The Discovery of a New World of Being

Abstract

THE world discovered by this psychological Columbus is the “world of spirits,” although he “disclaims all connection with so-called Spiritualists—a sect of modern times,” whom he somewhat ungenerously “believes to be either dupes or knaves.” Mr. Thomson believes that man consists of two “personalities,” an animal personality or body, and a personality he calls spirit, which is the “knowing and conscious we,” and which he believes to be as distinct from and as capable of being at almost any moment abstracted from the former as steam is from a steam-engine. Indeed, this latter phenomenon takes place every time the body “goes to sleep,” to use the vulgar phrase; for Mr. Thomson believes that the “animal life never sleeps, and cannot sleep, and that to say or think that it, or any other life, can sleep, in the popular sense of the word, is the most glaring absurdity that ever has had possession of the human mind.” “What is meant properly by sleep,” he goes on to say, “is simply the abstraction or withdrawal of the influence of a being, a spirit, from a being, an animal, the leaving of a servant to itself, from the influence of its lord and master.” Mr. Thomson explains the phenomenon of dreaming to be the struggles of this “being, a spirit,” to get out of and back into the house of its servant, the body. The frequently inpleasant consequences of a late supper might have led Mr. Thomson one step further, and suggested to him the probable habitat of the spirit when embodied. How brimful of meaning to Mr. Thomson, then, must be Shakespeare's well-known utterance— “We are such stuff as dreams are made of.” The particular merit which he claims for himself as a discoverer is, that he has realised to himself this spirit-world “predicted of old to be in existence,” become conscious of himself as a “spirit in the world of spirits,” clearly distinct, “in rounded belief,” as he puts it, from that other entity, the body; and he declares that any one may make this awful discovery for himself if he only has “faith,” shuts himself off from the outer world, and ponders long enough and with sufficient intensity. If our author is really in earnest—and we cannot but think he is—in trying to fathom the mystery of life and of consciousness, we recommend him to approach the subject unprejudicedly from the side of physiology; for so long as a psychologist concerns himself with the phenomena of his “inner consciousness” alone, and neglects the facts of his “outer man,” his work is less than half done, and he is as likely to succeed in arriving at the whole truth as Columbus would have been in discovering America, had he contented himself with studying charts and staring longingly across the Atlantic for forty years.

The Discovery of a New World of Being.

By George Thomson. (Longmans, Green and Co., 1871.)