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On the Ontological Quality of Phantoms
(Preliminary Proofs)
Not sufficiently often do we inquire by what criteria we judge of the reality of phenomena. Normally—as we call it, and our right to employ the word normal in its usual sense might form the subject of a very serious discussion!—I perceive a bay horse. Nobody questions me; nobody regards me as hallucinated, or clairvoyant, or insane. Regardless of expense, I now acquire delirium tremens, and observe blue rats. This time every one denies the validity of my experiment. Even the more philosophical distinguish the two experiences as objective and subjective.
It has rarely been asked: what are the bases of such distinction?
In earlier time, it is true, the distinction although clearly enough formulated carried with it no ontological judgment: or if any, rather in favour of what we now agree to call the "delusion". The devil belonged to a category of existence more permanent than the heavens and the earth. Temporal things changed daily; people even surmised the sun to renew himself by daily miracle of God: but Satan had a history of few capital events. 'He fell' was all his past: 'he will be bound and cast into the Lake of Fire' was all his future.
The acute reader will have observed that already I have assumed (as if by natural right) the touchstone of reality to be persistence. The ghost must fade with dawn; the ensorcelled cannot cross running water; the demon cannot abide the terror of the pentagram.
But let us ask ourselves why such forms of transitoriness should be preferred to others in this question?
Man cannot endure an atmosphere of carbonic acid gas: carbonic acid gas cannot subsist in the presence of ammonia: rocks melt before the sea, and the sea under the sun. The sun itself, a whirling mass of flame, alters even its gross shape from year to year. All component things change: even the elements—as I have long surmised—wear down. It becomes probable that there is but one ultimate substance, and doubtful if that substance be anything we mean by matter or by motion. Time and space are seen intellectually by philosophers, as they are realized experientially by mystics to be but forms of consciousness, moulds in which thought takes shape, but no part of that thought.
In such a destruction of our conventional conceptions, who is to say that the table is 'real', the mental concept excellence or the phantom God 'unreal'?
It should now be objected by the thoughtful that such criticism is purely destructive, that all things are reduced thereby to a common unreality. Accept this: abandon the metaphysical aspect: agree conventionally that the relative an unreal Ego has yet definite relations with the equally relative and unreal non-Ego, and let us seek in terms of common sense a reason for rejecting the comparative reality-value of the Centaur for that of the Cow. It is not a question of familiarity. The rare Ovis Poli is just as real as the sheep. It is not a question of permanence. The transitory dewdrop is as real as the granite. It is not a question of appeal to more than one sense, although this point deserves fuller exposition. Curious, when I come to set it down, that I cannot find any simple object that is recognizable by all five senses. Man himself, perhaps: but it is not the same quality of man (however much he may scream during the boiling) that can be both heard and tasted. Sight and touch seem allied and correspondent: so do smell and taste: but hearing stands apart. It is only by obscure ratiocination that one deduces the sound of a man's voice as caused by the visible and tangible organs of speech.
One may easily, however, find examples of things admittedly real which appeal to one sense only. Micro-organisms can only be seen, and then by a device: one might say, at second hand. Oxygen can only be detected in its reactions, and the same is true of nearly all gasses, the few exceptions being perceptible by either sight or smell, or sometimes by both these.
In fact, it would be true to go much further and say few really simple things are appreciable directly even by a single sense. Do we deny reality to the aether, or to the electric current?
When than a man comes to us and speaks of being pursued by hypnotic suggestions, or by electric waves, by what right do we certify him as insane?
By the very human right arising from our observation of his actions which render him unfit to be at large. We have found by constant experience that persons thus speaking may harm themselves or others. But this is relative, a matter of empirical expediency. It neither asks nor solves the question "Are these experiences of the patient real?" It matters nothing to us whether what he sees and hears is in the philosophical sense real or imaginary. We exhibit Potassium Bromide, and he sees and hears no more: we do not inquire whether what we have done is to destroy an image or to lower a veil.
Let us then consider for a moment the latter hypothesis. On what grounds do we judge the phantoms to be unreal? That they belong to another 'plane' is not here doubted: but is this plane in any important respect so different from our own?
"It is so wide, so vague, it obeys no law."
On the contrary, it is easy to classify phantoms. There is a sort of general division, firstly, into good, bad, and indifferent. The angel, the demon, and the elemental.
There is a well-defined class of animals exaggerated from normal experience perhaps mainly through fear. Such are the phang, the boar (as in Calydon), the basilisk, the roo, the dragon, the griffin.
There are minglings of man and beast; the satyr, the faun, the centaur, the minotaur, and their like.
