a conscious- ness of unrest and anxiety, often almost amounting to a vague feeling of alarm. There is a sense of chaotic surroundings, of unstable footing, of shrinking from the plunge into the unknown ; and many of the weaker sort, after going a little way, become troubled as to their own future, and — deficient in such a love for humanity as should induce them to dare all for its sake, and in such a faith in God as should lift them out of all personal anxieties — they scramble back into what they were brought up to believe was an ark of personal safety. There they find comparative rest among those whose consciences have not yet been stirred to any perception of the fearful inconsistencies of their conduct ; who distinguish be- tween things religious and things secular ; who are content to profess in pulpit and in pew on Sunday, moral axioms which they openly violate in almost every act of their daily lives, and who do this in all good faith, in the sincere belief that they are pleasing God, and following the example of their Lord and Master Jesus Christ, and will win for themselves heaven thereby. It is because they are in this morally dark- ened condition — the result mainly of fear of punishment and hope of reward — that they shrink appalled from the con- elusions of modern investigations, and refuse to receive any light which should pierce into the gloomy nooks and musty corners of their most unchristian creed, and which should force upon them an investigation into the errors of their present faith, and into the reasons why they are utterly unable to carry out in their daily conduct, and not merely to pro- nounce with their lips, the moral teachings of their nom- inal Master. ECCLESIASTICISM AND SCIENCE. 3 In strong contrast with these is the class who live under the full blaze of the light to which I have alluded, but who are morally unaffected by it. "It is a useful light," they say, "for looking into the past, — it has even some interest materially with regard to the present, — but it is useless so far as the future is concerned. It has been valuable as showing us the extent of our ignorance, and in revealing to us the many delusions in which we have been living, but it conveys no other truth to us ; on the contrary, it presents to us insoluble problems with more distinctness than before, and it has no power of penetrating these for others, further than it penetrates them for us. The limit of our range of vision under its influence must necessarily be the limit of theirs, and inasmuch as all that it shows us is that we don't know more than it shows us, (which is very little, because it does not penetrate below the surface of things, or beyond what we call the ' material '), therefore, what is im- penetrable surface for us must be impenetrable surface for everybody else, and what we call the material must be mate- rial for everybody else, and we refuse to admit that any- body can see further or have more light than we have." The analog}' does not seem to occur to such persons, that some people are naturally more short-sighted than others, and are obliged to wear spectacles ; did they not refuse to admit that spectacles exist for facilitating such internal vision as I am about to describe, they might possibly be furnished with them. In the meantime, there is far more hope for this class than for the one with which I liave contrasted it, for though " the light that is in them is darkness," they have the hon- esty to say so, — moreover, the light is in them unconsciously to themselves, and may burst out at any moment; but the others, more especially in the countries where the Greek or Ptoman Catholic religions prevail, have created their own darkness out of the l)igotries, the superstitions, ignorance, and cruelty of ages, and they wrap it round them and call it light. Tliere is another class, again, who are not troubled l)y the problems of life ; who consider that the pursuit of pleasure, fame, or wealth is the sane, laudable, and reasonable occupa- tion of a liuman being, inasmuch as, for aught they know, 4 SCIENTIFIC RELIGION. they may have no continuity of existence beyond this life. They ordinarily profess so-called Christianity, nevertheless, as a matter of convenience, but differ from the ardent votaries of that cult, in that they are governed by an enlightened selfishness as to the present, instead of as to the hereafter. They also are in a more hopeful condition than these lat- ter ; for their consciences are torpid, not perverted, and are therefore more susceptible to the electric shock of the divine touch. Far be it from me to say, however, that there are not thousands still embedded in existing forms of ecclesiasticism, who are daily becoming more highly sensitised morally ; whose aspirations are as noble, whose loves are as pure, whose mo- tives are as disinterested, as those of any of the earnest and devout truth-seekers and unbelievers in the popular theology ; but this is in spite of its dogmas, not in consequence of them. Such men have always existed in the period immediately pre- ceding reform in any religion, but they have always had the masses of their co-religionists against them ; and indications of an approaching schism of a far more profound character than any of which we have any historical record since the disciples were first called Cliristians at Antioch, are apparent to those who watch the spiritual horizon. To them a cloud bigger than a man's hand is visible above it. For the processes of the divine quickening are moving steadily forward, generating vital impulses which will prove uncontrollable to those who come under their influence, and suggesting an irresistible instinct for aggregation. Upon all classes, and in diverse countries, taking no account of race, or creed, or colour, does this new life descend ; and as those who are stirred by it move, do they recognise their aiSinity to others similarly affected, and the magnetic attraction which is inherent in the vivifying principle, draws them together, at present slowly and athwart obstacles that would seem insur- mountable — for in the early stages the recipients of this life feel weak and bewildered. Crushed by the weight of dry bones around tliem and above them, their first struggles are feeble and misdirected ; they know not in which direction to look for help ; the old deadness seems still to chain them to the spot where they first felt the vital touch, and yet they long NEW VITAL IMPULSES. 5 above all things to leave it. Progress they feel is impossible in the midst of the old surroundings. The atmosphere feels charged with mephitic vapour, which sometimes appears even to interfere with the ordinary respiration. There is a sensa- tion of struggle between the new life and the old, and the po- tency of the descending vigours seems at times as though it would destroy the outer bodily frame. It is the putting " the new wine into the old bottles," but the new wine takes no account of the condition of the bottle. Often it bursts it, and the spirit, vitalised and released, leaves its earthly shell, to carry on, from another vantage-point, the same work for humanity on this globe, which would have been allotted to it in its fleshly tabernacle. It would be hopeless, however, to attempt to give any com- plete description of the mode of operation of this new life- principle, for in no two cases are the phenomena which attend its descent into the human organism similar in their manifes- tation, while each who has been conscious of its influence has a varied experience to recount. With some, as I have said, it produces what may be called a life-and-death struggle ; with others the physical organism does not suffer, while the mor^l anguish is acute ; with some it is sudden, and seems to overwhelm and paralyse by the intensity of the shock; with others, it steals over them so slowly and so gradually — the preparation for its reception has been spread over so long a period of time — that there is com- paratively little suffering, as the first perception of the change which is being operated dawns upon the consciousness. Sooner or later, however, spiritual suffering must ensue, though this varies much in degree, depending on moral conditions which it is not necessary now to enter upon. The main point upon which I wish to insist is the fact, with regard to which I have had abundant evidence during the last quarter of a century — and not I alone — that a spiritual wave is at present rolling in upon tlie world of a character unprecedented in its past history ; that it is daily gathering force, and is already crest high. Before very long it will break ; and the object of tliis book is to prepare men's minds for a crisis in the history of tlie phiiiet wliich cannot, I think, be very long deferred, but which will take a very different form from tliat wliich is 6 SCIENTIFIC RELIGION. \isually anticipated ; for it is anticipated — anticipated in all the existing forms of religion, down to those which may almost be called heathen superstitions — anticipated by a dumb instinct in the minds of men who cannot be said to have any religion. It is in the air ; and only those of a pecu- liarly dense and unsusceptible temperament are absolutely without consciousness of it. It will be a moral rather than a physical crisis ; and its tendency will be (to use a Scriptural expression) to separate the sheep from the goats, and to bind together, in a way which no Churches have ever succeeded in doing, those who fight for the Powers of Light against those who fight for the Powers of Darkness. It will sweep away the present ecclesiasticisms, and substitute for them a re- ligion in which there shall be " one body that hath many ' members, and all the members of that one body, being many, ' shall be one body. So also is Christ. For by one spirit we ' shall all be baptised into one body, whether we be Jews or ' Gentiles, whether we be bond or free ; and we shall all be ' made to drink into one Spirit." ^ Now this one body can only be created, under the influence of that one vitalising principle to which I have already referred, by the strenuous co-operation and ardent effort of those who are conscious that they have received it, and the effort to create it will entail a struggle of stupendous proportions with the corrupt prin- ciple to which the misery and degradation of the world has been due. It is this struggle which will be so critical for the human race, for it involves an issue of inconceivable magni- tude, and must be carried on under conditions which will develop many new and terrible experiences, and call into operation laws which have been more or less hidden from scientific investigation, though of late years these have been dimly perceived, and in a superficial manner experimented upon by some of the first scientific men in Europe. In a word, it will be a psychical rather than a physical conflict, though I do not mean to say that the ordinary weapons of so - called " civilised warfare " will not be called into re- quisition. Now many have received, and are receiving, accessions of the special potency which shall enable them to engage in this ■* Romans xii. 4. 5 ; 1 Corinthians xii. 12, 13. PSYCHIC CONFLICT. 