Second Sight (22 page)
Authors: Neil M. Gunn
“Now I have tried to suggest to you the ultimate condition to which this psychical thinker, if we may so call him, strives to attain, in order that such by-products of his journey, as second sight typifies, may be seen in their secondary and to him quite unimportant light. For as I have said he develops these by-products far beyond anything comparable in the highest experience of human love, so that, for example, he can at last see that which is not within range of his physical eyes or which has not yet come before his physical eyes. And not only in the case of sight, but also of sound, and even of smell. To him these by-products are elementaries, and students are warned against playing with them, as I, a churchman, would warn my congregation against playing with carnal things. To him they were elementariesâover two thousand years ago.
“The strife here is between matter and mind, and mind will win through, because it is more important, more stupendous in its significance, than matter. A boy whistling a tune is a more wonderful phenomenon than the largest inert sun in all the universe, and we know it, and the materialist admits it. At times, matter will predominate and we become estranged from the things of the mind, of the spirit, by the force of external things, by excessive toil, by material greed, by all sorts of sensual cravings and excitements, by intrigues, by tyranny, by lust for power, and by the conjunction of all these in war. Not only does the mystic tell you that, not only the Christian, but even the so-called anti-Christian, anti-mystic, like the communist or socialist, tells you the same thing. Everyone who is for the freedom of the spirit, for its integrity and need for development, must tell you the same thing, and must damn and want to destroy all that which thwarts it and keeps it from its high adventure. Now the spirit will never be defeated. Not because it strives for what is easily called right or moral or religious or equalitarian, but because it does not want to be cheated out of its own fulfilment, out of attaining that state of freedom, of delight, of ecstasy, of which once or twice in a lifetime it has caught a glimpse. The materialist, the scoffer, the sceptic, may try to destroy that spirit. He can never succeed. In the struggle it is not the spirit he will destroy,
it will be himself
.”
The Dean paused for a moment. “Don't misunderstand me,” he went on. “Science will
help
enormously, more perhaps than any other factor. Already, you see, Colonel Brown is attempting to prove by mathematics the existence of the fourth dimension for the use of our spirit. We are here to-night discussing it. Which in itself is surely a remarkable thing. And always cropping up are these marvels concerning watches and ghosts and funerals and strange prophecies. All these are mere signs, intimations. I have dealt with Yoga because it happened to have been mentioned. I might have dealt with Plotinus, other men, other periods and places. For the spirit is in all men, and it is the same spirit.
“I might even have tried to deal with this land, this very beautiful land, the Highlands; have tried to show a manner of life, a humanism, concerned not with the outward show of material aggrandisement, but with the inward affairs of the spirit, as in poetry and music and good manners, in vanities and jealousies and strife, in a certain vividness, divine or diabolical, of the personal spirit. I do not wish to flatter this spirit. It appears, anyway, to be dying, to be passing out. But it had its day in an environment which forced the eyes at times to stare in contemplation. You have only to listen to their music, to perceive the way in which the finest, most sensitive spirits amongst them still become overborne by its rhythm, to see that what I say is true.
“But I am not going into that, fascinating as the subject may be, linking up rhythm and contemplation with the philosophies of the East, with the fundamental oneness of man. All I want to say is that I am not surprised that in this land in particular there should have lingered on these mental manifestations or marvels, grouped under the name of second sight. And when you examine them you find, as one should expect, that they do not refer exclusively to seeing or to such prophecy as the Brahan Seer's âDoom of the House of Seaforth'. They also refer to other senses, as in Indiaâthough manifestly these simple people of a past age here, who could neither read nor write, had no knowledge of even the existence of Indian religion or philosophy; they refer to the sense of hearingâfor example, the hearing of boards being sawn for coffins before they were actually sawn; even a forecasting of events by the sense of smell is by no means unknown. These marvels are in the case of the Highlands merely the manifestations of a spirit in declineâinstead of, as they should be, the manifestations of a spirit exploring towards the light. And if I have spoken so much it is merely that I have tried to put them in proper perspective, to give them their elementary place, in this mysterious movement from the simple consciousness of the lower forms of life, through the self-consciousness of man to-day, to that higher consciousness which, I am afraid, I have failed even to suggest.”
