A STORY OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH.*

THIS is a very entertaining little book, though it can hardly be called a story in any sense in which the word " story " describes that which owes its chief interest to plot. Still, it is a very lively account of Boston transcendentalists of the new or esoteric school of spiritualists, of Boston fashion, and Boston journalism; and is evidently a study by a very acute man who has apparently become a convert to all the " astral " doctrines of Colonel Olcott and Mr. Laurence Oliphant. Still, Mr. Quincy is much more readable than Mr. Laurence Oliphant used to be in his mystical phase, and besides adapting himself better to the ignorance of unilluminated human nature, he introduces such very lively sketches of the condition of society and journalism in Boston, that the little book would be well worth reading were it only for that portion of it in which the parvenu wealth of Boston and the competition of the penny-a- liners for the first publication of private gossip, is described. No wonder that a man snatches eagerly at all the lore concerning astral bodies, of the movements of which (as yet) the reporters for the Press can give no account, who has to endure such chronic curiosity into the details of private life as is described in the following scene. Professor Hargrave is watching by what believed to be the death-bed of one of the millionaires of Boston, when his wife, who is waiting for him in the sitting-room below, is thus assailed by the reporter to the Morning Trumpet :— "Suddenly there came a tapping at one of the windows ; it was followed by a voice which said, Please raise the sash, and let me speak to you.' The instinct was to retreat ; but would she find any room in the house warmed and lighted save that dreadful chamber ? After all, it might be something important. No robber would seek to enter a front window on Brandon Avenue, which was cheerful, prosperous, and safe, even on a stormy night. On the whole, it would be best to lift the sash, as requested. The face of a young man, which appeared just above the sill, looked longingly into the luxurious room. It was a pallid, eager face, framed in a comforter that muffled ears and throat ; the jaunty self-confidence in the features covered a certain remonstrance with fortune for not providing a situation where that quality was not required. 'What's going on inside here ?' demanded this strange visitor. 'I saw Dr. Bense and Professor Hargrave enter the door not half-an-hour ago. Tell me what's up, and I'll give you a dollar. See, here are my credentials.' A long arm was thrust into the room, with a card in the fingers at the end of it. The inscription was large enough to be read at some distance.

MR, DAELIII8 BICKBY, Reporter to the Horning Trumpet.

Clara's cheeks reddened with indignation at this intrusion upon the sanctities of a private household. She could not command the words to tell the fellow to be gone. She would blight him with a look. Mr. Bickby perceived the blunder he had made. She was no servant to whom his money had been offered; pro- bably some relative or trusted friend of the dying man. No menial's eyes could shoot such scorn at him. Please to excuse me, madam,' he said, in a voice which had now some tone of refinement in it. I owe you an humble apology for my hasty speech. These costly surroundings cushion you off from us humble breadwinners of the street, yet I think your humanity will pardon one who has been over-zealous in his calling. Nature's first command is to get a living,—at least when social arrangements, which are open to much question, have not already provided one.'—' I accept your apology,' said the lady, mollified, as women are apt to be, by the flattery of a deferential address.— ' Then will you kindly tell me what the chances are that Mr. Peckster will die before morning, and whether anything is going on here in which the public would be interested ? ' inquired Mr. Darius Bickby, pushing his business with commendable energy.— ' Much,' said Clara with a shudder, in answer to the last part of the question, yet nothing capable of record by your pencil. Of the probabilities of Mr. Peckster's condition I know nothing. You should be about better work than this eavesdropping.'—' I know it,' answered the reporter ; yet here I am, stunted like the great majority by the pressure of hard material necessities. I have some college learning, but found it utterly unexchangeable for food, clothing, and a small amount of comfort. For a sufficiency of the first I was forced to snatch such place as I could in the uni- versal scramble ; as for the comfort, just now I find very little of it upon this shaky trellis where I stand to reach the window. Under the circumstances, I thought a ring at the door would neither be in the best taste nor produce the best results. I saw a light in this room and supposed it must have been given to the nurse' they often put them on the lower floor, for, being rather stout, they object to the stairs. Then I wanted to steal a march