7 warfare, without any due conception of its nature. They are conscious of a moral disturbance within them, of new ex- periences which they shrink from alluding to, and of which in some instances they even entertain a certain feeling of dread. Sometimes new light dawns upon them, relieving them of moral perplexity — at others, new sensations stir their ner- vous centres ; they rise at times to conditions of exaltation which fill them with joy for which there is no adequate ex- ternal cause, or sink into profound depths of despondency equally unaccountable. They may even be treated for hys- teria by their doctors, wlio are none the less profoundly puzzled to know wliat hysteria is, and totally in the dark on the subject. All these are indications that they are being- subject to the influences which are about to make war against each other in human organisms, and that the moment has come when those who know, or tliink they know, what these signs of the times mean, should not be deterred from throw- ing whatever light may have been vouchsafed upon it, by the hostile criticism of the majority — whose intelligence, by reason of their organic denseness, is still beclouded upon the subject. But before attempting to do this, it is expedient that I should explain how this light may be gained ; for rays are shot athwart the spiritual firmament from opposing direc- tions — lurid rays from below, flickering rays of many colours and from many diverse quarters. To no human being has it ever been given to transmit untainted the white ray that issues from the throne of the Most High, for our world could not bear the fierceness of its splendour. All revelation wliich proceeds from the invisible must be relative in its value, all inspiration imperfect. It behoves us, therefore, to consider, in our searcli after divine truth, liow we are to judge of the value of revelation, and to arrive in our minds at a definite idea of what we mean by " inspiration." I shall endeavour in the following pages to discuss the functions and cliaracteristics of those subtle atomic forces in nature, which are now attracting increased attention on the l)art of the learned and the thouglitful, — show liow they act upon man morally, intellectually, and pliysically ; or, in otlier words, in what sense they stimulate his aspirations, control liis inspirations, and aff'ect liis l)odily liealtli, — and consider 8 SCIENTIFIC RELIGION. further their practical bearing upon those biological and theo- logical theories and problems which tend at present to confuse liis religious instinct, and cloud his perceptions of the beauti- ful, the good, and the true. Finally, I will offer the solution of those problems and theories which, under tlie operation of these forces, has been revealed to me. ] would only say in conclusion, that it would not be right for any man, desiring to know whether this inspiration is true or not, to begin by believing it after the manner of the Churches : no belief can stand in these days that is not based upon the evidence of personal experience. These are not things that one man can prove to another ; all he can do is to say, that in all cases where certain experiments have been faithfully made, they have been attended with the same results. It is left to each to make them or not, as he chooses ; but I should be highly culpable, — having tested them in my own person, having seen them tested in the persons of others, and having received what I feel to be a strong internal direction to place before others the conclusion at which I have arrived, — to allow myself to be deterred from doing so by any sense of my own incapacity to do justice to so great a theme — which is pro- found — by any fear of the hostility or ridicule which it may excite, or by any anticipation of failure to reach the hearts of those to whom it is addressed. The issues are with God, and His servants know not the word disappointment, for they are incapable of reading His designs. Only this they know, that the slightest hesitation in obeying what they believe to be a divine impulse, produces a suffering more intense than any consequences which may accrue to them from the world. If, in my attempt to exhibit the dangers to which moral pro- gress is exposed l)y the present methods of theology and science, and their antagonism to each other, I have spoken more hardly of the two classes engaged in these pursuits than the circumstances seem to warrant, it has not been from any want of the deepest respect for good men wherever they are to be found, or however much in error they may appear to me to be. Error is only dangerous when it is aggressive — and to PERSONAL EXPERIENCE. 9 meet error of this description, when one is convinced by one's own personal experience that it is error, a certain attitude of aggression seems to be imposed upon one ; but it is consistent with an entire tolerance and charity for individuals, and is, in fact, only applicable to those who are thoroughly honest and in earnest, even if their earnestness be misdirected. 10 CHAPTER I. uncertainty attending all revelation purporting to be divine — causes op this uncertainty — the responsibility of every man as the final judge of revelation — none of the most ancient revelations attempted to grapple with social and economic problems — substitution almost immediately after Christ's death of a desire for personal salvation in lieu op THE practice OP DAILY LIFE INCULCATED BY HIM — THEOSOPHY, OCCULTISM, AND MYSTICISM, OFFER NO REMEDY FOR THE WORLD'S MALADY — NATURE OF BIBLICAL INSPIRATION EXAMINED— LATER IN- SPIRATIONAL AVRITINGS. The main cause of religious difference at all times has arisen from the attempt to define the indefinable, and this has neces- sarily involved the use of terms either not susceptible of accurate definition, or for which none could be found by com- mon consent. By the use of precise terms, on the exact meaning of which everybody was agreed, angry theologians would have often been saved the disagreeable duty — imposed upon them, as they believed, by their consciences and their love for God and their fellows — of fiying at each other's throats, and many stumbling-blocks would have been removed from the path of earnest truth-seekers. This latter daily increasing class refuse to be satisfied with ancient theological formulae and unproven hypotheses. The fact that they happen to be born in a country in which a certain form of faith has pre- vailed for a certain number of centuries, is no longer a con- vincing reason that that form of faith must be the right one. They have gone back in their investigations, behind what has been considered the only sacred record of divine truth, to see what the most ancient peoples believed before INSPIRATION NOT INFALLIBLE. 11 that record was compiled ; for they remember that it is written therein, " In the beginning was the Word," and that the great Teacher said, " Before Abraham was, I am ; " and they know that before Abraham was, mighty nations existed, with their aspirations after God and their w^orship of Him, and that He must therefore have revealed Himself to them in some form or other long before the law was given to the Jews. They have gone forward in their investigations into the domain of psychical science, and have encountered phenomena which tlirow new light upon the faith of their childhood, and which force upon them considerations which seem to increase their responsibilities to a degree unknown to a previous generation. Wlien so much doubt is cast upon the old belief, when so many new possibilities for belief of another kind are springing into existence, it becomes a matter of supreme importance to consider the processes by which God has revealed Himself to man, and to estimate the values which are to be attached to those processes. Ilevelation purporting to be divine has always come through human instrumentality, and it has differed according to the race, country, moral condition, and temperament of the trans- mitting medium, and the people to whom it was addressed. Whatever may subsequently have been -the view of the disciples concerning the greatest teachers that the world has seen, as to their superhuman natures, there was nothing to distinguish tliem, as far as we know, in outward appearance, from other men. They depended for their authority on their words and on their acts ; so their words were considered in- spired, their acts miraculous. The disciples of the founders of all tlie principal religions of the world, have appealed to the wonders that their masters could perform, as an evi- dence of the truth of their teaching; and it is only since modern investigation has ventured into the regions of the psychical and the occult, that men are beginning to perceive that thaumaturgy i)0ssesses no value as an evidence for or against moral truth, and that tlie word " miracle " is mislead- ing, if by that term is implied a violation of the laws of nature ; as is also the term " inspiration," if by that word is implied an infallible communication to man from God. It does not fallow from this, liowever, that God does not 12 SCIENTIFIC RELIGION. comniiiiiicate with man, and that the coininunications do not receive strong confirmation, to the recipient of them, through the operation of laws whicli have hitherto been concealed from the ordinary man, of a nature whicli he, ignorant of these laws, might term miraculous. It was not to be won- dered at that in an age when tlie intellect had not been divorced from the affections to the extent that it is now, and when the emotional and intuitive faculties were more highly developed, the tendency was towards superstition, and towards the recognition, in the exercise of occult powers, of the direct intervention of a Divine Being, and in the utterances of men thus gifted, of the voice of God. The tendency of modern philosophy is to react to the exactly opposite extreme ; to deny the existence of occult powers altogether, and to consider the most lofty utterances of men nothing more than the result of chemical changes in their brains, which thus inspire the ideas which they put into words. The truth will be found to be between these two ex- tremes ; and this imposes upon us the consideration, which is vital to those engaged in the pursuit of divine knowledge, of the real meaning of inspiration. No attempt, so far as I am aware, has ever been made by theologians to analyse the process by which the will of God is conveyed to the mind of man with such certainty that the human recipient shall not be mistaken as to the divine source, and that his fellow-men should not be mistaken as to the claims of the human recipient. It always resolves itself into this — that each man must himself be the supreme judge and arbiter of whether what is so conveyed, is, or is not, a com- munication from God. This is a fearful responsibility laid upon every man ; and yet how few realise that there can be no higher test of inspiration for any man than he is himself: from this position there is no escape. If he at- tempts to shirk the responsibility by saying, " I will accept in this matter the teaching of the Church in which I was born," he only increases it ; for he then becomes the final judge of the claims of the Church in which he was born to decide upon what is and what is not divine inspiration ; and in determining to abdicate his own right to judge, in favour AUTHORITY AND RESPONSIBILITY. 