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Page 31
When he left me, I still felt very weary, and lay down on a little couch
in the room, falling presently asleep. I was roused by the entry of a
young man, who said he had been sent to fetch me: we went down along the
passages, while he talked pleasantly in low tones about the arrangements
of the place. As we went along the passages, the doors of the cells kept
opening, and we were joined by young men and women, who spoke to me or
to each other, but all in the same subdued voices, till at last we
entered a big, bare, arched room, lit by high windows, with rows of
seats, and a great desk or pulpit at the end. I looked round me in great
curiosity. There must have been several hundred people present, sitting
in rows. There was a murmur of talk over the hall, till a bell suddenly
sounded somewhere in the castle, a door opened, a man stepped quickly
into the pulpit, and began to speak in a very clear and distinct tone.
The discourse--and all the other discourses to which I listened in the
place--was of a psychological kind, dealing entirely with the relations
of human beings with each other, and the effect and interplay of
emotions. It was extremely scientific, but couched in the simplest
phraseology, and made many things clear to me which had formerly been
obscure. There is nothing in the world so bewildering as the selective
instinct of humanity, the reasons which draw people to each other, the
attractive power of similarity and dissimilarity, the effects of class
and caste, the abrupt approaches of passion, the influence of the body
on the soul and of the soul on the body. It came upon me with a shock of
surprise that while these things are the most serious realities in the
world, and undoubtedly more important than any other thing, little
attempt is made by humanity to unravel or classify them. I cannot here
enter into the details of these instructions, which indeed would be
unintelligible, but they showed me at first what I had not at all
apprehended, namely the proportionate importance and unimportance of all
the passions and emotions which regulate our relations with other souls.
These discourses were given at regular intervals, and much of our time
was spent in discussing together or working out in solitude the details
of psychological problems, which we did with the exactness of chemical
analysis.
What I soon came to understand was that the whole of psychology is ruled
by the most exact and immutable laws, in which there is nothing
fortuitous or abnormal, and that the exact course of an emotion can be
predicted with perfect certainty if only all the data are known.
One of the most striking parts of these discourses was the fact that
they were accompanied by illustrations. I will describe the first of
these which I saw. The lecturer stopped for an instant and held up his
hand. In the middle of one of the side-walls of the room was a great
shallow arched recess. In this recess there suddenly appeared a scene,
not as though it were cast by a lantern on the wall, but as if the wall
were broken down, and showed a room beyond.
In the room, a comfortably furnished apartment, there sat two people, a
husband and wife, middle-aged people, who were engaged in a miserable
dispute about some very trivial matter. The wife was shrill and
provocative, the husband curt and contemptuous. They were obviously not
really concerned about the subject they were discussing--it only formed
a ground for disagreeable personalities. Presently the man went out,
saying harshly that it was very pleasant to come back from his work, day
after day, to these scenes; to which the woman fiercely retorted that it
was all his own fault; and when he was gone, she sat for a time
mechanically knitting, with the tears trickling down her cheeks, and
every now and then glancing at the door. After which, with great
secrecy, she helped herself to some spirits which she took from a
cupboard.
The scene was one of the most vulgar and debasing that can be described
or imagined; and it was curious to watch the expressions on the faces of
my companions. They wore the air of trained doctors or nurses, watching
some disagreeable symptoms, with a sort of trained and serene
compassion, neither shocked nor grieved. Then the situation was
discussed and analysed, and various suggestions were made which were
dealt with by the lecturer, in a way which showed me that there was much
for us to master and to understand.
There were many other such illustrations given. They were, I discovered,
by no means imaginary cases, projected into our minds by a kind of
mental suggestion, but actual things happening upon earth. We saw many
strange scenes of tragedy, we had a glimpse of lunatic asylums and
hospitals, of murder even, and of evil passions of anger and lust. We
saw scenes of grief and terror; and, stranger still, we saw many things
that were being enacted not on the earth, but upon other planets, where
the forms and appearances of the creatures concerned were fantastic and
strange enough, but where the motive and the emotion were all perfectly
clear. At times, too, we saw scenes that were beautiful and touching,
high and heroic beyond words. These seemed to come rather by contrast
and for encouragement; for the work was distinctly pathological, and
dealt with the disasters and complications of emotions, as a rule,
rather than with their glories and radiances. But it was all incredibly
absorbing and interesting, though what it was to lead up to I did not
quite discern. What struck me was the concentration of effort upon human
emotion, and still more the fact that other hopes and passions, such as
ambition and acquisitiveness, as well as all material and economic
problems, were treated as infinitely insignificant, as just the
framework of human life, only interesting in so far as the baser and
meaner elements of circumstance can just influence, refining or
coarsening, the highest traits of character and emotion.
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