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Title: The History of Spiritualism Vol II (1926)
Author: Arthur Conan Doyle
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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook
Title: The History of Spiritualism Vol II (1926)
Author: Arthur Conan Doyle
THE HISTORY OF SPIRITUALISM
BY
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, M.D., LL.D.
PRESIDENT D'HONNEUR DE LA FEDERATION SPIRITE INTERNATIONALE
PRESIDENT OF THE LONDON SPIRITUALIST ALLIANCE
PRESIDENT OF THE BRITISH COLLEGE OF PSYCHIC SCIENCE
VOLUME TWO
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. The Career of Eusapia Palladino
II. Great Mediums from 1870 to 1900:
Charles H. Foster-Madame d'Esperance-Eglinton-Stainton Moses
III. The Society for Psychical Research
IV. Ectoplasm
V. Spirit Photography
VI. Voice Mediumship and Moulds
VII. French, German, and Italian Spiritualism
VIII. Some Great Modern Mediums
IX. Spiritualism and the War
X. The Religious Aspect of Spiritualism
XI. The After-Life as Seen by Spiritualists
Appendix
Index
ILLUSTRATIONS
(not included in this eBook)
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Sir Oliver Lodge
Rev. W. Stainton Moses
Madame Juliette Bisson
Dr. Gustave Geley
The Experiment at the Institut Metapsychique, Paris
Plaster Cast of Ectoplasmic Hand
Allan Kardec
CHAPTER I
THE CAREER OF EUSAPIA PALLADINO
The mediumship of Eusapia Palladino marks an important stage in the
history of psychical research, because she was the first medium for
physical phenomena to be examined by a large number of eminent men of
science. The chief manifestations that occurred with her were the
movement of objects without contact, the levitation of a table and other
objects, the levitation of the medium, the appearance of materialized
hands and faces, lights, and the playing of musical instruments without
human contact. All these phenomena took place, as we have seen, at a much
earlier date with the medium D. D. Home, but when Sir William Crookes
invited his scientific brethren to come and examine them they declined.
Now for the first time these strange facts were the subject of prolonged
investigation by men of European reputation. Needless to say, these
experimenters were at first sceptical in the highest degree, and
so-called "tests" (those often silly precautions which may defeat the
very object aimed at) were the order of the day. No medium in the whole
world has been more rigidly tested than this one, and since she was able
to convince the vast majority of her sitters, it is clear that her
mediumship was of no ordinary type. It is little use pointing out that no
psychic researcher should be admitted to the seance room without at least
some elementary knowledge of the complexities of mediumship and the right
conditions for its unfoldment, or without, for instance, an understanding
of the basic truth that it is not the medium alone, but the sitters
equally, who are factors in the success of the experiment. Not one
scientific man in a thousand recognizes this, and the fact that Eusapia
triumphed in spite of such a tremendous handicap is an eloquent tribute
to her powers.
The mediumistic career of this humble, illiterate Neapolitan woman, of
surpassing interest as well as of extreme importance in its results,
supplies yet another instance of the lowly being used as the instrument
to shatter the sophistries of the learned. Eusapia was born on January
21, 1854, and died in 1918. Her mediumship began to manifest itself when
she was about fourteen years of age. Her mother died at her birth, and
her father when she was twelve years old. At the house of friends with
whom she went to stay she was persuaded to sit at a table with others. At
the end of ten minutes the table was levitated, the chairs began to
dance, the curtains in the room to swell, and glasses and bottles to move
about. Each sitter was tested in turn to discover who was responsible for
the movements, and in the end it was decided that Eusapia was the medium.
She took no interest in the proceedings, and only consented to have
further sittings to please her hosts and prevent herself from being sent
to a convent. It was not until her twenty-second or twenty-third year
that her Spiritualistic education began, and then, according to M.
Flammarion, it was directed by an ardent Spiritualist, Signor Damiani.
In connexion with this period Eusapia relates a singular incident. At
Naples an English lady who had become the wife of Signor Damiani was told
at a table seance by a spirit, giving the name of John King, to seek out
a woman named Eusapia, the street and the number of the house being
specified. He said she was a powerful medium through whom he intended to
manifest. Madame Damiani went to the address indicated and found Eusapia
Palladino, of whom she had not previously heard. The two women held a
seance and John King controlled the medium, whose guide or control he
continued ever after to be.
Her first introduction to the European scientific world came through
Professor Chiaia, of Naples, who in 1888 published in a journal issued in
Rome a letter to Professor Lombroso, detailing his experiences and
inviting this celebrated alienist to investigate the medium for himself.
It was not until 1891 that Lombroso accepted this invitation, and in
February of that year he had two sittings with Eusapia in Naples. He was
converted, and wrote: "I am filled with confusion and regret that I
combated with so much persistence the possibility of the facts called
Spiritualistic." His conversion led many important scientific men in
Europe to investigate, and from now onward Madame Palladino was kept busy
for many years with test sittings.
Lombroso's Naples sittings in 1891 were followed by the Milan Commission
in 1892, which included Professor Schiaparelli, Director of the
Observatory of Milan; Professor Gerosa, Chair of Physics; Ermacora,
Doctor of Natural Philosophy; M. Aksakof, Councillor of State to the
Emperor of Russia; Charles du Prel, Doctor of Philosophy in Munich; and
Professor Charles Richet, of the University of Paris. Seventeen sittings
were held. Then came investigations in Naples in 1893; in Rome, 1893-4;
in Warsaw, and France, in 1894-the latter under the direction of
Professor Richet, Sir Oliver Lodge, Mr. F. W. H. Myers, and Dr.
Ochorowicz; in 1895 at Naples; and in the same year in England, at
Cambridge, in the house of Mr. F. W. H. Myers, in the presence of
Professor and Mrs. Sidgwick, Sir Oliver Lodge and Dr. Richard Hodgson.
They were continued in 1895 in France at the house of Colonel de Rochas;
in 1896 at Tremezzo, at Auteuil, and at Choisy Yvrac; in 1897 at Naples,
Rome, Paris, Montfort, and Bordeaux; in Paris in November, 1898, in the
presence of a scientific committee composed of MM. Flammarion, Charles
Richet, A. de Rochas, Victorien Sardou, Jules Claretie, Adolphe Bisson,
G. Delanne, G. de Fontenay, and others; also in 1901 at the Minerva Club
in Geneva, in the presence of Professors Porro, Morselli, Bozzano,
Venzano, Lombroso, Vassalo, and others. There were many other
experimental sittings with scientific men, both in Europe and in America.
Professor Chiaia, in his letter to Professor Lombroso already referred
to, gave this picturesque description of the phenomena occurring with
Eusapia. He invited him to observe a special case which he considers
worthy of the serious attention of the mind of a Lombroso, and continues:
The case I allude to is that of an invalid woman who belongs to the
humblest class of society. She is nearly thirty years old and very
ignorant; her look is neither fascinating nor endowed with the power
which modern criminologists call irresistible; but when she wishes, be it
by day or by night, she can divert a curious group for an hour or so with
the most surprising phenomena. Either bound to a seat or firmly held by
the hands of the curious, she attracts to her the articles of furniture
which surround her, lifts them up, holds them suspended in the air like
Mahomet's coffin, and makes them come down again with undulatory
movements, as if they were obeying her will. She increases their weight
or lessens it according to her pleasure. She raps or taps upon the walls,
the ceiling, the floor, with fine rhythm and cadence. In response to the
requests of the spectators, something like flashes of electricity shoot
forth from her body, and envelop her or enwrap the spectators of these
marvellous scenes. She draws upon cards that you hold out, everything
that you want-figures, signatures, numbers, sentences-by just stretching
out her hand toward the indicated place.
If you place in the corner of the room a vessel containing a layer of
soft clay, you find after some moments the imprint in it of a small or a
large hand, the image of a face (front view or profile) from which a
plaster cast can be taken. In this way portraits of a face taken at
different angles have been preserved, and those who desire so to do can
thus make serious and important studies.
This woman rises in the air, no matter what bands tie her down. She seems
to be upon the empty air, as on a couch, contrary to all the laws of
gravity; she plays on musical instruments-organs, bells, tambourines-as
if they had been touched by her hands or moved by the breath of invisible
gnomes. This woman at times can increase her stature by more than four
inches.
Professor Lombroso, as we have seen, was interested enough by this
graphic account to investigate, with the result that he was converted.
The Milan Committee (1892), the next to experiment, say in their report:
It is impossible to count the number of times that a hand appeared and
was touched by one of us. Suffice it to say that doubt was no longer
possible. It was indeed a living human hand which we saw and touched,
while at the same time the bust and arms of the medium remained visible,
and her hands were held by those on either side of her.
Many phenomena occurred in the light supplied by two candles and an
oil-lamp, and the same occurrences were witnessed in full light when the
medium was in trance. Dr. Ochorowicz persuaded Eusapia to visit Warsaw in
1894., and the experiments there were in the presence of men and women
eminent in scientific and philosophical circles. The record of these
sittings says that partial and complete levitations of the table and many
other physical phenomena were obtained. These levitations occurred while
both the medium's feet were visible in the light, and when her feet were
tied and held by a sitter kneeling under the table.
After the sittings at Professor Richet's house on the Ile Roubaud in
1894, Sir Oliver Lodge in the course of his report to the English Society
for Psychical Research said:
However the facts are to be explained, the possibility of the facts I am
constrained to admit. There is no further room in my mind for doubt. Any
person without invincible prejudice who had had the same experience would
have come to the same broad conclusion, viz.: that things hitherto held
impossible do actually occur. The result of my experience is to convince
me that certain phenomena usually considered abnormal do belong to the
order of nature, and, as a corollary from this, that these phenomena
ought to be investigated and recorded by persons and societies interested
in natural knowledge.*
* JOURNAL, S.P.R., Vol. VI, Nov. 1894., pp. 334, 360.
At the meeting at which Sir Oliver Lodge's report was read, Sir William
Crookes drew attention to the resemblance of the phenomena occurring with
Eusapia to those that happened in the presence of D. D. Home. Sir Oliver
Lodge's report was adversely criticized by Dr. Richard Hodgson, then
absent in the United States, and as a consequence Eusapia Palladino and
Dr. Hodgson were invited to England, and a series of sittings were held
at Cambridge at the house of Mr. F. W. H. Myers in August and September,
1895. These "Cambridge Experiments," as they were called, were for the
most part unsuccessful, and it was claimed that the medium was repeatedly
detected in fraud. A great deal has been written on both sides in the
acute controversy that followed. It is enough to say that competent
observers refused to accept this verdict on Eusapia, and that they
roundly condemned the methods adopted by the Cambridge group of
experimenters.
It is interesting to recall that an American reporter, on the occasion of
Eusapia's visit to his country in 1910, bluntly asked the medium if she
had ever been caught tricking. Here is Eusapia's frank reply: "Many times
I have been told so. You see, it is like this. Some people are at the
table who expect tricks-in fact, they want them. I am in a trance.
Nothing happens. They get impatient. They think of the tricks-nothing but
tricks. They put their mind on the tricks, and-I-and I automatically
respond. But it is not often. They merely will me to do them. That is
all." This sounds like Eusapia's ingenious adoption of a defence she has
heard others make on her behalf. At the same time it has no doubt an
element of truth in it, the psychological side of mediumship being little
understood.
Two important observations may be made in this connexion. First, as Dr.
Hereward Carrington pointed out, various experiments conducted with the
object of duplicating the phenomena by fraudulent means resulted in
complete failure in almost every case. Second, that the Cambridge sitters
were apparently entirely ignorant of the existence and operation of what
may be called the "ectoplasmic limb," a phenomenon observed in the case
of Slade and other mediums. Carrington says: "All the objections Mrs.
