The summation Olaf Stapledon prepared for the Progressive League's symposium at Brighton in February 1949 — re-set as an essay. The argument, structure, and emphases follow his manuscript notes sheet by sheet; the prose is editorial — connective sentences and asides in his manner that the notes do not contain. For exactly what is his, word for word, see the source-bounded reading edition; for his notes beside the reconstructed prose, the side-by-side reconstruction.
Occasion. Sheet 1 carries, in red pencil beneath the title, the inscription Progressive League / Brighton, Feb 1949 — the speaker's own note on his own papers, the strongest evidence class this archive affords, and the latest-dated set it holds. It fixes no day within the month. The occasion is corroborated externally: the project's deep analysis (§3.10) records, from Crossley's biography, that the Progressive League held a national symposium on psychical research at Brighton in February 1949 and that Stapledon spoke as its commentator, "making the final summation of the conflicting views"; a report in Plan (April 1949, cited there) preserves the summation's core in indirect speech matching these notes. The sheets name only the society, the town, and the month.
The manuscript. Twenty-seven sheets (Liverpool University Library OS/F12/20; folder F12). Several versos are Stapledon's home notepaper (Simon's Field, Caldy); sheet 25 carries the letterhead and nothing else. Sheet 26 is a struck section-divider (Towards a new world view, with an abandoned "Two" cancelled above it), and the final sheet breaks off mid-sentence ("science is not a key to ultimate reality. And that—"). The transcription is diplomatic: cancelled matter is shown struck and never voiced, and the cross-sheet insertions Stapledon keyed by his own marks are placed where those marks direct.
The argument in brief. A commentator's synthesis rather than an advocacy. The key-note is "the opening up of a new world-view," and the discipline is stated at once: accept the evidence "with caution," and "beware staking one's life on it" — founding a faith on the paranormal, or using it "as a prop for crumbling theories" that "should be outgrown." Stapledon surveys the powers (telepathy, clairvoyance, telekinesis, pre- and postcognition, and his own terms teleboulia, pre-kinesis, post-kinesis), a possible three-phase development of psi, and three theories of personality, concluding only that "simple materialism" is untenable and mind "no epiphenomenon." The second half turns to "the highest reaches of human personality" — love, social loyalty, creative intellect and art, religious experience — and closes on the salute and the survival question: "the desire for survival is at bottom irreligious … must be outgrown," and belief in survival "makes true salvation harder."
Position in the corpus. This is the endpoint of the genealogy the deep analysis traces. Section 3.10 reads it as the last dated platform statement of the salute, fourteen years after the 1934 South Place lecture — the prayer of sheet 22 extending Job's sentence to cosmic scale with the object left unknown. The lecture concordance indexes the set for the two loyalties, the Other, agnostic piety (the word stands in sheet 1's margin), man-as-instrument and the salute. Sheet 21's margin also supplies a rare late literary citation, the Keats "Vale of Soul-Making."
What is not known. The day within February 1949; the other symposiasts beyond "the leading British researchers"; whether the twenty-seven sheets are complete (the final sheet breaks off, and the struck "Two" on sheet 26 hints at a division that may not survive); and how far these summation notes match what was said — the one external check, the Plan report, is indirect speech, agreeing with the notes but not fixing their delivered wording.
The question, and the discipline
My key-note is the opening up of a new world-view; but in attempting it we must be true to certain old-new principles and values that come clear only today, clarified in the long clash between science and religion. What we are discovering is that religion, at its best, is not a matter of belief or theory, but of feeling and attitude — an attitude to the actual, here and now. It has two faces: the moral championship of something worth while (call it spirit), and an agnostic piety toward the Whole, or whatever superhuman reality lies beyond us. The past gave us religious experience but confused it with theory; the modern age has given us the scientific spirit, intellectual integrity, and a sense of the limits of thought and language. Out of the combination come agnosticism, natural piety, and cosmical piety.