There are personifications of human passion: the fury, the harpy, the pissacha, the ghoul; perhaps one might here include the succubus and incubus. Or relegate them to the next class, that of distorted personifications of observed phenomena, among which one would place the marut, the Will o' the wisp, and the siren.
There are poetic place-spirits: the oread, the noreid, the wood-nymph; possibly this class might be taken to include the fairy.
Again we have certain cousins of death: the banshee, the stryge, the lemur, the larva, and many other.
There is also a majestically comprehensive class of beings which apparently do little but fill the gaps of theological speculation.
Is this classification a destructive criticism? Is even the appropriateness and coherence of the image a sign that it is but poetry or parable?
It seems bad logic to attack a theory because it both transcends and complies with certain of the theories by which we set great store. It is true that the phenomena of nature are far more varied; and at first sight, more unexpected, so that each new sub-species is a wonder and surprise to its discoverer.
But this is an effect of ignorance; in chemistry, where we have gained some true insight into nature's laws, we have been able to predict unknown elements by periodicity, new compounds by hypothesizing a geometrical atomic structure (in such things as benzene) of which we have and can have no direct perception. If therefore one may to-day predict—I hereby formally do so—that lunatics will arise imagining themselves to be attacked by aeroplanes, is this a final proof of the unreality of what they fear? May it not be, at the very least, that that which persecutes them is a real thing, presented to their minds under the form of current and rational dreads? Nor is any argument based on the classification of phantoms valid, since no one pretends that we have a complete knowledge of the world of phantoms.
Nor is their correspondence—if proved, which it is not—with the normal phenomena of the mind of any value as evidence toward or rejection of their validity, since it may easily be riposted that only those phantoms which have a natural affinity for the mind be perceived thereby. It is clear that the aether, for example, having in its nature no attraction for any sense, cannot be imagined. It never was imagined; accordingly it came as the final term, the climax, so to speak, or a sorites of scientific speculation: it is a necessary postulate underlying observed facts, just as Euclid's postulates are necessary because we know by experience that his propositions are true. The aether is indeed a thing of exactly the same nature and quality as the hyle of the God of the philosophers and theologians of a past age. A merciful God, provident for Mankind, was necessary to account for the taste of corn and wine, for the desire of woman and her beauty, and for all good things and convenient for man; a vengeful God was necessary to account for suffering and death. The legend of the Creation was constantly being elaborated to fit new facts observed, new generalizations being accepted; and only when science, taking sudden strides, marched to fast for theology, was the fable exploded, and a new theory of Genesis required.
But to-day we put Aether in the place of God: for His impossible and irreconcilable attributes of Three-in-One, of Omnipotent and Omni-benevolent ruler of an evil world, we acquiesce in a substance at once infinitely rigid and infinitely tenuous, a conception equally unthinkable, equally impossibly in nature, equally contrary to all experience. More useful? To the abstruse calculations of science, yes. But for all the practical purposes of life, I think no. Not but what the old idea of God has wrought immeasurable evil, bringing fear and torment to thousands, being the apology of vice and tyranny to thousands more. But this is not our present concern; all we wish to do is to show the identity of quality between the conceptions of modern physics and mediaeval metaphysics. This being so in the ultimate, why not also in the mediate? If in the deduction, why not in the observation?
You can fix diatoms on a glass slide, and exhibit them at will; you cannot so fix ghosts. But then you cannot so fix shadows, or the rapture of spring winds, or—God and the poet know too well!—the thoughts of the mind. Yet each of these has unquestioned reality.
Is it the evidence of mankind that we require? We have schooled and scolded men into a belief in religion, so that today myriads of people who are verily atheists are ready to persecute others in its name, if not to die for it: and we have made it 'stupid' to dispute conclusions of 'science' which change yearly, and of which not one man in ten thousand is really in any proper sense aware.
But even now one could get far more people to testify to the Resurrection of Jesus Christ than to the quadrivalence of carbon. If we believe the latter dogma, not the former, it is because some few of the adherents of the latter could bring forward proofs of their belief, could, in fact, establish their case to such persons as were qualified to understand the evidence.
The argument for the reality of phantoms is not so strong: the phenomena are transitory. But we do not doubt the astronomer who reports a comet seen for a moment and never again: only his colleagues do that! There are two theories of phantasms of all kinds: one that they are images of no substance pictured by a diseased or disordered brain, or figured by a disturbed sense; the other, not necessarily denying the first, that they are images either true or pertaining to or reflections or refractions of true things.
The evidence of insanity and that of folk-lore have been briefly sketched above. There is admittedly a family likeness between delusions. There is a whole class of lunatics who fancy that they cannot eat, and have not eaten for years; another which pretends to royal or divine honour; a third which fears conspiracy manifested in diverse forms. The very natures of the Gods coalesce and blend, and the legend of the Flood is all but universal.