Sidgwick raises might be met if we could suppose that Eusapia
materializes for the time being a third arm, which produces these
phenomena, and which recedes into her body at the conclusion of a
phenomenon." Now, strange as it may appear, this is just the conclusion
to which abundant evidence points. As early as 1894. Sir Oliver Lodge saw
what he describes as an "appearance as of extra limbs," continuous with
Eusapia's body or very close to it. With that assurance which ignorance
so often assumes, the editorial comment in the JOURNAL of the Society for
Psychical Research, wherein Sir Oliver's account was printed, says: "It
is hardly necessary to remark that the continuity of the 'spirit' limbs
with the body of the medium is PRIMA FACIE a circumstance strongly
suggestive of fraud."
But later scientific investigators amply confirm Sir Oliver Lodge's
surmise. Professor Bottazzi states:
Another time, later on, the same hand was placed on my right forearm,
without squeezing it. On this occasion I not only carried my left hand to
the spot, but I looked, so I could see and feel at the same time: I saw a
human hand, of natural colour, and I felt with mine the fingers and the
back of a lukewarm, nervous, rough hand. THE HAND DISSOLVED, AND (I SAW
IT WITH MY EYES) RETREATED AS IF INTO MADAME PALLADINO'S BODY, DESCRIBING
A CURVE. I confess that I felt some doubt as to whether Eusapia's left
hand had freed itself from my right hand, to reach my forearm, but at the
same instant I was able to prove to myself that the doubt was groundless,
because our two hands were still in contact in the ordinary way. If all
the observed phenomena of the seven seances were to disappear from my
memory, this one I could never forget.
Professor Galeotti, in July, 1907, plainly saw what he called the
doubling of the left arm of the medium. He exclaimed: "Look, I see two
left arms, identical in appearance! One is on the little table, and it is
that which M. Bottazzi touches, and the other seems to come out of her
shoulder-to approach her, and touch her, and then return and melt into
her body again. This is not an hallucination." At a seance in July, 1905,
at the house of M. Berisso, when Eusapia's hands were thoroughly
controlled and visible to all, Dr. Venzano and others present "distinctly
saw a hand and an arm covered by a dark sleeve issue from the front and
upper part of the right shoulder of the medium." Much similar testimony
might be given.
Towards a study of the complexities of mediumship, especially with
Eusapia, the following case is deserving of serious attention. In a
sitting with Professor Morselli, Eusapia had been detected liberating her
hand from the professor's grasp and stretching it out to reach a trumpet
which was on the table. She was prevented, however, from doing this. The
report then says:
At this moment, while the control was certainly more rigorous than ever,
the trumpet was raised from the table and disappeared into the cabinet,
passing between the medium and Dr. Morselli. Evidently the medium had
attempted to do with her hand what she subsequently did mediumistically.
Such a futile and foolish attempt at fraud is inexplicable. There is no
doubt about the matter; this time the medium did not touch, and could not
touch, the trumpet; and even if she could have touched it she could not
have conveyed it into the cabinet, which was behind her back.
It may be mentioned that a corner of the room was curtained off to form
what is called a "cabinet" (i.e. an enclosure to gather "power") and that
Eusapia, unlike most other mediums, sat outside it, about a foot distant
from the curtains behind her.
The Society for Psychical Research in 1895 had decided that Eusapia's
phenomena were all fraudulent, and would have no more to do with her. But
on the Continent of Europe group after group of scientific inquirers,
adopting the most rigorous precautions, endorsed Eusapia's powers. Then
in 1908 the Society for Psychical Research decided to investigate this
medium once more. It nominated three of its most capable sceptics. One,
Mr. W. W. Baggally, a member of the Council, had been investigating
psychic phenomena for more than thirty-five years, and during that
time-with the exception, perhaps, of a few incidents at a seance with
Eusapia a few years before-had never witnessed a single genuine physical
phenomenon. "Throughout his investigations he had invariably detected
fraud, and nothing but fraud." Also, he was an expert conjurer. Mr.
Everard Feilding, the honorary secretary of the society, had been
investigating for some ten years, but "during all that time he had never
seen one physical phenomenon which appeared to him to be conclusively
proved," unless, again, perhaps in the case of a seance with Eusapia. Dr.
Hereward Carrington, the third of the nominees, though he had attended
countless seances, could say, until he sat with Eusapia, "I had never
seen one single manifestation of the physical order which I could
consider genuine."
At first blush this record of the three investigators seems like a
crushing blow to the assumptions of the Spiritualists. But in the
investigation of Eusapia Palladino this trio of sceptics met their
Waterloo. The full story of their long and patient research of this
medium at Naples will be found in Dr. Hereward Carrington's book,
"Eusapia Palladino and Her Phenomena" (1909).
As evidence of the careful investigation of scientific investigators on
the Continent, we may mention that Professor Morselli noted no fewer than
thirty nine distinct types of phenomena occurring with Eusapia Palladino.
The following incidents may be mentioned because they can well be classed
under the heading "Foolproof." Of a seance in Rome in 1894, in the
presence of Professor Richet, Dr. Schrenck Notzing, Professor Lombroso,
and others, the report says:
Hoping to obtain the movement of an object without contact, we placed a
little piece of paper folded in the form of the letter "A" under a glass,
and upon a disc of light pasteboard. Not being successful in this, we did
not wish to fatigue the medium, and we left the apparatus upon the large
table; then we took our places around the little table, after having
carefully shut all the doors, the keys of which I begged my guests to put
in their pockets, in order that we might not be accused of not having
taken all necessary precautions.
The light was extinguished. Soon we heard the glass resound on our table,
and having procured a light, we found it in the midst of us, in the same
position, upside down, and covering the little piece of paper; only the
cardboard disc was wanting. We sought for it in vain. The seance ended. I
conducted my guests once more into the antechamber. M. Richet was the
first to open the door-well bolted on the inside. What was not his
surprise when he perceived near to the threshold of the door, on the
other side of it, upon the staircase, the disc that we had sought for so
long! He picked it up, and it was identified by all as the card placed
under the glass.
A strong objective proof worth recording is the fact that M. de Fontenay
photographed various hands appearing over Eusapia's head, and in one
photograph the medium's hands can be seen to be securely held by the
investigators. Reproductions of these photographs are given in the
"Annals of Psychical Science" (April, 1908, p. 181 et seq.).
At the sixth and last seance of the series at Genoa with Professor
Morselli in 1906-7, an effective test was devised. The medium was tied to
the couch with a thick, broad band, of the kind used in asylums to fasten
down maniacs, and capable of being tied very tightly without cutting the
flesh. Morselli, with experience as an alienist, performed the operation,
and also secured the wrists and ankles. After a red electric lamp of
ten-candle power had been lighted, the table, which was free from all
contact, moved from time to time, small lights were seen and a hand. At
one stage the curtains in front of the cabinet opened, giving a view of
the medium lying securely bound. "The phenomena," says an account, "were
inexplicable considering that the position rendered movement on her part
impossible."
Here, in conclusion, are two accounts, out of many, of convincing
materializations. The first is related by Dr. Joseph Venzano in the
"Annals of Psychical Science" (Vol. VI, p. 164., September, 1907). Light
was provided by a candle, enabling the figure of the medium to be seen::
In spite of the dimness of the light I could distinctly see Madame
Palladino and my fellow sitters. Suddenly I perceived that behind me was
a form, fairly tall, which was leaning its head on my left shoulder and
sobbing violently, so that those present could hear the sobs: it kissed
me repeatedly. I clearly perceived the outlines of this face, which
touched my own, and I felt the very fine and abundant hair in contact
with my left cheek, so that I could be quite sure that it was a woman.
The table then began to move, and by typtology gave the name of a close
family connexion who was known to no one present except myself. She had
died some time before, and on account of incompatibility of temperament
there had been serious disagreements with her. I was so far from
expecting this typtological response that I at first thought this was a
case of coincidence of name, but while I was mentally forming this
reflection I felt a mouth, with warm breath, touch my left ear and
whisper, IN A LOW VOICE IN GENOESE DIALECT, a succession of sentences,
the murmur of which was audible to the sitters. These sentences were
broken by bursts of weeping, and their gist was repeatedly to implore
pardon for injuries done to me, with a fullness of detail connected with
family affairs which could only be known to the person in question. The
phenomenon seemed so real that I felt compelled to reply to the excuses
offered me with expressions of affection, and to ask pardon in my turn if
any resentment of the wrongs referred to had been excessive. But I had
scarcely uttered the first syllables when two hands, with exquisite
delicacy, applied themselves to my lips and prevented my continuing. The
form then said to me, "Thank you," embraced me, kissed me, and
disappeared.
With other mediums there have been finer materializations than this one,
and in better light, but in this case there was internal, mental evidence
of identity.
The last example we shall give occurred in Paris, in 1898, at a sitting
at which M. Flammarion was present, when M. Le Bocain addressed a
materialized spirit in Arabic, saying: "If it is really thou, Rosalie,
who art in the midst of us, pull the hair on the back of my head three
times in succession." About ten minutes later, and when M. Le Bocain had
almost completely forgotten his request, he felt his hair pulled three
separate times, just as he had desired. He says: "I certify this fact,
which, besides, formed for me a most convincing proof of the presence of
a familiar spirit close about us." He adds that it is hardly necessary to
say that Eusapia knows no Arabic.
Opponents and a section of psychic researchers contend that the evidence
for phenomena occurring at seances is of little value because the usual
observers have no knowledge of the resources of conjurers. In New York in
1910 Dr. Hereward Carrington took with him to a seance given by Eusapia,
Mr. Howard Thurston, whom he describes as the most noted magician in
America. Mr. Thurston who, with his assistant, controlled the hands and
feet of the medium in a good light, wrote:
I witnessed in person the table levitations of Madame Eusapia
Palladinoand am thoroughly convinced that the phenomena I saw were not
due to fraud and were not performed by the aid of her feet, knees, or
hands.
He offered to give a thousand dollars to a charitable institution if it
could be proved that this medium could not levitate the table without
resort to trickery or fraud.
It will be asked what has been the outcome of all the years of
investigation conducted with this medium. A number of scientists holding
with Sir David Brewster that "Spirit" is the last thing they will give in
to have invented ingenious hypotheses to account for the phenomena, of
the genuine nature of which they are fully convinced. Colonel de Rochas
tried to explain them by what he called "exteriorization of motivity." M.
de Fontenay spoke of a dynamic theory of matter; others believe in
"ectenic force" and "collective consciousness," and the action of the
subconscious mind, but those cases, well authenticated, where the
operation of an independent intelligence is clearly shown, make these
attempted explanations untenable. Various experimenters were forced to
adopt the Spiritualist hypothesis as the only one that explained all the
facts in a reasonable way. Dr. Venzano says:
In the greater number of the materialized forms perceived by us either by
sight, contact, or hearing, we were able to recognize points of
resemblance to deceased persons, generally our relatives, unknown to the
medium and known only to those present who were concerned with the
phenomena.
Dr. Hereward Carrington speaks with no uncertain voice. Regarding Mrs.
Sidgwick's opinion that it is useless to speculate whether the phenomena
are Spiritualistic in character, or whether they represent "some unknown
biological law," until the facts themselves have been established, he
says: "I must say that before I obtained my sittings I, too, took Mrs.
Sidgwick's view." And he continues: "My own sittings convinced me finally
and conclusively that genuine phenomena do occur, and, that being the
case, the question of their interpretation naturally looms before me. I
think that not only is the Spiritualistic hypothesis justified as a
working theory, but it is, in fact, the only one capable of rationally
explaining the facts."*
* "Eusapia Palladino and Her Phenomena." By Hereward Carrington Ph.D.,
pp. 250-1.