13 of another authority, upon him alone rests the responsiljility of deciding upon the competence of that authority. It is thus that God lays upon each one of us the obligation of find- ing out truth for ourselves. It will probably be urged that this obligation is incompat- ible with the multifarious duties of daily life — that it would be unreasonable to expect that the masses in their ignorance, in their struggle for existence, and the absorbing cares which it involves, should devote themselves to theological research, should study the sacred records of all religions, and that each unit should decide for himself or herself, upon the respective claims of revelations professing to be divinely inspired. If divine truth were to be discovered by a study of " divinity," in the sense in which that term is used among Christian theologians, or by contemplation, as enjoined by the religions of the East, the task would indeed be hopeless, and the ob- jection would Ije unanswerable ; but I propose to show that it is not a question of judging of rival existing inspirations, but of every man receiving his own message for himself in a fuller manner than he can obtain it from any book or from any pulpit ; and that in proportion as he is prepared to make every sacrifice in order to receive it, will he gain strength to fulfil his daily round of duties even to their most minute de- tails. The days of bibliolatry and of priestcraft are draw- ing to an end ; for with the descent of the divine vital ])rinciple to which I have alluded in the last chapter — and which the Cliurches call the Messiah — into every man's organism who opens himself to receive it, will he rise out of ecclesiasticisms, with their forms and ceremonies, into " the liberty wherewith Clirist has made him free." It must not be concluded from this, however, that the Bible and the Churches have not been of inestimable value to hu- manity, while they have no less been the cause of sanguinary wars and bitter persecutions. Without venturing to question the divine methods of operation with man, or to enter upon any attempt of an exposition of the laws l)y which those methods are governed, we can recognise in the sacred litera- ture whicli lias inspired tlie world witli its religious senti- ment, however crude or distorted, tlie divine attiutus ; and in its varied forms of worship, tlie most powerful restraining 14 SCIENTIFIC EELIGION. iuHuence which their adherents were capable of obeying in their daily lives. In all cases the sacred record and the sacred rites, with the functions of the ministry, were adapted to the moral and intellectual condition of those for whom they were intended. It is because these moral and intel- lectual conditions have undergone such vast changes during this century, that the book and the Churches which have guided and controlled the nations of the West so long, must be interpreted and renewed by the light of fresh revelations, and by a more direct outpouring of the divine vitality upon human organisms than they have been heretofore prepared for, — revelations, the truth of which each man can test for himself, and which will rest on the experiences which he himself must make in his search after them ; for the time has arrived when he refuses any longer to put his conscience in the hands of a priest, or unintelligently to accept dogmas because he was taught them in his childhood, or to blind himself to the anomalies and inconsistencies which certain doctrines involve, and which are so faithfully reflected in the daily lives of those who profess them. The reason why the inspirations upon whicli the most ancient religions were founded, so often contradicted them- selves and each other, and why their prophets so often pro- phesied falsely, was because they had lost sight of the great truth, that the highest inspiration comes through physical as well as intellectual service for the race ; for the laws which govern the transmission of moral potency into man, are so interwoven with tliose which control the development of his physical energies, and the purest life influxes are so con- ditioned on the equal distribution of its currents through the physical, affectional, and intellectual human systems, that the undue expansion of any one of these at the expense of the others, must of necessity distort the ultimate manifesta- tion, whether in word or deed. Hence we find that with all the beauties of the earliest religious expressions, there is the fatal defect of unpracticality. Not one of them attempts a radical, political, social, and industrial reform with the hope of striking at the root of the world's evil. The most ancient religious records which exist are the Egyptian hieroglyphics and the Accadian and earliest Ve- ANCIENT EELIGIONS. 15 dantic liyniiis, which contain mythical accounts of the struggles of divinely inspired heroes with the Powers of Darkness ; symlwlising in mystical language the cosmogony of the world and the progress of the human soul towards perfection ; con- cealing, in images incomprehensible to the people, many truths of deep spiritual import, the true meaning of which have only been partially retained by the initiated. In them may be traced analogies to the mysteries concealed in the Druid, Chaldean, Persian, Jewish, Greek, and other ancient minor religious communities ; but while some of these incul- cated morality of tlie highest character, and while even those among them which ultimately degenerated into the worship of many gods, retained in their essence the worship of the one true God, they did not grapple with the social and economic problems of life. They made no attempt to con- struct society upon a basis which should enable men to give practical effect to it in their daily lives. With the suppres- sion of the mystical sects in the early Christian Church, and with the inauguration upon a substantial basis of the present system of Christian ecclesiasticism, about the close of the second century after Christ, the so-called " heresies," which were the legacy that oriental mysticism had bequeatlied to the West, gradually faded ; and with them some of the dee]) internal truths which they contained, notwithstanding their many errors and exaggerations, were lost. Henceforward re- ligion in the West became, not the repository of occult know- ledge of mysteries more or less diA-ine, but a system by which men were assured of their escape from eternal torments, and their safe passage to endless joys. While incidentally pure life and right conduct were enjoined, it was only as a means to this end ; and as it was evident that no man could by his (Avn efforts win the immortal crown for whicli all were striv- ing, tliey were consoled by the further assurance that this was already achieved for those who would believe that God had sacrificed Himself (or His Son who was Himself) on tlie cross for tlie purpose. The whole tendency of this teaching was to fix men's minds far more intensely upon the future than upon the present; and as its cardinal principle in re- gard to the future was the selfish attiiiument of cvc^rlast- ing bliss, it followed as a ii;itunil consequence in most 16 SCIENTIFIC RELIGION. cases, that their object in the present life was to secure to themselves earthly happiness, or, if they feared that this might injure their eternal wellbeing, to lead them into asceticism. This religion of selfishness lias practically stimulated com- petition for the acquisition of money, because it is considered the chief ingredient of that earthly happiness ; and the result has been a steady progress in the arts both of peace and war, and that strange compound of vast accumulations of wealth, of hideous depths of misery, poverty, and degradation, of luxury and squalor, of gigantic industrial and commercial enterprise, of huge standing armies and most formidable in- ventions for the destruction of human life, of rapid means of communication, of extraordinary intellectual activity, of international rivalries, jealousies, and lust of territory, and of universal competition, inciting to new forms of dishonesty, and new impulsions to hate, which goes by the name of " Christian civilisation." So far from there being any tend- ency in this outcome of so-called Christianity to build up society, its whole scope is toward its disintegration, and we are at this day trembling on the verge of a social revolu- tion, which even physically as well as morally threatens to explode it. The consequence is that the increasing hold which their material interests have acquired over men's minds, combined with the progress which has been made in external science, to the utter exclusion of all knowledge except tliat based on what they can see and feel, has produced a materialistic movement, which the Churches — to which indirectly it was prmiarily due — are utterly unable to stem, except in those parts of Eastern Europe where the people are still immersed in the grossest ignorance and superstition ; and here it is only a matter of time. The result of nearly 1900 years of Christianity is, that if Christ were to appear in the flesh in Christendom He would be unable to find a follower ; for His literal moral teaching is practically ignored, and He could certainly not call Him- self a Christian. He would be more at home among the people of His own race, for they only crucified Him once, but the Christians crucify Him daily. As, however, no human ] RESULTS OF CHRISTIANITY. 17 invention could extinguish the vitality of the seed which He planted in the world during His short term of existence upon it, the nature of which will be discussed later, the civilisation which calls itself by His name has still more divine life in it than the relative barbarism of the East. Under its influ- ence alone is woman seeking her true position, though she has not yet found it ; and in Christendom alone is there a burning desire on the part of a growing class of men and women, to rise out of the sham into the realisation of the true Christianity, to embody the ideal life at any personal sacrifice, and to spare neither money nor energy, fame nor position, if so be that by their efforts they might contribute towards laying a single stone of the foundations of a social system in which the relations of man to woman, and of man to his fellow -man, should be divinely regulated, and which should be built upon the corner-stones of sex-purity and mutual co-operation. Hence it is that the Eastern races, with their mystical religions which neither terrify nor bribe, have lagged behind so-called Christendom. They have neither risen so high nor fallen so low ; they have not conceived of new virtues nor invented new vices, for they had no spurs to goad them in either direction ; they continue to treat sacred things with a genuine reverence and respect, while hypocrisy may be con- sidered a Christian speciality ; and, excepting so far as they liave been influenced by the education introduced by their conquerors, they live in the daily moral practice of their ancestors. At the same time it is probable, to judge from their sacred books, that the general standard was higher when tliey were written ; for men in tlie ancient times were evidently more open to occult influences than they have been in these more recent centiiries, and it was doubtless this fact which produced tliat tendency to mysticism whicli proved in the end highly detrimental to moral, intellectual, or material progress. For already in the Vedantic period we find the practice of asceticism enjoined as essential to the mystical union of man with God ; while Buddha, despite his intense sympathy for the sufferings of humanity, can suggest nothing better to his disciples than to practise self-liypnotisation by sitting under a bo-tree, and induce pious contem]ihition by li 18 SCIENTIFIC KELIGION. keeping their eyes fixed on the tips of their noses. So in the fiftli century we hear of Christian mystics gazing at their stomachs until they saw the liglit of Tabor issuing. The consequence of the special diet and of the solitary practices tlnis enjoined, was naturally to lead to trance obsession, which resulted in an inspiration that has proved of no earthly benefit to the human race, and which finds expression among its votaries in England, in such specific directions for obtaining a knowledge of divine truth as these — " Hold fast to that which has neither substance nor ex- ' istence. " Listen only to the voice whicli is soundless. " Look only on that which is invisible alike to the inner and ' the outer sense." ^ Doubtless a chief fascination of mysticism with a large class of minds was the phenomenal development of certain faculties which men acquired, in the degree in which they succeeded in overcoming all natural appetites, and divinely implanted human instincts : the power of levitation, of sup- pressed respiration for incredil^le periods, of control over material substances, and of performing many other wonders, was calculated to impress the ignorant, and invest them with supernatural attributes and authority, which, in spite of the unselfishness that they practised theoretically, was gratify- ing to the natural man. Those who deny the possibility of such jjlienomena can satisfy themselves on the subject by personal experiment, provided always that they have faith. Let any English philosopher, who is ready to make the necessary sacrifice, begin by accepting the hypothesis as possible that he can upset the laws of gravitation and sit in the air, or otherwise perform so-called miracles ; let him go to India and sit for ten or fifteen years under a bo-tree, staring most of the time at one object ; let him live on nothing but lentils and water, with perhaps a little fruit, avoid all contact with his fellow- man, practise constantly holding his breath, and sleep as little as possible ; it will not be long before he will pass occasion- ally into states of semi-consciousness to external things, which he will plainly distinguish from sleep, and if he does not die ^ Light on the Path, p. 22. ASCETICS AND MYSTICS. 