GERMAN PHILOSOPHERS AND MAGNETIC PH ENOMEN A.
WHAT ought to be the attitude of candid and reasonable men towards the class of phenomena of what, adapting Madame de Steel's expression, we may call the "night-side of Nature," has long been doubtful, and of late has become especially perplexing. The credulity that ofttimes masks itself under the Shakespearian quotation, "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy," is only less irrational than the hard dogmatic disbelief common to the scientific mind. It is surely evident that however much we may confide in the regularity of the ordinary course of nature, which means the order wherein it has been customary to observe the occurrence of things, there must be a point at which the accumulated testimony of credible witnesses will, and ought to, justify belief in the most abnormal events. Unless we are able to lay down a priori laws as absolutely necessary and universal, we are forced to admit that there may be such an amount of evidence for the most irregular and seemingly incredible occurrences as must be valid. Those who decline to allow this, acting on the theory of Hume with more stringency than that thinker would have ever practised except where the interests of the Christian religion were concerned, are bound to let as know what those irreversible and never-varying canons
of the actual are, which outweigh and always must outweigh the most forcible testimony of experience. Yet, as they can only them- selves be founded upon experience, and every observed order of phe- nomena rests upon what is known by us in experience as customary and common, a conflict of experiences is the inevitable issue ; because there is a possible or conceivable amount of testimony which it would be utterly contrary to and inconsistent with all precedent observation of facts to believe to be either designedly false or unconsciously deceived. It is therefore impossible to find any general rule or regulation applicable in such cases. Never- theless, it would obviously be of advantage to be in possession of a theory which in any way, not wholly irrational, would enable us to admit the possibility of such phenomena as are brought under notice in connection with magnetism, and, later, of spiritualism ; for the two are evidently akin. In the hope that we may perhaps contribute towards this end, we shall here briefly indicate the attitude and the views regarding such occurrences of the two great German thinkers, Schelling and Hegel.
Those who remember the keen interest with which in our own country the late Sir William Hamilton investigated mesmeric and magnetic phenomena will not be surprised to learn that the philo- sophers we have named were far from being indifferent to them. In the case of Schelling, the fact will doubtless to many seem only natural. For was he not all his life something of a mystic, and in his later years was he not altogether given up to unin- telligible speculations in theogony and theosophy ? His brother Charles made magnetic experiments a special subject of research and study, and he himself, with his vast but vague generaliza- tions in his " Naturphilosophie," always attributed the highest value and importance to magnetism. With Hegel, however, it might have been supposed it would be different. There was no love for or tendency towards mysticism in his rigidly rational nature. His life was devoted to systematic effort to explain and elucidate all facts and laws in the light of a precise, though often excessively rarified and refined logic, in which the lines of thought sometimes seem to disappear altogether. The dimness and mystery of feeling itself, from its lowest to its loftiest manifestations, were translated by Hegel into terms of philosophical thought. Surely, then, it might be fancied, the absurdities of clairvoyance and somnambulism, the follies and pretensions of visionaries claiming capacities of "second sight," power to annihilate space and time and to know the distant and the future, together with the whole brood of crude and repulsive deceptions resultant from animal magnetism, must be disowned and denounced by the apostle of absolute idealism, if he should ever refer to them at all. The facts, however, are otherwise. Schelling has indeed in many of his works expounded principles that may easily be employed in explanation of magnetic phenomena. And in one, at least, of his later works he has incidentally spoken of the magnetic sleep in terms that exhibit the very great moment attached by him to such states. But it is Hegel who, as is his wont, seta himself, after a quite systematic fashion, to explain all such occurrences and incidents, accepting as real the most extraordinary facts of the kind alleged to have taken place. While three or four pages in his " Weltalter " are all Schelling directly devotes to the subject, we have about forty pages of HegePs " Philosophie des Geistes " entirely occupied with a classi- fication of the several kinds of remarkable phenomena of this character, which he seeks also to explain in harmony with his own philosophical views.
To Schelling the human spirit was a veritable battle-field on which the struggles of the most terrible forces of the universe were fought out. While there was a lower power of selfneas tending to drag man down, there was also in him a higher power inciting him to rise to the possession of an ever fuller freedom in harmony with the Universal Will. Only by separating himself from himself, by, as it were, developing himself out of himself, could man attain the greatest spiritual elevation to which he was called, and which was indeed his birthright. Only thereby could he restore the Jacob's ladder of heavenly forces by which he might ascend to the true home of his spirit. In nature, as in spirit, there are forces that operate alike in the constitution of what is external to man and within his own physical system, and it is by the subordination of some of these and the elevation of others, that that separation or " crisis " is brought about by which the highest order is ensured and disorganization excluded. It is because the more external force has obtained the mastery that man is subjected to pain, and its suppression or subordination occasions, on the other hand, that com- plete painlessness and that feeling of delight which accompany the separation referred to. Sleep is the outer appearance or
manifestation of this "crisis," and, in the view of Schelling, the magnetic sleep is nothing but an intensification of the ordinary. In the magnetic, he says, there are three grades or steps of the inner life, in each of which the spirit is freed from the limits of matter, and (though in differing degrees) is brought in contact with the spiritual nature which is the root and the source of all harmony and health, or by still greater intensification of the spiritual element in man, is made to discern the hidden things of its own inner essence. There is a third grade, says Schelling, which must be sought in relations lying beyond the ordinary human, and regarding which he cautiously adds it is better to be silent at present. He deems it possible, however, for the human spirit to obtain insight into the deepest essence of sutural objects and existences, but reserves further explanations of these "great secrets" to another occasion, —which never came.