The mediumship of Eusapia Palladino, as we said at the outset, was
similar to that of others, but she had the advantage of enlisting the
attention of men of influence whose published accounts of her phenomena
have had a weight not given to the utterances of less well-known people.
Lombroso in particular has recorded his convictions in his well-known
book, "After Death-What?" (1909). Eusapia was the means of demonstrating
the reality of certain facts not accepted by orthodox science. It is
easier for the world to deny these facts than to explain them, and that
is the course usually adopted.
Those who try to explain away all Eusapia's mediumship by alluding to her
superficial habit of playing conscious or unconscious tricks upon the
sitters are simply deceiving themselves. That such tricks are played is
beyond all question. Lombroso, who entirely endorses the validity of her
mediumship, describes the tricks thus:
Many are the crafty tricks she plays, both in the state of trance
(unconsciously) and out of it-for example, freeing one of her two hands,
held by the controllers, for the sake of moving objects near her; making
touches; slowly lifting the legs of the table by means of one of her
knees and one of her feet; and feigning to adjust her hair and then slyly
pulling out one hair and putting it over the little balance tray of a
letter-weigher in order to lower it. She was seen by Faifofer, before her
seances, furtively gathering flowers in a garden, that she might feign
them to be "apports" by availing herself of the shrouding dark of the
room. And yet her deepest grief is when she is accused of trickery during
the seances-accused unjustly, too, sometimes, it must be confessed,
because we are now sure that phantasmal limbs are superimposed (or added
to) her own and act as their substitute, while all the time they were
believed to be her own limbs detected in the act of cozening for their
owner's behoof.
In her visit to America, which was late in life when her powers were at a
low ebb, she was detected in these obvious tricks and offended her
sitters to such an extent that they discarded her, but Howard Thurston,
the famous conjurer, narrates that he determined to disregard these
things and continued the sitting, with the result that he obtained an
undoubted materialization. Another well-known sitter deposed that at the
very moment when he was reproaching her for moving some object with her
hand, another object, quite out of her reach, moved across the table. Her
case is certainly a peculiar one, for it may be most truthfully said of
her that no medium has ever more certainly been proved to have psychic
powers, and no medium was ever more certainly a cheat upon occasions.
Here, as always, it is the positive result which counts.
Eusapia had a peculiar depression of her parietal bone, due, it is said,
to some accident in her childhood. Such physical defects are very often
associated with strong mediumship. It is as if the bodily weakness caused
what may be described as a dislocation of the soul, so that it is more
detached and capable of independent action. Thus Mrs. Piper's mediumship
followed upon two internal operations, Home's went with the tubercular
diathesis, and many other cases might be quoted. Her nature was
hysterical, impetuous and wayward, but she possessed some beautiful
traits. Lombroso says of her that she had "a singular kindness of heart
which leads her to lavish her gains upon the poor, and upon infants in
order to relieve their misfortunes, and which impels her to feel
boundless pity for the old and the weak, and to be awake at night
thinking of them. The same goodness of heart drives her to protect
animals that are being maltreated by sharply rebuking their cruel
oppressors." This passage may be commended to the attention of those who
think that psychic power savours of the devil.
CHAPTER II
GREAT MEDIUMS FROM 1870 TO 1900: CHARLES H. FOSTER-MADAME
D'ESPERANCE-WILLIAM EGLINTON-STAINTON MOSES
There were many notable and some notorious mediums in the period from
1870 to 1900. Of these D. D. Home, Slade, and Monck have already been
mentioned. Four others, whose names will live in the history of the
movement, are the American, C. H. Foster, Madame d'Esperance, Eglinton,
and the Rev. W. Stainton Moses. A short account of each of these will now
be given.
Charles H. Foster is fortunate in having a biographer who was such an
admirer that he called him "the greatest spiritual medium since
Swedenborg." There is a tendency on the part of writers to exaggerate the
claims of the particular sensitive with whom they have been brought in
contact. None the less, Mr. George C. Bartlett in his "The Salem Seer"
shows that he had close personal acquaintance with Foster, and that he
really was a very remarkable medium. His fame was not confined to
America, for he travelled widely and visited both Australia and Great
Britain. In the latter country he made friends with Bulwer Lytton,
visited Knebworth, and became the original of Margrave in "A Strange
Story."
Foster seems to have been a clairvoyant of great power, and had the
peculiar gift of being able to bring out the name or initials of the
spirit which he described upon his own skin, usually upon his forearm.
This phenomenon was so often repeated and so closely examined that there
can be no possible doubt as to the fact. What may have been the cause of
the fact is another matter. There were many points about Foster's
mediumship which suggested an extended personality, rather than an
outside intelligence. It is, for example, frankly incredible that the
spirits of the great departed, such as Virgil, Camoens and Cervantes,
should have been in attendance upon this unlearned New Englander, and yet
we have Bartlett's authority for the fact, illustrated with many
quotations, that he held conversations with such entities, who were ready
to quote the context in any stanza which might be selected out of their
copious works.
Such evidence of familiarity with literature far beyond the capacity of
the medium bears some analogy to those book tests frequently carried out
of late years, where a line from any volume in a library is readily
quoted. They need not suggest the actual presence of the author of such a
volume, but might rather depend upon some undefined power of the loosened
etheric self of the medium, or possibly some other entity of the nature
of a control who could swiftly gather information in some supernal
fashion. Spiritualists have so overpowering a case that they need not
claim all psychic phenomena as having necessarily their face value, and
the author confesses that he has frequently observed how much that has
somewhere, some time, been placed on record in print or writing is
conveyed back to us, though by no normal means could such print or
writing be consulted at any time by the medium.
Foster's peculiar gift, by which initials were scrawled upon his flesh,
had some comic results. Bartlett narrates how a Mr. Adams consulted
Foster. "As he was leaving, Mr. Foster told him that in all his
experience he had never known one individual to bring so many spiritsthe
room being literally packed with them, coming and going. About two
o'clock the next morning Mr. Foster called to mesaying: 'George, will you
please light the gas? I cannot sleep; the room is still filled with the
Adams family, and they seem to me to be writing their names all over me.'
And to my astonishment a list of names of the Adams family was displayed
upon his body. I counted eleven distinct names; one was written across
his forehead, others on his arms, and several on his back." Such
anecdotes certainly give a handle to the scoffer, and yet we have much
evidence that the sense of humour is intensified rather than dulled upon
the Other Side.
The gift of blood-red letters upon Foster's skin would seem to compare
closely with the well-known phenomenon of the stigmata appearing upon the
hands and feet of devout worshippers. In the one case concentration of
the individual's thoughts upon the one subject has had an objective
result. In the other, it may be that the concentration from some
invisible entity has had a similar effect. We must bear in mind that we
are all spirits, whether we be in the body or out, and have the same
powers in varying degree.
Foster's views as to his own profession seem to have been very
contradictory, for he frequently declared, like Margaret Fox-Kane and the
Davenports, that he would not undertake to say that his phenomena were
due to spiritual beings, while, on the other hand, all his sittings were
conducted on the clear assumption that they were so. Thus he would
minutely describe the appearance of the spirit and give messages by name
from it to the surviving relatives. Like D. D. Home, he was exceedingly
critical of other mediums, and would not believe in the photographic
powers of Mumler, though those powers were as well attested as his own.
He seems to have had in an exaggerated degree the volatile spirit of the
typical medium, easily influenced for good or ill. His friend, who was
clearly a close observer, says of him:
He was extravagantly dual. He was not only Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but
he represented half a dozen different Jekylls and Hydes. He was strangely
gifted, and on the other hand he was woefully deficient. He was an
unbalanced genius, and at times, I should say, insane. He had a heart so
large indeed that it took in the world; tears for the afflicted; money
for the poor; the chords of his heart were touched by every sigh. At
other times his heart shrunk up until it disappeared. He would become
pouty, and with the petulance of a child would abuse his best friends. He
wore out many of his friends, as an unbreakable horse does its owner. No
harness fitted Foster. He was not vicious, but absolutely uncontrollable.
He would go his own way, which way was often the wrong way. Like a child
he seemed to have no forethought. He seemed to live for to-day, caring
nothing for to-morrow. If it were possible, he did exactly as he wished
to do, regardless of consequences. He would take no one's advice, simply
because he could not. He seemed impervious to the opinions of others, and
apparently yielded to every desire; but after all he did not abuse
himself much, as he continued in perfect health until the final breaking
up. When asked, "How is your health?" his favourite expression was,
"Excellent. I am simply bursting with physical health." The same dual
nature showed itself in his work. Some days he would sit at the table all
day, and far into the night, under tremendous mental strain. He would do
this day after day, and night after night. Then days and weeks would come
when he would do absolutely nothing-turn hundreds of dollars away and
disappoint the people, without any apparent reason, save he was in the
mood for loafing.
Madame d'Esperance, whose real name was Mrs. Hope, was born in 1849 and
her career extended over thirty years, her activities covering the
Continent as well as Great Britain. She was first brought to the notice
of the general public by T. P. Barkas, a well-known citizen of Newcastle.
The medium at that time was a young girl of average middle-class
education. When in semi-trance, however, she displayed to a marked degree
that gift of wisdom and knowledge which St. Paul places at the head of
his spiritual category. Barkas narrates how he prepared long lists of
questions which covered every branch of science and that the answers were
rapidly written out by the medium, usually in English, but sometimes in
German and even in Latin. Mr. Barkas, in summing up these seances, says*:
* PSYCHOLOGICAL REVIEW, Vol. I, p. 224.
It will be admitted by all that no one can by normal effort answer in
detail critical and obscure questions in many difficult departments of
science with which she is entirely unacquainted; it will further be
admitted that no one can normally see and draw with minute accuracy in
complete darkness; that no one can by any normal power of vision read the
contents of closed letters in the dark; that no one who is entirely
unacquainted with the German language can write with rapidity and
accuracy long communications in German; and yet all these phenomena took
place through this medium, and are as well accredited as are many of the
ordinary occurrences of daily life.
It must be admitted, however, that until we know the limits of the
extended powers produced by a liberation or partial liberation of the
etheric body, we cannot safely put down such manifestations to spirit
intervention. They showed a remarkable personal psychic individuality and
possibly nothing more.
But Madame d'Esperance's fame as a medium depends upon many gifts which
were more undoubtedly Spiritualistic. We have a very full account of
these from her own pen, for she wrote a book, called "Shadow Land," which
may rank with A. J. Davis's "Magic Staff" and Turvey's "The Beginnings of
Seership," as among the most remarkable psychic autobiographies in our
literature. One cannot read it without being impressed by the good
feeling and honesty of the writer.
In it she narrates, as other great sensitives have done, how in her early
childhood she would play with spirit children who were as real to her as
the living. This power of clairvoyance remained with her through life,
but the rarer gift of materialization was added to it. The book already
quoted contained photographs of Yolande, a beautiful Arab girl, who was
to this medium what Katie King was to Florence Cook. Not unfrequently she
was materialized when Madame d'Esperance was seated outside the cabinet
in full view of the sitters. The medium thus could see her own strange
emanation, so intimate and yet so distinct. The following is her own
description:
Her thin draperies allowed the rich olive tint of her neck, shoulders,
arms and ankles to be plainly visible. The long black waving hair hung
over her shoulders to below her waist and was confined by a small
turban-shaped head-dress. Her features were small, straight and piquant;
the eyes were dark, large and lively; her every movement was as full of
grace as those of a young child, or, as it struck me then when I saw her
standing half shyly, half boldly, between the curtains, like a young
roe-deer.
In describing her sensations during a seance, Madame d'Esperance speaks
of feeling as if spiders' webs were woven about her face and hands. If a
little light penetrated between the curtains of the cabinet she saw a
white, misty mass floating about like steam from a locomotive, and out of
this was evolved a human form. A feeling of emptiness began as soon as
what she calls the spider's web material was present, with loss of
control of her limbs.