My aim tonight is limited: to assess the interim findings of paranormal psychology in relation to the rest of modern experience, and above all to religion. What difference does the paranormal make — to our practical prospects, here and hereafter; to our understanding of self and cosmos; and to religion at its best? I come as a plain man to psychical research, mouth rather widely open in amazement but tongue still in cheek; I am no expert, and speak tentatively.
The experts' verdict divides. The agreement is impressive: psi does happen, and is not reducible to the physical; mind is no mere epiphenomenon, the physical is not the ultimate reality, and our experience of space — and, it seems, of time — is in some sense superficial. Beyond that, disagreement is wide: the actual powers; the self (a substantial ego, or a system of "psychons"?); survival and the worth of its evidence; whether one can argue from thinking to a thinker, or whether Hume's objection still bites; the common ground (personal, impersonal, supra-personal?); the status of time; and, through all, free will.
Two cautions. There may be a systematic error hidden in the whole field — as the old ether theory built its "perfect fluid" before relativity rose above the horizon; and there are the depths of human gullibility, for in a complex field, given the will to prove a thing, almost anything can be proved (the Bacon–Shakespeare controversy, the British Israelites, the Flat Earth). So I accept the main findings only provisionally. Above all, beware staking your life on them — founding a faith on the paranormal, or using it to prop up crumbling doctrines that ought to be outgrown. One distinction saves confusion: telepathy proper is awareness of another's experience; teleboulia, or far-willing, is the influencing of another mind, whether by transferring a thought or swaying a will — as helpful prayer would be, if it has any objective effect.
The powers, and the puzzle of time
Telepathy may be a direct contagion of experience, or work indirectly through some "other sphere," so that what reaches consciousness is only a symbolization — as a dream symbolizes — tangled with our repressions. There may be far more of it than we detect: a "tilting" of thought, a source of fashions of feeling (war fever among them), a factor in inspiration, reverie, and the visions on the edge of sleep. Telekinesis needs stronger caution and shows a very restricted scope; yet one wonders about the ages of miracle-working and about autosuggestive cures — is it a special case of the psychokinesis we all practise in moving our own muscles?
Precognition raises a puzzle. If I foresee dying tomorrow in a railway accident, I stay off the train — and if I escape, the "foreseeing" was none; but if it was real, my precautions must be defeated in ways unforeseen. Clairvoyance — awareness of remote, unsensed objects, neither telepathic nor precognitive — is hard to isolate for just that reason. And precognition does not war with free will: grant that choice is free and effective, but grant also a supratemporal sphere, and what I shall freely do is already available now, beyond time. Indeed the old free-will controversy is false: I may be, in one sense, wholly determined, and yet, in another, free within limits — as a trolley-bus is — self-determined by my own nature, not constrained from without. Free will is in fact unimportant; the cult of it springs from veiled egoism and offends the best religious feeling, whose aspiration is rather: let me be God's hand, eye and voice. There is even the question whether "pre-kinesis" and "post-kinesis" are logically possible — a present volition affecting past events: John's courage today strengthening him in the past, his love for Jane strengthening her as she was, or God, the ultimate flower of the process, creating in the end its initial stage. These are logical possibilities, no more.
Survival
Communication with the dead is the offered evidence, but the word wants defining. Complete survival is intelligent activity with memory of earthly life; without the activity, only the survival of records (Broad's "psychic factor"); without the memory, no personal survival at all, unless a "clean-slate" ego. Some say survival is proved, some that it is not, some that it is unproved but possible; I suspend judgement, having no expertise and no strong preference. Yet consider "ad hoc survival" — the ad hoc re-creation, or re-vival, of a full or partial personality. Tyrrell scorned it, but it would explain the scrappy evidence and the want of positive news of the after-life: a stimulus from the living reaches the common ground, which answers by re-creating the person for that occasion, with just the memory the stimulus needs. Our concepts here are probably inadequate; "does the person survive — yes or no?" may be a false question. Rhine reports that psi obeys the normal laws of the higher functions, and that drugs affect it as they affect them.
