The Sixth Sense, Charles H. Brent [most important books of all time txt] 📗

slow but certain undermining of the physical health may be laudably embarked on, if only the mind and character are not damaged, and if the end to be attained is found to be necessary or seriously helpful, and unattainable by other means.”[11]

Secondly, special and mystical means of promoting or regaining health must have as a background the accumulated knowledge and scientific skill of the day. If there are individual exceptions here and there, they go to prove the rule. We can no more ignore the history of medical and chemical science, the findings of the microscope and laboratory, without disaster, than we can cut our country off from the traditions, laws and customs of yesterday without similar results. On the other hand, it is at least equal folly to flout or discredit the mystical experience of the ages. Human life, individually and corporately, is a unit, and due recognition must be given to all that goes to make it up.

CHAPTER III
IN RELATION TO THOUGHT

The mind includes the Mystic Sense in somewhat a similar way to the manner in which the body includes the physical senses. But the Mystic Sense can be, indeed must be, considered as a distinct faculty having a peculiar function in the formation of that product of the mind called thought, which is “the effort to win over facts to ideas, or to adjust ideas to facts.”[12] The Mystic Sense can and does operate when the rationalizing faculty is reverently silent, and by its operation prepares new material for pure reason to consider.

There is no specifically intellectual organ. It is the whole man which apprehends knowledge just as it is the whole man and not an exclusively religious part of him, which apprehends and is apprehended by eternities and infinities. It is popularly supposed that science and mathematics call for the exercise of one set of faculties, and philosophy and religion another. Whereas the truth is that the same faculties are used for all alike in pretty much the same relation to one another. The Mystic Sense is as indispensable to science as it is to piety. Its method of operation is precisely the same in the one sphere as in the other.

We can best appreciate the important part the Mystic Sense plays in science by a survey of the foundations of accepted scientific fact. The whole body of our knowledge concerning the material universe is constructed upon a few ultimates, chief among them being the ether and the atom. The physical senses, so busy in that workshop of science, the laboratory, cease to be important when we deal with these fundamentals. The discoverer of ether never perceived it by touch, taste, smell, sight or hearing. Newton postulated it because he said it was a necessity, exactly as we postulate the existence of God. How could there be attraction across the measureless spaces which separate worlds if there were not some intangible substance? The ether was therefore discovered to order by the Mystic Sense and accepted because it proved a good working hypothesis. We are solemnly told by physicists that it is an “elastic solid,” a “pervasive fluid,” a “tenuous substance.” And yet when we chase this elusive something into a corner we find it to be “that which undulates,” a form of motion—well, so is a field mouse!

Again the atomic theory, first conceived by the Greeks, was restated by Dalton more than 2,000 years later, who brought it down “from the clouds to the laboratory and factory.” But neither Dalton nor anyone else ever touched an atom, saw an atom, heard an atom, smelt an atom, or tasted an atom, ultimate of matter that it is. The physicist claims, however, “that though he cannot handle or see them, the atoms and molecules are as real as the ice-crystals in the cirrhus clouds that he cannot reach—as real as the unseen members of a meteoric swarm whose death glow is lost in the sunshine, or which sweep past us unentangled in the night”—that the atoms are in fact “not merely helps to puzzled mathematicians, but physical realities.”[13] All this may be so. Nevertheless both the ether and the atom are so little material as to escape physical perception as completely as a ghost, and so nearly spiritual as to be perceived by the Mystic Sense with sufficient clearness to enable the scientist to use them as his fundamental hypothesis. If this reasoning be true, the ultimate of matter is spiritual and not material!

As with the ether so with the atom, it was a scientific necessity. The Mystic Sense contributed it to the laboratory, where it has been contentedly accepted as the ultimate of matter, until the other day, when someone opened the window of the atom to discover that it was a huge universe, of which a β corpuscle or electron was the least particle, related to the atom as a mote dancing in the sunbeam is to the room where it is. No sense but the Mystic Sense has yet sensed the electron. Not only, then, has science accepted the findings of the Mystic Sense, but, having accepted them, it has in the main not had reason to distrust them and continues confidently to base its research upon the foundation thus laid.

