Lo! (5 page)

4

Over the town of Noirfontaine, France, one day in April, 1842, there was a cloudless sky, but drops of water were falling. See back to data upon repetitions. The water was falling, as if from a fixed appearing-point, somewhere above the ground, to a definite area beneath. The next day water was still falling upon this one small area, as mysteriously as if a ghost aloft were holding the nozzle of an invisible hose.

I take this account from the journal of the French Academy of Sciences
(Comptes Rendus),
vol. 14, p. 664.

What do I mean by that?

I don’t mean anything by that. At the same time, I do mean something by the meaninglessness of that. I mean that we are in the helpless state of a standardless existence, and that the appeal to authority is as much of a wobble as any other of our insecurities.

Nevertheless, though I know of no standards by which to judge anything, I conceive—or accept the idea—of something that is The Standard, if I can think of our existence as an Organism. If human thought is a growth, like all other growths, its logic is without foundation of its own, and is only the adjusting construedevness of all other growing things. A tree cannot find out, as it were, how to blossom, until comes blossom time. A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine time. For whatever is supposed to be meant by progress, there is no need in human minds for standards of their own: this is in the sense that no part of a growing plant needs guidance of its own devising, nor special knowledge of its own as to how to become a leaf or a root. It needs no base of its own, because the relative wholeness of the plant is relative baseness to its parts. At the same time, in the midst of this theory of submergence, I do not accept that human minds are absolute nonentities, just as I do not accept that a leaf, or a root, of a plant, though so dependent upon a main body, and so clearly only a part, is absolutely without something of an individualizing touch of its own.

It is the problem of continuity-discontinuity, which perhaps I shall have to take up sometime.

However—

London
Times,
April 26, 1821—that the inhabitants of Truro, Cornwall, were amused, astonished, or alarmed, “according to nerve and judgment,” by arrivals of stones, from an unfindable source, upon a house in Carlow Street. The mayor of the town visited the place, and was made so nervous by the rattling stones that he called out a military guard. He investigated, and the soldiers investigated, and the clatter of theorists increased the noise.
Times,
May 1—stones still rattling, theorists still clattering, but nothing found out.

Flows of frogs—flows of worms—flows of water—flows of stones—just where do we expect to draw a line? Why not go on to thinking that there have been mysterious transportations of human beings?

We’ll go on.

A great deal of the opposition to our data is connotative. Most likely when Dr. Gilbert rubbed a rod and made bits of paper jump on a table, the opposition to his magic was directed not so much against what he was doing as against what it might lead to. Witchcraft always has a hard time, until it becomes established and changes its name.

We hear much of the conflict between science and religion, but our conflict is with both of these. Science and religion always have agreed in opposing and suppressing the various witchcrafts. Now that religion is inglorious, one of the most fantastic of transferences of worships is that of glorifying science, as a beneficent being. It is the attributing of all that is of development, or of possible betterment to science. But no scientist has ever upheld a new idea, without bringing upon himself abuse from other scientists. Science has done its utmost to prevent whatever Science has done.

There are cynics who deny the existence of human gratitude. But it seems that I am no cynic. So convinced am I of the existence of gratitude that I see in it one of our strongest oppositions. There are millions of persons who receive favors that they forget: but gratitude does exist, and they’ve got to express it somewhere. They take it out by being grateful to science for all that science has done for them, a gratitude, which, according to their dull perceptions won’t cost them anything. So there is economic indignation against anybody who is disagreeable to science. He is trying to rob the people of a cheap gratitude.

I like a bargain as well as does anybody else, but I can’t save expenses by being grateful to Science, if for every scientist who has perhaps been of benefit to me, there have been many other scientists who have tried to strangle that possible benefit. Also, if I’m dead broke, I don’t get benefits to be grateful for.

Resistance to notions in this book will come from persons who identify industrial science, and the good of it, with the pure, or academic, or aristocratic sciences that are living on the repute of industrial science. In my own mind there is distinguishment between a good watchdog and the fleas on him. If the fleas, too, could be taught to bark, there’d be a little chorus that would be of some tiny value. But fleas are aristocrats.