19 in the process (which he probably will not do if his faith is strong enough), he will find himself at last developing forces undreamed of in his philosophy. Until he has done so he is not in a position to deny the existence or the extent of poten- cies which are latent in the human organism, in the face of the testimony of those who have investigated these phenomena on the spot, and of such well-known instances as that of the " burying fakir " ; upon whom the experiment was officially conducted with every possible precaution by the Government of India. There has never been much difficulty in recruiting the ranks of ascetics in India ; and in proportion as they pass beyond this life into the other, and increase in numbers there, does their action upon this world become more power- ful. Hence it is that we have seen within the last few years a movement in the direction of ancient oriental mysticism, which would not have been possible did not a very powerful society exist in the invisible world, which has taken advan- tage of the increased attenuated condition of the odylic sphere of this one to make an inroad into it. At the same time, the revival of mysticism on its old lines, at this period of the world's history, is not possible. Had it nothing to contend against but materialism and ecclesiasticism, the struggle might not be unequal ; but there is another spiritual descent taking place more powerful than that which has developed into theosophic, hermetic, spiritualistic, and occult societies, and which, though working silently and apparently slowly, is none the less surely gathering its forces, not merely in the unseen world, but in the organisms of men and women in this one. As the heat which this new life generates, and the light which streams from it, warms and irradiates the world, the latest scientific theory will share the fate of the oldest theological superstition, or the newest fashion of mysticism and the evolution of man from amcebie, his eternal punish- ment in torments, in spite of the attempt of God to save him from them by suffering death, and the journey yet in store for him through successive "rounds," before he can hope to reach Nirvana, will all alike be relegated to the limbo of exploded fallacies ; for a divine science will be built upon the cUhrin of that which is purely human and 20 SCIENTIFIC RELIGION. superficial, a divine religion replace that which has been degraded by man's inventions, and divine mysteries supersede those which have been derived from sources more or less impure. The reason why this will be so is, that the growing desire to find truth will lead men to seek from God their own inspirations, and in the degree in which that desire is sincere and absolutely disinterested, they will find themselves mag- netically attracted to each other by an impulse of co-operation in its pursuit, and will discover that mutual unselfish service is the first condition of the highest internal illumination : provided always that the mind is kept entirely free from prejudice or preconceived opinions ; that the affections are emancipated from the thraldom which is imposed by ties of race, country, or family, in order that they may be bestowed freely upon humanity ; and that, while it may be necessary for them to live in the world, they have internally dissevered themselves from it so completely, that they are uninfluenced by its public opinion, totally unaffected by its censure, and absolutely indifferent to its praise, with which, indeed, it is extremely improbable that they would be favoured. In order to make clear the nature of this new inspiration, it will be necessary to describe its mode of operation, and discuss and contrast it with the old. The reason why old inspirations were defective, and the religions founded upon them degenerated so rapidly into superstitions, was because an equilibrium was not maintained between the physical, intellectual, and emotional functions — in other words, between body, soul, and spirit. Prophets were generally poets, often dreamers, rarely thinkers, never workers. It was to intensify this faculty of peering into the future, or, in other words, of looking into the world of substance — of which, though invis- ible to us, this is merely the shadow — and, by perceiving what was happening there, foretelling what would happen here (time being merely relative to our shadowy present, and having no real existence in itself), that they developed ex- clusively one side of their nature. But inasmuch as when they saw visions and dreamed dreams, they were in special conditions differing from those of other men, partly the result of heredity or constitutional temperament, and partly METHODS OF INSPIRATION. 21 induced by fasting and self-liypnotisation, it was impossible for them to know whether what they saw, or what was im- pressed upon them during these states, was real or phantas- magoric. The unseen world teems with intelligences, whose action upon this one is very direct, and is governed by laws, most of which are hidden from us, and those which are known, imperfectly known only to the few, and not yet comprehensible to the many. A man thus open to that world, becomes a point of attraction, round which in^dsible hosts cluster, some with the desire of infusing into his mind, or presenting to his internal vision fallacies, or pictorial rep- resentations of them, others with the desire of protecting him against these malignant attempts to deceive, and of con- veying to him images of truth. In other words, the powers of light and the powers of darkness war over him. But inasmuch as the laws which govern the projection of these impressions or images upon the mind, mainly depend upon the condition of the recipient, just as the representation con- veyed to a photograph-plate depends upon the method with which that plate has been prepared, as well as upon the con- ditions of light, exposure, and so forth, so it is evident that upon no two different people would it be possible for those in the invisible world to cast precisely the same impression, because no two people are precisely similar in constitution and temperament, nor could they possibly prepare them- selves, as photographic plates are prepared, so as to be in exactly the same state of receptivity. I am not now talking of apparitions and elemental forms, or of phenomena, such as that of the transfiguration on the mount, or the appearance of Christ to His disciples after the resurrection, — these belong to a class of manifestation which appeal to tlie external senses. The conditions incidental to deep insight and lofty inspirations are, moreover, totally dif- ferent from those known to ordinary " spirit mediums," who, finding themselves appropriately constituted, use the faculty they possess, in the case of those who are unprincipled, either as a source of profit, a means of imposture or amusement, or, in the case of those who are honest and well-principled, as a means of convoying such imperfect im})ressions from the other world as they think may benefit this one ; but dur- 22 SCIENTIFIC RELIGION. ing forty years of modern "Western spiritualism these have rarely proved of any practical value, from the fact that those obtaining them hardly ever go through the long and painful ordeals which are a necessary preparation for the reception of the higher truths. Thus all prophets and seers who have at any time given such spiritual light to the world that men have felt the divine element in it, and incorporated their teaching into their sacred books, have been almost invariably recluses and anchorites, and one may almost add, that in the degree in which they have been so, have their utterances been obscure and unintelligible to the common herd ; on the other hand, those who have conveyed moral teaching in language which contained such an element of divine life in it, as to pro- duce upon men the impression that they were inspired, have been, more or less, thinkers and workers — as, for instance, in the case of Christ the carpenter, and Paul the tent-maker. It is evident that the latter was conscious of different pro- cesses during composition — one in which he says, I speak this of myself ; and the other, where the projection on his mind was so strong that he attributed it to the Lord. This was not to be wondered at, when we consider how pure and full of a lofty spiritual impulse his moral teaching often was. Not knowing the laws which govern inspiration, it was nat- ural, when he felt a noble sentiment projected into his mind, which did not seem to emanate from it spontaneously, that he should attribute it directly to God — being ignorant of the fact that all divine perceptions are only allowed to reach us from the Infinite through the channels provided for it, and that these are angelic, and can only imperfectly convey to us conceptions which have to be tempered, as they descend, to meet the imperfect condition of the human instrument through which they are transmitted ; this human instrument being tainted by all sorts of impurity, warped by all manner of prejudice, seeing them only as through a glass darkly, with all the original brightness of their lustre dimmed, and with the reflection of his own personality cast strongly upon them. In the case of Paul and the other apostles, many of their finest utterances were no doubt directly inspired by Christ, and to this was due the extraordinary effect that they produced. PROPHETS AXD SEERS. 23 The readiness of meu open to these impressions to attribute them all to the one Divine Source, receives striking illustra- tion from the dispute which took place between the prophets Hananiah and Jeremiah, in the 28th chapter of Jeremiah, in wliich they both prophesy " in the name of the Lord " ; and Jeremiah charges Hananiah with prophesying falsely, predict- ing his death the same year as a punishment.