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In 1896 Popular Science Monthly published the following article. It was the hay-day of X-Rays and David Starr Jordon (ichthyologist, eugenicist, suspected strychnine poisoner and peace activist) thought up the jolly jape, which backfired as many believed it and attempted replication.
THE SYMPSYCHOGRAPH: A STUDY IN IMPRESSIONIST PHYSICS. |
By DAVID STARR JORDAN.
THE Astral Camera Club of Alcalde was organized in November, 1895, for purposes of scientific research through the medium of photography. The function of the club was the cooperative study of man's latent psychical powers, that these might be made helpful in the conduct of life. No powers granted to man should be neglected or allowed to waste in idleness. Just as the great physical force of electricity remained for centuries hidden, and known only by casual and unimportant manifestations, so the great odic forces within man still are scantily revealed. The method of the club in Alcalde was to be that of the most rigid scientific research. It was to take up, one after another, the discoveries of our eager century as they were made known to the world through the medium of the daily newspaper. To these were to be added those suggestions which alert intuition and psychic practicality would naturally suggest. No hypothesis in science was to be rejected beforehand, and no prejudice was to stand in the way of the reception of any new theory that might contain a living truth.
As soon as the news of the marvelous experiments of Prof. Röntgen had reached Alcalde, the Camera Club began work on the X rays, and on the larger problem of the significance of photography without visible light. They had no difficulty in repeating the usual experiments. They got an outline of the skeleton of a canary, the shadow of an empty pocketbook, the bones of a finger surrounded by a gold ring, and the location of an imbedded shot. Thus those strange rays of light, or odic force, invisible to our eyes, because none of our ancestors ever had a chance to gaze upon them, disclosed the presence of objects which had else lain forever in darkness. In addition to this, the green light of the vacuum tubes provoked that uncanny feeling which always precedes and presages a great discovery in occult science. From this feeling the club was safe in predicting that far greater discoveries were to follow, and that the X rays would not end in mere repetitions of Röntgen's triumphs in "skiography."
In this they were not disappointed. Prof. Inglis Rogers, of London, found that not only could pictures be produced in darkness by means of invisible force, but that the invisible waves sent out through the ether by the mind could also affect a sensitive plate. Just as one sensitive mind at a distance receives an image sent out from the psychic retina of another, so could the same image be concentrated and fixed upon a photographic plate. Prof. Rogers in a matter-of-fact way looked for a few minutes at a postage stamp, then retired to a dark room, and gazed through the lens of the camera at the sensitive plate. The figure of the post- age stamp was on his mind, and from his mind it passed out through the sensitive ether to the plate made ready to receive it. The result was a photograph of the stamp — small and a little blurred, but showing the undoubted features of the gracious Queen and the words "one penny." Thus was the bridge between psychic power and photographic sensitiveness made once for all. This connection established, there is naturally no limit to the application of the principle.
It thus becomes plain that the invisible rays of Rontgen are not light in the common sense, but akin rather to the brain emanations, or odic forces, which pass from mind to mind without the intervention of forms of gross matter as a medium, and to which gross matter in all its forms is subject.
Nor is this principle new in the philosophy of man. The wise of all ages have held that mind is sovereign over matter. Besides this general law, it has been known to our fathers that in the eye of the dying man is impressed the last scene on which he looked in life. With instruments of precision we may examine that scene, and by skillful photography we should be able to secure and fix it for all time. Whittier foreshadows the broad law on which this rests when he asks :
Do pictures of all the ages live
On Nature's infinite negative,
Whence half in sport, in malice half,
She throws at times, with shudder or laugh,
Phantom and shadow in photograph ?
It may be that by means of such negatives History is able to repeat herself. It is not unlikely that among the latent powers which are conferred upon man by the possession of the astral body, are those which will enable him to read the pictures on the infinite negatives of Nature, and by that means to rescue the records of the vanished past.
Following the experiments of Prof. Rogers, other physicists have tried to photograph the psychical images as they are impressed on the retina by the force of imagination. It is evident that such images are distinct from those arising from immediate contact with reality ; but their real nature is the same in essence. When Inglis Rogers was gazing at the stamp he saw only an image on the retina, and in reality it was not on the material cells of the retina itself that the image rested, but it was on the tabula rasa of the mind. It was outward from the mind itself, not from the retina, that this was projected through the sensitive and responsive ether to the sensitive plate of photography, an arrangement of unstable cells which is the triumph of the art of the chemist.
It is therefore not necessary for this experiment that one should gaze at an individual stamp. To think of a stamp will serve as well. Recognizing this fact, Mr. Cameron Lee, another English experimenter, attempted to secure the image of a thought. Placing his own eye in the focus of a lens in absolute darkness, he thought intensely of the face of a certain cat. After a long exposure, necessary on account of the comparative grossness of the photographic materials, a picture was formed. The negative shows a rounded outline evidently that of the enlarged pupil of the eye, and in its center was formed a faint image, which could be mistaken for nothing other than a cat. An account of this experiment was given in the daily press, but its true bearing was first seen at Alcalde.