Could the powers grow?
Are they primitive or developed? Much speaks for "primitive" — second sight, soothsayers, oracles and miracles; wheeling bird-flocks and the homing instinct; the capacities credited to primitive tribes; their rarity among us (too much individualism?); the primitive type of most mediums; the weight of dreams and trances. Yet Rhine's best subjects were intelligent, balanced and not neurotic. Are they universal or exceptional? The differences are great, but Rhine claims all have some. Fixed or improvable? Performance fades with use — fatigue, or boredom — and shows no improvement yet; but a technique may come, as electricity was known in fragments before any electrical technology. Hence, tentatively, three phases: primitive but wild, then civilized and weak, then perhaps greatly developed. At the ideal limit — full telepathy, clairvoyance, telekinesis, pre- and postcognition, pre- and post-kinesis — "I" should be "God." Short of it, partial development is the interesting case: telepathy would need prevention as well as cultivation, ending privacy, deepening understanding (Rhine), transforming love, crime, politics, the preparation for war, even the exploration of other worlds; clairvoyance might extend dowsing and assist astronomy; telekinesis might open a controlled age of "miracles"; precognition might forestall accidents and let us study "future history," postcognition rewrite the past; and far-willing would carry the swaying of minds across time as across space.
What is a person?
How could any of it work? Take the "system" theory in two forms: in one (Price), the elements are strictly atomic, externally related; in the other, each "element" is what it is by its function in a field — its relation to the physical world, to the individual subsystem, and to the supersystem — so that, in Whitehead's manner, an individual is a "prehension" of the universe from a certain place and date, and a certain position in the other sphere. But how does psi work, and why sometimes and not always? At its sharpest: why am I not God? The common-sense personality — imprisoned in its body and the passing moment, limited by the sense-organs, its character fixed by heredity and conditioning — is shattered by a single paranormal occurrence. Three theories offer to replace it: direct action by the personality as a substance (mind on mind, minds on things, the transcendence of time) — but how, and why not always? no answer; indirect action through a common ground beyond space and time, the individual "stretching" psychic pseudopodia into the other sphere (Tyrrell) — again no answer; and the person as a system, a subsystem within a supersystem (Carington, Price), its elements "psychons" — and still, why not always, and why am I not the supersystem? Whatever we adopt, simple materialism must go: mind is not absolutely limited by the physical, and is no epiphenomenon.
One suggestion about the linkage: as our own experiences cohere through an identical factor — Bradley's association of ideas, an experience AB recalling BC through their shared B — so telepathy might work through an identical factor in two minds (Carington's "K-object"), clairvoyance through an identity of mind and thing, telekinesis through an identity of mental and physical states. Does this smuggle in the identity of indiscernibles that Russell denies? Perhaps we should say "identity in the other sphere." The plain difficulty is that usually no such identity can be found.
Approach the person from the other side. Objects "appear," and so appear to something; yet the subject is a featureless viewpoint with a biography, knowing objects only from that viewpoint. Error is mental squinting — completing a dim shape in a dark lane by squinting a cow on to a bush. A person is neither a merely physical nor a merely biological system, but something aware of, and responding to, something — the subject-object relation itself; and awareness, being receptive-creative rather than photographic, is largely erroneous. There are hierarchical ranges of objectivity, from sensed qualities to pure abstractions, and an infinite gradation between the wide-awake and the somnolent — contrast the worlds of worm, dog, infant, average man, and saint, artist or philosopher. Values arise where dynamic objects strike the subject, always with the prejudice of biography, and are likewise hierarchical, the lower an ingredient in the higher. The growth of a person is growth in cognition, feeling and striving — in wisdom, love and creative action; its perversion is obsession with the familiar and trivial, or with a few high values to the exclusion of the rest, such as a doctrinaire pacifism. To "the unconscious" we may have to assign three storeys — the primitive, an "upper," and a universal — and so I incline to speak of personality-in-community, each involving the other.