The concluding words had a note of simple humility, and as the Dean smiled Helen turned her eyes away.
Presently Sir John said, “You have brought the East back to me. There were times often, I admit, when I was disturbed, disturbed more than I might care to say, though always just quite by what, it was difficult to know. You dismiss it, of course. You say, âYes, seems pretty marvellous.' You are sceptical, for you have to protect your own mind. But that certain of these thinkers had developed extraordinary gifts there could be no doubt. No question of deceit or fraud. On the contrary, there was a giving up of material things. They acted not for gain but for loss, if one may put it that way. To me they were almost completely incomprehensible, and would have been, I think, quite incomprehensible, were it not for one personal experience. However, I have enjoyed the talk. You haven't lost the old gift for philosophy, David.”
“I think”, said Mr. Blair, “that Sir John should tell us his personal experience.”
Sir John smiled and shook his head.
Lady Marway looked at him and then got up. “I think it is really time we were going.”
“No, no, no!” cried Mr. Blair.
But now all were on their feet, and as Lady Marway went up to the Dean, the others got into little talk groups.
Mr. Blair said to Geoffrey, “By the way, did you ever hear or read of the prophecies of the Brahan Seer?”
Geoffrey pleaded ignorance and Mr. Blair turned to a bookshelf. “Read this. Don't lose it. You'll enjoy the curse on the House of Seaforth. Are you fond of that sort of curse, by the way? I have a very good collection of curses. Although I suppose this wasn't properly a curse. But it's quite a remarkable story.”
“Is it censored? I mean, are the curses really printed?” Joyce asked, raising innocent eyebrows.
Mr. Blair was delighted with what he took to be her wit.
She became quite struck by this rubicund little man and insisted that he tell the story there and then specially for her benefit.
Marjory said nothing. Geoffrey smiled. George backed up Joyce. “Very good,” said Mr. Blair, bowing gallantly and assuming his tortoiseshell glasses; for it was now obvious that Lady Marway, the Dean and Sir John were deep in personal discourse, while in Colonel Brown's corner Harry and Helen were manifestly engaging that clear-headed army man in fourth-dimensional manÅuvres.
“This Brahan Seer lived in the sixteen-hundreds. Brahan is near Dingwall. The seat of the Mackenzies, the Seaforths. This Seer made very remarkable prophecies, most of which were fulfilled.”
“One moment,” said Geoffrey. “Is all the evidence the usual traditional hearsay?”
“Well, pretty nearly,” replied Mr. Blair.
“Pardon my interruption. Please go on,” said Geoffrey.
“Except in two cases at least, where there does seem fairly clear evidence that knowledge of the prophecies was widespread before the events happened. One was in the case of Fairburn Tower, a thriving mansion house of a local laird. The Seer said that the Tower would fall into ruins and that a cow would climb to a high room and have a calf there. The family decayed, the Tower fell into ruins, and a cow duly climbed the turret stairs and had a calf in a top room. People who had long known of the prophecy came from Inverness to see the cow. They had to let her down by ropes from a top window.”
“But what on earth made the cow climb the stairs?” asked Joyce.
“It seems the local farmer had stored some of his straw in the top room. The cow had followed the fallen straws up the stairs.”
Geoffrey laughed and was going to ask something when Mr. Blair, turning over a final page, found his prophecy of doom.