At the meeting of the Astral Camera Club held in Alcalde on April 1st of this current year, its president, Mr. Asa Marvin, read a paper on these discoveries, calling attention to their astral significance. The supremacy of mind over matter, already indicated in a hundred ways, was thus splendidly illustrated. As a thou- sand miles of ether may be made to vibrate at the command of the will of the psychical adept, so may the grosser forms of matter be shaken or removed when this subtle and resistless force acts upon it.
The famous legend of Odin and the Golden Mead, as Mr. Marvin went on to show, is not a myth, but was probably an actual occurrence. It may be a reality again when Odin's descendants rival their ancestor in that wisdom for which the famous hero so freely gave his right eye. It is not unlikely that the actual Niffelheim, or mist-home, where he exchanged his right eye for wisdom, is to be sought in the Himalayas rather than in Scandinavia. Odin, it will be remembered, after he had gained this wisdom, wished a draught of the golden mead which the giant Suttung kept locked up in his strong house of stone near his castle of Spukheim. Odin had arranged with the giant Bauge, whose hay he had harvested, that he should help him to secure this life-giving drink. And thus, the saga tells us, when they had found the stone castle in which the .mead was hidden, Odin and Bauge sat down all day before the stone wall and gazed steadily upon it. By this means, so the story goes, they bored a small hole through the stone large enough for Odin in the astral form of an angle- worm to pass through, and by this means the mead was gained and the strength of the giants passed over to mortals.
The essence of this story lies in its illustration of the power of mind over matter when its forces are concentrated. By psychic intensity the cohesion of molecules of gross matter may be overcome. It is well known to physicists that these molecules nowhere actually touch each other, nor do they come near doing so. The spaces between them are filled up by ether. Into the interstices of the ether it is easy for the odic force to introduce itself. It is, in fact, unlikely that the gross particles of stone exist at all; for, as some physicists have shown, these are but eddies or vortex- rings in the ether itself, which is the only material reality.
Mr. Marvin showed very clearly that this supposed legend was not lightly to be set aside as mythology ; or, rather, that it is likely that mythology is the only true history. The same psychic strength and wisdom which have caused Odin to be remembered and revered as a god by our ancestors, was the same psychic force by which he overcame the cohesion of matter. For us all to do this is doubtless only a question of time. Many adepts are already able to do more wonderful things than these. In time the evolution of man will bring these latent powers to light, superseding our common reason with astral intuition as reason has supplanted mere animal instinct.
Having thus shown the broad principles on which studies in the new psycho-physics must rest, Mr. Marvin described a special contrivance or application of these principles to the work of the Camera Club.
He had devised a camera with a lens having curved facets arranged on the plan of the eye of the fly. To each one of the seven facets led an insulated tube provided within by an electric connection, so that electric or odic impulses could be transferred from the brain or retina through the eye of each different observer to the many-faced lens. From the lens these impulses would be converged on a sensitive plate, as the rays of light are gathered together in ordinary photography.
From the members of the Camera Club, seven of those having greatest animal magnetism and greatest power of mental concentration were chosen for the experiment. Connection was made from the eye of these observers to the corresponding parts of the lens; then all were to remain in utter darkness and perfect silence, each person fixing his mind on a cat. They were not to think of any particular cat, but of a cat as represented by the innate idea of the mind or ego itself. This was highly important, for the purpose of Mr. Marvin was not simply to fix by photography an ephemeral recollection, as Mr. Rogers and Mr. Lee had done ; it was to bring out the impression of ultimate feline reality. The innate image in the mind was the object desired. One man's thought of a cat would be individual, ephemeral, a recollection of some cat which he had some time seen, and which by the mind's eye would be seen again. From seven ideals, sympathetically combined, the true cat would be developed. This combination is the essence of sympsychography, a term suggested by Prof. Amos Gridley, of Alcalde, as distinct from the ordinary ideography of Rogers and Lee. The personal equation would be measurably eliminated in sympsychography, while the cat of the human innate idea, the astral cat, the cat which "never was on sea or land," but in accordance with which all cats have been brought into incarnation, would be more or less perfectly disclosed.
In accordance with this plan the experiment was tried under the direction of Mr. Asa Martin. By the courtesy of the secretary of the club. Miss Corintha Jones, of Alcalde, we are enabled to present a copy of the resultant sympsychograph in advance of the publication of the regular bulletin of the society in which the apparatus used is figured in detail.