The highest reaches
The highest reaches grow from our most wide-awake experiences, our fullest sensitivity to what is. First, personal love: the espousal of another self, the true I–Thou relation (Buber), in which I know my "me" and yours as objects yet find a spiritual symbiosis, a "we" — complicated by individualism, and so by conflict and hate, but transmuted. Then social loyalty, widening from the "we" of acquaintance through college, union, Church and nation to the total human "we," loyalty to mankind. Then creative intellect — the disinterested handling of concepts under intellectual integrity, the scientific and philosophical spirits, loyal to fact (natural piety) and to logic, issuing in comprehensive theory held always with an inveterate doubt, the tongue in the cheek. This world, then, is what Keats called "the Vale of Soul-Making" — a name that condemns any bad otherworldliness. And there is creative art, the making of concrete symbols significant on every level, whether by purgation or by that midwifery to new experience which is creative innovation.
On survival the religious feelings conflict. One holds that without it all is meaningless, and treats religious experience as evidence for it — its interest in the subject; the other holds survival and immortality beside the point, its interest in the object, in the quality of a life, here or hereafter — if we survive, well; if not, well. On the second view we are vessels, not ends, and the desire for survival is at bottom irreligious and must be outgrown, even if survival is true. Out of the salutary tension between the worthwhileness of persons and their ephemerality arises the supreme religious experience. It has two aspects. The first is the apprehension of spirit as Tao, the Way: self-fulfilment through self-abnegation, fulfilling what I am "for" by identifying myself with "God," an ideal universal self, and so abandoning "self" as finite — the old doctrine of salvation, spirit being simply the way of love, wisdom and creativity. What spirit is in the cosmos is unknown, perhaps unknowable: if the person is instrumental, then for what — God, the Whole, or spirit itself? One might say subjectivity fulfils objectivity by awareness and creative action; but this may be sheer myth, however true in symbol. The second aspect is the attitude to the inconceivable reality — the Others, the superhuman, the Whole — whose only fit expression is a prayer:
"Thy will be done." "Though thou slay me, yet will I love thee." Though thou slay mankind — though thou slay thy cosmos — yet will I love thee, knowing not what thou art, or whether thou art, but feeling thee, in me, in others, in the cosmos.
Consequences — and an unfinished ending
Grant the paranormal, and the field of science is enlarged, not overthrown; the scientific temper — empirical, sceptical, loyal to the object, passionate for integrity — is more needed than ever, though the present orthodoxy is undermined, physical concepts being inadequate to mind and so to metaphysics. Psychology faces a vast complication, behaviour being played on from three spheres — conscious experience, the individual unconscious, and the paranormal. Philosophy must both re-examine every fundamental idea and build a new world-view, as it was once rebuilt by natural science; and education might in time cultivate these powers, in everyone and in experts. The significance? Practically, much. Scientifically, that materialism is untenable and mind no epiphenomenon, and that time and space must be understood more largely — real, but not fully revealed. As to personality, there may be unsuspected links between persons and an unsuspected reach beyond time, and survival becomes possible, though not proved. And religiously, even if survival were proved, no new values have come from the evidence, and the "other side" has offered no new vision. Spirit remains the goal; our task is engagement in this world for spirit, to build Jerusalem here and now. There is even a danger: belief in another world can foster a bad otherworldliness and a fresh field for self-concern. Disbelief in survival was salutary, for it clarified morality and true religion; renewed belief may make true salvation harder.
[Editorial note: the notes do not close cleanly. A section-divider sheet is headed "Towards a new world view," an abandoned "Two" struck out above it; and the last sheet breaks off mid-sentence — "science is not a key to ultimate reality. And that—" — with nothing after.]