“This Seer”, he explained, “was disliked by her Ladyship of Seaforth, because he could see too far into her affairs. She apparently was that sort of lady. Besides, he seemed to have had a fairly caustic tongue and was too obviously what we would call nowadays a democrat. So in the absence of her lord she got him tried by the church authorities for being a Satanic agent, and by all accounts the remarkable fellow was burned in a tar barrel near Fortrose. On his way to his unhappy end, he uttered Gaelic words to this effect:
“ âI see a Chief, the last of his House, both deaf and dumb. He will be the father of four fair sons, all of whom he shall follow to the tomb. He shall live careworn, and die mourning, knowing that the honours of his House are to be extinguished for ever, and that no future Chief of the Mackenzies shall rule in Kintail. After lamenting over the last and most promising of his sons, he himself shall sink into the grave, and the remnant of his possessions shall be inherited by a white-coifed lassie from the east, and she shall kill her sister. As a sign by which it shall be known that these things are coming to pass, there shall be four great lairds in the days of the last Seaforth (Gairloch, Chisholm, Grant, and Raasay), one of whom shall be buck-toothed, the second hare-lipped, the third half-witted, and the fourth a stammerer. Seaforth, when he looks round and sees them, may know that his sons are doomed to death, and that his broad lands shall pass away to the stranger, and that his line shall come to an end'.”
“Jehosophat!” exclaimed George. “You are not going to say next that all that really happened?”
“It didâbut not for nearly a hundred and fifty years. The prophecy got around and people wrote letters about it before it happened, and credible men who survived the fulfilment of the prophecy told how widespread the prophecy had been throughout the country in their youth. When the last Seaforth died, the papers featured it at length. Sir Walter Scott knew about it. Historically all that seems quite certain. In fact, there were people who thought that the old Seer, as generation followed generation, had made a grave fool of himself. Then there came a Seaforth who had four sons and the whole affair happened as detailed. Colonel Brown tried to work out mathematically the reasonable probabilities. The factors: a laird who would in his life become deaf and dumb (for he was not born so); four sons; the death of those four sons before himself; the loss of his lands and the end of his line; the lassie from the east who would kill her sister (through an accident, as it happened, while she was driving a dog-cart); and the four contemporary chiefs with their remarkable malformities. Colonel Brown said that when you give odds to each factor and multiply them to get the degree of probabilityâor something like that, for I never was a mathematicianâthe final odds against the whole happening were so inconceivably vast that coincidence must definitely be ruled out. Do I make myself clear to you?”
“Perfectly,” said Geoffrey. “I should agree with Colonel Brown. ButâI have not yet agreed with the evidence. When I read this I shall be able to show you its gaping lacunae. For example, in the letters that you assert referred to the curse before it was fulfilled, were those terms that you have read out explicitly stated?”
“Well, I couldn't say as to explicit statement. The trouble in those far-off days was, of course, that no one wrote, or no one thought of writing down facts to stand as evidence. Everything was committed not to paper but to memory. Poems and everything else. That fact has got to be taken into account when it comes to destructive criticism. Evidence was not deliberately or consciously withheld. For example, you will find here many prophecies of the Seer, utterly fantastic things, which never have been fulfilled. Nor, I should say, ever have the remotest chance of being fulfilledâshort, perhaps, of a world war that will turn us into primitive barbarians again.”
“And that's extremely unlikely the way things are going, what!” said George.
Mr. Blair glanced at him and smiled.
“But tell me,” asked Joyce, “how on earth could he see hundreds of years ahead?”
“He could see millions of years ahead,” said Geoffrey, “with the greatest of ease, because a million years to a man like that are but as a day.”
“Are you trying to be sarcastic?”
“Trying? I'm only trying my best to understand the extraordinary credulity of men who dabble in this sort of thing. If you only understood the terrific fight that science has had to put up against every kind of religious prophet and tribal witch-doctor and cultured dabbler in the occult, you would understand my impatience. And surely to goodness, you know them in London: you know people who go to crystal gazers and diviners of one kind or another, and in particular those loathsome mystics who have west-end parlours, oh very cultured, esoteric, you don't payâno, no, you just leave something, all in the nature of a religious service, dim lights, incenseâoh God, it turns my stomach. The new Messiah!” He laughed.
