The Debate on Spiritualism

G. K. Chesterton (1)

The tragedies left in the track of the great war have moved many, like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, to a certain type of psychical experiment. My own sentiment about it, I think, is none the less one of detachment because it is not one of denial, or even merely of doubt. It is inadequate merely to pit science against Spiritualism, when so many great men of science are already Spiritualists. And something wider than science, something in the widest sense to be called common sense, seems to me gen­erally suggestive of the supernatural. The position might be stated by saying that I have a belief in spirits, but no faith in spirits. For a faith in that sense means a trust; and I have far more faith in the almost universal popular legend, which rep­resents them as thoroughly untrustworthy. But my point here is not so much to defend my own position as to implore other people to define their own positions. My sole desire is that the agnostic should know what agnosticism is, as Huxley did; and that he should not be ignorant of the very nature of his own ignorance. In this respect I think the old religious systems, apart from truth, gave much better training. In one sense at least the word theological included the word logical. We are told to-day that we should be better for a religion without a theology. I believe our brains would be the better even for a theology with­out a religion.
The special mark of the modern world is not that it is sceptical, but that it is dogmatic without knowing it. It says, in mockery of old devotees, that they believed without knowing why they believed. But the moderns believe without knowing what they believe—and without even knowing that they do believe it. Their freedom consists in first freely assuming a creed, and then freely forgetting that they are assuming it. In short, they always have an unconscious dogma; and an unconscious dogma is the defi­nition of a prejudice. They are the dullest and deadest of all ritualists who merely recite their creed in their subconsciousness, as if they repeated their creed in their sleep. A man who is awake should know what he is saying, and why he is saying it—that is, he should have a fixed creed and relate it to a first principle. This is what most moderns will never consent to do. Their thoughts will work out to most interesting conclusions; but they can never tell you anything about their beginnings. They have always taken away the number they first thought of. They have always forgotten the very fact or fancy on which their whole theory depends.
The debate on the ethics of Spiritualism is a strong example of this. The Spiritualists act upon a dogma, which they cannot state dogmatically, and therefore only assume dogmatically. Most Anti-Spiritualists also, I may add, assume a dogma without knowing it—and a much staler and stupider dogma at that. But the point here is that they differ from the old creeds in never being stated as clearly as creeds. What a Spiritualist assumes is practically this; it is not merely the existence of spirits, but the non-existence of evil spirits. Or at least of extreme evil done to us by evil spirits. To put it popularly, Spiritualists are optimists about the spiritual world. The Puritans, and the people of the seventeenth century generally, were pessimists about the spir­itual world. They may almost be said to have felt, in Browning's phrase, that there may be heaven, but there must be hell. They thought it a thousand to one that anybody dealing with spirits was dealing with bad spirits. Hence they turned even the worst sort of witch-burning from murder to massacre. These were very appalling deductions from one axiom—that human nature is nearer to wicked spirits than to good ones. But at least the Puritans could state their pessimistic axiom as an axiom. The Spiritualists cannot state their optimistic axiom as an axiom at all; they do not even know it is optimistic. They simply feel it unconsciously as the spirit of their time—that is, as something not even as solid as climate, but rather as fickle as weather. They simply swallow it, like the germs, because it is in the air.
Now the real objection to Spiritualism is almost identical with the claim of Spiritualism. The objection to it is that it puts a man under the control of spiritual forces, or that it brings him in contact with the unknown. In fact, it is almost impossible to find any commendation of such a belief in spirits which will not serve as a condemnation in the mouth of those who believe in bad spirits. The very boast of the Spiritualists is the answer to Spiritualism. The very words "medium" or "control" will, in­deed, affect many of us as immoral words—I might say indecent words. They imply a spiritual surrender which is dubious even if the influence be good, and shocking if it be bad. Now it certainly is not self-evident, from the analogy of all we know, that it cannot be bad. We need not be such pessimists as the Puritans to think it is very likely to be bad. In this, indeed, the Spiritualists are always insisting on the strongest argument against To read more...