^ One denuncia- tion of prophets who prophesied falsely is so remarkable- that I will quote it : " And the word of the Lord came unto me, ' saying, Son of man, prophesy against the prophets of Israel ' that prophesy, and say thou unto them that prophesy out of ' their own hearts. Hear ye the word of the Lord ; thus saith ' the Lord God ; Woe unto the foolish prophets, tliat follow ' their own spirit, and have seen nothing ! Israel, thy pro- ' phets are like the foxes in the deserts. Ye have not gone up ' into the gaps, neither made up the hedge for the house of ' Israel to stand in the battle in the day of the Lord. They ' liave seen vanity and lying divination, saying, The Lord saith ' it ; albeit I have not spoken. Therefore thus saith the Lord ' God ; Because ye have spoken vanity, and seen lies, therefore, ' behold, I am against you, saith the Lord God." One of the remarkable features of inspirational writings or utterances of this description is the absolute certainty of the medium that the divine authority of his message is indis- putable. In the case of the prophets of Israel, it is evident that the poor Jews must often have been in a serious dilemma to know which to believe between those who claimed to be the spokesmen of God, and, as such, denounced the others as liars ; and this is rendered still more complicated by the fact that in some instances the Deity Himself , is said to have lied througli them — as in the scene witnessed by Micaiah, in the 22d chapter of 1st Kings, when the prophet says : " I saw ' the Lord sitting on His throne, and all the host of heaven ' standing by Him on His riglit liand and on His left. And ' the Lord said. Who shall persuade Ahab, that he may go up ' and fall at Ramoth-Gilead ? And one said on this manner, ' and another said on that manner. And there came f(»rth a ' spirit, and stood before the Lord, and said, I will jiersuade ' .Jeremiah xxviii. - Ezekiel xiii. 24 SCIENTIFIC RELIGION. ' him. And the Lord said unto him, Wherewith ? And he ' said, I will go forth, and I will he a lying spirit in the mouth * of all his prophets. And He said, Thou shalt persuade him, ' and prevail also : go forth, and do so. Now therefore, be- ' hold, the Lord hath put a lying spirit in the mouth of all ' these thy prophets, and the Lord hath spoken evil concern- ' ing thee." That Micaiah should in a trance, or even in a state of hypnotic consciousness, have had represented to him, by the spirits who had attached themselves to his organism, a scene such as the one above described, is perfectly possible, — that he should honestly believe that he had seen a vision of the Almighty sitting on His throne, discussing with attendant angels how He should lure to his destruction a king with whom He was displeased, and attain this object by command- ing a spirit to infest and lie through His prophets, is an evi- dence of a very debased mediumistic condition. Such a rep- resentation of God's methods of dealing with man, could only have been conveyed to the consciousness of one whose own moral and intellectual condition was of a very low order, and by spirits who were themselves of a low order. It is a re- markable fact that the mass of professing Christians, even of the present day, will believe in the truth of this monstrous picture of the prophet's subsurface consciousness — which re- flected the images appropriate to it, as projected through the agency of spirits also appropriate to it — and will believe, fur- ther, in the psychical invasion of the prophets of Ahab by spirits under superior direction, who ridicule the idea that direct action by similar spirits, not only uj)on the subsurface consciousness, but upon the external minds of men, is as possible now as it was three thousand years ago ; for the laws which govern our relations with the unseen world are as immutable as the laws which operate in this one, and noth- ing can be more trivial or shallow than the contention that what is possible at one period of the world's history is impos- sible at another. The presentation of the Deity by the Jewish prophets, is really constructed by spirits out of the j^revailing human con- ception of Him at the time, and is utterly irreconcilable with the instincts of a more enlightened age. It has ever been the SYMBOLISM. 25 tendency of men in their different religions to reverse the situation, and create God after their own image. At the same time, their prophetic presentations are not to be cast aside as worthless, because in their literal and external meaning they are often revolting. Behind them there is generally an in- ternal sense, which, owing to the crude and untutored moral condition of those through whom such communications came, and of those to whom they were addressed, it was not pos- sible to convey in terms which the transmitter or receiver either could understand or appreciate. Hence the deepest religious truths have had to be conveyed through symbols and images, and this has given rise to mysticism, and to the existence of a class of men who were supposed to vmderstand, and who doubtless often in some measure did understand, their inner meaning, and who were called " Initiates." It is evident that as the rational faculties are developed and brought to bear upon impressions projected upon the subsurface consciousness in the manner above described, the question must always arise in the mind of their recipient, if he is thoroughly honest, as to their origin and trustworthi- ness ; and in the degree in which his moral nature is purified and elevated, and his humility prominent, will he shrink from daring to assert that he can recognise them as the direct verbal utterances of tlie Great Almighty. Certainly others should shrink from asserting, as many do assert, not merely that these prophets and apostles speak with the divine voice, but that it has been personally revealed to them that they did so ; for it must always come to this, either in the first or second degree, and that every word written was suggested lit- erally by God. It is to be remarked that this claim was not made by the early Church. Indeed it would scarcely be credible that Pliilemon, for instance, when Paul returned his runaway slave Onesinius, with a note asking him to receive him back, and told him to make a memorandum of the amount of any money lie might be indebted to him, ])ut it down to his (Paul's) account, and get a lodging ready for liini, should have imagined, as Christians do now, that this epistle was dictated by God. What is true is, that the canon l)()th of the Jewish and Christian Scripture is full of inspirational writing, and the 26 SCIENTIFIC RELIGION. same may be said of the sacred records upon which the other great religions of the world are founded ; this inspirational writing goes back two thousand years before Moses, to the mythological literature of that most ancient people the Accadians, to the funereal ritual of the Egyptians, to the earliest Vedas, to the Buddhist Suttas, and the Zend-Avesta of the Persians, and the sacred books of other religions, and is strongly exhibited in the Jewish and early Christ- ians' writings, some of which are called apocryphal, but which were rejected by those who met to decide by the light of their own private judgment, what was and what was not divine inspiration, because they conflicted with cer- tain theological dogmas to which they were attached, and which were the cause of a good deal of hard lighting both before and since. It has continued from that time to the present, when an unprecedented development of this description of literature has taken place. There is a sense in which all writing may be considered inspirational, and in ordinary parlance is said to indicate genius, as in the cases of such poets as Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, and Dante : but I am alluding here rather to those who believed themselves to be channels of divine revelation, or at all events of ideas projected from supermundane source, sometimes by means of mere impressions, sometimes by words which were quite audible to their inner hearing, or by rep- resentations which were quite visible to their inner sight; or by phenomena which they recognised as abnormal, and which differed entirely from the effort of ordinary literary compositions. Among many such since the early Christian epoch may be mentioned Mohammed, Hamze, Jacob Boehmen, St Martin, George Fox, Ann Lee, and Swedenborg; and in our own time the works of T. L. Harris, Andrew Jackson Davis, Joseph Smith the prophet of the Mormons, Eliphaz Levy, the Marquis of St Yves, Madame Blavatsky, the authors of 'The Perfect Way,' 'Light on the Path,' 'The Mother, the "Woman clothed with the Sun,' ' The Plying Roll,' ' The Book of Life,' ' Geometrical Psychology,' and sundry theoso- phical, spiritualistic, and other publications, which are daily becoming more numerous. Besides these, many persons are guided largely in their own lives by private writings, which INSPIRATIONAL WRITINGS. 27 they receive either automatically or under impression, and in which they place absolute confidence. It is this fact which renders it of such great importance that some method of testing the relative values of these prodvictions should be arrived at, for already many trusting and earnest souls have been led by them into difficult and devious paths, in their desire to find some solid standing-ground amid the quicksands by which they are surrounded. 28 CHAPTEE II. RECENT EXAMINATION INTO THE NATURE OF THE FORCES LATENT IN THE HUMAN ORGANISM — HYPNOTIC EXPERIMENTS IN FRANCE, AND THE PSYCHICAL RESEARCH SOCIETY IN ENGLAND, FAMILIARISING THE SCIENTIFIC MIND WITH FORCES FORMERLY IGNORED — THEIR ORIGIN IN THE UNSEEN UNIVERSE — FORMER CONCEPTION OF MAT- TER MODIFIED BY RECENT DISCOVERIES — SIR HENRY ROSCOE ON ATOMS — INSEPARABILITY OF MATTER AND FORCE — DYNASPHERIC FORCE — SCIENTIFIC FACTS VALUABLE, CONCLUSIONS MISLEADING — HYPNOTIC EXPERIMENTS WITNESSED BY ME IN PARIS — HYPNOTISM RECOGNISED BY THE MEDICAL FACULTY IN FRANCE AS DANGEROUS — SPIRITUAL INSIGHT NECESSARY TO DISCOVER THE NATURE AND ORIGIN OF THESE FORCES, AND TO QUALIFY THE OPERATOR TO DEAL WITH THEM. "WiTHix the last few years an increasing amount of attention has been directed to an examination of those forces connected with the human organism, which for more than half a cen- tury have been vaguely known under the name of magnetic, whose existence even under this general term science has been reluctant to recognise ; or, if unable altogether to deny the fact that such forces did exist, it has shrunk from investigating them, lest it should be seduced away from the ground which it terms positive, but which might per- haps be more appropriately styled negative. As, however, these forces gained power under the new conditions which are invading the race, they forced themselves upon the notice of the world in general with such persistence, that it was no longer possible for them to be excluded from the range of scientific research, and as an evidence of this we have experiments of the leading medical practitioners in France, recording the result of their observations, in a monthly PHENOMENA OF HYPNOTISM. 29 periodical started for the purpose ; ^ and of the two schools devoted to this subject, one, directed by Dr Charcot in Paris, and the other by Professor Bernheim at Nancy ; while in London the Psychical Eesearch Society has sprung into ex- istence, which, though hesitating and timid in its conclusions so far, refusing to recognise these forces as conditioned by the unseen, is still too daring for the stolid and conservative in- stinct of British science in general. The result has been that both in France and England these investigations have led to wide divergences of opinion as to the mode of operation of these forces : in France, between the schools of Paris and Nancy; and in England, between the Psychical Eesearch Society and the body of members who dissent from its con- clusions. Nevertheless the phenomena which have resulted from all this inquiry and experiment have been of the utmost importance, as familiarising the scientific mind with the ex- istence of forces which were formerly ignored, of compelling it to try and account for their modes of operation, and of becoming speedily aware in the attempt, of tbe exceeding shallowness of its own acquirements, and of its incapacity to deal systematically with vital energies, which are as capricious as they are inexplicable in their manifestations. As illustra- tions of organic human potency, however, they have proved invaluable. It is no longer possible to deny the fact of what is termed telepathy, or to refuse to admit that, when certain conditions have been established between two organisms, one can be made subject to the other in thought and act, not- withstanding the most powerful effort on the part of the subjected organism to resist the subtle influence projected upon it by the other. The patient is compelled to perform every act and to say every word that may have been either silently or orally suggested — in other words, becomes com- pletely controlled Ity the operator. This is an instance of human psychical inspiration. The reason why there is no regularity in the manifestations, and why the form they will take can never be predicated — except where the conditions have long Ijeen established Ijetween the same two organisms ' Revue f fitter 'J'hink ? a Problem in P.iycliics. Biogen Series. 