Mr. Blair laughed also, and then, lowering his voice, “I like your attitude. It's what I call classical. Now, wait! I have an idea. Something has presumably been happening over at your place. Why not carry out an experiment? Why not? If you really have some material to go on. I understand about your laboratory tests and so forth, but after all you can't bring these surroundings and people to London. There is just this about the real second sight. It apparently is an involuntary and unusual exhibit. You can't ask the subject to sit down in a chair and turn on the prophetic tap. You see my point?”
“The strife here is between matter and mind, and mind will win through, because it is more important, more stupendous in its significance, than matter. A boy whistling a tune is a more wonderful phenomenon than the largest inert sun in all the universe, and we know it, and the materialist admits it. At times, matter will predominate and we become estranged from the things of the mind, of the spirit, by the force of external things, by excessive toil, by material greed, by all sorts of sensual cravings and excitements, by intrigues, by tyranny, by lust for power, and by the conjunction of all these in war. Not only does the mystic tell you that, not only the Christian, but even the so-called anti-Christian, anti-mystic, like the communist or socialist, tells you the same thing. Everyone who is for the freedom of the spirit, for its integrity and need for development, must tell you the same thing, and must damn and want to destroy all that which thwarts it and keeps it from its high adventure. Now the spirit will never be defeated. Not because it strives for what is easily called right or moral or religious or equalitarian, but because it does not want to be cheated out of its own fulfilment, out of attaining that state of freedom, of delight, of ecstasy, of which once or twice in a lifetime it has caught a glimpse. The materialist, the scoffer, the sceptic, may try to destroy that spirit. He can never succeed. In the struggle it is not the spirit he will destroy,
it will be himself
.”
The Dean paused for a moment. “Don't misunderstand me,” he went on. “Science will
help
enormously, more perhaps than any other factor. Already, you see, Colonel Brown is attempting to prove by mathematics the existence of the fourth dimension for the use of our spirit. We are here to-night discussing it. Which in itself is surely a remarkable thing. And always cropping up are these marvels concerning watches and ghosts and funerals and strange prophecies. All these are mere signs, intimations. I have dealt with Yoga because it happened to have been mentioned. I might have dealt with Plotinus, other men, other periods and places. For the spirit is in all men, and it is the same spirit.
“I might even have tried to deal with this land, this very beautiful land, the Highlands; have tried to show a manner of life, a humanism, concerned not with the outward show of material aggrandisement, but with the inward affairs of the spirit, as in poetry and music and good manners, in vanities and jealousies and strife, in a certain vividness, divine or diabolical, of the personal spirit. I do not wish to flatter this spirit. It appears, anyway, to be dying, to be passing out. But it had its day in an environment which forced the eyes at times to stare in contemplation. You have only to listen to their music, to perceive the way in which the finest, most sensitive spirits amongst them still become overborne by its rhythm, to see that what I say is true.
“But I am not going into that, fascinating as the subject may be, linking up rhythm and contemplation with the philosophies of the East, with the fundamental oneness of man. All I want to say is that I am not surprised that in this land in particular there should have lingered on these mental manifestations or marvels, grouped under the name of second sight. And when you examine them you find, as one should expect, that they do not refer exclusively to seeing or to such prophecy as the Brahan Seer's âDoom of the House of Seaforth'. They also refer to other senses, as in Indiaâthough manifestly these simple people of a past age here, who could neither read nor write, had no knowledge of even the existence of Indian religion or philosophy; they refer to the sense of hearingâfor example, the hearing of boards being sawn for coffins before they were actually sawn; even a forecasting of events by the sense of smell is by no means unknown. These marvels are in the case of the Highlands merely the manifestations of a spirit in declineâinstead of, as they should be, the manifestations of a spirit exploring towards the light. And if I have spoken so much it is merely that I have tried to put them in proper perspective, to give them their elementary place, in this mysterious movement from the simple consciousness of the lower forms of life, through the self-consciousness of man to-day, to that higher consciousness which, I am afraid, I have failed even to suggest.”
The concluding words had a note of simple humility, and as the Dean smiled Helen turned her eyes away.
