Theosophy - The New Epidemics - by Anon - as published in The Theosophist - June 1886
THE
NEW EPIDEMICS
by ANON
Initially printed in "The Theosophist" of June
1886
and reprinted from “Theosophical Siftings” Volume
1 -
ΔΔ
Cholera,
diphtheria, politics — all the evils of the century — are
thrown into the shade by the one ever-growing calamity,
the new plague sent by Providence to punish us for our
unbelief! Psychology is its name. Under the baleful influence
of this new scourge, men and women are changed suddenly,
without warning, between morn and noon, or the afternoon
walk and dinner, into incurable maniacs. They become assassins,
dishonest and immoral — criminal! It is an invisible,
terrible influence; one that respects neither age nor sex,
station in life, talent, late virtues, faith, or nationality,
all who are drawn into its current become drivelling idiots
or raging lunatics.
Our
jurymen, who, for the last decade, have been letting go
unpunished every kind of criminal under the sun, are wise
in their generation, as a verdict of guilty would have
only reached irresponsible victims of "Psychology".
"Monomania
does not exclude reasoning powers, while it develops
craft and cunning to quite an extraordinary degree",
we were told by the old allopaths. "Psychology" stands
several degrees higher, especially when it is "collective",
or, in other words, when a group of apparently sane individuals
are moved to exercise it mutually upon each other. The
psychological bacteria love to attack the great
and the intellectual of the land, and fasten themselves
in preference upon the cultured classes of society. Thus
we see it forcing one nation to throw glamour upon another,
often its ally and friend; and the other nation biologising
the rest of the powers into the belief of its righteousness.
It moves one crowned head to bewitch another, whose possessor,
thus envouté by diplomacy, exercises his
hypnotic power on his next-door neighbours, the rival
politicians. Physicians psychologise their patients,
advocates their clients, and the latter their creditors.
Moliere's famous query: "Lequel de nous deux trompe-t-on
ici ?" [“Which of us two deceives the
other?”] is reflected in the restless, suspicious
eye of all one meets in society. The daughter's confidence
in her mother is shaken, the father dreads his son, lest
he should psychologise him out of a cheque, and the wife
avoids her husband for fear she should be hypnotised
by him and made to tell her secrets. No more confidence
is possible, for mutual trust and primitive innocence
are things of the past! Friendship is dead, society disorganised,
the world shaken to its foundations, and things in general
turned upside down !
Why
all this ? Because the medical faculties of inquisitive
Europe have made an international conspiracy to pry simultaneously
into Mother Nature's secrets. Dr. Charcot hypnotised his
colleagues into investigating psychic
mysteries; those in their turn deluded the London and
Russian faculties; then they psychologised Germany, and
tricked innocent, classic Italy into following in their
steps. The result of their collective efforts was to
dethrone Mesmer, to show definitely the "Grand Albert" a
thimble-rigger, Apollonius of Tyana an hysterical sleight-of-hand
man; and the whole brood of modern mediums, sensitives
and theosophists a little worse than epileptic visionaries
and frauds.
The
noted — and, by the grace of God, long defunct — Commission
of 1784, for the investigation of Mesmer's phenomena, had
this suggestive sentence in its report to the French Academy: "We
thought it best not to fix our attention upon those rare,
isolated, marvelous facts that appear to contradict all
the laws of physical science, as those cases seem to be
always the result of very complicated causes — variable,
hidden [occult ?] inextricable", etc. [It
is very unphilosophical to deny the existence of magnetic
phenomena, only because in the actual state of our knowledge
they are inexplicable to us; for they (phenomena) cannot
be imagined”. (Laplace “Calcul des Probabilités”,
p 348. “These effects obtained on persons in a state
of trance (en syncope) do not permit the doubt that
. . . . there exists an effect very real and quite independent
of any participation of imagination. It is clear that they
(the effects) are due to some communication established
between their nervous systems” (of the magnetised
and the magnetiser). (Cuvier, “Lessons of Comparative
Anatomy”)]
Such
a method adopted, all was delightfully easy. The members
of the committee had a good time of it. Hence the conclusive
lines of the report, signed by Bailly, Franklin, and Darcet,
stating that "the mesmeric fluid having failed to
reveal itself to any of the senses of the committee-men,
that fluid could not be demonstrated and proven to them."