It will be noticed that this picture is unmistakably one of a cat. But it is a cat in its real essence, the type cat as distinguished from human impressions of individual cats. This achievement, like the earlier ones of Odin, Röntgen, Rogers, and Lee, opens great vistas for future scientific research. The next experiment will be by similar means to photograph the cat's idea of man.
As might be expected in a first attempt, there is a lack of coordination of the parts. Mr. Gridley, the schoolmaster, had planned his cat on a large scale, a huge cat face with gray radiant whiskers looking directly at the beholder. Most of the others thought of the cat in lateral view or profile. These variant and vagrant individual impressions naturally appeared on the camera before the ether waves were co-ordinated and the reflex influences came back from all to one, regulating and co-ordinating the thought of the cat. Thus these preliminary impressions are recorded as ghost pictures in various places about the plate before the ultimate composite view was achieved. The delay in this regard has darkened the center picture, interfering a little with its perfection of definition. This darkening would probably appear in other experiments on account of the long exposure (sixteen minutes) thought necessary for a picture of this kind, in which odic magnetism is made to take the place of light.
On the cat's cheek is a curious black spot or stigma which has not been fully accounted for. From its sharpness of definition it must stand in some relation to each of the seven persons whose thoughts were centered upon it. One suggestion was that this was the blind spot on the retina in each of the sympsychographers. But the blind spot marks the point of entrance of the nerve which goes back to the brain. While it may not have visual power, it is not unlikely that it is a point of special activity in ideography. This suggests that the black stigma may be the yellow spot, or the macula hifea, the point of acute vision, a region on the retina where odic forces would naturally be absent. Mr. Marvin himself inclines to the opinion that a microscopic examination of the negative will show that this stigma has like- wise the form of a cat, and that it will be found to be an ideomorphic germ or centrum where the co-ordinate thought of the cat has first impinged on the plate and from which the image of the cat has concentrically arisen.
Meanwhile the cat of Mr. Thompson, the janitor, who alone could answer this question, lay in the darkness under the warm stove and purred softly.
Mr. Jordan had to write in to the science-rag, to try and redeem himself somewhat -
THE MORAL OF THE "SYMPSYCHOGRAPH."
Editor Popular Science Monthly:
Sir: I was both surprised and humiliated to find on my return from Bering Sea, a few days ago, a large correspondence from persons who had taken the "Sympsychograph" seriously. I had not the slightest idea that any one capable of "reading bound books" would be deceived by the meaningless phrases in that bit of burlesque. I intended it as a piece of gentle satire on the "wizards" and "impressionists" who follow in the wake of scientific work which attracts attention, and who pour their vagaries into the long ears of the daily newspaper.
The important element of one's belief arises from the way in which that belief is formed. No one was capable of understanding my story who did not at once see the incongruity of it. One might as well believe in Mahatmas and Odic forces as in cathode radiation or evolution if he does not have any clear ideas or a clear conception of the basis on which generalizations rest. One writer speaks of the article in question as a hoax upon an innocent public; but a public which has swallowed the alleged experiments of Inglis Rogers and other impressionists as scientific truth, and does not see any difference between the methods of these persons and the methods of Röntgen and Helmholtz, is not an innocent public. A vast amount of suffering In our society arises from the fact that men are ready to follow any notion in medicine, in politics, or in social reform, no matter how absurd, if it contains an element of mystery, or if it proposes to make life a little easier for men incapable of clear thinking.
I had a serious moral in the fable, and this, at the risk of trying to explain a joke, I shall give.
The methods ascribed to the "Astral Camera Club" are those which never have yielded and never can yield any results to science. Scientific investigators are not "wizards," their discoveries are not presaged by uncanny feelings nor green darkness, nor is there anything "occult" about their ways of working. They are simply men of unusual persistence and steady common sense. Everything easy was found out long ago, and additions to knowledge can only come from mastery of past achievements and mathematical accuracy in the registration of small details. The progress of science is not marked by surprises and contradictions. The result of scientific inquiry comes as a surprise only to those ignorant of the steps in investigation which leads up to it.
The discovery that the peculiar rays called "X" by Röntgen could be made to cast shadows on a sensitized plate does not imply that thought can be photographed. One might sooner expect to photograph the songs of birds than "the cat's idea of man."
The great power which exact knowledge gives adds nothing to the probability of the mythology of our own or other times. The "power of mind over matter" is not a form of hysterics. It depends on exact knowledge of the nature of material things. It is no occult influence showing itself in neurotic "adepts" by uncanny lights, under "astral" conditions. It is greatest by daylight, with sane men, with whom science is simply enlightened "common sense."
David Starr Jordan.
Palo Alto, Cal., October 10, 1896.
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A STEAMPUNK NOVEL, FULL OF
ANARCHIC EXPERIMENTAL SCIENCE
"Hodges emitted a scream the like of which
I hadn't heard since his scrotum was burned off
Unrelated to this post, below is an example of
eclectic science esoterica
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