In this somewhat mystical and mysterious manner does Schelling indicate a belief in the capacity of the human spirit, in certain states or conditions, to penetrate to the heart and hidden roots of existence, and to gain experiences by means of the magnetic sleep of a higher stage of spiritual enlightenment than is usually attained on earth. Hegel is here and on these points more in- telligible, and grapples with his subject with more thoroughness of purpose. To him the facts of animal magnetism in modern times have made manifest in actual experience "the substantial unity of the soul and the might of its ideality," and have greatly belped to dissipate the notion that the spirit can only cognize under the conditions of the laws or categories of the logical under- standing,—that is, in the relations of cause and effect, and under the forms of space and time. Instead, however, of regarding the magnetic condition as an elevation of the common life of the self-conscious spirit, as Schelling did, to Hegel it was much more a =state of sickness, a retrogression or sinking down of the spirit below the state of ordinary consciousness, inasmuch as in the magnetic state the spirit surrenders its own self-active thought to nature. And yet in the phenomena of magnetism he believed there was a release of the spirit from the limitations of space and time, and from all merely external or finite interconnections in which there was something in affinity with philosophy, since by actual facts it confounded the scepticism of the logical under- standing. And it is only to speculative philosophy that magne- tism is no unintelligible and inconceivable mystery.
In proceeding to remark in more detail upon the strange facts brought to light by magnetism, Hegel flings a passing sneer at those who, firmly fixed in their a priori understanding, will neither believe the testimony of others nor their own experience, because (he says) they are imprisoned within the categories of the understanding, or the lower and merely logical thinking. 'The characteristics of the magnetic condition he seeks to make clear by analogy. Just as there is sickness in the body when any one organ asserts its own individual independence by ceasing to .contribute to the harmony of the whole individual life, so also is there sickness of the soul when the merely psychical element of the organism, freeing itself from the authority of the spiritual con- sciousness, claims to exercise the functions of the latter. Then occurs the separation of the psychical from the objective (healthy) consciousness to which the world is always an external, manifold, and necessarily interconnected whole, of which we have knowledge through definite organs of sense. When the separation takes place, knowledge becomes possible after a purely subjective manner, and the phenomena of vision are, for in- stance, recognized without the mediation of the eye and of light. This kind of immediate knowledge, or perception by feeling alone, is -of many kinds. There are men, for instance, says Hegel, who have been able to discover the localities of hidden metals or of water by means of feeling. Then there is the state of somnambulism in which the sleep-walker sees, though the eye is fixed and rigid, the soul operating with undivided force only in and through the sense of feeling. Thirdly, there is the state of vision of things far dis- tant in space and future in time, for space is a property of ex- ternal nature, and not of the soul, and when consciousness sinks clown to the condition of the merely feeling or sensitive soul, the subject is no longer in bondage to either space or time. In con- nection with this point, Hegel instances the "second sight" of the Scottish Highlanders as a prophetic faculty, in whose reality he entirely believes. In the fourth state, which is attained in magnetic somnambulism, there is a recognition of the condition and experiences of another's individuality, as if it were one's own ; and in the fifth and highest degree of inwardliness and intensity, the subject knows not only of, but in another, sees and feels all that affects the other as if it were his own experience. All these phenomena, though occurring sometimes naturally, may also be
induced of set purpose, and in that case we have animal mag- netism proper. The characteristic of both is, however, the same ; there is a gulf or breach between the psychical and the waking being of the individual, between the sensitive natural life and the mediating intellectual consciousness, and the former seeks to discharge the functions appropriate to the latter, in consequence of which the individual ceases to have power to resist any external influence, and becomes entirely subject to it. The person magnetized therefore descends into his own natural life, and beholds his individual world no longer outside, but inside of himself. His own intellectual consciousness also then becomes to him as that of another person. We may add that Hegel asserts strongly his belief in the cures performed through animal magnetism, of which he says there have been in modern times so many testified to by men worthy of all credit, that it is impossible to doubt the fact of its healing force.
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