Presently Sir John said, “You have brought the East back to me. There were times often, I admit, when I was disturbed, disturbed more than I might care to say, though always just quite by what, it was difficult to know. You dismiss it, of course. You say, âYes, seems pretty marvellous.' You are sceptical, for you have to protect your own mind. But that certain of these thinkers had developed extraordinary gifts there could be no doubt. No question of deceit or fraud. On the contrary, there was a giving up of material things. They acted not for gain but for loss, if one may put it that way. To me they were almost completely incomprehensible, and would have been, I think, quite incomprehensible, were it not for one personal experience. However, I have enjoyed the talk. You haven't lost the old gift for philosophy, David.”
“I think”, said Mr. Blair, “that Sir John should tell us his personal experience.”
Sir John smiled and shook his head.
Lady Marway looked at him and then got up. “I think it is really time we were going.”
“No, no, no!” cried Mr. Blair.
But now all were on their feet, and as Lady Marway went up to the Dean, the others got into little talk groups.
Mr. Blair said to Geoffrey, “By the way, did you ever hear or read of the prophecies of the Brahan Seer?”
Geoffrey pleaded ignorance and Mr. Blair turned to a bookshelf. “Read this. Don't lose it. You'll enjoy the curse on the House of Seaforth. Are you fond of that sort of curse, by the way? I have a very good collection of curses. Although I suppose this wasn't properly a curse. But it's quite a remarkable story.”
“Is it censored? I mean, are the curses really printed?” Joyce asked, raising innocent eyebrows.
Mr. Blair was delighted with what he took to be her wit.
She became quite struck by this rubicund little man and insisted that he tell the story there and then specially for her benefit.
Marjory said nothing. Geoffrey smiled. George backed up Joyce. “Very good,” said Mr. Blair, bowing gallantly and assuming his tortoiseshell glasses; for it was now obvious that Lady Marway, the Dean and Sir John were deep in personal discourse, while in Colonel Brown's corner Harry and Helen were manifestly engaging that clear-headed army man in fourth-dimensional manÅuvres.
“This Brahan Seer lived in the sixteen-hundreds. Brahan is near Dingwall. The seat of the Mackenzies, the Seaforths. This Seer made very remarkable prophecies, most of which were fulfilled.”
“One moment,” said Geoffrey. “Is all the evidence the usual traditional hearsay?”
“Well, pretty nearly,” replied Mr. Blair.
“Pardon my interruption. Please go on,” said Geoffrey.
“Except in two cases at least, where there does seem fairly clear evidence that knowledge of the prophecies was widespread before the events happened. One was in the case of Fairburn Tower, a thriving mansion house of a local laird. The Seer said that the Tower would fall into ruins and that a cow would climb to a high room and have a calf there. The family decayed, the Tower fell into ruins, and a cow duly climbed the turret stairs and had a calf in a top room. People who had long known of the prophecy came from Inverness to see the cow. They had to let her down by ropes from a top window.”
“But what on earth made the cow climb the stairs?” asked Joyce.
“It seems the local farmer had stored some of his straw in the top room. The cow had followed the fallen straws up the stairs.”
Geoffrey laughed and was going to ask something when Mr. Blair, turning over a final page, found his prophecy of doom.
“This Seer”, he explained, “was disliked by her Ladyship of Seaforth, because he could see too far into her affairs. She apparently was that sort of lady. Besides, he seemed to have had a fairly caustic tongue and was too obviously what we would call nowadays a democrat. So in the absence of her lord she got him tried by the church authorities for being a Satanic agent, and by all accounts the remarkable fellow was burned in a tar barrel near Fortrose. On his way to his unhappy end, he uttered Gaelic words to this effect:
“ âI see a Chief, the last of his House, both deaf and dumb. He will be the father of four fair sons, all of whom he shall follow to the tomb. He shall live careworn, and die mourning, knowing that the honours of his House are to be extinguished for ever, and that no future Chief of the Mackenzies shall rule in Kintail. After lamenting over the last and most promising of his sons, he himself shall sink into the grave, and the remnant of his possessions shall be inherited by a white-coifed lassie from the east, and she shall kill her sister. As a sign by which it shall be known that these things are coming to pass, there shall be four great lairds in the days of the last Seaforth (Gairloch, Chisholm, Grant, and Raasay), one of whom shall be buck-toothed, the second hare-lipped, the third half-witted, and the fourth a stammerer. Seaforth, when he looks round and sees them, may know that his sons are doomed to death, and that his broad lands shall pass away to the stranger, and that his line shall come to an end'.”
