THE " BRITISH QUARTERLY" ON MODERN NECROMANCY.
rpuE new number of the British Quarterly has an article on 1 "Modern Necromancy," the exact drift of which it is not
very easy to catch. It appears to assume,—what, indeed, so many
intelligent persons day by day now become convinced of, that, fluent and almost inapprehensible as the evidence is found by many who have earnestly sought for it, we are no longer sur- prised to find any inquirer accepting it,—namely, that there is a solid nucleus of preternatural fact in the phenomena called Spiri- tualistic. And as far as we can make out, the writer does not mean to condemn those investigators who, like Mr. Crookes and Mr. Wallace, have courted experience of this kind, in the view of ascertaining the falsehood or reality of the facts asserted. But yet the main drift of the reviewer is to show that the whole order of facts cornea under the class formerly called Necromantic, and that the moral conditions which produce them, as they were forbidden by the law of Moses, and by the higher instincts of the Christian faith, are degrading to human nature, and an abomi- nation to the spirit of true religion. Now it is a very difficult thing to reason at all as to what the true attitude of man's mind ought to be to facts which the greater number of think- ing men, both religious and sceptical, do not at present be- lieve to be facts at all. If that view be correct, Necromancy is mischievous because it is a frivolous and idle attempt to foster the belief in preternatural phenomena which do not exist except in-the heated imagination of ignorant men,—because it exhausts the human spirit by prostrating it before creations of the fancy which it summons up by virtue of • fictitious incantations and preposterous spells. That, at least, is an intelligible view. Nothing can be wiser than to deprecate heaping fuel on the smouldering fires of a dark superstition which diverts human intelligence from work for which it is fitted, in order to waste it on feverish and intoxicating dreams. On the other hand, it may fairly be said that if there be really a nucleus of fact amidst the marvellous rubbish of the so-called spiritualistic phenomena, it is perfectly idle in the present day, when there is so vehement a tendency to deny all mental phenomena which are not functions of some living and active brain, to depreciate their importance, indeed, their vast philosophic significance. Indeed, even if it could be shown in the clearest way that all tampering with them is morally wrong, or can be proved by experience to be pernicious to the inquirer, that philosophic significance would not be diminished. But we can hardly understand at all the line which, as far as we can gather it, the British Quarterly reviewer appears to take up, which is—if we rightly understand what seems shrouded in a certain almost intentional vagueness— something like this,—that it is quite right to try and make out whether these alleged preternatural facts are facts or not, but that if you have once made out their claim to be preternatural, it is quite wrong, and directly contrary to the revealed morality of Judaism, to try and extract any sort of new information, taken even for what it is worth (which would usually be exceedingly little), out of these preternatural phenomena. For instance, as we interpret the reviewer, he would think Mr. Crookes right in testing his " medium " by all sorts of tests, electrical and otherwise, and even in walking about with the "materialised" spirit hanging on his arm, or even in clasping it round the waist. But he would think any one quite wrong who, having been told two or three times through the agency of a medium—if such a thing ever happened —of some event then quite unexpected, but which afterwards actually occurred, should in consequence make inquiry at the same source—or what appeared likely to be the same source—on any contingency of interest to the inquirer, and take the reply for as much as it was worth,—as a guess, perhaps, but one formed, as far as he could judge, by an agency possessed of certain quali- fications for seeing further into the future than himself.
We confess we are wholly unable to enter into these fine dis- tinctions. That Moses and his successors, legislating for a people who were always on the brink of an abyss of degrading physical superstitions, should have absolutely forbidden all this questioning of the invisible world through persons of abnormal constitution, unless these were kept straight by their faith in the revealed God of their fathers, is quite as intelligible as that the same great legislators should have promulgated an elaborate ceremonial and symbolic system adapted to the condition of that people's mind. But it is just as absurd to quote such rules now as fatal to certain kinds of modern inquiry, however strictly impartial and self- restrained, as it would be to maintain that the ceremonial law against the use of particular kinds of food is still in force. If there be, as many good investigators think, 'a sufficient mass of fairly-accredited phenomena beyond the scope of any admitted laws, which need investigation, they should surely be investigated without assuming any predetermined mode of dealing with such results, if any, as might be established by the investigation. It seems childish to say,—' Let us find out whether these things do or do not happen, but, if it turns out that they do happen, let us resolve beforehand to have nothing further to say to them.' The present writer, if he relied on his own experience alone, would feel confident that the alleged phenomena never occur when any one is present who is not already predisposed to believe that they will occur ; but he confesses himself staggered by the enormous weight of secondary evidence which appears to be accu- mulated, and every fresh day accumulating, on all sides, not a little of it, too, on the faith of witnesses whose evidence no one would reject in regard to any events, however marvellous, not obviously of the preternatural kind. However, if you could mice prove that by the agency of persons of particular temperament,—an agency not in itself involving any element of insincerity or other species of immorality,—you could obtain access to new sources of information proved by experience to be so far trustworthy as to make them an appreciable element in considering what one ought to do, it would surely be very absurd to call it wicked to assign any such value to it, only because the Jews in a very different age were forbidden all such trifling with the invisible world, on the express ground that it led them into sensual idolatry, and poisoned the active faith in God. It seems to us that the soundest principle of the modern world is,—'Refuse no sort of light you can extract from evil or from good, provided that no moral evil, no sort of self- deception, no trifling with temptation, is necessary to procure that light.' A worthy living clergyman declares himself to have been one of the sitters at a séance at which the object was to get a com- munication from the supreme Spirit of Evil, and according to his story, the only result was that the table at which the seance was held was violently broken to pieces by some invisible agency before the eyes of the sitters. Well, it is certainly very difficult to con- ceive how, if such an agency could be consulted, it would be pos- sible to get any truth out of it. Even a French juge d'instruction could hardly, one would suppose, so cross-examine a supremely evil and unseen being, as to extract from him valuable admis- sions which could serve the cause of truth. But suppose for a moment that it were conceivable that you could elicit a word of truth from a supremely evil being,—say a word of involuntary warning as to the direction in which you are most open to temptation,—in that case we could not conceive a reasonable moral being failing to profit by the hint. If there were such a thing as an available channel of communication with finite beings who are not now in the flesh, and it could be used without violating any of the moral and spiritual laws which are our highest certainties, we cannot understand how any one could wish to persuade us that we ought not to take such communications for whatever, when weighed in the scales of reason and experience, they might be worth. It cannot be right to test the facts, and yet wrong to use the facts when you have tested them ; if it is wrong to use them for whatever they are worth in the last resort, it must be equally wrong to meddle with them at all, even for the sake of testing them. Whether we rightly apprehend the drift of the British Quarterly reviewer, we are by no means sure. But so far as we can gather it, it seems to us a singularly weak and indefensible one, which either goes too far at first, or stops short without any intelligible reason where it does stop short.
