Occultism

It is gradually being discovered that a characteristic of the latest intellectual movement of our time is a reactionary tendency against a belief in the all-sufficiency of positive science to answer the Sphinx-riddles which beset humanity. Every era, it has been observed, has its animating idea, and this trust in positive science has been the animating idea of the nineteenth century, just as faith was that of the fourteenth, dissent of the sixteenth, and doubt of the eighteenth. A process of continual change — of evolution or degeneration, according to the point of view—has displaced each of these controlling ideas in turn, and it is interesting to find a writer in the Quarterly Review hailing the German positivist MAX NORDAU as the herald of another change. The author of "Degeneracy " and " Conventional Lies of Society," it seems, has been collecting evidences of the inadequacy of science to satisfy the secular mind. He finds among the results of its ascendency a literature tainted with insanity, popular fashions which are feverish and unfixed, a reaction from credulity to various forms of superstition, and an instinctive feeling after religious aids which is prepared to take refuge in anything, from a calendar of positivist saints such as Mr. HARRISON has given us to the Esoteric Buddhism of Colonel OLCOTT and Madame BLAVATSKY. It is hardly possible for the most incurious reader to avoid being interested in the different deductions drawn by different observers of these signs. NORDAU, writing as a physician and a positive thinker, finds them the result of nerve and brain fatigue. Others see in them not only so many evidences of reaction against an inadequate creed, but convincing proofs of a coming revival of faith. According to these, we have arrived at a time when the pendulum, having swung too far, is swinging back with redoubled energy into credulity and superstition before settling down into its normal pulse-beat of a reasonable faith. Such a reactionary tendency is by no means a new thing in the history of the evolution of ideas, and indeed the whole story of humanity is a tale of alternate motion and reaction. Just in proportion as the propulsion has been violent, the reaction has been marked. The ascetics and mystics produced LUTHER, who evoked LOYOLA, who in a certain sense made possible PASCAL and VOLTAIRE. The mere mention of those names is sufficient to show that there is nothing new in this idea of a fin de síecle reaction either in fact or theory.

The formidable array of evidences which NORDAU collects is at least proof enough that the mind of the age is not restful in the stage at which it has arrived. A little while ago the reading world was half amused and half alarmed by a book from Professor LOMBROSO, of Milan, in which that eminent specialist went a long way towards demonstrating to his own satisfaction that the man of genius was either a "sport" of heredity or a product of disease. According to him, it would almost seem that all the men who have assisted in the intellectual work of the world were mattoids or epileptics. The German scientist seems to agree with him. He finds ZOLA a graphomaniac, SWINBURNE a mattoid, ROSSETTI an imbecile, VERLAINE a degenerate like the American tramp and idler WHITMAN, and MAUPASSANT a lunatic. Medical men, he says, find the poetry of the Décadents exactly similar to that composed by their insane patients. IBSEN, TOLSTOI, WAGNER, are all degenerates. The movement of society is in the direction of making telepathy, clairvoyance, and occultism fashionable, and hypnotism and necromancy have obtained a vogue that transcends anything MESMER or CAGLIOSTRO ever knew. Mystery had been chased out of life by the sceptical and scientific spirit ; but, as was said of the natural instincts in parallel circumstances, it returns at a gallop and carries us into the fantastical extremes of spiritualism, chiromancy, and witchcraft. "Superstition ought to have been slain by Positivism," says the writer in the Quarterly, "and behold, the snake is not even scotched." To be sure, there never was a time when the fascination of the mysterious and occult was unfelt by men, and some of the greatest figures of the Middle Ages were not untempted by this desire to scan the vistas of their paths of glory, loading always down to graves. But in the days when every great man had his astrologer, and science was yet unexplored, this sort of thing was the luxury of the few. Now we find it the occupation of the many, and the generation that was to have been delivered from superstition and belief in anything that could not be tested by exact science is found to be given up to the investigation of occult science under its most capricious and vulgarised forms. This is one of the signs of the mental temper of the age that NORDAU has noted and indicated as among the chief dangers to the civilisation of our own time.

The deduction drawn from these evidences collected by the German savant is that science has proved itself unequal to the task of satisfying the instincts of the race. He himself is certain that the evil can be coped with by establishing a censorship over everything printed, and by having the bacillus of unsound literature studied by physicians. But others may agree with the writer in the Quarterly, who appears to be doubtful if this will adequately meet the case. There is some thing in humanity and about it that positive science cannot reach—a desire that must be satisfied, and which is as imperative as any other natural instinct. Man will be found huddling up a deity out of rags and stage properties, says this writer, rather than be left alone in the universe. In like manner the same impulse that makes a Mumbo Jumbo in South Africa, or a Phoebus Apollo in old Greece, will lead the starved instincts of modern society to find occupation in magic and modern witchcraft.

The problem which NORDAU sets forth, however, is whether the signs to which he calls attention are the precursors of a revival of faith or a new barbarism, for he, as well as his critics, is convinced that at present they are but the outcome of a phase of moral insanity resulting from a hysterical attempt to supply the needs of the spirit in the wrong way. From whatever standpoint we may consent to regard it, there can be no doubt that the situation is interesting to the inquirer, and full of significance to those who have been able to philosophically survey the advances of positive science and its claim to dispose of all questions in its own fashion. That this claim has not yet made itself out the conflict with the popular craze after occult science seems to prove, and so far from redeeming men's minds from superstition, it would almost seem as though the reaction has left them in a worse state than before. It may be that somewhere between the spiritual aridities of positive science at one point in the arc of the pendulum and the crude superstitions which amuse the curious at the other there will be found a sane mean which will offer room for the recognition of the supernatural instinct in the world. This will not be inconsistent with progress, for all action and reaction is part of the movement which results in development; and meanwhile there may be something in the theory that, as the writer in the Quarterly puts it, the absolute truth of a belief in the supernatural is the moral of the frightful and unclean apparitions which, as from the tomb of Faith, call aloud that it will rise again.

smh 31/3/1894,