London
Times,
Jan. 13, 1843—that, according to the
Counter de l’Isère,
two little girls, last of December, 1842, were picking leaves from the ground, near Clavaux (Livet), France, when they saw stones falling around them. The stones fell with uncanny slowness. The children ran to their homes, and told of the phenomenon, and returned with their parents. Again stones fell, and with the same uncanny slowness. It is said that relatively to these falls the children were attractive agents. There was another phenomenon, an upward current, into which the children were dragged, as if into a vortex. We might have had data of mysterious disappearances of children, but the parents, who were unaffected by the current, pulled them back.

In the
Toronto Globe,
Sept. 9, 1880, a correspondent writes that he had heard reports of most improbable occurrences upon a farm, near the township of Wellesley, Ontario. He went to the place, to interview the farmer, Mr. Manser. As he approached the farmhouse, he saw that all the windows were boarded up. He learned that, about the end of July, windows had begun to break, though no missiles had been seen. The explanation by the incredulous was that the old house was settling. It was a good explanation, except for what it overlooked. To have any opinion, one must overlook something. The disregard was that, quite as authentic as the stories of breaking windows, were stories of falls of water in the rooms, having passed through walls, showing no trace of such passage. It is said that water had fallen in such volumes, from appearing-points in rooms, that the furniture of the house had been moved to a shed. In all our records openness of phenomena is notable. The story is that showers fell in rooms, when the farmhouse was crowded with people. For more details see the
Halifax Citizen,
September 13.

I omit about sixty instances of seeming teleportations of stones and water, of which I have records. Numerousness hasn’t any meaning, as a standard to judge by.

The simplest cases of seeming teleportations are flows of stones, into open fields, doing no damage, not especially annoying anybody, and in places where there were no means of concealment for mischievous or malicious persons. There is a story of this kind, in the
New York Sun,
June 22, 1884. June 16th—a farm near Trenton, N.J.—two young men, George and Albert Sanford, hoeing in a field—stones falling. There was no building anywhere near, and there was not even a fence behind which anybody could hide. The next day stones fell again. The young men dropped their hoes and ran to Trenton, where they told of their experiences. They returned with forty or fifty amateur detectives, who spread out and tried to observe something, or more philosophically sat down and arrived at conclusions without observing anything. Crowds came to the cornfield. In the presence of crowds, stones continued to fall from a point overhead. Nothing more was found out.

A pig and his swill—

Or Science and data—

Or that the way of a brain is only the way of a belly—

We can call the process that occurs in them either assimilative or digestive. The mind-worshiper might as well take guts for his god.

For many strange occurrences there are conventional explanations. In the mind of a conventionalist, reported phenomena assimilate with conventional explanations. There must be disregards. The mind must reject some data. This process, too, is both alimentary and mental.

The conventional explanation of mysterious flows of stones is that they are peggings by neighbors. I have given data as I have found them. Maybe they are indigestible. The conventional explanation of mysterious flows of water is that they are exudations from insects. If so there must sometimes be torrential bugs.

New York Sun,
Oct. 30, 1892—that, day after day, in Oklahoma, where for weeks there had been a drought, water was falling upon a large cottonwood tree, near Stillwater. A conventionalist visited this tree. He found insects. In
Insect Life,
5-204, it is said that the Stillwater mystery had been solved. Dr. Neel, Director of the Agricultural Experimental Station, at Stillwater, had gone to the tree, and had captured some of the insects that were causing the precipitation. They were
Proconia undata
Fab.

And how am I going to prove that this was a senseless, or brutal, or anyway mechanical, assimilation?

We don’t have proofs. We have expressions.

Our expression is that this precipitation in Oklahoma was only one of perhaps many. We find three other recorded instances, at this time, and if they be not attributable to exudations from insects—but we’ll not prove anything. There is a theorem that Euclid never attempted. That is to take
Q.E.D.
as a proposition.

