understanding.' There is no doubt whatever that to the average man of the day, whose reading is confined to the newspaper and the finelychopped and hashed-up contents of the popular magazine, all great poetry, music, fine art, and religion, is as a sealed book. The proof of this is that anything above mediocrity is scarcely ever presented to him. For him the book of life remains closed. In his firmament there are no stars; only the lamps in the streets and the footlights of the music hall. And even these lose their poetry (so cleverly revealed by the muse of Arthur Symons) when he looks upon them. The great majority of men move from the enchanted garden of passion into the toilsome pilgrimage of after-life, and find too late that they have forgotten to bring with them the talisman of romance, the talisman which in its myriad forms is the safeguard against ennui and dryness of spirit. To those who have not yet lost all sensitiveness of temper, in whom feeling is not yet petrified, the seer, the artist, and the poet come, and from their own abundant stores of invention, make up what is lacking in others. But there is a time beyond which such repentance is impossible. Prof. James says that the ideas which a man gets before he is twenty-five have to serve him throughout life. To those for whom the fatal hour has tolled and tolled too soon, nothing remains but to tread the earth for the rest of their tale of years, phantoms in the guise of men.

CHAPTER X

PROPHECY AND INSPIRATION

Inspiration higher than symbolism-Ecstasy and prophecy-The spiritualistic trance-Obsession by ideas-" Speaking with tongues"-Vision and prophecy-Parable and thought-Feeling and insight-Prophecy and prediction-Savonarola-His visions and trances-Exegesis-Prophecies-As statesmanCromwell as prophet-Religious enthusiasm as opposed to liberty and freethinking.

WE

E have vindicated the normal character of certain kinds of vision, and also the validity of the symbolic method. Some of those who have come thus far, may have done so with a certain repugnance, as though it was dangerous -and indeed it is to leave even for a short time the solid ground of common experience. In fact this temporary journey into the mysterious only becomes permissible when the soul is dominated by ideas which flow from the central body of truth, or in other words, which contribute to express that ideal which is drawing the world to itself. For it is to be remembered that the intellectual ideal is not yet fully expressed, any more than the moral ideal is yet fully realised. The proportions of the different parts of the whole system of truth do not reveal themselves

to the analytical method. And, therefore, just as the preferences of certain minds lay down canons of moral judgment to which the rest of mankind feel more or less bound to conform, so in the intellectual world certain souls reach heights of insight from which everything is seen, not under the more or less accidental and transitory aspects of the actual, but, in Spinoza's phrase, under the form of eternity. It is not essential that these men should express themselves under the forms of vision or of symbol, though there is a certain propriety sometimes in the use of these means. But such inspiration reaches its highest forms in those who have risen above symbol and parable to the direct communication of the truth. Jesus is not only the master of the symbol and the parable. He is also one who speaks in the most explicit manner possible. Take, for instance, His saying: "God is a spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth." There is no doubt of His meaning when He sets out thus to make statements in the ordinary forms of speech. It is only so far as vision and symbol rise ultimately into this clearness of utterance that prophecy really comes to its own-the "forth-speaking" of that which is seen.

The ecstatic states, therefore, into which some persons fall are so far from being the natural accompaniments of prophecy, that in themselves they tend to discredit the prophetic gift so far as we understand by that gift the vision of things

"under the form of eternity."

At the same time

spiritualist mediums exhibit a prophetic gift of a lower order. (It is not the fact of inspiration that is interesting, but what the prophet is inspired to say. Some persons drivel by a kind of inspiration.) I cannot do better than quote the description given by Prof. James who has a right to be heard on what was in its origin an American product : "Mediumistic possession in all its grades seems to form a perfectly natural special type of alternate personality, and the susceptibility to it in some form is by no means an uncommon gift in persons who have no other obvious nervous anomaly. The phenomena are very intricate and are only just beginning to be studied in a proper scientific way. The lowest phase of mediumship is automatic writing, and the lowest grade of that is where the Subject knows what words are coming but feels impelled to write them as if from without. Then comes writing unconsciously, even whilst engaged in reading or talk. Inspirational speaking, playing on musical instruments, etc., also belong to the relatively lower phases of possession in which the normal self is not excluded from participation in the performance though their initiative seems to come from elsewhere. In the highest phase the trance is complete, the voice, language, and everything are changed, and there is no after memory whatever until the next trance One curious thing about trance utterance is their generic similarity in different individuals.

comes.

The 'control'

here in America is either

a

grotesque, slangy, and flippant personage (Indian 'controls' calling the ladies 'squaws,' the men 'braves,' the house a 'wigwam,' are excessively common), or if he ventures on higher flights he abounds in a curiously vague optimistic philosophy-and-water, in which phrases about spirit, harmony, beauty, law, progression, development, etc., keep recurring. It seems exactly as if one author composed more than half the trance messages, no matter by whom they are uttered. Whether all subconscious selves are peculiarly susceptible to a certain stratum of the Zeitgeist, and get their inspiration from it, I know not, but this is obviously the case with the secondary selves which become developed in spiritualist circles. There the beginnings of the medium trance are indistinguishable from those of hypnotic suggestion. The subject assumes the rôle of a medium simply because opinion expects it of him under the conditions which are present, and carries it out with a feebleness or vivacity proportionate to his histrionic gifts." 1

Now on this description I wish to offer a few remarks. First, it seems to me that the alternation of personality is a phrase which goes beyond the minimum amount of hypothesis which, by the principle of Parsimony, we ought to employ. If we assume that the subject is susceptible to hypnotic suggestion, the cases seem to consist in 1 Textbook of Psychology, 213.