Psychical Miscellanea
Being Papers on
Psychical Research, Telepathy,
Hypnotism, Christian Science, etc.

BY
J. ARTHUR HILL
Author of “Psychical Investigations,” “Man is a Spirit,”
“Spiritualism; Its History, Phenomena and Doctrine,” etc.

NEW YORK:
HARCOURT, BRACE & HOWE,
1920

Printed in England

PREFACE

Many friends and correspondents have suggested that I should republish a number of articles which have appeared from time to time in various quarters. The present volume brings these articles together, with some which have not appeared before.

Each chapter is complete in itself, but there is more or less connexion, for each deals with some aspect of the subject to which I have given most attention during the last twelve years—namely, psychical research.

I thank the editors of the Holborn Review, National Review, World’s Work, and Occult Review for permission to republish articles which have appeared in their pages.

J. A. H.
Thornton,
Bradford.

CONTENTS

Psychical Miscellanea

DEATH

Our feelings with regard to the termination of our earthly existence are remarkably varied. In some people, there is an absolutely genuine and strong desire for cessation of individual consciousness, as in the case of John Addington Symonds. Probably, however, this is met with only in keenly sensitive natures which have suffered greatly in this life. Such unfortunate people are sometimes constitutionally unable to believe in anything better than cessation of their pain. Anything better than that is “too good to be true”, so much too good that they hardly dare wish for it. Others, who have had a happy life, naturally desire a continuance of it, and are therefore eager, like F. W. H. Myers, for that which Symonds dreaded. Others, again, and these are probably the majority, have no very marked feeling in the matter; like the good Churchman in the story, they hope to enter into everlasting bliss, but they wish you would not talk about such depressing subjects. This seems to suggest that they have secret qualms about the reality of the bliss. Perhaps they have read Mark Twain’s Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven, and, though inexpressibly shocked by that exuberant work, are nevertheless tinged with a sneaking sympathy for its hero, who found the orthodox abode of the blest an unbearably dull place. The harp-playing in particular was trying, and he had difficulty in managing his wings.

Anyhow, these people avoid the subject. As Emerson says somewhere, religion has dealings with them three times in their lives: when they are christened, when they are married, and when they are buried. And undoubtedly its main appeal is in the period prior to this third formality, if they happen to have a longish illness. The rich Miss Crawley, in Vanity Fair, is typical of many. In days of health and good spirits, this venerable lady had “as free notions of religion and morals as Monsieur de Voltaire himself could desire”; but when she was in the clutches of disease, and even though in the odour of sanctity, so to speak—for she was nursed by Mrs Reverend Bute Crawley, who hoped for the seventy thousand pounds if she could keep Rawdon and Becky off the doorstep—even with this spiritual advantage she was in much fear, and “an utter cowardice took possession of the prostrate old sinner.”

Well, let those laugh who will. As for me, I have great sympathy with Miss Crawley. Probably those who laugh, or are contemptuous of such cowardice, are people who have not yet come to close quarters with death—have not looked him, as the French say, in the white of the eyes. Let them wait until that happens. If they come back after that rencontre, they will be a little more tolerant of the cowardice of those whom they called weaker brethren.

Fear of death may be divided into classes, according to its cause, i.e., the intellectual state out of which it seems to arise. It may be due to the expectation of physical suffering; or, as in such cases as Cowper’s and Dr Johnson’s, to expectation of what may happen after death, in that undiscovered country from which Hamlet said no traveller returned, though he had just been talking with his father’s ghost, piping hot—as Goldsmith has it in his Essay on Metaphor—from Purgatory. In my own case, I think the fear is a little of both. And I admit that in both directions the fear is irrational. As to the physical part, it is probable that when my