The Hon. Alexander Aksakof, of St. Petersburg, a well-known psychical
researcher and editor of Psychische Studien, has described in his book,
"A Case of Partial Dematerialization," an extraordinary seance at which
this medium's body was partly dissolved. Commenting on this, he observes:
"The frequently noted fact of the resemblance of the materialized form to
that of the medium here finds its natural explanation. As that form is
only a duplication of the medium, it is natural that it should have all
her features."
This may, as Aksakof says, be natural, but it is equally natural that it
should provoke the ridicule of the sceptic. A larger experience, however,
would convince him that the Russian scientist is right. The author has
sat at materializing seances where he has seen the duplicates of the
medium's face so clearly before him that he has been ready to denounce
the proceedings as fraudulent, but with patience and a greater
accumulation of power he has seen later the development of other faces
which could by no possible stretch of imagination be turned into the
medium's. In some cases it has seemed to him that the invisible powers
(who often produce their effects with little regard for the
misconstructions which may arise from them) have used the actual physical
face of the unconscious medium and have adorned it with ectoplasmic
appendages in order to transform it. In other cases one could believe
that the etheric double of the medium has been the basis of the new
creation. So it was sometimes with Katie King, who occasionally closely
resembled Florence Cook in feature even when she differed utterly in
stature and in colouring. On other occasions the materialized figure is
absolutely different. The author has observed all three phases of spirit
construction in the case of the American medium, Miss Ada Besinnet, whose
ectoplasmic figure sometimes took the shape of a muscular and
well-developed Indian. The story of Madame d'Esperance corresponds
closely with these varieties of power.
Mr. William Oxley, the compiler and publisher of that remarkable work in
five volumes entitled "Angelic Revelations," has given an account of
twenty-seven roses being produced at a seance by Yolande, the
materialized figure, and of the materialization of a rare plant in
flower. Mr. Oxley writes:
I had the plant (IXORA CROCATA) photographed next morning, and afterwards
brought it home and placed it in my conservatory under the gardener's
care. It lived for three months, when it shrivelled up. I kept the
leaves, giving most of them away except the flower and the three top
leaves which the gardener cut off when he took charge of the plant.
At a seance on June 28, 1890, in the presence of M. Aksakof and Professor
Butlerof, of St. Petersburg, a golden lily, seven feet high, is said to
have been materialized. It was kept for a week and during that time six
photographs of it were taken, after which it dissolved and disappeared. A
photograph of it appears in "Shadow Land" (facing p. 328)
A feminine form, somewhat taller than the medium, and known by the name
of Y-Ay-Ali, excited the utmost admiration. Mr. Oxley says: "I have seen
many materialized spirit forms, but for perfection of symmetry in figure
and beauty of countenance I have seen none like unto that." The figure
gave him the plant which had been materialized, and then drew back her
veil. She implanted a kiss on his hand and held out her own, which he
kissed.
"As she was in the light rays, I had a good view of her face and hands.
The countenance was beautiful to gaze upon, and the hands were soft,
warm, and perfectly natural, and, but for what followed, I could have
thought I held the hand of a permanent embodied lady, so perfectly
natural, yet so exquisitely beautiful and pure."
He goes on to relate how she retired to within two feet of the medium in
the cabinet, and in sight of all "gradually dematerialized by melting
away from the feet upwards, until the head only appeared above the floor,
and then this grew less and less until a white spot only remained, which,
continuing for a moment or two, disappeared."
At the same seance an infant form materialized and placed three fingers
of its tiny hand in Mr. Oxley's. Mr. Oxley afterwards took its hand in
his and kissed it. This occurred in August, 1880.
Mr. Oxley records a very interesting experience of high evidential value.
While Yolande, the Arab girl, was speaking to a lady sitter, "the top
part of her white drapery fell of and revealed her form. I noticed that
the form was imperfect, as the bust was undeveloped and the waist
uncontracted, which was a test that the form was not a lay figure." He
might have added, nor that of the medium.
Writing on "How a Medium Feels During Materializations," Madame
d'Esperance throws some light on the curious sympathy constantly seen to
exist between the medium and the spirit form. Describing a seance at
which she sat outside the cabinet, she says*:
* MEDIUM AND DAYBREAK, 1893, p. 46.
And now, another small and delicate form appears, with its little arms
stretched out. Someone at the far end of the circle rises, approaches it,
and they embrace. I hear inarticulate cries, "Anna, oh, Anna, my child,
my dear child!" Then another person rises and throws her arms around the
spirit; whereupon I hear sobs and exclamations, mingled with
benedictions. I feel my body moved from side to side; everything grows
dark before my eyes. I feel someone's arms around my shoulders; someone's
heart beats against my bosom. I feel that something happens. No one is
near me; no one pays the slightest attention to me. Every eye is fixed
upon that little figure, white and slender, in the arms of the two women
in mourning.
It must be my heart that I hear beating so distinctly, yet, surely,
someone's arms are around me; never have I felt an embrace more plainly.
I begin to wonder. Who am I? Am I the apparition in white, or am I that
which remains seated in the chair? Are those my arms around the neck of
the elder woman? Or are those mine which lie before me on my lap? Am I
the phantom, and if so, what shall I call the being in the chair?
Surely, my lips are kissed; my cheeks are moist with the tears so
plentifully shed by the two women. But how can that be? This feeling of
doubt as to one's own identity is fearful. I wish to extend one of the
hands lying in my lap. I cannot do so. I wish to touch someone so as to
make perfectly certain whether I am I, or only a dream; whether Anna is
I, and if I am, in some sort, lost in her identity.
While the medium is in this state of distracted doubt another little
spirit child who had materialized comes and slips her hands into those of
Madame d'Esperance.
How happy I am to feel the touch, even of a little child. My doubts, as
to who and where I am, are gone. And while I am experiencing all this,
the white form of Anna disappears in the cabinet and the two women return
to their places, tearful, shaken with emotion, but intensely happy.
It is not surprising to learn that when a sitter at one of Madame
d'Esperance's seances seized the materialized figure, he declared it to
be the medium herself. In this connexion Aksakof's views* on the general
question are of interest:
* "A Case of Partial Dematerialization," p. 181.
One may seize the materialized form, and hold it, and assure himself that
he holds nothing except the medium herself, in flesh and bone; and it is
not yet a proof of fraud on the medium's part. In fact, according to our
hypothesis, what could happen if we detain the medium's double by force,
when it is materialized to such a degree that nothing but an invisible
simulacre of the medium remains in the seat behind the curtain? It is
obvious that the simulacre-that small portion, fluid and ethereal-will be
immediately absorbed into the already compactly materialized form, which
lacks nothing (of being the medium) but that invisible remainder.
M. Aksakof, in the Introduction he has written for Madame d'Esperance's
book, "Shadow Land," pays a high tribute to her as a woman and as a
medium. He says she was as interested as himself in trying to find the
truth. She submitted willingly to all the tests he imposed.
One interesting incident in the career of Madame d'Esperance was that she
succeeded in reconciling Professor Friese, of Breslau, to Professor
Zollner, of Leipzig. The alienation of these two friends had occurred on
account of Zollner's profession of Spiritualism, but the English medium
was able to give such proofs to Friese that he no longer contested his
friend's conclusions.
It should be remarked that in the course of Mr. Oxley's experiments with
Madame d'Esperance moulds were taken of the hands and feet of the
materialized figures, with wrist and ankle apertures which were too
narrow to allow the withdrawal of the limb in any way, save by
dematerialization. In view of the great interest excited by the paraffin
moulds taken in 1922 in Paris from the medium Kluski, it is curious to
reflect that the same experiment had been successfully carried out,
unnoticed save by the psychic Press, by this Manchester student so far
back as 1876.
The latter part of Madame d'Esperance's life, which was spent largely in
Scandinavia, was marred by ill health, which was originally induced by
the shock that she sustained at the so-called "exposure" when Yolande was
seized by some injudicious researcher at Helsingfors in 1893. No one has
expressed more clearly than she how much sensitives suffer from the
ignorance of the world around them. In the last chapter of her remarkable
book she deals with the subject. She concludes: "They who come after me
may perchance suffer as I have done through ignorance of God's laws. Yet
the world is wiser than it was, and it may be that they who take up the
work in the next generation will not have to fight, as I did, the narrow
bigotry and harsh judgments of the 'unco' guid'."
* * * * *
Each of the mediums treated in this chapter has had one or more books
devoted to his or her career. In the case of William Eglinton there is a
remarkable volume, "'Twixt Two Worlds," by J. S. Farmer, which covers
most of his activities.
Eglinton was born at Islington on July 10, 1857, and, after a brief
period at school, entered the printing and publishing business of a
relative. As a boy he was extremely imaginative, as well as dreamy and
sensitive, but, unlike so many other great mediums, he showed in his
boyhood no sign of possessing any psychic powers. In 1874, when he was
seventeen years of age, Eglinton entered the family circle by means of
which his father was investigating the alleged phenomena of
Spiritualists. Up to that time the circle had obtained no results, but
when the boy joined it the table rose steadily from the floor until the
sitters had to stand to keep their hands on it. Questions were answered
to the satisfaction of those present. At the next sitting on the
following evening, the boy passed into a trance, and evidential
communications from his dead mother were received. In a few months his
mediumship had developed, and stronger manifestations were forthcoming.
His fame as a medium spread, and he received numerous requests for
seances, but he resisted all efforts to induce him to become a
professional medium. Finally, he had to adopt this course in 1875.
Eglinton thus describes his feelings before entering the seance room for
the first time, and the change that came over him:
My manner, previous to doing so, was that of a boy full of fun; but as
soon as I found myself in the presence of the "inquirers," a strange and
mysterious feeling came over me, which I could not shake off. I sat down
at the
table, determined that if anything happened I would put a stop to it.
Something did happen, but I was powerless to prevent it. The table began
to show signs of life and vigour; it suddenly rose off the ground and
steadily raised itself in the air, until we had to stand to reach it.
This was in full gaslight. It afterwards answered, intelligently,
questions which were put to it, and gave a number of test communications
to persons present.
The next evening saw us eagerly sitting for further manifestations, and
with a larger circle, for the news had got widely spread that we had
"seen ghosts and talked to them," together with similar reports.
After we had read the customary prayer, I seemed to be no longer of this
earth. A most ecstatic feeling came over me, and I presently passed into
a trance. All my friends were novices in the matter, and tried various
means to restore me, but without result. At the end of half an hour I
returned to consciousness, feeling a strong desire to relapse into the
former condition. We had communications which proved conclusively, to my
mind, that the spirit of my mother had really returned to us. I then
began to realize how mistaken-how utterly empty and unspiritual-had been
my past life, and I felt a pleasure indescribable in knowing, beyond a
doubt, that those who had passed from earth could return again, and prove
the immortality of the soul. In the quietness of our family circlewe
enjoyed to the full extent our communion with the departed, and many are
the happy hours I have spent in this way.
In two respects his work resembles that of D. D. Home. His seances were
usually held in the light, and he always agreed willingly to any proposed
tests. A further strong point of similarity was the fact that his results
were observed and recorded by many eminent men and by good critical
witnesses.
