CHAPTER III
The net result of his inquiries and research, when, at the age ofnearly forty, he established his own Private Home for unusual,so-called hopeless cases in North-West London--it was free to all, andas Spiritual Clinique he thought of it sometimes with a smile--may besummed up in the single sentence that man is greater than he knows, andthat completer realization of his full possibilities lies accessible tohis subconscious and superconscious powers. Herein he saw, indeed, thechief hope of progress for humanity.
And it was to the failures, the diseased, the evil and the brokenthat he owed chiefly his inspiring optimism, since it was largely incollapse that occurred the sporadic upheaval of those super-normalforces which, controlled, co-ordinated, led, must eventually bringabout the realization he foresaw.
The purpose, however, of these notes is not to furnish a sensationalstory of various patients whom he studied, healed, or failed to heal.Its object is to give some details of one case in particular whoseoutstanding peculiarities affected his theories and convictions,leaving him open-minded still, but with a breath of awe in his heartperhaps, before a possibility his previous knowledge had ruled entirelyout of court, even if--which is doubtful--he had ever considered it asa possibility at all.
He had realized early that the individual manifests but aninsignificant portion of his being in his ordinary existence, thenormal self being the tip of his consciousness only, yet whose fullerexpression rises readily to adequate evocation; and it was the studyof genius, of prodigies, so-called, and of certain faculties shownsometimes in hysteria, that led him to believe these were small jetsfrom a sea of power that might, indeed ought, to be realizable atwill. The phenomena all pointed, he believed, to powers that seemed assuperior to cerebral functions as they were independent of these.
Man's possible field of being, in other words, seemed capable ofindefinite extension. His heart glowed within him as he established,step by step, these greater powers. He dared to foresee a time when thelimitations of separate personality would have been destroyed, and thevast brotherhood of the race become literally realized, its practicalunity accomplished.
The difficulties were endless and discouraging. The inventive powers ofthe bigger self, its astonishing faculty for dramatizing its content inevery conceivable form, blocked everywhere the search for truth.
It could, he found, also detach a portion of its content into a seriesof separate personalities, each with its individual morals, talents,tendencies, each with its distinct and separate memory. These fragmentsit could project, so to speak, masquerading convincingly as separateentities, using strange languages, offering detailed knowledge ofother conditions, distant in time and space, suggesting, indeed, tothe unwary that they were due to obsessing spirits, and leaving theobserver in wonder before the potential capacity of the central selfdisgorging them.
The human depths included, beyond mere telepathy and extendedtelepathy, an expansion of consciousness so vast as to be, apparently,limitless. The past, on rare occasions even the future, lay open; theentire planetary memory, stored with rich and pregnant accumulatedexperience, was accessible and shareable. New aspects of space and timewere equally involved. A vision of incredible grandeur opened graduallybefore his eyes.
The surface consciousness of to-day was really rather a trumperyaffair; the gross lethargy of the vast majority _vis a vis_ thegreater possibilities afflicted him. To this surface consciousnessalone was so-called evil possible--as ignorance. As "ugly is onlyhalf-way to a thing," so evil is half-way to good. With the greaterpowers must come greater knowledge, shared as by instantaneous wirelessover the entire planet, and misunderstanding, chief obstacle toprogress always, would be impossible. A huge unity, sense of onenessmust follow. Moral growth would accompany the increase of faculty.And here and there, it seemed to him, the surface ice had thawedalready a little; the pressure of the great deeps below caused cracksand fissures. Auto-suggestion, prototype of all suggestion, offeredmysterious hints of the way to reach the stupendous underworld, as theChristian Scientists, the miraculous healers, the New Thought movement,saints, prophets, poets, artists, were finding out.
The subliminal, to state it shortly, might be the divine. This was thehope, though not yet the actual belief, that haunted and inspired him.Behind his personality lurked this strange gigantic dream, ever beatingto get through....
In his Private Home, helping, healing, using his great gifts ofsympathy and insight, he at the same time found the material forintimate study and legitimate experiment he sought. The buildinghad been altered to suit his exact requirements; there were privatesuites, each with its door and staircase to the street; one part of itprovided his own living quarters, shut off entirely from the patients'side; in another, equally cut off and self-contained, yet within easycommunication of his own rooms, lived Paul Devonham, his valued youngassistant. There was a third private suite as well. The entire expenseshe defrayed himself.
Here, then, for a year or two he worked indefatigably, with the measureof success and failure he anticipated; here he dreamed his great dreamof the future of the race, in whose progress and infinite capacitieshe hopefully believed. Work was his love, the advancement of humanityhis god. The war availed itself of his great powers, as also of hisready-made establishment, both of which he gave without a thought ofself. New material came as well from the battlefields into his ken.
The effect of the terrible five years upon him was in direct proportionto his sincerity. His mind was not the type that shirks conclusions,nor fears to look facts in the face. For really new knowledge he wasever ready to yield all previous theories, to scrap all he had heldhitherto for probable. His mind was open, he sought only Truth.
The war, above all the Peace, shook his optimism. If it did not whollyshatter his belief in human progress, it proved such progress to be soslow that his Utopia faded into remotest distance, and his dream ofperfectibility became the faintest possible star in his hitherto brightsky of hope.
He felt shocked and stupefied. The reaction was greater than atfirst he realized. He had often pitied the mind that, aware onlyof its surface consciousness, uninformed by thrill or shift of thegreat powers below and above, lived unwarned of its own immenserpossibilities. To such, the evidence for extended human faculties mustseem explicable by fraud, illusion, derangement, to be classed asabnormal rubbish worthy only of the alienist's attention as diseases.To him such minds, though able, with big intellects among them, hadever seemed a prejudiced, fossilized, prehistoric type. Restricted bytheir very nature, violently resisting new ideas, they might be intensewithin their actual scope, but, with vision denied them, they nevercould be really great.
One effect of the shock he had undergone will be evident by merelystating that he now understood this type of mind a good deal betterthan before.