* The Peckster Professorship an Episode in the History of Psychical Research. By J. P. Quincy. Boston and New York : Houghton, Mifflin, and Co.

on the Clarion's man, who is in the rear of the house, waiting for the cook's candle. She promised to put it in the attic window as soon as he dies, but ten to one she doesn't remember it. We want the obituary for our morning issue ; there's a column of it all in type, and we shall delay going to press till half-past three on the chance of printing it. There you have the situation. Now, my dear madam, will you give a young man who never injured you a lift in his profession ? I know that Professor Hargrave and Dr. Bense are in this house ; they brought with them a heavy case containing—something. What are they here for ? It can't be an autopsy yet. The evening papers will of course have a full solution of the problem. Now it will be worth something to me if the Morning Trumpet can blow the froth off this news ; that will create a demand for our one-o'clock edition, which will contain the latest particulars. Excuse my abruptness; you can help me ; what do you say?"

Yet if Mr. Quincy's accounts of the astral life were true, we do not see why there should not some day be an Astral Morning Trumpet, competent to report all sorts of events in the invisible world, and to keep the Boston of to-day informed

of the precise moral condition and sufferings or joys of the Bostonians of two hundred years ago, as well as of the exact spiritual destiny of those, poor or rich, who pass from life at the present day. Nay, more, Mr. Quincy evidently holds what we have always regarded as the self-contradictory view which treats time as a pure illusion, and regards past, present, and future as mere elements in an eternal Now. That is a view, we venture to think, which is as inconsistent with any law of evolution as it is with any law of moral responsibility and moral retribution. If

temptation, sin, repentance, amendment, may be properly regarded as all simultaneous in the eternal Now, "character"

and "conduct," as we understand the words, are as much of illusions as history. For you could no more make sin and penitence simultaneous without taking all significance from the moral character of man, than you could make the coming of Christ simultaneous with the call of Abraham without destroying the significance of history. However, the con- sequence of this transcendental doctrine concerning the illusory and purely misleading nature of our time-ideas, is that Mr. Quincy supposes it quite as easy to anticipate the future as to dive into the past, and gives us one vision of an event that is not to happen till 1987. Now, if there be any reality in the freedom of the human will, as Mr.

Quincy's hero steadfastly maintains, the prevision of any distant future involving the conduct of moral beings, must be as much conditioned by the outcome of hundreds of thousands of intermediate acts of free-will, as the prevision whether any particular man is to suffer remorse or to enjoy a good con- science at a particular moment, is by the moral alternative which he may have chosen the moment before.

However, we must take Mr. Quincy's doctrine as it is, and though we cannot reconcile his view on free-will with his view of the unreality of time, any more than we can reconcile Kant's views on the same subject, we are willing to admit that with regard to ninny of the tendencies of our modern civilisation, Mr. Quincy's views are sound enough, and that he sees very clearly the hollowness of much in which society is usually taught to take the utmost pride. We will supplement

the sketch just given of the Boston penny-a-liner, by his admirable sketch of the way in which one of the most respectable of the Boston journals, which he calls the Daily Adviser, changes sides when it finds it necessary to change sides :— " The large folio sheet was the Daily Adviser, the matutinal counsellor of Mr. Peckster from his youth up ; the counsellor also of his father and of his grandfather. The proportions of objects change as we proceed on life's journey ; even the Adviser was not quite what it had been. Yet among all the vicissitudes of its existence the journal had maintained its identity. If exigencies had compelled it to put off one set of respectable opinions and take up another, it had never changed suits with careless alacrity. It had retired, as it were, to its vestry, re-robed with due decorum, and appeased again as guide and philosopher to the prosperous portion of humanity, and friend to whatever had gotten itself established."

