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of Britain in 1924. Romain Rolland, the hated and hounded of 1914, lives to see the thinking class come round shamefacedly to the position which he never abandoned. That he should never have abandoned it can now be seen to have been foreordained out of the whole character of his previous life-course.

The courageous solitary who could disdain vulgar triumphs and keep his faith in the power of ideas while toiling year after year with those three good comradessilence, solitude, and obscurity - was forging a blade which would not splinter when the moment came to cleave the anvil.

What we are watching here is the emergence of an international mind. It appears first in the highest and noblest thinkers. The thought which to-day is theirs alone to-morrow is everyone's. Science, art, music, literature, education, sport, invention, commerce, industry all are now international. Only statecraft lags behind. Why? Ask the owning classes. Statecraft with the accent on the craft. Romain Rolland's mind has been an Ararat of internationalism towering out of the European deluge of blood and fire.

VI

Music is the youngest of the arts. The Greeks could beat us at sculpture. The Middle Ages could beat us at architecture. The Renaissance could beat us at painting. The Elizabethans could beat us at poetry. The only art in which our age has surpassed is the art of sound. Literature has felt in turn the impact of all the others. And music has felt the impact of literature. The symphonic poem is one fruit of it. But, fifty years before Liszt, Beethoven liked to speak of his act of composition as 'poetizing.' Wagner attempted the conquest of both arts.

Now the symphonist speaks with a voice above voices. No writing of one line at a time for him! The web of sound he weaves may be twenty staves deep. A man of letters, understanding music, who would envy the composer this wealth and gorgeousness of utterance, was sure to come some author who would turn in discontent from his little page of words arranged in single lines to cast about him for some means of approximating in prose the richness and emotional glow of the orchestral score. No longer would he be content to jot down the tinkling melody of mere narration. He would resolve to score thought in all the color and variety of sonorous instrumentation. Just as the occupational representation of Soviet Russia was the idea bound to appear in twentieth-century politics, so this conception of orchestral prose was an idea bound to appear in twentieth-century literature. It has begun with Romain Rolland. It still has far to go. Symphonic in scale Jean-Christophe assuredly is; but in structure it is only slightly so. Rolland has written the first great musical novel. The European saga of Wagner's life overlapped the even more heroic European saga of Beethoven's by fourteen years. Rolland's life overlapped Wagner's by seventeen. Prophets and sons of prophets. Rolland has taken these two titanic figures from the Promethean world of music, blended their fire and clay with that of a dozen other composers, among them Bach, Handel, and Hugo Wolf,- and wrought the whole into a superb prose saga of the imagination. A European book in the sense that Faust was a European book it may or may not prove to be. Certainly it is the last will and testament of the age which perished on August 2, 1914.

What is more, Rolland's creative

process is the composer's own. It overflows with inruptions of the unconscious. Here are pages that were written with eyes wide open, - pupils a little dilated perhaps, intellectual faculties alert to full stretch, but all under possession of the not-me. Confine it to Jean-Christophe alone. For a mind attuned, the reading of this prose epic is like standing on a seaward crag to watch surf. One moment it will have the motion of fine intellectuality, but nothing more. The next, and it will speak with the flame-tongue of the Oversoul-power inexhaustible, prodigality of life, thought and style caught up into a star-swung rhythm crash! of breaking wave; swirling cauldrons of foam-seethe, and the pang of some divine electricity flashing into brain and vitals direct from the universal; instants not of time but of eternity. No need to catalogue the pages where these moments occur. The heart knoweth. 'Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.'

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Music, therefore, has made its way into the matter of literature but not yet into the manner. The sonata form is much more exactly applicable to literary form than men of letters as yet guess. The Wagnerian leitmotif is of course already in literature and, in forms more or less rudimentary, has been ever since the choric odes of Eschylus. Its terrific emotional power as applied to prose narrative and spoken drama has yet to be discovered. Shaw, one of the few authors who understand music, has given a hint of this in the phrase-refrains of Candida, though it is a question if he did not pick up the device quite as much from Ibsen as from Wagner. The peril of literature attempting to rival music in its own domain is of course obvious. That would be to bastardize the art of letters. But in the co-development of music

and literature lies a natural and organic art-growth of the future. Artists consume form-material with terrific prodigality. Beethoven all but exhausted the symphony. Wagner, in applying the symphonic form to drama, all but exhausted the opera. What he did not do was conquer both music and literature. It was once thought that his librettos would stand alone as poetry. They do not. These twain arts are still awaiting the titan who can, in some sort or other, master them both. Of this new conquest Romain Rolland is precursor.