32 SCIENTIFIC RELIGION. In a recent paper on atoms, molecules, and ether waves, Professor Tyndall makes the following statement: "When ' water is converted into steam, the distances between the ' molecules are greatly augmented, but the molecules them- ' selves continue intact. We must not, however, picture the ' constituent atoms of any molecules as held so rigidly as to ' render intestine motion impossible. The interlocked atoms ' have still liberty of vibration. The constituent atoms of ' molecules can vibrate to and fro millions of millions of ' times in a second. The atoms of different molecules are ' held together with varying degrees of tightness, they are ' tuned as it were to notes of a different pitch. The vibra- ' tions of the constituent atoms of a molecule may under cer- ' tain circumstances become so intense as to shake the mole- ' cules asunder ; most molecules, probably all, are wrecked ' by internal heat, or, in other words, by intense vibratory ' motions." Electricity, for instance, will tear these molecules to pieces. This is not the case, however, with atoms, which science so far asserts to be indestructible. Upon them electricity has no effect ; and Sir Henry Eoscoe tells us that " a hydrogen ' atom can endure unscathed the inconceivably fierce tempera- ' ture of stars presumably many times more fervent than our ' sun — as Sirius and Vega." Indeed the address of the presi- dent of the British Association at Manchester is full of most interesting facts, as bearing upon the atomic theory, at which I have arrived from a very different source than from any investigation into the researches of Dalton, Prout, Huggins, and others, but which those researches seem in a most re- markable manner to confirm. We are told that, " in the ' mind of the early Greek, the action of the atom as one sub- ' stance, taking various forms by unlimited combinations, was ' sufficient to account for all the phenomena of the world." And this is true when we divest our minds of all idea of space, which only exists relatively to our senses, and which it is impossible to imagine limited. Our present experience has already got to the vanishing-point of size in so far as these atoms are concerned ; ^ and I am quite ready to admit ^ Professor Roscoe goes on to say that " modern research has accomplished, ' as regards the size of the atom, at any rate to a certain extent, what Dalton THE ATOMIC THEORY. 33 that " it does seem miraculous that chemists should now be ' able to ascertain with certainty the relative position of atoms ' so minute that millions upon millions can stand upon a ' needle's point ; " and, what is still more wonderful, that they should have discovered that each element possesses distinct capabilities of combination — some a single capacity, some a double, some a triple, and others again a fourfold capacity for combination. The importance of this fact will appear in the remarks I am about to make, and we are further told that " the number of carbon compounds far exceeds that of all other elements put together, for these combinations not only pos- sess four means of grasping other atoms, but these four-handed carbon atoms have a strong partiality for each other's com- pany, and readily attach themselves hand in hand to form open chains or closed rings, to which the atoms of other ele- ments join, to grasp the unoccupied carbon hand, and thus to yield a dancing company in which all hands are locked to- gether. Such a group, each individual occupying a given position with reference to the others, constitutes the organic molecule. When in such a company the individual members change hands, a new combination is formed." It must be re- membered that, small though these atoms be, nature may contain others as small again, for all science can know to ' regarded as impossible. Thus, in 1865, Loschmidt, of Vienna, by a train of ' reasoning which I cannot now stop to explain, came to the conclusion that the ' diameter of an atom of oxygen or nitrogen was 1-1 0,000,000th of a centimetre. ' With the liighest known magnifying power we can distinguish the 1 -40,000th ' part of a centimetre ; if now we imagine a cubic box, each of whose sides has ' the above length, such a box when filled with air will contain from 60 to 100 ' millions of atoms of oxygen and nitrogen. A few years later William Thom- ' son extended the methods of atfjmic measurement, and came to the conclusion ' that the distance between the centres of contiguous molecules is less than ' l-5,000,000th and greater than l-l,000,000,000th of a centimetre ; or, to put ' it in language more suited to the ordinary mind, Thomson asks us to imagine ' a droj) of water magnified up to the size of the earth, and then tells us tliat ' the coarseness of the graining of sucli a mass would be something Ijetwecn a ' heap of small sliot and a heap of cricket-balls. Or, again, to take Clifford's ' illustration, you know that our best microscopes magnify from 6000 to 8000 ' times ; a microscope which would magnify that result as niucli again would ' show the molecular structure of water. Or again, to put it in another form, ' if we 8upjK)He tliat the minutest organism we can now see were provided with ' equally i)owerful microscopes, these beings would be able to see the atoms." C 34 SCIENTIFIC RELIGION. the contrary ; and that, in fact, when once the principle is conceded of the important bioh3gical factor wliich these atoms represent, there is no limit to the solutions which they may offer of phenomena which are now repudiated as impossible, or are a cause of perplexity to those who credit them. We learn from the distinguished authority I have already quoted, " that the phenomena of vegetation, no less than those of the ' animal world, have during the last fifty years been placed by ' the chemist on an entirely new basis." Yet science was as full of prejudices then as it is now. It is safe to predict that before another fifty years have passed, another basis will be found, for no basis is sound which does not take into account the forces which are active in what is called the unorganised world ; and to do this involves the passage of a chasm, which all l)ut a few enthusiastic materialists of the grosser sort pro- nounce to be impassable. Sir H. Eoscoe says : " It is true ' there are those who profess to foresee that the day will arrive ' when the chemist, by a series of constructive efforts, may ' pass beyond albumen, and gather the elements of lifeless ' matter into a living structure. Whatever may be said re- ' garding this from other standpoints, the chemist can only ' say that at present no such problem lies within his province. ' Protoplasm, with which the simplest manifestations of life ' are associated, is not a compound, but a structure built up ' of compounds. The chemist may successfully synthetise any ' of its component molecules, but he has no more reason to ' look forward to the synthetic production of the structure ' than to imagine that the synthesis of gallic acid leads to the ' production of gall-nuts." The advance of science during the last fifty years has at all events proved to us that our previous conception of matter was entirely erroneous, and must undergo a com- plete change ; and that the further it attempts to follow up matter into the new region thus opened, the greater the diffi- culty becomes. Professor Helmholz tells us " that the elec- ' tricity which permeates all matter, and is like an envelope ' to all its atoms, is itself apparently composed of atoms, only ' infinitely finer than any others ; " and Professor Maxwell talks of particles of electricity, and says that an electric current consists " of files of particles," — one theory being THE ADVANCE OF SCIENCE. 35 that the passage of a current of electricity is a vibration or revokition of particles, each particle being a group of particles revolving upon themselves. There are many elements in nature which are called imponderable, simply because at present hydrogen is the lightest thing we can weigh — in other words, they are not really imponderable, but only imponderable as far as we have got. This is admitted, and is illustrated by Mr Crookes in what he calls "the fourth state of matter," a form and condition vastly more rarefied than the lightest substance known — so we pass from the solids, which were formerly called matter, to liquids, from liquids to gases, from gases to electricity and magnetism, from these to aeriform or radi- ant matter ; for we learn from Ganot's 'Elements of Physics ' that "that subtle, imponderable, and eminently elastic fluid ' called the ether, distriljuted through the entire universe, per- ' vading the mass of all 1)odies, the densest and most oj)aque ' as well as the lightest and most transparent, is composed of ' atoms, and not merely do the atoms of bodies communicate ' motion to the atoms of the ether, but the latter can impart ' it to the former. Thus the atoms of bodies are at once the ' sources and the recipients of motion. All physical pheno- ' mena referred thus to a single cause are but transformations ' of motion. . . " In the present state of science we cannot say whether the ' forces in nature are properties inherent in matter, or whether * they result from movements impressed on the mass of subtle ' and imponderable forms of matter through the universe. ' The latter hypothesis is, however, generally admitted." This and many other like points can never be settled until we realise that our external senses are not tests upon which we can rely for anything — being mere organs for the trans- mission of sensations, which are conditioned not upon what things really are, but upon what they appear to us to be. Science, to be true, must not be human but divine, and those who would searcli into the secrets of nature, must begin by searching into the mysteries of God, from wlioni it emanated. "Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all other tilings sliall be added to you;" and this kingdom, we are told, is "within us." Alen have 36 SCIENTIFIC RELIGION. begun at the wrong end to work up to the Unknowable through the external manifestations of its power, by the aid of their own limited faculties of reason and observation, while they have failed to enlist in the quest the most power- ful faculty of all, an instinct directed by love for God and humanity. I do not mean to imply that scientific men are surpassed by any other men in the pureness and nobleness of their aims and aspirations, but that few of them have perceived that there is no such thing as physical science apart from religion, and that external nature should be read as a sacred record of divine mysteries of which they would become the high priests. It would be necessary to assume the hypothesis of an intelligent Author in thus seeking to turn the pages of His book of nature, but scientists made a greater demand upon their imagination than that in their latest assumption as to the origin of man : it now behoves them to develop within themselves the faculty of understanding these pages of nature, by submitting to the ordeals of absolute self- sacrifice and personal discipline of the affections, which shall leave that love paramount which furnishes the key to all knowledge. It is this mistaken attitude of the scientific mind in general, which makes it necessarily blind to the per- ception of the highest truths, whether moral or physical. A highly eminent member of the scientific fraternity sounds no uncertain note on the subject. " Anatomically," he says, " we ' find no provision in the nervous system for the improvement ' of the moral, save indirectly — through the intellectual — ' the whole aim of development being for the sake of intel- ' ligence. Historically, in the same manner, we find that the ' intellectvial has always led the way in social advancement, * the moral having been subordinate thereto. The former ' has been the mainspring of the movement, the latter pas- ' sively affected. It is a mistake to make the progress of ' society depend on that which is itself controlled by a ' higher power." ^ Is there no provision in the nervous system for the senti- ment of love, except indirectly through the intellect ? Wlien, with its passionate longing, it sweeps through the human ^ Draper's Intellectual Development of Europe, vol. ii. p. 360. CHEISTIAN CIVILISATION". 