Eglinton, like Home, travelled a great deal, and his mediumship was
witnessed in many places. In 1878 he sailed for South Africa. The
following year he visited Sweden, Denmark, and Germany. In February,
1880, he went to Cambridge University and held sittings under the
auspices of the Psychological Society. In March he journeyed to Holland,
thence proceeding to Leipzig, where he gave sittings to Professor Zollner
and others connected with the University. Dresden and Prague followed,
and in Vienna in April over thirty seances were held which were attended
by many members of the aristocracy. In Vienna he was the guest of Baron
Hellenbach, the well-known author, who in his book, "Prejudices of
Mankind," has described the phenomena that occurred there. After
returning to England, he sailed for America on February 12, 1881,
remaining there about three months. In November of the same year he went
to India, and after holding numerous seances in Calcutta, returned in
April, 1882. In 1883 he again visited Paris, and in 1885 was in Vienna
and Paris. He subsequently visited Venice, which he described as "a
veritable hotbed of Spiritualism."
In Paris, in 1885, Eglinton met M. Tissot, the famous artist, who sat
with him and subsequently visited him in England. A remarkable
materializing seance at which two figures were plainly seen, and one, a
lady, was recognized as a relation, has been immortalized by Tissot in a
mezzotint entitled "Apparition Medianimique." This beautiful, artistic
production, a copy of which hangs at the offices of the London
Spiritualist Alliance, shows the two figures illuminated by spirit lights
which they are carrying in their hands. Tissot also executed a portrait
etching of the medium, and this is to be found as the frontispiece to Mr.
Farmer's book, "'Twixt Two Worlds."
A typical example of his early physical mediumship is described* by Miss
Kislingbury and Dr. Carter Blake (Lecturer in Anatomy at Westminster
Hospital):
* THE SPIRITUALIST, May 12, 1876, p. 221.
Mr. Eglinton's coat-sleeves were sewn together behind his back near the
wrist with strong white cotton; the tying committee then bound him in his
chair, passing the tape round his neck, and placed him close behind the
curtain (of the cabinet) facing the company, with his knees and feet in
sight. A small round table with various objects upon it was placed before
the medium outside the cabinet and in view of the sitters; the little
stringed instrument known as the Oxford Chimes was laid inverted across
his knees, and a book and a hand-bell were placed upon it. In a few
moments the strings were played upon, though no visible hand was touching
them, the book, the front of which was turned towards the sitters, opened
and shut (this was repeated a great number of times, so that all present
saw the experiment unmistakably), and the handbell was rung from within,
that is, without being raised from the board. The musical box placed near
the curtain, but fully in sight, was stopped and set going, while the lid
remained shut. Fingers, and at times a whole hand, were now and then
protruded through the curtain. An instant after one of these had
appeared, Captain Rolleston was requested to thrust his arm through the
curtain and ascertain whether the tying and sewing were as at first. He
satisfied himself that they were, and the same testimony was given by
another gentleman later on.
This was one of a series of experimental seances held under the auspices
of the British National Association of Spiritualists, at their rooms, 38
Great Russell Street, London. Referring to these, THE SPIRITUALIST says*:
* May 12, 1876.
The test manifestations with Mr. Eglinton are of great value, not because
other mediums may not obtain equally conclusive results, but because in
his case they had been observed and recorded by good critical witnesses
whose testimony will carry weight with the public.
At the beginning Eglinton's materializations were obtained in the
moonlight, while all present sat round a table, and there was no cabinet.
The medium, too, was usually conscious. He was induced to sit in the dark
for manifestations by a friend who had been to a seance with a
professional medium. Having thus started he was apparently obliged to
continue, but stated that the results obtained were of a less spiritual
character. A feature of his materializing seances was the fact that he
sat among those present and that his hands were held. Under these
conditions full-form materialization s were seen in light which was
sufficient for the recognition of those appearing.
In January, 1877, Eglinton gave a series of nonprofessional seances at
the house, off Park Lane, of Mrs. Makdougall Gregory (widow of Professor
Gregory, of Edinburgh). They were attended by Sir Patrick and Lady
Colquhoun, Lord Borthwick, Lady Jenkinson, Rev. Maurice Davies, D.D.,
Lady Archibald Campbell, Sir William Fairfax, Lord and Lady Mount-Temple,
General Brewster, Sir Garnet and Lady Wolseley, Lord and Lady Avonmore,
Professor Blackie, and many others. Mr. W. Harrison (editor of The
Spiritualist) describes one of these seances*:
* THE SPIRITUALIST, Feb. 23, 1877, p. 96.
Last Monday evening ten or twelve friends sat round a large circular
table, with their hands joined, under which conditions Mr. W. Eglinton,
the medium, was held on both sides. There were no other persons in the
room than those seated at the table. An expiring fire gave a dim light,
permitting only the outlines of objects to be visible. The medium sat at
that part of the table which was nearest to the fire, consequently his
back was to the light. A form, of the full proportions of a man, rose
slowly from the floor to about the level of the edge of the table; it was
about a foot behind the right elbow of the medium. The other nearest
sitter was Mrs. Wiseman, of Orme Square, Bayswater. This form was covered
with white drapery, but no features were visible. As it was close to the
fire, it could be seen distinctly by those near it. It was observed by
all who were so placed that the edge of the table or intervening sitters
did not cut oft the view of the form; thus it was observed by four or
five persons altogether, and was not the result of subjective
impressions. After rising to the level of the edge of the table, it sank
downwards, and was no more seen, having apparently exhausted all the
power. Mr. Eglinton was in a strange house and in evening dress.
Altogether it was a test manifestation which could not have been produced
by artificial means.
One sitting described by Mr. Dawson Rogers showed remarkable features. It
was held on February 17, 1885, in the presence of fourteen sitters, under
test conditions. Though an inner room was used as a cabinet, Mr. Eglinton
did not stay there, but paced about among the sitters, who were arranged
in horseshoe formation. A form materialized and passed round the room
shaking hands with each one. Then the form approached Mr. Eglinton, who
was partially supported from falling by Mr. Rogers, and, taking the
medium by the shoulders, dragged him into the cabinet. Mr. Rogers says:
"The form was that of a man taller by several inches and older than the
medium. He was apparelled in a white flowing robe, and was full of life
and animation, and at one time was fully ten feet away from the medium."
Particular interest attaches to that phase of his mediumship known as
Psychography, or slate-writing. With regard to this there is an
overwhelming mass of testimony. In view of the wonderful results he
obtained it is worthy of note that he sat for over three years without
receiving a scratch of writing. It was from the year 1884 that he
concentrated his powers on this form of manifestation, which was
considered to be most suited to beginners, especially as all the seances
were held in the light. Eglinton, in refusing to give a seance for
materialization to a party of inquirers who had had no experience of this
phase, wrote giving the following reason for his action: "I hold that a
medium is placed in a very responsible position, and that he has a right
to satisfy, as far as he possibly can, those who come to him. Now, my
experience, which is a varied one, leads me to the conclusion that no
sceptic, however well-intentioned or honest, can be convinced by the
conditions prevailing at a materialization seance, and the result is
further scepticism on his part, and condemnation of the medium. It is
different when there is a harmonious circle of Spiritualists who are
advanced enough to witness such phenomena, and with whom I shall always
be delighted to sit; but a neophyte must be prepared by other methods. If
your friend cares to come to a slate-writing seance I shall be happy to
arrange an hour, otherwise I must decline to sit, for the reasons stated
above, and which must commend themselves to you as to all thinking
Spiritualists."
In the case of Eglinton, it may be explained that common school slates
were used (the sitter being at liberty to bring his own slates), and
after being washed, a crumb of slate pencil was placed on the upper
surface and the slate placed under the leaf of the table, pressed against
it and held by the hand of the medium, whose thumb was visible on the
upper surface of the table. Presently the sound of writing was heard, and
on the signal of three taps being given, the slate was examined and found
to contain a written message. In the same way two slates of the same size
were used, bound tightly together with cord, and also what are known as
box slates, to which a lock and key are attached. On many occasions
writing was obtained on a single slate resting on the upper surface of
the table, with the pencil between it and the table.
Mr. Gladstone had a sitting with Eglinton on October 29, 1884, and
expressed himself as very interested in what took place. When an account
of this sitting appeared in Light it was copied by nearly all the leading
papers throughout the country, and the movement gained considerably by
this publicity. At the conclusion of the seance Mr. Gladstone is reported
as saying: "I have always thought that scientific men run too much in a
groove. They do noble work in their own special lines of research, but
they are too often indisposed to give any attention to matters which seem
to conflict with their established modes of thought. Indeed, they not
infrequently attempt to deny that into which they have never inquired,
not sufficiently realizing the fact that there may possibly be forces in
nature of which they know nothing." Shortly afterwards Mr. Gladstone,
while never professing himself to be a Spiritualist, showed his sustained
interest in the subject by joining the Society for Psychical Research.
Eglinton did not escape the usual attacks. In June, 1886, Mrs. Sidgwick,
wife of Professor Sidgwick, of Cambridge, one of the founders of the
Society for Psychical Research, published an article in the JOURNAL of
the S.P.R. entitled "Mr. Eglinton,"* in which, after giving other
people's descriptions from over forty seances for slate-writing with this
medium, she says: "For myself, I have now no hesitation in attributing
the performances to clever conjuring." She had no personal experience
with Eglinton, but based her belief on the impossibility of maintaining
continuous observation during the manifestations. In the columns of LIGHT
Eglinton invited testimony from sitters who were convinced of the
genuineness of his mediumship, and in a later special supplement of the
same journal a very large number responded, many of them being members
and associates of the S.P.R. Dr. George Herschell, an experienced amateur
conjurer of fourteen years' standing, furnished one of the many
convincing replies to Mrs. Sidgwick.
* June, 1886, pp. 282-324. 1886, p. 309.
The Society for Psychical Research also published minute accounts of the
results obtained by Mr. S. J. Davey, who professed to obtain by trickery
similar and even more wonderful results in slate-writing than those
occurring with Eglinton.* Mr. C. C. Massey, barrister, a very competent
and experienced observer, and a member of the S.P.R., embodied the views
of many others when he wrote to Eglinton in reference to Mrs. Sidgwick's
article:
* S.P.R. PROCEEDINGS, Vol. IV, pp. 416-487.
I quite concur in what you say that she "adduces not one particle of
evidence" in support of this most injurious judgment which is opposed to
a great body of excellent testimony, only encountered by presumptions
contrary, as it seems to me, to common sense and to all experience.
On the whole, Mrs. Sidgwick's rash attack on the medium had a good
effect, because it called forth a volume of more or less expert testimony
in favour of the genuineness of the manifestations occurring with him.
Eglinton, like so many other mediums for physical manifestations, had his
"exposures." One of these was in Munich, where he had been engaged to
give a series of twelve seances. Ten of these had proved very successful,
but at the eleventh a mechanical frog was discovered in the room, and
though the medium's hands were held, he was charged with fraud because
the musical instruments, having been secretly blackened, black was
afterwards found on him. Three months later a sitter confessed that he
had brought the mechanical toy into the room. No explanation of the
blackening was forthcoming, but the fact of the medium's hands being held
should have been sufficient refutation.
A fuller knowledge since that time has shown us that physical phenomena
depend upon ectoplasm, and that this ectoplasm is reabsorbed into the
body of the medium carrying any colouring matter with it. Thus, in the
case of Miss Goligher after an experiment with carmine, Dr. Crawford
found stains of carmine in various parts of her skin. Thus, both in the
case of the mechanical frog and of the lamp-black, it was, as so often
happens, the "exposers" who were in the wrong and not the unfortunate
medium.
A more serious charge against him was made by Archdeacon Colley, who
declared * that at the house of Mr. Owen Harries, where Eglinton was
giving a seance, he discovered in the medium's portmanteau some muslin
and a beard, with which portions of drapery and hair cut from alleged
materialized figures corresponded. Mrs. Sidgwick, in her article in the
S.P.R. journal, reproduced Archdeacon Colley's charges, and Eglinton, in
his general reply to her, contents himself with a flat denial, remarking
that he was absent in South Africa when the charges were published and
did not see them until years after.