The freshest of more recent scientific discoveries, evolution, is as much the child of the Mystic Sense as of inductive reasoning. It was the Mystic Sense of ancient philosophers, exploring the unseen, which first descried it on the horizon as the sailor at the masthead spies the distant land. Darwin was the helmsman who steered the ship to port. He rationalized it and applied it as a working hypothesis. It is instructive to note that Darwin began his career with a rather acute sense of the mystical. He had a keen appetite for poetry, and pictures, and the music in King’s College Chapel “gave him intense pleasure, so that his backbone would sometimes shiver.”[14] He even began preparation for Holy Orders. In later life the interests that meant so much to him in youth died. “My mind,” he says, “seems to have become a kind of machine for finding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organized or better constituted than mine, would not, I suppose, have thus suffered; and if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once a week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.” It would be more accurate, perhaps, to explain this loss, not by atrophy but by too narrow specialization. His Mystic Sense and powerful imagination were not dead. They were centred on a single object. Having developed his Mystic Sense in one or all the ways open to him, a man may abandon its use in every direction but one. Christian worship, poetry, music prepare the Mystic Sense for that daring creation of hypotheses characteristic of Darwin. Without his power of hypothesis he could never have become more than a mere collector of the jackdaw order. He is his own best witness to the truth of this assertion. He says, “I have steadily endeavored to keep my mind free so as to give up any hypothesis, however much beloved (and I cannot resist forming one on every subject), as soon as facts are shown to be opposite to it,” adding that he could not remember “a single first formed hypothesis which had not after a time to be given up or modified.”

It is one of the chief functions of the Mystic Sense to present hypotheses. Without hypothesis the reason is a shorn Samson. A goal must be postulated, otherwise the wood could not be seen for the trees, and the intellect would be hopelessly lost in a tangle of underbrush and smothered by the weight of its own learning. “While theory is aimless and impotent without experimental check, experiment is dead without some theory passing beyond the limits of ascertained knowledge to control it. Here, as in all parts of natural knowledge, the immediate presumption is strongly in favor of the simplest hypothesis; the main support, the unfailing clue, of physical science is the principle that, nature being a rational cosmos, phenomena are related on the whole in the manner that conceptual reason would anticipate.”[15] Generalization of a tentative character precedes and gives a starting point for induction. Hypothesis is more often the child of intuitive processes which capture thought by quick assault than of slower and more analyzable forces. First comes hypothesis, then the accumulation of data, finally, when all available evidence is in, rejection and the adoption of fresh hypothesis, or modification, or verification. “A bundle of disconnected facts is only the raw material for an investigation: their mere collection is the very earliest stage in the process; and even while collecting them there is nearly always some system, some place, some idea under trial.”[16] The spiritual contents of the physical universe are, in part, evolution, the ether, the atom and such like. They bear material names, but they are ideas, out of reach of our sensory nerves, and capable of being perceived, first dimly and then clearly, only through the Mystic Sense. They form the allegorical department of scientific thought, and are to the reality as the Apocalypse is to the Kingdom of Heaven.

It would be without special gain, however easy, to multiply illustrations of the princely place which the Mystic Sense holds in scientific research. Let us, therefore, turn for a moment to mathematics with its array of imperturbable digits and prosaic facts. No sooner does the mathematician begin to move, than he finds it necessary to call to his aid the self-same faculty, which furnishes the physicist with his ether and atoms, and enables the worshipper to pray. Else how could he explore the fifth dimension, and define a line as having length without breadth, or a plane superficies as having only length and breadth, or a point as having no parts? It is not astonishing that the mathematician, “Lewis Carroll,” was the author of those most delicious imaginative works of immortal fame, “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking-Glass.” His vocation prepared and trained him for his avocation, and his avocation gave him new efficiency in his vocation. That which made him able to write the story of dreamland equipped him as an able scholar—the use in proper relation to his other mental gifts of the Mystic Sense. Similarly it is not surprising, but to be expected that Bacon, Pasteur, and Kelvin were, each in his own degree, religious men. They are the normal men of science, La Place, Huxley, and Haeckel being eccentrics and developed in a lop-sided way.

Invention, to turn to the department of practical science, relates the same story. Long before men saw, they dreamed. The locomotive was a vision before it was a fact; the aeroplane began as an idea, stinging men into adventurous experiment, before it spread its wings above the earth; men talked across vast spaces in thought before the earliest cable ticked its message, or the wireless system enthralled us by its wizardry. The Mystic Sense is prophetic and sees to-morrow