Part 19

Furthermore, the scientific investigation of these phenomena is no longer precisely in its infancy. Science has at least got so far as to have invented a terminology, by means of which one can express oneself respectably on the subject. What I saw were “telekinetic” phenomena, phenomena of motion at a distance. This particular medium, young Willy S., is especially strong in the production of this kind of manifestations, which in their origins are closely related with the occult natural phenomenon of materialization--in other words, the temporary organization of energy outside the medial organism, its _exteriorization_, so to speak. Among reasonable people it is agreed that the agent which performs the tricks I have described, the swinging of the bell, the lifting of the handkerchief, the typing, is not a spiritistic “intelligence” by the name of Minna, neither is it Aristotle or Napoleon, but the partly exteriorized medium himself. But even that does not go far toward making our problem more accessible to the reason. On the contrary, the popular, spiritualistic hypothesis is much clearer and simpler than the scientific one; while as for the problem of exteriorization and materialization, the longer one looks at it, the more it reveals a complexity apparently calculated for the express purpose of making a mock of the human intellect. Which is not surprising--considering that after all it is bound up with the presumably not occult problem of life itself!

“That which governs life,” Claude Bernard wrote, “is neither chemistry nor physics, nor anything of the kind; but the ideal principle of the life-process.” A strangely indefinite saying for a great scientist, he being a Frenchman to boot; a saying that gropes vaguely after a mystery, and shows that it is precisely the great world of scholarship which never loses an inward feeling for the mystery; and that only the rank and file run the danger of scientific darkness, unmindful how very little complete, how much mingled with mystery--and riddles perhaps never-to-be-solved--is all their exact knowledge of nature and life and its functions. It is accepted as an established fact in the world of occultism today that the effective and formative principle at work in the psychological processes does in certain cases assume a “teleplastic” character: in other words, it passes beyond the limits of the organism and operates outside it, “ectoplastically.” That is, it calls into temporary existence, out of the exteriorized, organic basic substance (the appearance and form of which have already been observed with some degree of exactitude), shapes, limbs, bodily organs, particularly hands, which possess all the properties and functions of normal, physiological, biologically living organs. These teleplastic end-organs move apparently free in space, but so far as can be observed have a close physiological and psychological relation with the medium, in such a way that any impression received through the teleplasm has its effect upon the medial organism, and vice versa. Here we see supra-normal physiology vying with the normal to bear witness to the unity of the organic substance. A fluid, in varying degrees of density, leaves the body of the medium as an amorphous, unorganized mass; takes form in various teleplastic organs, hands, feet, heads, and so on; and after a brief existence in this form, during which, however, it displays all the attributes of living substance, dissolves and is reabsorbed into the medial organism. And this fluid, this substance, this substratum of the various organic formations, is uniform, undifferentiated; there is not such a thing as a bone-substance as different from a muscular or visceral or nervous one; there is only the one substance, the basis and substratum of organic life.

Probably all reasoned thinking and talking in this highly speculative field of facts is today premature and can only seem to clarify without doing so. But one thing is certain: we shall be thinking and talking most inadequately about the phenomena of materialization, as about the riddle of life in general, if we regard them from the physical and material side alone, and not from the psychical as well. It was Hegel who said that the idea, the spirit, is the ultimate source of all phenomena; and perhaps supra-normal physiology is more apt than normal to demonstrate his statement. Yes, it undertakes to place the philosophic demonstration of the primacy of the idea, of the ideal origin of all reality, alongside the biological demonstration of the unity of all organic life.

Quite uninstructed, and on my own responsibility, I explained the telekinetic phenomena as the medium’s magically objectivated dreams. And the literature of the subject confirms my explanation; with an awe-inspiring display of technical terms, it explains that the _idea_ of the phenomenon, present in the subconsciousness of the somnambulist, mingled moreover with that of the other persons present, is by the aid of psychophysical energy “ectoplastically” moved, by a biopsychical projection, to a certain distance, and imprinted--that is to say, “objectivated.” In other words, we call to aid an uninvestigated _ideoplastic_ faculty possessed by the medial constitution. Ideoplastic--a word, and a conception, of Platonic power and charm, not without flattering unction to the artist’s ear, who will be ready from now on to characterize, not only his own work, but universal reality as ideoplastic phenomena. Yet a word, and a conception, of quite as turbid depths as the word “delusion” itself, and, by virtue of its maddening mixture of elements of the real and the dream, leading straight to the morbid and the preposterous.