37 organism, does it not carry away any feeble barriers that the intellect may have erected to stay its course ? — unless, indeed, some still stronger moral impulse restrains it, and then it is not intellect, but conscience, or the operation of a higher love. In point of fact, whatever it may be anatomi- cally, intellect is the sport of the passions, their slave and obedient servant, to carry out their behests ; but as it is impossible to anatomise either the emotions or the intellect, or to push research beyond the cerebrum, any attempt to formulate their relations to each other by an analysis of the nervous system of man, must inevitably at present lead to confusion and error. The best proof that this is so, is to be found in what Professor Draper calls the " social advance- ment " at which we have arrived. If inventions by which wars can be conducted on a scale of more wholesale slaughter than history records, and explosions can be effected wliich will cause greater destruction in a moment than could for- merly be accomplished in a week ; if frauds can be perpetrated by which more money can be legally acquired by a financial operation in a day, and more innocent victims ruined than was formerly possible in a lifetime ; if science, to use his own words, has given rogues such discoveries as "would ' suggest to the evil-disposed the forging of bank-notes, the ' sophisticating of jewellery, and be invaluable in the utter- ' ing of false coinage ; " if more squalor, poverty, misery, and seething vice is now collected on a given area than we have ever heard of in ancient times ; if the grinding of labour by capital has so exasperated the working classes that the social fabric of what is called " Christian civilisation " is threatened from its basis ; if the unparalleled ingenuity in crime, extravagance in luxury, and the deliberate repudiation in daily practice of the moral teaching of Christ, are an evi- dence of " social advancement " and of intellectual supremacy, — and if these are the conclusions to wliich a study of the anatomy of tlie human frame leads its students, then the sooner the science of physiology is swept off the face of the earth the better, and the cerebrum abandoned as fur- nishing the highest source of human inspiration. But, indeed, it is not tlie fault of physiology that its pro- fessors go so wide of the mark, but of the prejudices and 38 SCIENTIFIC RELIGION. preconceptions with which they approach it. If scientific men woukl only confine themselves to recording facts, their researches would be in the highest degree valuable — as in- deed they are — in the cause of divine truth. It is when they come to forming hypotheses, and arriving at conclusions, that they so terribly mislead those who are unable to dis- criminate between those facts, and the fallacies of their de- ductions from them, and they thus work irreparable injury to the cause they most wish to serve. Modern science, then, having reached the vanishing-point of matter, and there stuck hopelessly befogged, and unable to decide whether it generates force, in which case it might be called ponderable force — or is only acted on by force, in which case the force that acts upon it must also be material, or it would have no transmitting medium ; and having also decided that matter can never touch matter, every atom being pre- vented from doing so by its own " dynasphere " (nobody knows what a dynasphere is made of) ; and being further satisfied that " the atomic abyss is as unfathomable as the interstellar space is immeasurable," — leaves us there to scramble out of it as best we may. But it has carried us along far enough for our purposes, for it has given us a new conception of matter, and one which, if we could divest our minds com- pletely of the definition which we received of it from science before it knew better, we might still use. This, however, is scarcely possible, and would be too misleading. Though it is scientifically admitted that matter is in gases and ether, in light and heat, as well as in solids and liquids, and that it pervades all known forces — electric, magnetic, galvanic, odylic, or by whatever name they may be called — and that, in fact, nothing has yet been discovered of which we can assert that no matter is there, not even the interstellar spaces, or the atomic dynaspheres themselves, it is evident we can conceive of no limit to it, either in time or space, for it is indestruc- tible as well as illimitable. In other words, it is infinite and eternal ; and as we cannot conceive of the Deity being out- side of what is infinite and eternal. He also must be in this sense material — an idea which seems to crop out, though perhaps not consciously to himself, in Mr Norman Lockyer's suggestion that the varied forms of matter, simple and com- I MATTER IN MOTION. 39 plex, are but presentations of diversified properties, of tem- porary conditions of that which is essentially one and the same for ever. Another scientific writer remarks that " the ' physical thing whicli energises and does work in and upon ' ordinary matter, is a separate form of matter infinitely refined ' and infinitely rapid in its vibrations, and thus able to pene- ' trate through all ordinary matter, and to make everywhere a ' fountain of motion, no less real because unseen. It is among ' the atoms of the crystal and the molecules of living matter ; ' and whether producing locked effects or free, it is the same ' cosmic thing, matter in motion, which we conceive as mate- ' rial energy, and with difficulty think of as only a peculiar ' form of matter in motion." The physical thing which is here described as a separate form of matter, and as being " able to penetrate through all ordinary matter, and to make everywhere a fountain of motion, no less real because unseen," is nothing more nor less than what we have been in the habit of calling spirit, when we wished to separate it from what is termed above " ordinary matter " : mind is also composed of this extraordinary matter, so is will, so is every emotion ; but in order to avoid confu- sion, it would be well to find a specific designation for it. Jacob Boehmen calls it " heavenly substantiality," and Sweden- borg " natural and spiritual atmospheres composed of discrete substances of a very minute form." Mr Crookes has invented the word protyle, which may pos- sibly convey the desired idea ; and Professor Coues calls it soul- stuff or biogen ; while occultists call it astral fluid. The most remarkaljle illustration of the stupendous energy of atomic vibratory force is to he found in that singular apparatus in Philadelphia, which for the last fifteen years has excited in turn the amazement, the scepticism, the admiration, and tlie ridicule of those who liave examined it — called " Keely's Motor." Already more than £50,000 have been expended u])on it, and so far it lias not been possible to render it com- mercially available. Hence, in the practical land of its ori- gin, it has popularly been esteemed a fraud. I liave not examined it personally, but I believe it to be based upon a sound j^rinciple of dynamics, and to be ])robably the first of a series of discoveries destined to revolutionise all 40 SCIENTIFIC RELIGION. existing mechanical theories, and many of the principles upon which tliey are founded. Mr Keely has discov- ered that such a change can be effected by vibration, in the atoms of which the atmosphere is composed, that what he terms " atmospheric disintegration " can be produced, which has the effect of liberating a subtle essence, the nature of which has still to be determined, and which he believes to be "inter-atomic." The energy it possesses is so great that it exercises a pressure of 25,000 lb. to the square inch, and in the engine which he has just constructed for traction purposes, develops a force of 250 horse-power. All this is achieved without the introduction of any extraneous motive power, the whole apparatus being so constructed that the liberation of this tremendous agency from its atmosj^heric prison-house can be effected by the vibrations produced by a tuning-fork.^ Those who are sufficiently unprejudiced to connect the bear- ings of this discovery, of what must be dynaspheric force, with phenomena which have hitherto been regarded as super- natural by the ignorant, will perceive how rapidly we are bridging over the chasm which has always divided the seen from the unseen, and obliterating the distinction between what has erroneously been called matter, and what has no less erroneously been called spirit. From this we may infer that the dynaspheres of the atoms cognisable by science themselves contain atoms, which are in their turn surrounded by dynaspheres, and so on ad infinitum, and that this dynaspheric force is the agent of those phe- nomena of hypnotism, spiritualism, telepathy, and occultism generally, which are now puzzling the more advanced students of philosophy, and inquirers of the type of the Psychical Ee- search Society. This force it is which, passing through the organism of the operator into the hypnotised patient, controls his will, and inspires his words and acts ; and in order to do this, it has to penetrate the atoms of the ordinary matter which compose the fleshly particles of the visible frames of both. It can now easily be understood how, when another class of operators intervene, who have " shuttled off this mor- tal coil," but who none the less live in the so-called spiritual ^ See the ]5ritish Mercantile Gazette, 15th February 1887, and the Scientific Arena, Dr Wilford Hall. — Ed. DYNASPHERIC FORCE. 