“Jehosophat!” exclaimed George. “You are not going to say next that all that really happened?”
“It didâbut not for nearly a hundred and fifty years. The prophecy got around and people wrote letters about it before it happened, and credible men who survived the fulfilment of the prophecy told how widespread the prophecy had been throughout the country in their youth. When the last Seaforth died, the papers featured it at length. Sir Walter Scott knew about it. Historically all that seems quite certain. In fact, there were people who thought that the old Seer, as generation followed generation, had made a grave fool of himself. Then there came a Seaforth who had four sons and the whole affair happened as detailed. Colonel Brown tried to work out mathematically the reasonable probabilities. The factors: a laird who would in his life become deaf and dumb (for he was not born so); four sons; the death of those four sons before himself; the loss of his lands and the end of his line; the lassie from the east who would kill her sister (through an accident, as it happened, while she was driving a dog-cart); and the four contemporary chiefs with their remarkable malformities. Colonel Brown said that when you give odds to each factor and multiply them to get the degree of probabilityâor something like that, for I never was a mathematicianâthe final odds against the whole happening were so inconceivably vast that coincidence must definitely be ruled out. Do I make myself clear to you?”
“Perfectly,” said Geoffrey. “I should agree with Colonel Brown. ButâI have not yet agreed with the evidence. When I read this I shall be able to show you its gaping lacunae. For example, in the letters that you assert referred to the curse before it was fulfilled, were those terms that you have read out explicitly stated?”
“Well, I couldn't say as to explicit statement. The trouble in those far-off days was, of course, that no one wrote, or no one thought of writing down facts to stand as evidence. Everything was committed not to paper but to memory. Poems and everything else. That fact has got to be taken into account when it comes to destructive criticism. Evidence was not deliberately or consciously withheld. For example, you will find here many prophecies of the Seer, utterly fantastic things, which never have been fulfilled. Nor, I should say, ever have the remotest chance of being fulfilledâshort, perhaps, of a world war that will turn us into primitive barbarians again.”
“And that's extremely unlikely the way things are going, what!” said George.
Mr. Blair glanced at him and smiled.
“But tell me,” asked Joyce, “how on earth could he see hundreds of years ahead?”
“He could see millions of years ahead,” said Geoffrey, “with the greatest of ease, because a million years to a man like that are but as a day.”
“Are you trying to be sarcastic?”
“Trying? I'm only trying my best to understand the extraordinary credulity of men who dabble in this sort of thing. If you only understood the terrific fight that science has had to put up against every kind of religious prophet and tribal witch-doctor and cultured dabbler in the occult, you would understand my impatience. And surely to goodness, you know them in London: you know people who go to crystal gazers and diviners of one kind or another, and in particular those loathsome mystics who have west-end parlours, oh very cultured, esoteric, you don't payâno, no, you just leave something, all in the nature of a religious service, dim lights, incenseâoh God, it turns my stomach. The new Messiah!” He laughed.
Mr. Blair laughed also, and then, lowering his voice, “I like your attitude. It's what I call classical. Now, wait! I have an idea. Something has presumably been happening over at your place. Why not carry out an experiment? Why not? If you really have some material to go on. I understand about your laboratory tests and so forth, but after all you can't bring these surroundings and people to London. There is just this about the real second sight. It apparently is an involuntary and unusual exhibit. You can't ask the subject to sit down in a chair and turn on the prophetic tap. You see my point?”
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