Such seems to me the unique position of Romain Rolland as artist. But lest anyone should think I am penning one installment the more of literary twaddle for the innocuous delectation of dilettante pundits, let me instantly add what I consider to be the dignified position of Romain Rolland as thinker. He is type and forerunner of the intellectual class renouncing the propertied class a major symptom of our time and one which is causing the conscious elements among the propertied no end of secret panic. Yet valiantly as Rolland has mounted the barricades for the workers, he is no more bounden to them than to the plutocracy. It is one example the more of the artist containing all programmes but not contained by any one of them. To befriend humanity? Naturally. To battle for the oppressed? As a matter of course. But as artist, not as propagandist. Life is larger than any single programme, however large. Let the artist create in beauty and his beauty becomes a truth which liberates the oppressed, not in his own generation merely, but in all generations.

Does this mean that the artist should stand coldly aloof from the shindies of his day? Far from it! These shindies are his very school. Tolstoy's polemics,

Shaw's prefaces, Rolland's war-essays are croix-de-guerre in the very noblest sense of a cross-of-war. Wagner has thundered in the same index. And how the artolater-æsthetes hate to be reminded of Wagner's socialism. 'As if that has anything to do with his music!'

Only a middle class, and one sitting ever more precariously on the lid of domination, could have fallen into an error so grotesque as the idea of divorcing the artist from the social thinker. Yet when the artist comes, as artist,

to create, all these brabbles over the bread of the body must be as they may. His concern now is with the bread of the spirit. He must put his trust in a higher rhythm. Let the spirit speak and the intellect be amanuensis only. On these higher reaches art is no longer constrained by the plot terrestrial, to give or take ringing blows on the windy plains of Troy. Art is become the procession of beacon fires flaming from peak to peak across the blue Ægean, heralding to watchers at Argos the final victory.

THE PARADOX OF PSYCHIC RESEARCH

WITH ESPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE 'MARGERY' CASE

BY EDWIN G. BORING

THE Margery mediumship, which has now become so famous, brings to the fore certain problems of scientific method which the lay public seldom faces, and which, being unrealized, are likely to leave the thoughtful student of such a case in considerable perplexity. In the scientific investigation of an affair like the Margery case it is generally supposed that the investigators are seeking to prove or to disprove the genuineness of certain supernormal phenomena. A scientist cannot, however, seriously undertake to offer a solution of such a proposition, for it implies some things that are not true about scientific method. There are at least four difficulties with this formulation of the problem.

VOL. 137- - NO. 1

D

I

Genuineness. Strange as it may seem, science can never deal with the problem of genuineness. All it can do is to report the relations it observes among phenomena, and then go on, reporting other relationships between these phenomena and other phenomena, thus building up ultimately a systematic body of knowledge that is a chapter of science.

Let us take the atom. Are atoms real or genuine? Originally they were purely speculative affairs. It did not seem to be conceivable that matter could be subdivided and subdivided again, and so on forever. There must be, so it seemed, some stopping-place, something so small that it could be no further divided an atom forsooth.

Were such atoms genuine? No, they were the product of the inability of the mind to grasp the notion of an infinitude of subdivisions. There was no proof that they actually 'existed.'

Ever so much later the chemical law of multiple proportions was discovered. This law was an observed relationship. It showed that in entering into chemical combination the amounts of the elementary substances either remained constant or bore simple proportional relationships to one another. For instance, a given amount of hydrogen will combine with a given amount of oxygen to yield water, and for water the proportion of hydrogen to oxygen is fixed immutably. It is possible, however, to cause exactly twice as much oxygen to combine with the same amount of hydrogen to make hydrogen peroxide, and for hydrogen peroxide the proportions are also immutable. One cannot, with the same amount of hydrogen, get one and one-half or any fractional proportion of oxygen to combine. This law is a matter of observation and cannot be challenged within the limits of the exactness with which it was observed. It happens, however, to be a law which would hold if the chemical elements were divided into atoms which were themselves indivisible in entering into combinations, and thus the law of multiple proportions came to support the atomic hypothesis. We now say water is H2O and hydrogen peroxide H2O2. With two parts of hydrogen we can combine one part or two parts of oxygen because the atoms combine thus to make a molecule. We cannot have one and onehalf parts of oxygen to the two of hydrogen because we cannot have one and one-half atoms of oxygen. The atoms for these purposes are indivisible.