41 bodies composed of this supersensuous material force, which are still invisible to the great majority of people, though by no means so to all, their influence can be more powerfully exercised than if they still remained in the flesh; for the finer atoms of which they are composed, are not encrusted with those coarser particles which we see, and with which the finer particles are interlocked. It is the relationship which these two varieties of atoms bear to each other, which regu- lates and controls all organic phenomena, and which suggests the cause of effects that have been heretofore considered unaccountable. Here we have the secret of that magnetic attraction and repulsion which we call love or hate, sympathy or antipathy, and of all the varieties of sentiment which we produce upon our neighbours and they upon us. We express this truth unconsciously when we say of a man that he makes " a certain impression " upon us, the impression being literally produced by the impact of one variety of atoms upon another variety. So, in the emotions of anger, joy, sorrow, &c., the varieties and movements of atoms are as infinite which compose these emotions, as those are which go to com- pose our ideas, and which Mr Herbert Spencer defines as the result of " the liberation of certain forces produced by chem- ical action in the brain." As he admits that these forces have their origin in the unknowable, and are not generated in the brain itself, and as these cannot exist without atoms as a transmitting medium, he is not so far from the solution of the mystery of the metamorphosis which takes place between the forces which he calls physical, and those which he calls mental, as he himself supposes. " How this metamorphosis takes place," he says, " how a ' force existing as motion, heat, or light can become a mode ' of consciousness ; how it is possible for aerial vibrations to ' generate the sensations we call sound, or for the forces liber- ' ated by chemical changes in the brain to give rise to emotions, ' — tliese are mysteries wliicli it is impossible to fathom." l>ut when once we perceive that the aerial vil^rations consist of movements of atoms which make the tune in the case of music, and tlie words in tlie case of speech, and that they in turn receive their impact from other atoms l)ehind them which suggest tlie tune or the thouglit, which again receive 42 SCIENTIFIC RELIGION. theirs in like manner, and so on np the scale of the universal consciousness to the source of all consciousness ; and that by their impact on the atoms of what we term " ordinary matter," they affect these atoms in our nerve-centres, and so convey sensation, emotion, and thought to the brain, there is bottom found to the unfathomable, so far as this particu- lar mystery is concerned : we no longer make chemical changes in our brains responsible for the ideas which they give forth, but we (ypen the avenues to inspiration, which would otherwise be closed to it, and in opening those avenues afford ourselves the possibility and the hope of fathoming other mysteries besides this one. When once we have clearly grasped the idea that physical, mental, and emotional forces are all material, and that their varied manifestations are conditioned by the varieties of which they consist, and of endless combinations and permu- tations which may be produced by those atoms, resulting in effects as infinitely varying, and all correlated to each other, and possessing conserved energies of undreamt-of potency, science will have a field before it in which discoveries tran- scending human imagination lie buried; but the spots in which they are concealed are holy ground, upon which no profane foot dare tread — mysteries which the ancients pro- tected from profanation by their mysticism, and to which the moderns have blinded themselves by their scepticism. Though from what has been said we may vaguely perceive where these treasures of divine knowledge lie hid, no man can furnish another with a sure key to them. That is to be found by each who would learn the secrets of wisdom, only in his own heart ; and it is by an effort of his affections, and not by one of his brain, that he can fit this key to the lock of knowledge. So long as he stands perched on the in- tellectual pedestal upon which it is his ambition to tower, the admired of all beholders, so long will he search in vain for that hidden treasure which his soul longs after, and continue to cast reflections upon the intelligence of his pre- decessors, if not upon his own, by exhibiting to the world the shallowness of many of those scientific conclusions upon which their greatness at the time was founded. Let him then beware of intellectual effort in this direction, unpre- DANGERS OF HYPNOTISM. 43 pared by the necessary preliminary moral training and dis- cipline to make it. Science is already responsible for having put dynamite, roburite, melanite, and other destructive explosives into the hands of the vicious and cruel ; and its manifold inventions have facilitated the perpetration of various kinds of crime ; while it has already, panic-stricken, begun to perceive that the therapeutic advantages which may accrue from hypnotism, are more than counterbalanced by the fearful dangers which it involves. M. Liegois ^ tells us that it would be difficult to find twenty persons among the patients of Dr Liebault who could resist a criminal assault. Ladame writes ^ : " Personne ne doute plus au- ' jourd'hui de la possibilite pour une femme de subir les ' derniers outrages pendent le sommeil hypnotique ; et le ' Docteur Cullerre dans son interessant volume ^ ecrit que * c'est la une des liypotheses le moins susceptible d'objections * serieuses parmi toutes celles qui pourraient etre presentees." In the 'Archives de I'Anthropologie Criminelle, et des Sciences Penales ' of March 1886, p. 188, is narrated the case of a girl in which the operator produced a blister upon her arm, as well as stigmata, by simple hypnotic suggestion ; and by the same means Professors Beaumis and P)ernheim retarded or accelerated the circulation of the blood, and the pulsations of the heart to suit themselves, the experiment being recorded on a sphygmograph, and the evidence remains in the traces still existing made by the instrument, the con- clusion being finally arrived at that, as by an act of will the vital functions could be so powerfully acted upon, they might by the same act of will be arrested altogether, and death would ensue. In the case of a woman with child, abortion could be produced by the same means. " Je ne parle pas," continues ]\Ions. Toureaux, who was a witness, and sometimes an actor in these experiments, " de I'idee du suicide qu'il ' serait facile d'infliger u quelque individu. L'obsession de ' Liegr)iM, professeur h la facultd de dntit de Nancy. I^e la suggestion hypnotique danw cei? rajiiKirtw avec le di-oit criniinel et le droit civil. Nancy : 1885. ^ L'Hypnotisme et la Medicine l^egale. Dr Ladame. ' Culture Magnetism. PariH : 188G. 44 SCIENTIFIC RELIGION. ' la mort ne cesserait en ce cas qu'avec le dernier instant ' la victime. La justice n'a-t-elle done point a se soucier de ' de tons ces mysteres." A suggestion is, for instance, made to a subject, who is a perfectly honest, well-principled girl, to steal a jewel at the same hour on the following day, the method to avoid suspicion being also pointed out. This she does with great dexterity, following the instructions exactly. She first denies the theft, then is made to admit it, and finally to write to the judge of the district accusing a third person of the theft by naming him in a letter of her own com- position, and signed by herself. When she was in her normal condition she was entirely unconscious of the whole episode ; though while the patient is in this hypnotic state there is nothing usually to indicate to an ordinary observer anything abnormal. Experiments have also been made to discover how long hypnotic suggestion retains its influence over a patient, and Professor Beaumis has succeeded in having a suggestion realised 172 days after he had made it — from the 14th July 1884 to the 1st of January 1885.^ Instances of all kinds, some of them even more remarkable than the above, could be quoted, for new developments are every day occurring, all tending, however, in the same direc- tion, and all going to show that there is no limit to the danger with which society is threatened from this source. When I was in Paris in February 1887, I went to the Salpetriere, wliere some of the most remarkable of Dr Char- cot's experiments have been made, and witnessed the stage through which they were passing, and the phenomena that were being exhibited, and which Dr Charcot classifies under the three heads, lethargic, cataleptic, and somnambulic, including them all in " Le grand Hypnotisme." The operator on the occasion of my visit was Dr Babinski, the patient a girl of about twenty, partially paralysed on one side. On being seated in a chair, and her elbow pressed for a few seconds by Dr Babinski, she passed at once into the lethargic state, and became insensible to all surrounding impressions of sight, sound, or touch, but not rigid. In fact she presented some- what the appearance of a limp corpse, and on a limb being ^ Beaumis. Le Soinnambulisme Provoque : Etudes Psychologiques, p. 233. Paris: 1886. HYPNOTIC EXPERIMENTS. 45 raised it fell immediately. By simply opening her eyes, she was thrown into a cataleptic state, and her limbs remained in any attitude in which they were placed. She continued perfectly deaf, and though her eyes were open, they appa- rently received no visual impression ; she was not rigid, but on a muscle being touched it stiffened, while a pass immedi- ately released it. Sensation could be transferred to the para- lysed side from the other by closing the eye on that side ; the side which was formerly sensitive now became perfectly insensible to pain, while the slightest prick of a pin could instantly be felt on the other. Sensation could thus be trans- ferred from one side to the other by opening the right or left eyes ; when both eyes were closed she fell back into the lethargic condition ; when both were open, insensibility re- mained in the paralysed side ; on the forehead being briskly rubbed for a few seconds, she passed into the somnambulic state. In this condition she could see and hear, and in fact seemed thoroughly herself, excepting that she had lost all power of will, and was open to suggestion. When told there was a potato on the end of the nose of a gentleman who was present, she was for a moment inclined to deny it, but gradually the expression of her face changed, and assumed one of mingled horror and amazement, and she finally burst into a fit of violent laughter, and admitted that she did see a potato there. She was then told that she had a glass of champagne in her hand, and ordered to drink it, on which she lifted her empty hand to her mouth, and went through all the action of swallowing a highly satisfactory liquid. She sneezed violently on being told that slie was sniffing smelling- salts. Closing her eyes threw her instantly into the lethargic state, and opening them, into the cataleptic. On electricity being applied to the risible muscles, she expanded into a sweet smile ; she clenched her fists, and her features were con- vulsed with rage when it was applied to her frontal muscles ; and when it was applied to those on her chin, her lips and nostrils curled into an expression of profound contempt. On another ]nitient being introduced and thrown into the som- namlmlic state, tlie two were ]»laced back to l)ack with a high screen between them, a large magnet being put on tlic table in close proximity. The actions performed by one were 46 SCIENTIFIC RELIGION. tlien exactly reproduced by the other, although they were (|uite im'isible to one another. If the muscles of one were made rigid by a touch, the muscles of the other became rigid sympathetically. If the hands of one were raised, the other raised her hands. The action of the magnet and the electric battery on the patient was an interesting demonstration of the intimate relations which exist between the atoms of electric and magnetic forces outside tlie organism and those in it. Dr Babinski informed me that it was difficult to obtain the reproduction of each other's motions by patients in the absence of the magnet in close proximity. The effect upon me of being present while scientific men are exploring these forces in this reckless manner, is very much what it would 1)6 if I was hunting for something in a powder-magazine with a man who did not know there was any powder there, and held a naked candle in his hand. That they themselves, however, recognise how great is the danger, is proved by the efforts that are being made to bring it under the action of the law, and render it penal for anybody to grope into these mysteries in the dark, except those who are supposed to be professionally qualified to do so. In Denmark it has already been rendered penal.^ The result of the dabbling by amateurs into these phenomena, and the fashion of making hypnotisa- tion an after-dinner amusement, has been to increase the annual percentage of patients to the Salpetriere to a very great extent, which I was told at the time, but the amount of the percentage has slipped my memory. The defence of those ^ Since the ab