The
naïvetés of the committee, or of some
of them, anyhow, were unique. Thus Dr. Bailly discovered
that all those "incomprehensible effects" and "prodigious
results" that "contradict physical laws" were
the product of imagination. [See Arago's Annuaire, p. 420
: Visquoedaminimagitiatione!]
This new theory of "imagination" was very soon
after declared by Laplace, Cuvier, Jussion, and even Dr.
Gall very poorly imagined. [Perpetual Secretary of
the Academy of Medicine; author of several works besides
the one from which we quote: “Histoire Académique
du Magnétisme
Animal"] This
puerile sophistry was repeated by Dr. Dubois of
Amiens, who concludes his great work [page 89] with these
words: "General conclusion — the
magnetic fluid does not exist, and the means to make it
act are dangerous". To make something that does not
exist act, and moreover act so as to be dangerous, is quite
a priceless discovery. It reminds one of Dr. Majendie's
later fallacy when, denying on one hand the reality of
mesmeric phenomena, he asserted in the same breath that
he had seen several persons who had died under the influence
of that art". [See letters, by Dupau]
This
Academical report having been analysed by Arago in 1853, [Page
13] Mesmer's
name was hooted out of academical circles by the men
of science. It was left for Dr Charcot to resurrect the
same thing under another name, and Dr. Braid’s “Hypnotism” became
the new slogan. Very soon Hypnotism became the happy parent
of Hallucination, Delusion, Suggestion, Thought-transference,
and Psychology — last and greatest of the litter.
Those
who have grumbles against science for neglecting psychic
phenomena have no more cause for doing so. The savants have
analyzed them chemically and physically; weighed and
measured, dissected them; and invented new names for
psychic gestures and psycho-physical terms for things
unseen. They exerted their intellectual faculties to
the utmost stretch to perceive telepathically the “pale
imprisoned form” called soul, but succeeded only
in finding the seat of Hysteria, the universal generator
of all phenomena — objective or subjective. Sad,
yet not disappointed, for they had never supposed for
one moment there was anything external to man himself
in the phenomena, they finally caught the dreary epidemics,
and hanging their medical harps on the willows of the
Salpetrière, rested upon their laurels. They had
thoroughly psychologised themselves into the belief that
they had done good work, that they had nailed the shadows
to their proper places, and labeled correctly every
important phases of Hysteria, Hallucination, Thought-transference,
Delusion, Illusion and Suggestion.
But
it never struck our investigators, we fear, that they may
be as incompetent to handle their psychic microscope as
the famous Chancellor was to use his telescope. At any
rate, they act as though they had found out the last word
of psychic phenomena. To our eye they appear to have made
themselves immortal in a certain fashion. For this is what
they have done: Hemmed within the magic circle of their
physical limitations, our great investigators seem to have
worked out a complete schedule of the phenomenal hallucinations.
Of the highest interest to the world in general, it is
especially so to those who would like to conduct their
experiments upon those lines. Thanks to them, the world
has come to know that (i) a man had no need to be a regular
madman, or to pass for one in the eyes of his next-of-kin
and neighbour, to be labouring all his lifetime under chronic
delusion; (2) a person may look terribly like a lunatic — i.e.,
he may be positively hallucinated, yet still retain, without
one moment's interruption, the full possession of his reason
and senses; (3) for he can be a full-blown visionary, and
at the same time the severe magistrate sitting in judgment
over the tricks and pranks of his own nervous centres and
brain pulp!
This
category, of course, includes only those abnormal sensitives
who, on account of their social position, high character,
and generally recognised public and domestic virtues, could
not be very conveniently branded as frauds or liars.
Mediums
and “somnambules” are treated with less leniency.
There [Page
14] are two
varieties in this family of "abnormals" — professional
and other mediums. "A medium may be, though generally
he is not, an honest man or woman. In this case he may
be producing all his life fraudulent phenomena, with
or without confederates, and help other mediums to produce
the same, firmly believing all the while that these manifestations
are produced by spirits." [Pathological Essays, “On
Mediums”] In the other variety the medium
is consciously and thoroughly dishonest, an "
abnormal development of cunning allowing him to perform
unaided a mass of most wonderful phenomena." The
hundreds and thousands of his patrons, the spiritualists
and stray gobe-mouches remaining, of course, firmly
convinced of the reality of his manifestations, " under
mutual psychological influence and a collective temporary
delusion".[Andrien’s Phenomena. See
Dubois’ History, etc., op 34.] (sic), which
amounts to saying that a man may assure large crowds
of sane people that he is sitting on his own shoulders,
and those "often respectable and highly cultured
witnesses" believe him on his word
As
to the Theosophists and Occultists, recent developments
have shown what they can be made to appear.
