EASTERN THOUGHT AND PSYCHICAL PHENOMENA
[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.] SIR,—Mr. Gerald Heard, in his interesting review of the book In Defence of Miracles : A New Argument for God and Survival, by Mr. Malcolm Grant, indicates that the author " appeals very largely to the evidence of psychical phenomena of the last eighty years " and " he establishes by the argument that so many scientists have studied these phenomena for so many years, they have failed to discover any Natural Law which moves them and that proves that these phenomena are not subject to Natural Law " 1 Mr. Joad referred in his article to the sphere " where so little is known " and narrated certain facts he had observed, with which psychic-research annals in the West are by now crowded.
The explanations referred to gain in general intelligibility today from the fact that owing to the recent work of Prof. P. A. M. Dirac of Cambridge and other brilliant physicists in Great Britain and America, as Dr. J. G. Crowther pointed Out in an English contemporary of yours in February, matter 'is shown to resolve itself into positive and negative charges of electricity. Man, therefore, must himself be a living dynamo of electrical energy. This was the ancient theory, if I comprehend it. Participants in a seance generate currents of energy and the medium by reason of a peculiar physiological
• organization becomes the conductor of this intelligent vital electricity.
It will be recalled that Sir William Crookes quoted Serjeant Cox on " psychic force " and that Mesmer in his eighth proposition called attention to an " agent " which insinuated itself into the substance of the nerves. In the Journal de 1liagnetisme in Paris associated with Dr. Morin, following the eminent Baron Du Potet, appeared a remarkable letter which
• indicated that persons or tables might be charged with
the intelligent vital electricity of the people present at a --seance, which magnetic efflux created an intelligence analogous
to their own. Prof. Nicholas Wagner of the University of • Petersburg set forward a similar idea. He held that the electricity of the investigators concentrated itself in the table, which psychical force evolved itself out of all the other • forces of the organisms present. This would explain table- turning as well as the production of astral currents strong enough to lift articles considerably heavier than the handker- chief in mid-air recorded by the cameras, and the transportation of small objects referred to by Mr. Joad.
" If ghosts have souls," he wrote in this article, " they certainly have no brains." This conclusion of his, as well as others, is similar to those long ago established in the East.
• It is only necessary to take the Indian teaching on what are called bhuls and the explanation of " elementaries " as discussed in the United States in the 'seventies of last century to understand the varying standards of intelligence in com- munications. On this point controversy raged in the American spiritualist journals nearly 60 years ago, which makes lively
• and valuable reading still, because Madame Blavatsky dared - to maintain, in the face of the fiercest opposition, facts she had personally noted in 25 years' experiences in India, Tibet, Borneo, Siam, Egypt, Asia Minor, and in North and South
• America. Indians, Chinese, Egyptians and Greeks all affirmed that the spiritual entity withdrew at death from its grosser remains to pass into its own ethereal state. The disintegrating casts-off of the deceased, now unensouled by the higher intelligence according to these ideas, would still be endowed with the memories of the past personality, since as Prof. G. T. Ladd of Yale University once pointed out, the atoms making up the human body are what he termed " supersensible beings " and " every area and every limit of the nervous system has its own memory." Galvanize these remnants into a factitious life which is dependent on the medium and sitters in the seance-room, as indicated above, and through the action of the intelligent vital electrical currents they can be made to yield up their stored trivialities which, being authentic, startle the practitioners of what centuries ago used to be known as necromancy.
- Surely by this time modern psychic research investigators ought to have reached some decision as to whether they will find out the. whys and wherefores of the noetic action tliey seem to know so little- about ; or perhaps they prefer-to- go on incessantly recording the phenomena of the psychic action, at which they have been at work for some 80 years without reaching anywhere, as Mr. Grant indicates. So far we have studied in the West but part of the proposition and it is the other side of it, according to the Eastern investigators, which indicates that all psychic phenomena operate under Natural Law and that there is no such thing as a miracle, apparent miracles being merely happenings due to forces antagonistic to the at present known laws so far as the West
is concerned.—I am, Sir, &c., M. A. THOMAS.
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