Have we proven the genuineness of the atom now? No, because we have

not observed atoms as such. All we have done is to establish an atomic hypothesis, a statement that certain phenomena occur as if matter were made up of indivisible atoms. Nevertheless we must now distinguish between science and human belief. Certainly the fact that combinations occur in multiple proportions strengthens the belief of both layman and scientist that there actually are atoms.

The atomic hypothesis, since it was first laid down, has been tremendously strengthened. Something might have been discovered at any time to discredit it, but nothing has. What has happened has been that chemists have assumed that the hypothesis is genuine, and have set experiments based upon this hypothesis, realizing that every such experiment was a test of it. The belief in the reality of atoms grew stronger as more and more experiments, based upon the belief, proved successful. Presently the belief became so strong that we came to speak of the atomic law instead of the atomic hypothesis.

Nowadays, however, no physicist believes in an indivisible atom. Atoms are supposed to be made up of ions. And the physicist counts the ions in an atom, measures them, and plots their orbits of motion within the complex system that the atom is. What does this mean? Is the atom no longer genuine? Well, the original proposition has been proven untrue. The atom is not, after all, an indivisible smallest particle of matter. The atom is, speaking relatively, a vast system of ions, each moving in a precise manner at a tremendous velocity. As originally defined, the atom is not genuine, but this discovery makes no difference to the scientist. The law of multiple proportions and all the other observed relationships still hold, and all that has happened is that a partially erroneous hypothesis has led

to positive results and a further knowledge of the truth.

Moreover, we may go even further. The atomic hypothesis is based on a belief in the reality of matter, but modern physics is beginning to question even this reality. The hypothesis of matter has yielded most of modern science, but it may be wrong after all. There may be nothing but energy. It now seems possible that even matter is not genuine.

It is plain, then, that genuineness.is a relative and temporary affair. Genuineness is simply an expression that means we have a practical belief in something at a particular time. What is doubted to-day is proven to-morrow and disproven later. But the disproof of the better accepted scientific beliefs generally means progress and not retrogression. Professor Whitehead has recently expounded this fact of the progressive nature of science in the Atlantic. The observed laws remain, worth all that they ever were. All we do is to alter our belief in the nature of factors, like the atom, with which the laws are concerned.

Now it is this instability of the genuineness of scientific conclusions that makes particular difficulty in the investigation of psychic phenomena. The investigation usually hinges on the genuineness of certain phenomena, as to whether they are 'normal' or 'supernormal.' Sometimes a prize is offered for a proof of genuineness. What can the scientist do? The medium, not being a scientist, usually wants her genuineness attested, and may make such an attempt the condition of the investigation. If the scientist goes ahead he probably does so with the mental reservation that he means by genuineness a naïve definition of the word. But when he comes to make a conclusion, he is faced with a dilemma, especially if he should be about to conclude that the

phenomena are supernormal. He may assert that the phenomena are genuine, but he must know in his heart that his assertion is simply the measure of the strength of his temporary belief. Any discovery at any time may make him wish to alter his verdict. He would not be a scientist if he felt that his conclusion was necessarily permanent. If a prize has been offered, his dilemma is the worse. He feels that money is being paid on the basis of a conclusion that may later have to be altered. On the other hand, if his conclusion is negative, as it usually is, he is in difficulty. There is always a chance that he is wrong, if not about the problem of the normal and the supernormal, at least about his own particular explanation of normal fraud; and he may be sure that the proponents of the supernormal will not fail to take advantage of this chance of error in controversy subsequent to his formal conclusion.

Perhaps this difficulty of the scientist will be clearer if we consider specifically the Margery case. A year ago there was a committee of scientists who sought to render a verdict upon the question of the genuineness of the phenomena which occur in the presence of Margery. This committee witnessed many things that they could not immediately explain and they signed reports describing them because they knew what they had observed. So far they were on safe ground. A trained observer can report what he observes with considerable reliability. Just so one might report that the motorman turned a handle and the trolley-car moved forward, without having any notion at all how the movement was brought about. Perhaps there was a demon inside the thing, and, not liking the crank to be turned, he ran and made the car go- at least this is a possible hypothesis.

Now, if this committee had kept on

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