Cock Lane and Common-Sense | Page 5

from the Australian blacks in the Bush, who
hear raps when the spirits come, to ancient Egypt, and thence to Greece,
and last, in our own time, and in a London suburb, similar experiences,

real or imaginary, are explained by the same hypothesis. No 'survival'
can be more odd and striking, none more illustrative of the permanence,
in human nature, of certain elements. To examine these psychological
curiosities may, or may not, be 'useful,' but, at lowest, the study may
rank as a branch of Mythology, or of Folklore.
It is in the spirit of these sciences, themselves parts of a general
historical inquiry into the past and present of our race, that we would
glance at the anecdotes, legends, and superstitions which are here
collected. The writer has been chiefly interested in the question of the
Evidence, its nature and motives, rather than in the question of Fact. It
is desirable to know why independent witnesses, practically
everywhere and always, tell the same tales. To examine the origin of
these tales is not more 'superstitious' than to examine the origin of the
religious and heroic mythologies of the world. It is, of course, easy to
give both mythology, and 'the science of spectres,' the go by. But
antiquaries will be inquiring, and these pursuits are more than mere
'antiquarian old womanries'. We follow the stream of fable, as we track
a burn to its head, and it leads us into shy, and strange scenes of human
life, haunted by very fearful wild-fowl, and rarely visited save by the
credulous. There may be entertainment here, and, to the student of his
species, there may be instruction.
On every side we find, as we try to show, in all ages, climates, races,
and stages of civilisation, consentient testimony to a set of
extraordinary phenomena. Equally diffused we find fraudulent
imitations of these occurrences, and, on one side, a credulity which has
accepted everything, on the other hand, a scepticism which denies and
laughs at all the reports. But it is a question whether human folly would,
everywhere and always, suffer from the same delusions, undergo the
same hallucinations, and elaborate the same frauds. The problem is one
which, in other matter, always haunts the student of man's development:
he is accustomed to find similar myths, rites, customs, fairy tales, all
over the world; of some he can trace the origin to early human
imagination and reason, working on limited knowledge; about others,
he asks whether they have been independently evolved in several
places, or whether they have been diffused from a single centre. In the

present case, the problem is more complicated. Taboos, totemism,
myths explanatory of natural phenomena, customs like what, with Dr.
Murray's permission, we call the Couvade, are either peculiar to
barbarous races, or, among the old civilised races, existed as survivals,
protected by conservative Religion. But such things as 'clairvoyance,'
'levitation,' 'veridical apparitions,' 'movements of objects without
physical contact,' 'rappings,' 'hauntings,' persist as matters of belief, in
full modern civilisation, and are attested by many otherwise sane,
credible, and even scientifically trained modern witnesses. In this
persistence, and in these testimonies, the alleged abnormal phenomena
differ from such matters as nature-myths, customs like Suttee, Taboo,
Couvade, and Totemism, the change of men into beasts, the raising of
storms by art-magic. These things our civilisation has dropped, the
belief in other wild phenomena many persons in our civilisation retain.
The tendency of the anthropologist is to explain this fact by Survival
and Revival. Given the savage beliefs in magic, spirit rapping,
clairvoyance, and so forth, these, like Marchen, or nursery tales, will
survive obscurely among peasants and the illiterate generally. In an age
of fatigued scepticism and rigid physical science, the imaginative
longings of men will fall back on the savage or peasant necromancy,
which will be revived perhaps in some obscure American village, and
be run after by the credulous and half-witted. Then the wished-for
phenomena will be supplied by the dexterity of charlatans. As it is easy
to demonstrate the quackery of paid 'mediums,' as that, at all events, is
a vera causa, the theory of Survival and Revival seems adequate. Yet
there are two circumstances which suggest that all is not such plain
sailing. The first is the constantly alleged occurrence of 'spontaneous'
and sporadic abnormal phenomena, whether clairvoyance in or out of
hypnotic trance, of effects on the mind and the senses apparently
produced by some action of a distant mind, of hallucinations coincident
with remote events, of physical prodigies that contradict the law of
gravitation, or of inexplicable sounds, lights, and other occurrences in
certain localities. These are just the things which Medicine Men,
Mediums and classical Diviners have always pretended to provoke and
produce by certain arts or rites. Secondly, whether they do or