* MEDIUM AND DAYBREAK, 1878, pp. 698, 730. THE SPIRITUALIST,
1879, Vol. XIV, pp. 83, 135. 1886, p. 324.
Discussing this incident, LIGHT in a leading article says that the
charges in question were fully investigated by the Council of the British
National Association of Spiritualists and dismissed on the ground that
the Council could by no means get direct evidence from the accusers. It
goes on:
Mrs. Sidgwick has suppressed very material facts in her quotation as
printed in the JOURNAL. In the first place the alleged circumstances
occurred two years previous to the letter in which the accuser made his
charge, during which time he made no public move in the matter, and only
did so at all in consequence of personal pique against the Council of the
late B.N.A.S. In the second place, the suppressed portions of the letter
quoted by Mrs. Sidgwick bear upon their face the mark of utter
worthlessness. We affirm that no one accustomed to examine and weigh
evidence in a scientific manner would have accorded to the correspondence
the slightest serious attention without the clearest corroborative
testimony.
None the less, it must be admitted that when so whole-hearted a
Spiritualist as Archdeacon Colley makes so definite a charge, it becomes
a grave matter which cannot be lightly dismissed. There is always the
possibility that a great medium, finding his powers deserting him-as such
powers do-should resort to fraud in order to fill up the gap until they
return. Home has narrated how his power was suddenly taken from him for a
year and then returned in full plenitude. When a medium lives on his work
such a hiatus must be a serious matter and tempt him to fraud. However
that may have been in this particular instance, it is certain, as has
surely been shown in these pages, that there is a mass of evidence as to
the reality of the powers of Eglinton which cannot possibly be shaken.
Among other witnesses to his powers is Kellar, the famous conjurer, who
admitted, as many other conjurers have done, that psychic phenomena far
transcend the powers of the juggler.
There is no writer who has left his mark upon the religious side of
Spiritualism so strongly as the Reverend W. Stainton Moses. His inspired
writings confirmed what had already been accepted, and defined much which
was nebulous. He is generally accepted by Spiritualists as being the best
modern exponent of their views. They do not, however, regard him as final
or infallible, and in posthumous utterances which bear good evidence of
being veridical, he has himself declared that his enlarged experience has
modified his views upon certain points. This is the inevitable result of
the new life to each of us. These religious views will be treated in the
separate chapter which deals with the religion of Spiritualists.
Besides being a religious teacher of an inspired type, Stainton Moses was
a strong medium, so that he was one of the few men who could follow the
apostolic precept and demonstrate not only by words but also by power. In
this short account it is the physical side which we must emphasize.
Stainton Moses was born in Lincolnshire on November 5, 1839, and was
educated at Bedford Grammar School and Exeter College, Oxford. He turned
his thoughts towards the ministry, and after some years' service as a
curate in the Isle of Man and elsewhere he became a master at University
College School. It is remarkable that in the course of his wanderjahre he
visited the monastery of Mount Athos, and spent six months there-a rare
experience for an English Protestant. He was assured later that this
marked the birth of his psychic career.
Whilst Stainton Moses was a curate he had an opportunity of showing his
bravery and sense of duty. A severe epidemic of smallpox broke out in the
parish which was without a resident doctor. His biographer says: "Day and
night he was in attendance at the bedside of some poor victim who was
stricken by the fell disease, and sometimes after he had soothed the
sufferer's dying moments by his ministrations he was compelled to combine
the offices of priest and gravedigger and conduct the interment with his
own hands." It is no wonder that when he left he received a strongly
worded testimonial from the inhabitants, which may be summed up in the
one sentence, "The longer we have known you and the more we have seen of
your work, the greater has our regard for you increased."
It was in 1872 that his attention was drawn to Spiritualism through
seances with Williams and Miss Lottie Fowler. Before long he found that
he himself possessed the gift of mediumship to a very unusual extent. At
the same time he was prompted to make a thorough study of the subject,
bringing his strong intellect to bear upon every phase of it. His
writings, under the signature of "M.A. Oxon.," are among the classics of
Spiritualism. They include "Spirit Teachings," "Higher Aspects of
Spiritualism," and other works. Finally, he became editor of Light, and
sustained its high traditions for many years. His mediumship steadily
progressed until it included almost every physical phenomenon with which
we are acquainted.
These results were not obtained until he had passed through a period of
preparation. He says:
For a long time I failed in getting the evidence I wanted, and if I had
done as most investigators do, I should have abandoned the quest in
despair. My state of mind was too positive, and I was forced to take some
personal pains before I obtained what I desired. Bit by bit, here a
little and there a little, the evidence came, AS MY MIND OPENED TO
RECEIVE IT. Some six months were spent in persistent daily efforts to
bring home to me proof of the perpetuated existence of human spirits and
their power to communicate.
In Stainton Moses's presence heavy tables rose in the air, and books and
letters were brought from one room into another in the light. There is
independent testimony to these manifestations from trustworthy witnesses.
The late Serjeant Cox, in his book "What am I?" records the following
incident which occurred with Stainton Moses:
On Tuesday, June 2nd, 1813, a personal friend, a gentleman of high social
position, a graduate of Oxford, came to my residence in Russell Square,
to dress for a dinner party to which we were invited. He had previously
exhibited considerable power as a Psychic. Having half an hour to spare
we went into the dining-room. It was just six o'clock and, of course,
broad daylight. I was opening letters, he was reading The Times. My
dining-table is of mahogany, very heavy, old-fashioned, six feet wide,
nine feet long. It stands on a Turkey carpet, which much increases the
difficulty of moving it. A subsequent trial showed that the united
efforts of two strong men standing were required to move it one inch.
There was no cloth upon it, and the light fell full under it. No person
was in the room but my friend and myself. Suddenly, as we were sitting
thus, frequent and loud rappings came upon the table. My friend was then
sitting holding the newspaper with both hands, one arm resting on the
table, the other on the back of a chair, and turned sidewise from the
table so that his legs and feet were not under the table but at the side
of it. Presently the solid table quivered as if with an ague fit. Then it
swayed to and fro so violently as almost to dislocate the big pillar-like
legs, of which there are eight. Then it moved forward about three inches.
I looked under it to be sure that it was not touched; but still it moved,
and still the blows were loud upon it.
This sudden access of the force at such a time and in such a place, with
none present but myself and my friend, and with no thought then of
invoking it, caused the utmost astonishment in both of us. My friend said
that nothing like it had ever before occurred to him. I then suggested
that it would be an invaluable opportunity, with so great a power in
action, to make trial of motion without contact, the presence of two
persons only, the daylight, the place, the size and weight of the table,
making the experiment a crucial one. Accordingly we stood upright, he on
one side of the table, I on the other side of it. We stood two feet from
it, and held our hands eight inches above it. In one minute it rocked
violently. Then it moved over the carpet a distance of seven inches. Then
it rose three inches from the floor on the side on which my friend was
standing. Then it rose equally on my side. Finally, my friend held his
hands four inches over the end of the table, and asked that it would rise
and touch his hand three times. It did so; and then, in accordance with
the like request, it rose to my hand, held at the other end to the same
height above it, and in the same manner.
At Douglas, Isle of Man, during a Sunday in August, 1872, a remarkable
exhibition of spirit power was given. The facts related by Stanton Moses
are corroborated by Dr. and Mrs. Speer, at whose house the phenomena
occurred, and they lasted from breakfast-time until ten o'clock at night.
Raps followed the medium wherever he went in the house and even at church
he and Dr. and Mrs. Speer heard them while sitting in their pew. On
returning from church Stanton Moses found in his bedroom that objects had
been moved from the toilet table and laid on the bed in the form of a
cross. He went to summon Dr. Speer to witness what had taken place, and
on returning to the bedroom discovered that his collar, which he had
removed a minute or so before, had in his absence been placed round the
head of the improvised cross. He and Dr. Speer locked the door of the
bedroom and adjourned to lunch, but during the course of the meal loud
raps occurred and the heavy dining-table was moved three or four times.
On a further inspection of the bedroom they found that two other articles
from the dressing-case had been added to the cross. The room was again
locked, and at three subsequent visits fresh objects had been added to
the cross. We are told that on the first occasion there was no one in the
house who was likely to play a trick, and that afterwards adequate
precautions were taken to prevent such a thing from happening.
Mrs. Speer's version of this series of events is as follows:
During the time we were at church, raps were heard by each member of the
circle in different parts of the pew in which we were all sitting. On our
return Mr. S. M. found on his bed three things removed from his dressing
table, and placed in the form of a cross on his bed. He called Dr. S.
into his room to see what had taken place during our absence. Dr. S.
heard loud raps on the foot board of the bed. He then locked the door,
put the key in his pocket, and left the room vacant for a time. We went
to dinner, and during our meal the large dining-table, covered with
glass, china, etc., repeatedly moved, tilted and rapped; it seemed to be
full of life and motion.
Raps accompanied the tune of a hymn our little girl was singing, and
intelligent raps followed our conversation. We paid several visits to the
locked-up room, and each time found an addition had been made to the
cross. Dr. S. kept the key, unlocked the door, and left the room last. At
last all was finished. The cross was placed down the centre of the bed;
all the dressing things had been used that our friend had in his
travelling dressing-case. Each time we went into the room raps occurred.
At our last visit it was proposed to leave a piece of paper and pencil on
the bed, and when we returned again we found the initials of three
friends of Mr. S. M.'s, all dead, and unknown to anyone in the house but
himself. The cross was perfectly symmetrical, and had been made in a
locked room that no one could enter, and was indeed a startling
manifestation of spirit power.
A drawing showing the various toilet articles in their arranged form is
given in Arthur Lillie's "Modern Mystics and Modern Magic" (p. 72).
Further examples are given in the Appendix.
At his sittings with Dr. and Mrs. Speer many communications were
received, giving proofs of the identity of the spirits in the form of
names, dates, and places, unknown to the sitters, but afterwards
verified.
A band of spirits is said to have been associated with his mediumship.
Through them a body of teaching was communicated by means of automatic
writing, beginning on March 30, 1873, and continuing to the year 1880. A
selection of them is embodied in "Spirit Teachings." In his Introduction
to this book Stanton Moses writes:
The subject-matter was always of a pure and elevated character, much of
it being of personal application, intended for my own guidance and
direction. I may say that throughout the whole of these written
communications, extending in unbroken continuity to the year 1880, there
is no flippant message, no attempt at jest, no vulgarity or incongruity,
no false or misleading statement, so far as I know or could discover;
nothing incompatible with the avowed object, again and again repeated, of
instruction, enlightenment and guidance by Spirits fitted for the task.
Judged as I should wish to be judged myself, they were what they
pretended to be. Their words were words of sincerity, and of sober,
serious purpose.
A detailed account of the various persons communicating, many of them
having renowned names, will be found in Mr. A. W. Tetley's book, "The
'Controls' of Stainton Moses" (1923).
Stainton Moses aided in the formation of the Society for Psychical
Research in 1882, but resigned from that body in 1886 in disgust at its
treatment of the medium William Eglinton. He was the first president of
the London Spiritualist Alliance, formed in 1884, a position he retained
until his death.
In addition to his books "Spirit Identity" (1879), "Higher Aspects of
Spiritualism" (1880), "Psychography" (2nd ed. 1882), and "Spirit
Teachings" (1883), he contributed frequently to the Spiritualist Press as
well as to the SATURDAY REVIEW, PUNCH, and other high-class journals.
A masterly summary of his mediumship was contributed to the PROCEEDINGS
of the Society for Psychical Research by Mr. F. W. H. Myers.* In an
obituary notice of him Mr. Myers writes: "I personally regard his life as
one of the most noteworthy lives of our generation, and from few men have
I heard at first hand facts comparable in importance for me with those
which I heard from him."