Let me give in closing one single but striking example. We are repeatedly assured that the ideoplastic formations, for the time during which they are present, possess all the characteristics of actual life. When they have been in a good mood they have not only let themselves be seen and touched, and their objective reality established by photography and apparatus which registered their telekinetic activities; but plaster casts have been made, hands of transcendental origin having been persuaded to dip themselves into basins of warm water with melted wax floating on top. In this way a mould has been formed about the spirit member, and hardened by exposure to air. Out of such a mould no human hand could get free without breaking the mould. But the teleplastic organ frees itself by dematerialization, and the experimenters pour plaster of Paris into the wax glove and thus obtain a cast of the materialized organ, which should correspond to it in all particulars. It is to be noted that the casts thus obtained show no resemblance in shape or lines to the hands of the medium, or to those of anyone else present. Now at one of Willy’s sittings the following perfectly lunatic thing occurred (and not the only one of its kind). The medium being under the most careful control, a shape like a hand appeared, coming from above and behind, and showed itself above a piece of grey clay on the little table. It had a forearm, and was lighted by a rosy light, and it hovered about over the surface of the clay; on which, after the sitting, six flat impressions were found, on the previously smooth surface. But at the base of Willy’s little finger on his left hand, and on the back of the fourth finger of the same hand, _there were traces of clay_.

Now I ask of nature and spirit, I inquire of reason and of logic on her throne: How, when, and from where came the clay on Willy’s fingers?

No, I will not go to Herr von Schrenck-Notzing’s again. It leads to nothing, or at least to nothing good. I love that which I called the moral upper world, I love the human fable, and clear and humane thought. I abhor luxations of the brain, I abhor morasses of the spirit. Up to now, indeed, I have seen but a few stray sparks from the infernal fires--but that must suffice me. I should like of course to hold, as others have held, a hand like that, a metaphysical delusion made of flesh and blood, in mine. And perhaps there might appear to me, as it has to others, Minna’s head, above the shoulder of the sleeping Willy: the head of a charming girl, Slavic in type, with lively black eyes. That, however uncanny, must be a wonderful experience.... After all, I will have another try or so with Herr von Schrenck-Notzing; two or three times, not more. That much could do me no harm; and I know myself, I am a man of ephemeral passions; I shall take care that it leads to nothing, and put the whole thing out of my mind for ever after. No, I will not go two or three times, I will only go once, just once more and then not again. I only want to see the handkerchief rise up into the red light before my eyes. For the sight has got into my blood somehow, I cannot forget it. I should like once more to crane my neck, and with the nerves of my digestive apparatus all on edge with the fantasticality of it, once more, just once, see the impossible come to pass.

1923

Thomas Mann is one of the really great contemporary men of letters. He, himself, however roundly resents being labeled a “writer,” and insists upon considering himself not as an “artist” at all but only “a good bourgeois drifted by chance into literature.” To Mann this is no mere equivocation in terms; rather it represents the very keynote of his philosophy as revealed in his works, springing from a deeply held conviction that the intellectual type is not the ideal toward which evolution moves, but, instead, the man-of-action. All of Mann’s writing indeed, from the epoch-making “Buddenbrooks” of his youth to “The Magic Mountain,” the masterpiece of his maturity, constitutes the most elaborate rejection in literature of the “intellectual” as an unhealthy growth upon the main body of humanity; but while this theme dominates Mann’s works, it is only the scarlet thread in his design, the whole of which comprises nothing less than the most profound criticism of the modern world yet vouchsafed by any novelist.

_This book was set on the linotype in Bodoni, electrotyped, printed and bound by The Plimpton Press, Norwood, Mass. The paper was made by S. D. Warren Co., Boston_