That strikes us as a very happy description of the mode in which the more majestic organs of the Press pass from one policy to another, often the opposite policy, without openly admitting or regretting their former mistake.

Mr. Quincy puts his case for all the out-of-the-way facts of spiritualism that he desires to be established, with great acuteness. For example :—

"Modern investigation may yet prove, what ancient inspiration has asserted, that chaotic spiritual regions infest the neighbour-

hood of human life. But those too dull to feel susceptibility to these influences declare that they do not exist ! Suppose the metals which do not respond to the loadstone should meet in con- vention and pass a resolution that its power was imaginary !"

Only the words, "too dull to feel susceptibility to these in- fluences," hardly do justice to Mr. Quincy's own view. He makes his hero, the Professor, say at the opening of the story, that those who are most susceptible to these influences have

often far less original strength of their own in them than those who are least susceptible to them. Indeed, the first faLt which is supposed to have given the Professor the hint as to the existence of spiritual affinities of which the world is sceptical, is the feat of a schoolgirl who, when asked what she knew concerning the founder of the school, suddenly got up and delivered an eloquent peroration which he himself had composed for his evening's address, and which had, never left his hands since he wrote it in the morning. It is not pretended that this girl was clever or original in any way. She was only supposed to be "suscep- tible" to mental processes going on in a neighbouringbrain; and yet many of the children who were not thus susceptible were probably much less " dull " than she. Thus it is quite incon- sistent with Mr. Quincy's own theory to treat this susceptibility to the influence of other minds as a sign of any largeness of mental capacity. Indeed, one of the most alarming aspects of the new psychical investigation, is that it seems to show how much mental energy is required to resist the aggressive influences of other minds, even when those aggressive influences do nothing but harm to the somnambulic patient on whom they are brought to bear.

We will close with a passage giving the kind of evidence upon which the sceptic of this little volume is supposed to be convinced that spiritual agencies, not now embodied, can com- municate with this world, a passage certainly meant to be :accepted in good faith as a record of actual facts :—