In
Science,
21-94, Mr. H. Chaplin, of Ohio University, writes that, in the town of Akron, Ohio—about while water was falling upon a tree in Oklahoma—there had been a continuous fall of water, during a succession of clear days. Members of the faculty of Ohio University had investigated, but had been unable to solve the problem. There was a definite and persisting appearing-point from which to a small area near a brickyard, water was falling. Mr. Chaplin, who had probably never heard of similar occurrences far from damp places, thought that vapors from this brickyard were rising, and condensing, and falling back. If so there would often be such precipitations over ponds and other bodies of water.

About the same time, water was mysteriously appearing at Martinsville, Ohio, according to the
Philadelphia Public Ledger,
Oct. 19, 1892. Behind a house, a mist was falling upon an area not more than a dozen feet square.
St. Louis Globe-Democrat,
November 19—that, in Water Street, Brownsville, Pa., there was a garden, in which was a peach tree, upon which water was falling. As to the insect explanation, we note the statement that the water “seemed to fall from some height above the tree, and covered an area about fourteen feet square.”

For all I know, some trees may have occult powers. Perhaps some especially gifted trees have power to transport water, from far away, in times of need. I noted the drought in Oklahoma, and then I looked up conditions in Ohio and Pennsylvania. Rainfall was below normal. In Ohio, according to the
Monthly Weather Review,
of November, there was a drought. A watery manna came to chosen trees.

There is no sense in trying to prove anything, if all things are continuous, so that there isn’t anything, except the inclusive of all, which may be Something. But aesthetically, if not scientifically, there may be value in expressions, and we’ll have variations of our theme. There were, in places far apart, simultaneous flows of water from stationary appearing-points, in and around Charleston, S.C, in the period of the long series of earthquake shocks there. Later I shall touch more upon an idea that will be an organic interpretation of falls of water in places that have been desolated by catastrophes. About the middle of September, 1886, falling water from “a cloudless sky,” never falling outside a spot twenty-five feet wide, was reported from Dawson, Ga. This shower was not intermittent. Of course the frequently mentioned circumstance of the “cloudless sky” has no significance. Water falling all the way from the sky, even at times of the slightest breezes, cannot be thought of as localizing strictly upon an area a few yards in diameter. We think of appearing-points a short distance above the ground. Then showers upon a space ten feet square were reported from Aiken, S.C. There were similar falls of water at Cheraw, S.C. For particulars, see the
Charleston News and Courier,
October 8, 21, 25, 26. For an account of falls of water, “from a cloudless sky,” strictly to one point, in Charlotte, N.C, according to investigations by a meteorologist, see the
Monthly Weather Review,
October, 1886. In the
New York Sun,
October 24, it is said that, for fourteen days, water had been falling from “a cloudless sky,” to a point in Chesterfield County, S.C, falling so heavily that streams of it had gushed from roof pipes.

Then came news that water was falling from a point in Charleston.

Several days before, in the
News and Courier,
had been published the insect explanation of falls of water. In the
News and Courier,
November 5, a reporter tells that he had visited the place in Charleston, where it was said that water was falling, and that he had seen a fall of water. He had climbed a tree to investigate. He had seen insects.

But there are limits to what can be attributed, except by the most desperate explainers, to insects.

In the
Monthly Weather Review,
August, 1886, it is said that, in Charleston, September 4th, three showers of hot stones had been reported.

“An examination of some of these stones, shortly after they had fallen, forced the conviction that the public was being made the victim of a practical joke.”

How an examination of stones could demonstrate whether they had been slung humorously or not, is more than whatever brains I have can make out. Upon September 4th, Charleston was desolated. The great earthquake had occurred upon August 31st, and continuing shocks were terrorizing the people. Still, I’d go far from my impressions of what we call existence, if I’d think that terror, or anything else, was ever homogeneous at Charleston, or anywhere else. Battles and shipwrecks, and especially diseases, are materials for humorists, and the fun of funerals never will be exhausted. I don’t argue that in the midst of desolation and woe, at Charleston, there were no jokers. I tell a story as I found it recorded in the
Charleston News and Courier,
September 6, and mention my own conclusion, which is that wherever jocular survivors of the catastrophe may have been cutting up capers, they were not concerned in this series of occurrences.