Very rum
Christopher Booker
Natural and Supernatural: A History of the Paranormal Brian Inglis (Hodder and Stoughton 0.95) Surely the whole world of paranormal phenomena — from ghoulies and ghosties to telepathy and dreams about Derby winners — is the best practical joke ever played on mankind. A week or two ago, under the headline 'The Frightening Truth Society Dares Not Admit', Bernard Levin gave an ecstatic pre-publication puff for this alleged 'historical survey' of the subject by his friend Brian Inglis, pouring elaborate scorn on the minority of diehard rationalists who simply refuse to admit that this dimension of human experience exists at all. And of course he is right that the determination of such people to accept no evidence for paranormal activity at all is of some pathological interest.
But the real point is not that the paranormal keeps the out-and-out sceptics baffled, but that it keeps us all baffled. As an intrusion of the inexplicable into everyday mundane reality, we are none of us sure precisely how far we are prepared to accept the existence of poltergeists, levitation, pre-cognitive dreams and all the rest. They sit on the edge of our consciousness like a perpetual tease. And as for reducing this dimension of human experience to any kind of scientific laws or explanations, the 'believers' are in their own way driven into just as much of a brick wall as the sceptics — from Sir William Crookes, onetime President of the Royal Society, who spent decades at the end of the nineteenth century in the most painstaking investigation of spiritualist phenomena (without getting anywhere at all), through poor old J. B. Rhine, and those endless telepathic experiments with cards bearing squiggles and triangles, right up to the Russian and American scientists who in the sixties spent countless thousands of pounds vainly searching for a way to train the crews of nuclear submarines to communicate telepathically with their bases back on shore.
An Everest of evidence has been accumulated to show that most of these strange phenomena exist — that there is something very rum, in the way of an 'extra-sensory dimension' beyond our obvious sense of physical reality, pervading the world. But as to how it works and what it represents, where it comes from and what it means, we are scarcely an inch further on than we were in the days of Plotinus, Porphyry and St Augustine when these things were first, as it were, called into scientific or philosophic question.
One thing that does seem to be clear is that in what is called 'the childhood of man kind', our primitive forebears (pace Laurens van der Post's Bushmen) were more at home with this extra-sensory dimension than we have become in the past two hundred, or even two thousand years. For primitive man it appears that his relationship to the world, sensory and extrasensory, is like a seamless web. It seems just as natural for him to 'know' that a friend has died fifty miles away as it does to perceive the same event taking place with his eyes. His sense of the 'one-ness' of the world, of the unity of inner and outer realities, of the relativity of time and space, seems so much more complete than our own that one can only suppose that a grasp of the paranormal is a survival of the astonishing extra-sensory capacities of birds and animals, which have become increasingly lost through the differentiation of human consciousness. As civilisation has advanced, so have the various psychic functions — rational intellect, intuition, the senses — become increasingly split off from one another, finally leaving our capacity for extra-sensory perception twitching like a half-forgotten psychic appendix, obstinately refusing to go away, to leave us to our tidy, rational little view of the universe, and yet yielding no consistent meaning whatever.
To justify such extravagant claims as Mr Levin's — that this is 'an extraordinarily important and valuable work' — Brian Inglis's historical survey would really have to show how the decay of paranormal powers has apparently matched the growth of our other mental faculties, and the development (much too one-sided) of other ways in which we we construe the world within us and around us. He would, in effect, have to have written a kind of 'psychic history' of the human race, taking particular account of the rise of the postCartesian belief that everything can be seen strictly in terms of, preferably physical, cause and effect. (the last major Western philosopher to allow for `synchromatics' was Leibniz.) Admittedly the first 130 or so pages of Mr Inglis's book — in which he takes us on a brisk scamper through nineteenth-century reports on shamanism, firewalking and clairvoyance among primitive tribes, and then on through the Judaeo-Christian scriptures, the classical world and the Middle Ages — do read like the preliminary notes for quite an interesting survey of the subject. But as one snippet succeeds another — witchcraft, the nuns of Loudun, Nostradamus — the book veers dangerously towards a mere Reveille-style 'Believe It Or Not' anthology. And from the eighteenthcentury, and the arrival of Mesmer, it col lapses for its final three hundred pages into nothing more than a laborious plod through the already extremely well-ploughed ground of the attempts of nineteenthcentury rationalism to come to terms (its own terms) with hypnotism, table-turning and above all spiritualism. The Fox sisters, William Dunglass Hume (who perplexed and delighted Victorian London for twenty years with his acts of levitation and mysterious rappings), Florence Cook, are yet again wheeled on for inspection without arlY new illumination. Just why the High Victorians (from. Dickens to Darwin) should have become so obsessed with spiritualism, at the very moment when belief in a divine supernatural order was being abandoned (very often by the same people), is clearly a fascinating field for disciplined speculation. Among the founding fathers of the SocietY for Psychical Research were three wellknown Cambridge agnostics, one of whom, Myers, in 1871 asked another, the moral philosopher Sidgwick, 'whether he thought that when Tradition, Intuition, Metaphysic had failed to solve the riddle of the Universe, there was still a chance that from any actual observable phenomena — ghosts, spirits, whatever there might be — some valid knowledge might be drawn as to a world unseen.' There is something indescribably poignant (reminiscent of Arnold's Dover Beach) about these high-minded rationalists, no longer able to accept the existence of God, but somehow hoping to find an answer to 'the riddle of the universe' in things that go bump in the night, and the meaningless babbling of spirit mediums (a poignance only increased by the knowledge that in its nearly one hundred years of existence, the Society for Psychical Research has come up with nothing conclusive whatever).
But here, on the same note of inde terminacy, Inglis himself more or less ends his story. Despite hints that he may pursue his investigation into the twentieth century with a second volume (Uri Geller's spoons, J. B. Rhine's cards, presumably the Nikolaiev-Kamensky experiments of the
Sixties — it is interesting that the Russians have gone so big on the paranormal), one is
left with little hope that Volume Two will offer any more enlightenment than the first. Quite apart from the lack of sparkle in the prose, Inglis simply does not seem to have been able to lever himself up to a sufficiently Olympian point of perspective
over his material — above all, on the rela
tionship between the place given by society to the paranormal and prevailing philosophical and spiritual attitudes (why, for instance, did the decay of belief in the supernatural seem to coincide with the emergence of the occult in fiction — e.g. the Gothic novel, the ghost story?). I could not disagree more with Bernard Levin when he claims that acceptance of the paranormal will in itself help one to accept the existence of 'a transcendent reality', a 'force that might make sense of everything', a sense that the universe might indeed be run according to some hidden pattern and purpose. If one does accept those things, then indeed many of the phenomena commonly described as paranormal may also take their subordinate place as part of a meaningful (if Still infinitely mysterious) supra-physical dimension to human existence. But so long as study of the paranormal is regarded as an end in itself (as the Society for Psychical Research, Dr Rhine and others have deitionstrated to the nth degree), then these phenomena remain random, enigmatic and ultimately (because they are separated from meaning) very boring. Which, give or take the odd epithet for courtesy's sake, is my verdict on Mr Inglis's book.
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