In sum, the ideas of the uncultured brain on the one hand and the diseased brain on the other, tend to fall into certain not very numerous classes.
Consider now the further evidence of mystics and of persons under the influence of drugs, both types that I have long and carefully studied.
I have succeeded in producing artificially the mystic trances in persons totally ignorant of the history and literature of the subject, that they spontaneously reproduce the exact language used by the mystics of history to describe their experiences. The Vision of the Creator, of the Personal God, of the Pantheos, of the No-God beyond that, and of the final Nothing, this being conceived as a positive making the previous gods negative: these have come successively and in the same order.
With such drugs as opium, hashish, and mescal I have found results strikingly similar. I even go so far as to perceive a certain consonance between Chinese art and Chinese opium visions, to mention one case, so that it might be maintained that the artist, so far from imagining dragons, was merely trying to paint the things he saw. However, this is a matter of smaller importance. My point must be that most brains, given the same stimulus, will agree on most points; that is, the mind if stimulated tends to perceive the same sort of things. (There is also a correlevalence in dreams of the irrational, e.g. the flying dream. But most dreams are rational, i.e. are distorted ideations either of proximate memories or of actualities of the slumber.)
If you take men to Switzerland they will tend to perceive mountains, and (alas!) Swiss. This fact is not held to militate against the reality of Swiss and mountains; but on the contrary, to establish it.
Now I have no wish to argue that the things which one tends to perceive, the ideas which one tends to formulate, are themselves real. That is another argument. The microscope may so distort perception that what we see as round may in reality be square. But it is probably something rather than nothing; whether or no there is any coherence between it and its representation in the mind. The application of a magnifying glass to a half-tone reproduction reveals an illusion indeed strange: one's razor-edge is a very saw under the microscope. One's sense of touch breaks up under examination; so far from being uniform, there are separate centres sensitive to pleasure and pain, to heat and cold. All that we perceive, when investigated in some subtler way, turns out to be very different from what our senses told us, and we have no guarantee of any finality of knowledge. Matter itself, we now again begin to think, has no substance, is but the name of a condition of strain and stress. But this is a matter of no import; something may be anything, but it is not nothing, or if so is a kind of nothing which must be defined in some new way.
It is then not only possible but probable that there is a certain kind—a very likely not the ordinary kind—of objectivity about all phantasmagoria, a real world of which they are the reflections. It is urgently desirable that a closer classification be attempted, a subtler analysis made, a more careful aetiology suggested, and above all a freer and less dangerous way into their world discovered.
In my ignorant and very limited way I have endeavoured to do this by the practice of what are (inconveniently enough) called 'astral visions.'
And of this one fact I am sure, that there is a real and immutable correspondence in thought between ideas and symbols which are not connected by rational trains of thought.
Some years ago I produced a slim volume called 777, in which I tabulated colours, perfumes, magical weapons, gods, demons, geometrical figures, names, numbers and so on, so that one could trace the correspondences (traditional for the most part) of any idea through almost all departments of Nature. Thus, one reads on line 6 Beauty, Sol, Clear pink rose, (Gold) yellow, Rich salmon, Gold amber, Asar (Osiris), Ra, Iacchus, Apollo, Adonis, Vishnu0Hari-Krishna-Rama, Phoenix, Lion, Child, Acacia, Bay, Laurel, Vine, Topaz, Christ, Olibanum, Stramonium, Alcohol, Digitalis, Coffee, the Mysteries of the Crucifixion, the Vision of the Harmony of Things, the Lamen or Rosy Cross, Calvary Cross, truncated Pyramid, Cube, etc. to about 200 times.
Now then I found that by burning the incense mentioned and perhaps making the experimenter imagine himself to be passing through a door marked with a star of the appropriate number of points, he would get a vision in which all the things seem corresponded to that perfume and that number.
This he would do although ignorant of the very existence of the book 777.
It is true that I know the proper correspondences; but if I communicated them to him, then is indeed telepathy established as a practical means of superseding speech; the alternative is to admit not only the accuracy of the traditional correspondences, and thus incidentally vindicating the theories of such people as Paracelsus, but the objectivity of the ideas which correspond.
I may say that I do this experiment with such success and so frequently that even partial failure is almost distressing; and with the majority of people I obtain convincing results even on the first trial.
And yet I must conclude thus: I am but a crude and ignorant experimenter; I have but partially opened this
Yet I have heard the song and learnt the secret of the nightingale; and who offers his breast to the thorn may follow boldly and firmly in the path which I have trod but timidly and with ataxic gait to a goal in which the Reality of phenomena of whatever kind shall no longer be a subject for any conceivable discussion.
Perdurabo.
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