The group being suigeneris, a special notice
is taken of them and a special catalogue prepared. Thus we
learn that :—
1.
A Theosophist can be "a very honourable man, truthful
and thoroughly reliable". Withal, he may help towards
the production of bogusphenomena, remaining
convinced himself of the reality of that he aids in performing
by tricks. In this case he is simply " acting under
chronic or temporary psychological influence".
2.
An Occultist, or a candidate for becoming one, may be a
deeply-deluded maniac under every circumstance of his life.
Nevertheless, this affliction does not stand at all in
his way of being a wonderfully clever man — often
a genius.
The
following case will be found of paramount interest to all
who would avoid falling victims to the epidemic of the
age; —
3.
An Occultist of the modern type is an out-and-out trickster,
a fraudin a clear
crystal, suspected by all, known as such by the few. He
is not even a medium; in short, has no psychic powers whatever".
Yet he may, upon entering unexpectedly, and for the first
time in his life, a room full of strangers, and a stranger
himself to all, "cause several persons in the assembly,
who were unknown to him to that day, to see one and the
same personality near him — a personality having
no real existence, and solely generated and bred in his
own vicious brain".[Extracts from private letters
from an “Investigator” to the Editor of the
THEOSOPHIST]
Such
are the modern powers of hallucination and psychology.
If the [Page
15] learned
gentlemen who have worked out the programme are asked: "But
how can one with no psychic powers whatever, a suspected
fraud, produce such good results?" the answer is
ready: "The
group of persons hallucinated into seeing simultaneously
that which was nowhere save in the brain of the trickster
have deliberately produced their own delusion —
perhaps in a fit of unmanifested hysteria". "But
the victims were unaware of the arrival of that remarkable
impostor, nor had they been previously acquainted".
Oh, well — yes, quite so. "Yes, but then even
this can be very easily explained: They may have acted
under the law of suggestion. Their seeing the apparition
was put previously into their heads" —— "By
whom, since they were naturally strangers to each other
?". " Oh — well — well — by
themselves of course" (sic).
Quite
so. The programme is offered to those who will accept it.
Of course, the really scientific men may be fathered with
only a certain portion of it — namely, "hallucination" resulting
from physiological causes. The several other paradoxical
enunciations belong simply to their imitators —
the smaller fry of science. But then one has not always to
do with a Dubois-Raymond, a Huxley, or a Charcot.
Yet
even these great men are not the inventors or the discoverers
of the double action of the brain. Mysterious cases of
neuropathy — as they now call it in France — have
occurred in every age. Even during the relative infancy
of western exact science, Father Malebranche, a learned
monk and physician, wrote that " the nervous filament
may be moved in two ways, either by the end which is outside
the brain, or by the extremity that plunges into the mass
(of the brain). If those filaments are moved by whatever
influence within the brain, the soul perceives something
outside the body". Therefore, the mediaeval physiologist
knew as well as the modern that there was a difference
between an optical phenomenon and a cerebral intuition.
The
mediaeval men of science knew something more, as also did
their predecessors in the hoary antiquity. Unfortunately,
they had to keep it to themselves, unless they would consent
to attribute the phenomena to satanic influence, when their
testimony became a marketable commodity. The devil being
now discarded and discredited, the investigators have to
fall back on Diabolus Hallucination, pure and simple, the
effect of "malignant psychology". This squirrel-like
method of ever traveling round the same wheel, when once
set in motion by a physiological suggestion, is naturally
calculated to make the heads of our investigators rather
giddy, and to haze their ideas. But if they sincerely believe
that they are progressing thereby in the right direction,
and are instructing humanity, we have no quarrel with them,
but rather wish them sincerely God-speed in their "collective
hallucination". Thanks, gentlemen, for that word.