" LEVITATION."
AN old lady, a former acquaintance of the present writer, was once heard to reiterate with much emphasis, during the cold ablutions of her little grandson, under the more modern nursery discipline of his mother,—" More I'd be so cruel, I'd fly up F th' air." At that time, the so-called modern phenomenon of " Levitation" had not become generally known to the English public, but it has often occurred to us since, that possibly the old lady in question was one of the subjects of this mysterious phenomenon, and that she might perhaps, on more than one occasion, have escaped the performance of irksome or, as she thought, cruel duties, by an aerial journey of the kind which the Quarterly Journal of Science, of this month, attributes to Dr. Monck, of Bristol,—it was performed last year from Bristol to Swindon, to Mrs. Guppy from Holloway to Lamb's Conduit Street, to Mr. Henderson from Holloway to Hig,hbury, and to Mr. Home on various occasions and for shorter dis- tances. However, it may perhaps be doubted whether the oppo- site mode of assimilating the psychological experience of the lady in question to that of the modern " wthrobats " may not be equally plausible,—i.e., whether Dr. Monck, Mrs. Guppy, Mr. Henderson, and Mr. Home did not " levitate " mentally rather than physically,—i.e., without following their own imagina- tions up into the aerial spaces, whither they had flown under the repulsion caused by some such revulsion of feeling against the hardness of earthly conditions as the lady to whom we referred evidently experienced. That there is a very common experience which might properly be called mental levitation, the believers in physical levitation seem to us to demonstrate, and it is of course natural to inquire whether the supposed physical phenomenon is more than what the late Dr. Strauss defined as a myth,—a myth in the sense of a fiction representing the crystallisation of the psychological experience to which we are now referring. What we mean by mental levitation is the habit of throwing out the ballast of legitimate evidence till the mind appears to soar in the Tightest and most ambitious way through spaces which it is not ordi- narily possible for us to traverse, bringing back as serious theories conjectures which are hardly worth even the attention of a moment. Now what strikes most persons in considering such statements as Mr. Alfred Wallace's nine months ago in the Fortnightly, and those of the writer of the present article in the Quarterly Journal of Science, is, that, in spite of the indisputable scientific originality and power of the former, and the obvious subtlety of the latter, both writers betray a striking deficiency of judgment for the appreciation of evidence in the course of the very papers in which they array the evidence which is meant to convince us. They are guilty of a large amount of mental "levitation," and show them- selves, in the largest sense, intellectual " mthrobats " in the very essays which are offered to persuade us of the facts of physical levitation and of the existence of physical " mthrobats." We pointed out last April, for instance, that Mr. Wallace pronounced the most wonderful panegyric on the eloquent spiritual teachings of " mediums " of whose utterly stilted and unmeaning ver- biage we gave our readers some specimens, and we could not help doubting the calmness of a judgment which was evidently so intoxicated with the class of marvels with which it had been dealing, that it could seriously see beauty and power in tall talk of the rubbishiest, the most vulgar, and the most ungrammatical description. Now we must make a criticism of the same kind on the obviously very subtle writer of the article on " Human Levitation," in the new number of the Quarterly Journal of Science. We agree entirely with the main principles of that article. It seems to us utterly illogical to assume that we know all the secrets of Nature so well that a new set of facts, for which there is any considerable body of evidence, ought to be set aside as incredible simply because they do not fit into the very limited niches of our existing knowledge. If that had been the case in former times, instead of investigating the laws of magnetism and electricity, we should have rejected the attraction of a loadstone for iron filings, or of a bit of well - rubbed amber for little bits of paper, without examining into it, on the principle that the facts were inconsistent with the known attraction of the earth. No one could put the futility of the assumption that we can discriminate whether an asserted event could or could not arise from natural causes, better than the writer of this article, and no one has ever answered the views of those who declare that Prayer cannot possibly affect any physical event without transgressing the laws of nature, better than this writer. Let us give one specimen of his acuteness :— " Dr. Tyndall," he says, "lays down as ' science ' the gratuitous paradox that winds and clouds of to-morrow may be, like the planetary motions, predetermined by only brute cosmic forces; which, if as true as it is demonstrably false, would not even then give the fixity he wants, as the planetary system itself is invaded at any moment by unknowable comets and meteors, and solar radiation hourly altered by storms of the photosphere. He requires, at the outset of his attack, all the pre- sent century's discoveries to be ignored. But let us grant him a solar system as simple as mediaeval ignorance ever fancied ; this would not help him. Yonder is a gardener, who may dig twenty more spadefuls before dinner, or perhaps only nineteen. Is Dr. Tyndall prepared to prove that whether they shall be twenty or nineteen is already as de- termined, by laws of brute matter, as the next transit of Venus ? If not, he should have warned his readers that the whole Prayer argument was a mere feu d'esprit, hanging on the assumption of this extreme necessarianism. Relax one stitch thereof, and the whole fabric falls, thus :—If there be any uncertainty about that twentieth spadeful, on this may depend whether a slug is turned up or not ; on the slug may depend a young swallow's dinner who is feeble, and on this may depend whether he shall follow his colony, and reach Africa ; but on this fledgling's arrival or non-arrival may depend whether a certain insect shall serve him for supper, or be left to lay a million eggs, which, in that case, will next month be each a locust laying a million more - and on thi.i billion of locusts and their progeny may depend whether at Christmas all Ashantee and three Senegambias of forest shall be green as Eden or a leafless wilderness, and its mean temperature 100° or only 700; and on whether such an area be the hottest or coolest portion of the planet's intertropical lands may well depend, by Dr. Tyndall's own showing, the winds and drought or wet of a season, over half Europe or the whole. It behoved him, then, to be quite sure about that gardener's last spadeful, and all such causes, which yet he wholly leaves out of account! The weather of large districts may as plainly be still more quickly affected by events that acts of man or beast unconsciously bring about—as forest fires ; avalanches that a goat may set rolling ; dykes burst, and Zuyder Zees refilled for ages by the burrowing of a rat ; shoals of herrings or of whales that by turning right or left may make a month's difference in the break-up and drifting to us of half a year's polar ice. Here we confine ourselves to visible nature and known forces. Lot the insane assumption be granted that there is no invisible nature nor aught unknown, and even so, He that owns and
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actuates the cattle on a thousand hills, might thus plainly, by only one of their hoofs, make the winds his ministers, and flames of fire his messengers."