* PROCEEDINGS S.P.R., Vol. IX, pp. 245-353. and Vol. XI, pp. 24-113.
The various mediums treated in this chapter may be said to cover the
different types of mediumship prevalent during this period, but there
were many who were almost as well known as those which have been quoted,
Thus Mrs. Marshall brought knowledge to many; Mrs. Guppy showed powers
which in some directions have never been surpassed; Mrs. Everitt, an
amateur, continued throughout a long life to be a centre of psychic
force; and Mrs. Mellon, both in England and in Australia, excelled in
materialization s and in physical phenomena.
CHAPTER III
THE SOCIETY FOR PSYCHICAL RESEARCH
Any full account of the activities of the Psychical Research Society,
with its strangely mingled record of usefulness and obstruction, would be
out of place in this volume. There are some points, however, which need
to be brought out, and some cases which should be discussed. In certain
directions the work of the society has been excellent, but from the
beginning it made the capital error of assuming a certain supercilious
air towards Spiritualism, which had the effect of alienating a number of
men who could have been helpful in its councils, and, above all, of
offending those mediums without whose willing co-operation the work of
the society could not fail to be barren. At the present moment the
society possesses an excellent seance room, but the difficulty is to
persuade any medium to enter it. This is as it should be, for both the
medium and the cause he represents are in danger when misrepresentation
and injurious charges are made as lightly as in the past. Psychical
research should show some respect for the feelings and opinions of
Spiritualists, for it is very certain that without the latter the former
would not have existed.
Amid the irritations of what they regard as offensive criticism
Spiritualists must not forget that the society has at various times done
some excellent work. It has, for example, been the mother of many other
societies which are more active than itself. It has also nurtured a
number of men both in London and in its American branch who have followed
the evidence and have become whole-hearted advocates of the spirit view.
Indeed, it is not too much to say that nearly all the bigger men, the men
who showed signs of strong mentality apart from this particular subject,
adopted the psychic explanation. Sir William Crookes, Sir Oliver Lodge,
Russel Wallace, Lord Rayleigh, Sir William Barrett, Professor William
James, Professor Hyslop, Dr. Richard Hodgson, and Mr. F. W. H. Myers were
all in different degrees on the side of the angels.
There had been a previous society of the same nature, the Psychological
Society of Great Britain, which was founded in 1875 by Mr. Serjeant Cox.
On the death of this gentleman in 1879 this society dissolved. On January
6, 1882, a meeting was held at the initiative of Sir William Barrett to
consider the formation of a new society, and on February 20 it came into
being. Professor Henry Sidgwick of Cambridge was elected President, and
among the Vice-Presidents was the Rev. W. Stainton Moses. The Council
included such representative Spiritualists as Mr. Edmund Dawson Rogers,
Mr. Hensleigh Wedgwood, Dr. George Wyld, Mr. Alexander Calder, and Mr.
Morell Theobald. We shall see in the course of our review of its history
how the Society for Psychical Research gradually alienated the sympathies
of these members and caused many of them to resign, and how the cleavage
thus early begun has gone on widening with the passage of the years.
A manifesto of the society sets out:
It has been widely felt that the present is an opportune time for making
an organized and systematic attempt to investigate that large group of
debatable phenomena designated by such terms as mesmeric, psychical and
Spiritualistic.
Professor Sidgwick, in his first presidential address to the society on
July 17, 1882, speaking of the need for psychical research, said:
We are all agreed that the present state of things is a scandal to the
enlightened age in which we live, that the dispute as to the reality of
these marvellous phenomena of which it is quite impossible to exaggerate
the scientific importance, if only a tenth part of what has been alleged
by generally credible witnesses could be shown to be true-I say it is a
scandal that the dispute as to the reality of these phenomena should
still be going on, that so many competent witnesses should have declared
their belief in them, that so many others should be profoundly interested
in having the question determined, and yet that the educated world, as a
body, should still be simply in an attitude of incredulity.
The attitude of the society, as thus defined by its first president, was
a fair and reasonable one. Answering a criticism to the effect that their
intention was to reject as untrustworthy the results of all previous
inquiries into psychical phenomena, he said:
I do not presume to suppose that I could produce evidence better in
quality than much that has been laid before the world by writers of
indubitable scientific repute-men like Mr. Crookes, Mr. Wallace, and the
late Professor De Morgan. But it is clear from what I have defined as the
aim of the society, however good some of its evidence may be in quality,
we require a great deal more of it.
The educated world, he pointed out, was not yet convinced, and thus more
evidence must be piled up. He did not add that there was abundant
evidence already but that the world had not yet troubled to examine it.
Returning to this aspect at the close of his address he said:
Scientific incredulity has been so long in growing, and has so many and
so strong roots, that we shall only kill it, if we are able to kill it at
all as regards any of those questions, by burying it alive under a heap
of facts. We must keep "pegging away," as Lincoln said; we must
accumulate fact upon fact, and add experiment upon experiment, and, I
should say, not wrangle too much with incredulous outsiders about the
conclusiveness of any one, but trust to the mass of evidence for
conviction. The highest degree of demonstrative force that we can obtain
out of any single record of investigation is, of course, limited by the
trustworthiness of the investigator. We have done all that we can when
the critic has nothing left to allege except that the investigator is in
the trick. But when he has nothing else left he will allege that. We must
drive the objector into the position of being forced either to admit the
phenomena as inexplicable, at least by him, or to accuse the
investigators either of lying or cheating or of a blindness or
forgetfulness incompatible with any intellectual condition except
absolute idiocy.
The early work of the society was devoted to an experimental
investigation of thought-transference, a subject which Sir William (then
Professor) Barrett had brought before the British Association in 1876.
After long and patient research it was considered that
thought-transference, or telepathy, as it was named by Mr. F. W. H.
Myers, was an established fact. In the domain of mental phenomena much
valuable work has been done by the society, and this has been placed on
record in a systematic and careful manner in the society's "Proceedings."
Its researches, too, into what are known as "Cross Correspondences"
constitute an important phase of its activities. The investigation of the
mediumship of Mrs. Piper was also a notable work, to which we shall refer
later.
Where the society has been less fortunate has been in its consideration
of what are known as the physical phenomena of Spiritualism. Mr. E. T.
Bennett, for twenty years the assistant secretary to the society, thus
refers to this aspect:
It is a remarkable thing, we are inclined to say one of the most
remarkable things in the history of the society, that this branch of
inquiry should have been-it is hardly an exaggeration to say-absolutely
barren of result. It may also be said that the result has been barren in
proportion to the simplicity of the alleged phenomena. As to the moving
of tables and other objects without contact, the production of audible
raps, and of visible lights, opinion, even within the society itself, to
say nothing of the outside intelligent world, is in the same state of
chaos as it was twenty years ago. The question of the movement of tables
without contact is exactly in the state in which it was left by the
Dialectical Society in the year 1869. Even then, the fact of the movement
of a heavy dining-room table, untouched by anyone present, and not in the
presence of a professional medium, was attested by a number of well-known
men. If it was "a scandal that the dispute as to the reality of these
phenomena should still be going on," when Professor Sidgwick gave his
first presidential address, how much more of a scandal is it that now,
after the lapse of nearly another quarter of a century, "the educated
world as a body should still be simply in an attitude of incredulity." In
the whole series of volumes issued by the society, there is no light
whatever thrown on these simple alleged phenomena of seeing and hearing.
With regard to the higher physical phenomena which imply intelligence for
their production, such as Direct Writing and Spirit Photography, some
investigation has been made, but to a large extent, though not entirely,
with negative results.*
* "Twenty Years of Psychical Research," by Edward T. Bennett (1904),
pp. 21-2. LIGHT, 1833, p. 54.
These sweeping charges against the society are made by a friendly critic.
Let us see how Spiritualists of that time viewed its activities. To start
from near the beginning, we find early in 1883, a year after the
formation of the society, a correspondent writing to Light asking, "What
is the distinction between the Society for Psychical Research and the
Central Association of Spiritualists?" and also inquiring whether there
was any antagonism between the two bodies. The reply is given in a
leading article from which we make this extract. With our retrospect of
forty years from that date it has an historic interest:
Spiritualists cannot doubt what the end will be-they cannot doubt that,
as time goes on, the Society for Psychical Research will afford as clear
and unquestionable proofs of clairvoyance, of spirit-writing, of
spiritual appearances, and of the various forms of physical phenomena as
they have so successfully afforded of thought-reading. But mean while
there is a sharp line of distinction between the Society for Psychical
Research and the Central Association of Spiritualists. The Spiritualists
have a settled faith-nay, more, a certain knowledge-in regard to facts
about which the Society for Psychical Research would not yet profess to
have any knowledge whatever. The Society for Psychical Research are busy
with phenomena only, seeking evidence of their existence. To them the
idea of spirit communion, of sweet converse with dear departed friends-so
precious to Spiritualists-has no present interest. We speak of them, of
course, as a Society-not of individual members. As a Society they are
studying the mere bones and muscles, and have not yet penetrated to the
heart and soul.
The editor, continuing, takes a dip into the future, though how distant a
future it was destined to prove he could not see:
As a Society, they cannot yet call themselves Spiritualists. As a
Society, they will, as their proofs accumulate, in all probability
become-first, "Spiritualists without the spirits"-and ultimately very
like other Spiritualists, with the added satisfaction that in reaching
that position they have made good every step in their path as they went
along, and have, by their cautious conduct, induced many noble and clever
men and women to tread the same way with them.
In conclusion, the correspondent is assured that there is no antagonism
between the two bodies, and that Spiritualists are confident that the
Society for Psychical Research is doing a most useful work.
The extract is instructive, showing as it does the kindly feelings
entertained by the leading Spiritualist organ towards the new society.
The prophecy accompanying it, however, has been far from realized. In an
exaggerated striving after what was considered to be an impartial,
scientific attitude, a certain little group within the society has
continued for many years to maintain a position, if not of hostility to,
yet of persistent denial of, the reality of physical manifestations
observed with particular mediums. It has mattered not what weight of
testimony was forthcoming from trustworthy men whose qualifications and
experience made them worthy of credence. As soon as the Society for
Psychical Research came to consider such testimony, or, more rarely, to
conduct an investigation for themselves, either open charges of fraud
were levelled against the mediums or possibilities of how the results
might have been obtained by other than supernormal means were suggested.
Thus, we have Mrs. Sidgwick, who is one of the worst offenders in this
respect, saying of a sitting with Mrs. Jencken (Kate Fox), held in light
reported to be sufficient to read print by, when direct writing was
obtained on a sheet of paper supplied by the sitters and placed under the
table: "We thought that Mrs. Jencken might have written the word with her
foot." Of Henry Slade: "The impression on my mind after about ten seances
with Dr. Sladeis that the phenomena are produced by tricks." Of William
Eglinton's slatewriting: "For myself I have now no hesitation in
attributing the performances to clever conjuring." One lady medium, the
daughter of a well-known professor, described to the author how
impossible, and indeed how unconsciously insulting, was the attitude of
Mrs. Sidgwick on such an occasion.
Many further quotations to the same effect, and about other famous
mediums, could be given, as already stated. A paper entitled "Mr.
Eglinton," contributed by Mrs. Sidgwick to the society's JOURNAL in 1886,
caused a storm of angry criticism, and a special supplement of Light was
devoted to letters of protest. In an editorial comment coming from Mr.