"It is not necessary to give the doctor's narrative in detail. The scene was a parlour on the Avenue, just two streets near the country. A casual meeting of five acquaintances. No instability of cerebral equilibrium ; no constitutional infirmity of mental structure ; no stream of nervous exaltation running through the well-fed company ; all was health and merriment. Dr. Bense was entertaining his friends with the exhibition of a little heart- shaped table, supported upon two wheeled legs and a leadpencil ; it had been captured somewhere by a brother researcher. Placing the instrument upon a sheet of paper, he proceeded to show the facility with which it could be operated. He could push it about and make it write anything ; and with considerable effort he cer- tainly did succeed in writing several sprawling words. Then a young-lady teacher in Mr. Greyson's Sunday-school, saying that she had never seen the thing before, and would like to try it, placed the tips of her fingers upon the narrow shelf. The little apparatus now ran about the paper as if it were alive. Muscular direction, of course ! After a time the pencil began to write in a clear, round hand. I am not forming these letters ; I do not know what it is writing,' said the lady, in a tone of which the truthfulness was apparent. Very likely not ; there are certain nervous states in which the muscles act without consciousness. 'Dr. Bense may ask a mental question,' wrote the pencil. The physician smilingly complied. An answer, unexpected, but singularly pertinent, was promptly written. Extraordinary coincidence Out came the professional note-book, almost auto- matically, and the incident was confided to its pages. 'Let the doctor write some questions in his book ; we have unusual power to-night,' wrote the pencil. Again there was compliance; but not until Dr. Bonze so arranged a screen that no alien eye could see the motion of his hand. 'In what month of the year does Christmas come?' The mind-reading theory came into the doctor's head, and he thought he would test it by making a vivid mental picture of the word December. 'A trifling question; look in the almanac for your answer !' wrote the pencil. Why, this was no thought-reflection; the banter was like that of a person. The pencil was suddenly agitated, and wrote a name unknown to any one present. It was written that a man bearing this name had certain specified transactions with an ancestor of Dr. Bense who had lived in the last century. After a moment it was added that a record could be found in a certain public building that would prove the truth of the assertion. (The next day, after much searching, the document was discovered, and the truth of the statement established.) The perambulatory power of the pencil was withdrawn for some moments. Then, with a series of jerks, it scrawled a sentence containing vulgarities of expression and gross blunders of grammar for which it seemed impossible that the conscious mind of any one present could be responsible. The stuff was followed by a name, Enoch Dodrey ; then an obscure town in Maine was given as the mundane residence of Mr. Dodrey, and the words killed by a kick' were added as signifying the mode of translation to his present abode. ('Has a person called Dodrey ever lived in your town ?' wrote Dr. Bense to the post- master of this rural settlement. A negative reply was promptly received ; the oldest inhabitant had never heard the name. A month later came another letter; the postmaster chanced to be looking over some old records of the almshouse which had been undisturbed for forty years ; he had there found the name of Dodrey prefixed by Enoch. It was entered as belonging to a negro who was killed by the kick of a horse, September 29th, 1832.) Puzzling enough ! Another name,—this was written with a rolling progression of the pencil, of a character not before observed,—Gustave Bel-mine. No; Dr. Bense had never known such a person. Stay : had he not met a medical student of that name, forty years before, in Paris ? Yes, it must have been at Madame Eugenie D'Uvert's pension,' thought the doctor, as he wrote a question that might elicit that answer, and fixed Madame D'IJvert's name before his mental vision, as if it were chalked upon a huge blackboard. I met you at the crdmerie on the Quai des Augustins, where we breakfasted together for a week.' The blackboard business evidently did not work. When, later in the evening, the perplexed researcher consulted a bundle of old letters, he found that 'Gustave' was right about the place of their meeting, and that he was wrong. It may be well to add a single specimen of another class of perplexities. Dr. Bense, while passing through Charleston two years before the war, had been summoned in consultation during the last illness of a noted citizen. A rough imitation of the signature of this gentleman was unexpectedly written. Can you identify yourself,' asked the physician, by giving the name of the mulatto slave who was your personal attendant?' Abraham Mountain was an appellation so singular for a person of this class that it had lodged in the questioner's memory, and he willed vigorously that the letters forming it might now be written. But the power that moved the little table scribbled a silly counter- interrogation in which the doctor could discover no signifi cance. What a simple conundrum planchette is asking us ! ' exclaimed one of the company. "What is higher than a hill?" Why a mountain of course; but that has nothing to do with your inquiry ! ' A thrill of sudden comprehension was experienced by the eminent neurologist. Yes, A. Mountain was the name he had demanded. Was it given in this roundabout fashion to show that his own mind was not concerned in the revelation ? While the intelligent sensorium was active in one direction, was there beneath consciousness a more potent activity which gave counter orders ? One might assume, of course, that certain nervous substrata were engaged in abnormal functions while the work of the nerve-tracts which appeared to be busy was coincidently suspended. Alas, the pressure of this ponderous phraseology would not attenuate the difficulty ! The longer Dr. Bense peered into the darkness, the thicker it seemed to grow ; even the jack-o'-lanterns of the metaphysicians threw no ray into its pitchy bewilderment."

Statements of that kind, however, fall very short of the " astral " body marvels of which the Professor who is Mr. , Quincy's hero comes to be the recognised exponent. And, for our parts, we doubt exceedingly whether by 1987 even the class of facts which convinced Dr. Bense, will be regarded as established by the scientific world. Remarkable as much of the testimony to this class of facts undoubtedly is, it is so strangely mixed up with fraud, caprice, and moral levity of all kinds, that it will take quite a new class of witnesses, and a very different tendency in the drift of that to which they bear witness, to convince the great majority of serious people that there is anything worth looking into in their evidence.