The true moral to be derived from the mass of miscellaneous rant and rubbish, mingled with more or less curious testimony as to physical and intellectual events, which is recorded in the litera- ture of modern spiritualism, is this,—that very few minds have enough culture, coolness, common-sense, firm moral judgment, and hatred of self-deception, to investigate it adequately at all. And we need not say that it is mere running headlong into danger of mischievous and superstitious delusions, for any man to apply himself to sift evidence who is not clearly conscious of possessing the qualities necessary to sift it, and to check promptly that dangerous appetite for believing marvels which we so often see. Again, there can be no doubt that the investigation brings you into the company of a very strange lot of people, often without clear conceptions of right and wrong, and sometimes with very well-marked leanings to particular kinds of license. The qualities needful for dealing with such circumstances are rare. And it is still seldomer, perhaps, that those who have these qualities, are with- out others which would find full employment for their minds and
hearts in much less ambiguous and risky regions. But granted the existence of a few persons who have such qualities, and who have no clear duties taking them into other fields, and grant- ing that when they come to investigate the phenomena alleged, they find a residuum of solid fact in them which is inexpli- cable without assuming the existence of non-embodied intel- ligences, then, we confess, it seems to us perfectly childish to say to such investigators,—' Thus far shall you go, but no farther,—you may determine for us whether there be evidence of the agency of disembodied intelligences in human affairs, but when you have determined this, you shall not venture to estimate what modicum of credit, if any, is to be assigned to these com- munications.' The British Quarterly reviewer terminates his rather ambiguous counsels on these grotesque matters as follows : —" To hearken to the voices of the dead is either a delusion or a reality. If it be the former, no delusion can be more mischievous, more degrading, or more revolting. If it be the latter, no pursuit can be more dangerous. It is an attempt to return to the infancy of the human race. It is a revolution against reason, and an arrest of scientific and practical education. It is so opposed in its nature to the primary laws of human progress and human welfare, that its character must be apparent to every man of calm intelli- gence, even apart from the emphatic condemnation of the legis- lators of our race." Now, of course we heartily agree with his opinion on the first branch of the alternative. If the whole matter be pure delusion, no vaster or more discreditable waste of human energy and credulity on a gross superstition than the time devoted to this spiritualism in recent years has ever occurred to show the fatuity of human intelligence. But if it be not a delusion, why can't these signs of intelligence from the invisible world, if such there really be, be taken,—like the evidence of bad witnesses, for example,—just for what they are worth ? The reviewer fails to see that what was bad and even wicked in the old Necromancy, was this, that superstitious men delivered themselves over, body and soul, into the power of malignant and often cheating magicians,—that they really made the practice a kind of idolatry. Whatever may be said against modern spiritualism as a waste of time, this at least cannot be said of it,—that even spiritualists themselves propose to put these usually silly oracles above their own judgments or consciences. On the contrary, spiritualiats appear to us nearly unanimous in admitting that most of the com- munications come from silly gossips and liars, who did not put off the habit of silly gossiping and lying when they put off their body. Now, if this be once admitted,—if it once be clear that these things are taken purely for what they are worth, i.e., for the evidence they can give of intrinsic intelligence, if they can give such evidence,—and however much there may be of waste of time and thought about such sub- jects, it is at least impossible to say that there is any of that peculiar peril in the pursuit which the Jewish law discerned in the demonology of that time. The evil of that practice lay in giving your mind and heart up to the guidance of a creature in all probability more evil and more frivolous than yourself, in attaching a supernatural importance to a preternatural and perhaps wholly malignant agency. There may be, and probably are, silly people who do this still. We have heard of weak women who have made bad marriages in consequence of the communications made to them through a medium, and who have even come to their death by obeying the oracles delivered. Where there are such people, the condemnation of the British Quarterly reviewer applies. But so long as a man retains the full possession of his good-sense, refuses to believe without evidence simply because appeals are made to his credulity, and keeps his conscience as well as his judgment well above the waters of these troubled and muddy subjects, it seems to us unmeaning to say that it is wicked to re- ceive a communication purporting to come from the dead, and take it for what it is worth. To prostrate your soul before such a communication as if it were divine, is idiotic, is de- grading. But to examine it as you would examine any other piece of curious evidence, and act on your own calm judgment, after taking that and all other considerations into account, seems to us the reasonable course of any man who should have once convinced himself that there is in these subjects a residuum of preternatural fact to be explained.
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