Now, that strikes us as exceedingly true and acute, and if all were like that, we should perhaps have been disposed to take for granted that the writer attached the due weight to evidence, as the proper criterion of belief, in relation to questions of fact ; and that when very strange facts, certainly wholly unparalleled in the experience (say) of 9,999 out of every 10,000 educated persons, were asserted, his sifting of the evidence for such facts would be much stricter and more exhaustive than it ought to be in the case of facts paralleled in his own experience in the belief (say) of one person in every ten. But the essayist takes care to furnish us with very good evidence that this is not at all the case. Thus he actually builds up a conjectural history of Christ's temp- tation on the joint foundation of this supposed fact of "levitation" and that of a silly legend of the fifth century, or possibly earlier, that Judas was himself the tempter,—(the writer, who holds the theory of metempsychosis, apparently believes Judas to be one of the later incarnations of the Angel of Evil),—that the scene on the pinnacle of the Temple was not a vision, but a real scene, in which both Christ and Judas were exhibiting their power of "levitation," and that the object of Judas was to make Christ cast himself down, and so kill himself. To this historical inter- pretation of a wild piece of legend, the essayist evidently attaches real value, and goes on to suggest that Christ chose the top of a mountain for his transfiguration because it was easier for Moses and Elijah to re-embody themselves there than it would
have been in the lower atmosphere, and illustrates his view by the supposed facts of the like embodiments of the various departed members of " the Eddy family in Vermont." Now, surely this sort of wild nonsense is a fair test of the charac- ter of the evidence which the writer requires for justifying a belief. He believes strenuously that John the Baptist was Elijah re-embodied in the flesh, on the strength of our Lord's obviously metaphorical assertion, " if ye will receive it, this is Elias which was to come,"—by which he means, of course, not that John the Baptist was Elias, but that he was another Elias, and would fulfil the functions of the forerunner,—otherwise he would never have used the phrase, "If ye will receive it." Now, what we ask is, How can any one help seeing that this sort of wild speculation makes against the scientific judgment of the writer, and that no man in his senses who was inquiring into questionable and improbable assertions, would attach much im- portance to the judgment of a scientific man who can indulge in such caprices of speculative conjecture as this, and evidently lay store by them as highly probable, not to say true.
The plain truth is, that men who, far from adopting, earnestly reject the principle that nothing can be accepted as true except what is in keeping with the laws of Nature hitherto discovered, are yet prevented from seriously inquiring into the extraordinary statements made by the Spiritualists by two distinct causes. One is, that those who accept these beliefs seem to accept such monstrously absurd and superfluous conjectures as part of their beliefs, that their scientific judgment is at once discredited, and put, as it were, out of Court for the purpose of attesting any new and very marvellous statement. Mr. Crookes, the editor of the Quarterly Journal of Science, is himself unquestionably, in his own sphere, a thoroughly -scientific man. His researches into the atomic weight of Thal- lium, for instance, and his recent experiments on the effect of heat acting through a vacuum, have been as good as any of their class :of recent years. Yet here is Mr. Crookes allowing an essay to appear in a professedly scientific journal edited by himself, wherein not only is no one fact of the asserted " levitation " proved by the testimony of witnesses of the proper kind,—witnesses of whose calmness of temperament and accuracy the world knows something,—but the flights through the air of Mrs. Guppy, Dr. Monck, and others, are announced as historical data upon which to build the most grotesque conceivable constructions of the mere hints of Gospel history,—nay, in which the -truth of the doctrine of metempsychosis is also assumed as another of the fruits of the new Spiritualists' lore. Surely this is playing with Science. That, if one good fact of levitation could be established, a vast number of doubtful stories about the Saints would seem likely to come under
t he same law, whatever that law might be, is obvious enough. But to treat the fact as scientifically established when probably no physicist in the United Kingdom, except Mr. Crookes,—who is more a chemist than a physicist,—would accept it, and then to build upon it the most violent conjectures as to the most doubtful fragments of history, is surely to invite people to say that the believers in the new creed are not men serious enough or calm enough in their judgment to deserve that their assertions should be even seriously investigated.
The second cause of legitimate distrust is this,—that so many men who are anxious to sift the evidence, if evidence be forthcoming, are excluded from these wonderful seances, or if admitted, ad- mitted only to seances which prove failures. Ws know by our own experience that people who are ready to believe are invited, when people who are only ready to inquire, but not to believe with- out adequate and convincing evidence, are kept at a distance, and only supplied with second-hand attestations. While these things are so, even the high scientific character of the Quarterly Journal of Science will not gain serious consideration for the facts of "levita- tion " and the asserted phenomena which accompany levitation. Rather will it be said that wise men are apt to write like fools, directly they come to subject their minds to the contagious in- fluence of this rapidly growing body of ill-attested physical and spiritual marvels.
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