Stainton Moses, this newspaper, which in the past had shown such uniform
sympathy with the new body, writes
The Society for Psychical Research have in more than one direction placed
themselves in a false position, and when their attention has been drawn
to the fact, have allowed judgment to go by default. Indeed, the secret
history of "Psychical Research" in England will, when written, prove a
very instructive and suggestive narrative. Moreover, we regret to say
that (and we say it with a full sense of the gravity of our words), as
far as free and full discussion of these matters is concerned, their
policy has been an obstructionist one. In these circumstances, therefore,
it rests with the Society for Psychical Research itself to decide whether
the friction which now unfortunately exists shall be intensified, or
whether a MODUS VIVENDI between themselves and the Spiritualistic body
shall be established. No official disavowal of Mrs. Sidgwick's views as
being representative of the Society has, however, yet been made. That is
assuredly the first step.
The situation here indicated in the fourth year of the existence of this
society has continued with little alteration until the present day. We
can see it well described by Sir Oliver Lodge,* who says of the society,
while of course not agreeing with the dictum: "It has been called a
society for the suppression of facts, for the wholesale imputation of
imposture, for the discouragement of the sensitive, and for the
repudiation of every revelation of the kind which was said to be pressing
itself upon humanity from the regions of light and knowledge."
* "The Survival of Man." (1909), p. 6.
If this criticism be deemed too severe, it at least indicates the tone of
a considerable body of influential opinion regarding the Society for
Psychical Research.
One of the earliest public activities of the S.P.R. was the journey to
India of their representative, Dr. Richard Hodgson, in order to
investigate the alleged miracles which had occurred at Adyar, the
headquarters of Madame Blavatsky, who had taken so prominent a part in
resuscitating the ancient wisdom of the East and forming it, under the
name of Theosophy, into a philosophic system which would be intelligible
to and acceptable by the West. This is not the place to discuss the mixed
character of that remarkable woman, and it may simply be stated that Dr.
Hodgson formed a most adverse opinion of her and her alleged miracles.
For a time it seemed that this conclusion was final, but later some
reasons were put forward for its reconsideration, the best epitome of
which is to be found in Mrs. Besant's defence.* Mrs. Besant's chief point
is that the witnesses were thoroughly malicious and corrupt, and that
much of the evidence was clearly manufactured. The net result is that
while this and similar episodes will always cast a shadow over Madame
Blavatsky's record, it cannot be said that the particular case was
finally established. In this as in other instances the society's standard
of evidence, when it wishes to prove fraud, is very much more elastic
than when it examines some alleged psychic phenomenon.
* "H. P. Blavatsky and the Masters of Wisdom." (Theosophical Publishing
House.)
LIGHT, 1901, p. 523.
It is more pleasing to turn to the thorough examination of the mediumship
of Mrs. Leonora Piper, the celebrated sensitive of Boston, U.S.A., for
this ranks amongst the finest of the results achieved by the Society for
Psychical Research. It was continued over a period of fifteen years, and
the records are voluminous. Among the investigators were such well-known
and competent men as Professor William James, of Harvard University, Dr.
Richard Hodgson, and Professor Hyslop, of Columbia University. These
three were convinced of the genuineness of the phenomena occurring in her
presence, and all favoured the Spiritualistic interpretation of them.
The Spiritualists were naturally jubilant at this justification of their
claims. Mr. E. Dawson Rogers, President of the London Spiritualist
Alliance, at a gathering of that body on October 24, 1901, said:
A little event has occurred during the past few days which it is thought
calls for a few words from myself. As many of you know, our friends of
the Psychical Research Society-or some of them-have come over to our
camp. I do not mean to say they have joined the London Spiritualist
Alliance-but I mean that some who laughed and scoffed at us a few years
ago now proclaim themselves as adherents to our creed; that is, adherents
to the hypothesis or theory that man continues to live after death, and
that under certain conditions it is possible for him to communicate with
those he has left behind.
Well, now, I have a somewhat painful memory of the early history of the
Society for Psychical Research. I was, fortunately or unfortunately, a
member of its first Council, as was also our dear departed friend W.
Stainton Moses. We sat together and we were sadly distressed by the way
in which the Council of the Society for Psychical Research received any
suggestion about the possibility of demonstrating the continued existence
of man after so-called death. The result was that, being unable to endure
it any longer, Mr. Stainton Moses and I resigned our position on the
Council. However, time has had its revenges. At that time our friends
professed to be anxious to discover the truth, but they hoped, and
strongly hoped, that the truth would be that Spiritualism was a fraud.
Happily that time, and that attitude, have passed, and we can now regard
the Society for Psychical Research as an excellent friend. It has gone
assiduously and sedulously to work, and has proved our case-if it needed
proving-up to the hilt. First of all we had our good friend Mr. F. W. H.
Myers, whose memory we all cherish, and we do not forget that Mr. Myers
stated plainly that he had come to the conclusion that the Spiritualistic
hypothesis alone accounted for the phenomena he had himself witnessed.
Then there is Dr. Hodgson. You will remember, those of you who have been
long acquainted with the subject, how earnestly he pursued all who
professed Spiritualism. He was a very Saul persecuting the Christians.
Yet he himself, by virtue of his investigations of the phenomena
occurring in the presence of Mrs. Leonora Piper, came over to our side,
and honestly and fearlessly declared himself a convert to the
Spiritualistic hypothesis. And now within the last few days we have had a
notable volume by Professor Hyslop, of the Columbia University, New York,
and published by the Society for Psychical Research-a book of 650 pages,
which shows that he too, a vice-president of the Society for Psychical
Research, is convinced that the Spiritualistic hypothesis is the only
possible hypothesis to explain the phenomena he has witnessed. They are
all coming in, and I am beginning almost to have a hope of our good
friend Mr. Podmore.
From our vantage ground of twenty odd years later, we see that this
forecast was altogether too optimistic. But the work with Mrs. Piper
stands beyond challenge.
Professor James became acquainted with Mrs. Piper in 1885, through
hearing of the visit of a relative of his who obtained highly interesting
results. Though he was rather sceptical, he determined to investigate for
himself. He obtained a number of evidential messages. For instance, his
mother-in-law had lost her bank-book, but Dr. Phinuit, Mrs. Piper's
control, when asked to help in finding it, told her where it was, and the
statement proved to be correct. On another occasion this control said to
Professor James: "Your child has a boy named Robert F. as a playfellow in
our world." The F.s were cousins of Mrs. James and lived in a distant
town. Professor James told his wife that Dr. Phinuit had made a mistake
in the sex of the dead child of the F.'s, because he had said it was a
boy. But Professor James was wrong; the child was a boy, and the
information supplied was correct. Here there could be no question of
reading the sitter's conscious mind. Many more examples of veridical
communications could be given. Professor James describes Mrs. Piper as an
absolutely simple and genuine person, and says of his investigation, "The
result is to make me feel as absolutely certain as I am of any personal
fact in the world, that she knows things in her trances which she cannot
possibly have heard in her waking state."
After Dr. Richard Hodgson's death in 1905, Professor Hyslop obtained
through Mrs. Piper a series of evidential communications which convinced
him that he was indeed in touch with his friend and fellow-worker.
Hodgson, for instance, reminded him of a private medium about whose
powers the two men had differed. He said he had visited her, adding, "I
found things better than I thought." He spoke of a coloured-water test
which he and Hyslop had employed to test a medium five hundred miles
distant from Boston, and about which Mrs. Piper could know nothing. There
was also the mention of a discussion he had had with Hyslop about cutting
down the manuscript of one of Hyslop's books. The sceptic may object that
these facts were within the knowledge of Professor Hyslop, from whom Mrs.
Piper obtained, them telepathically. But accompanying the communications
there were many evidences of personal peculiarities of Dr. Hodgson which
Professor Hyslop recognized.
To enable the reader to judge the cogency of some of the evidence given
through Mrs. Piper under the Phinuit control, the following case is
extracted:*
* PROCEEDINGS of S.P.R., Vol. VI, p. 509. Quoted in M. Sage's "Mrs. Piper
and the S.P.R.".
At the 45th English sitting on Dec. 24, 1889, when Messrs. Oliver and
Alfred Lodge and Mr. and Mrs. Thompson were the sitters, Phinuit suddenly
said:
"Do you know Richard, Rich, Mr. Rich?"
MRS. THOMPSON: "Not well. I knew a Dr. Rich."
PHINUIT: "That's him. He's passed out. He sends kindest regards to his
father."
At the 83rd sitting, when Mr. and Mrs. Thompson were again present,
Phinuit said all at once: "Here's Dr. Rich!" upon which Dr. Rich proceeds
to speak:
DR. RICH: "It is very kind of this gentleman" (i.e. Dr. Phinuit) "to let
me speak to you. Mr. Thompson, I want you to give a message to father."
MR. THOMPSON: "I will give it."
DR. RICH: "Thank you a thousand times; it is very good of you. You see, I
passed out rather suddenly. Father was very much troubled about it, and
he is troubled yet. He hasn't got over it. Tell him I am alive-that I
send my love to him. Where are my glasses?" (The medium passes her hands
over her eyes.) "I used to wear glasses." (True.)
"I think he has them, and some of my books. There was a little black case
I had-I think he has that, too.
I don't want that lost. Sometimes he is bothered about a dizzy feeling in
his head-nervous about it-but it is of no consequence."
MR. THOMPSON: "What does your father do?" The medium took up a card and
appeared to write on it, and pretended to put a stamp in the corner.
DR. RICH: "He attends to this sort of thing. Mr. Thompson, if you will
give this message, I will help you in many ways. I can, and I will."
Professor Lodge remarks about this incident: "Mr. Rich, senior, is head
of Liverpool Post Office. His son, Dr. Rich, was almost a stranger to Mr.
Thompson, and quite a stranger to me. The father was much distressed
about his son's death, we find. Mr. Thompson has since been to see him
and given him the message. He (Mr. Rich, senior) considers the episode
very extraordinary and inexplicable, except by fraud of some kind. The
phrase, 'Thank you a thousand times,' he asserts to be characteristic,
and he admits a recent slight dizziness." Mr. Rich did not know what his
son meant by "a black case." The only person who could give any
information about it was at the time in Germany. But it was reported that
Dr. Rich talked constantly about a black case when he was on his
death-bed.
M. Sage comments, "No doubt Mr. and Mrs. Thompson knew Dr. Rich, having
met him once. But they were quite ignorant of all the details here given.
Whence did the medium take them? Not from the influence left on some
object, because there was no such object at the sitting."
Mrs. Piper had several controls at various stages of her long career. The
original one was a Dr. Phinuit, who claimed to have been a French doctor,
but whose account of his own earth life was contradictory and
unsatisfactory. Apart from himself, however, his ministrations were most
remarkable, and he convinced very many people that he was actually an
intermediary between the living and the dead. Some of the objections to
him, however, had force, for though it is quite possible that a prolonged
experience of otherworld conditions may take the edge off our earthly
recollections, it is hardly conceivable that it could do so to the extent
which was implied by the statements of this control. On the other hand,
the alternative theory that he was a secondary personality of Mrs. Piper,
a single strand, as it were, separated from the complete fabric of her
individuality, opens up even greater difficulties, since so much was
given which was beyond any possible knowledge on the part of the medium.
In studying these phenomena Dr. Hodgson, who had been among the most
severe critics of all transcendental explanations, was gradually forced
to accept the spiritual hypothesis as the only one which covered the
facts. He found that telepathy from sitter to medium would not do so. He
was much impressed by the fact that where the communicating intelligence
had been deranged in mind before death, the after messages were obscure
and wild. This would be inexplicable if the messages were mere
reflections from the memory of the sitter. On the other hand, there were
cases, such as that of Hannah Wild, where a message sealed up in lifetime
could not be given after death. While admitting the validity of such
objections, one can but repeat that we should cling to the positive
results and hope that fuller knowledge may give us the key which will
explain those which seem negative. How can we realize what the laws are,
and what the special difficulties, in such an experiment?
In March, 1892, the Phinuit control was largely superseded by the George
Pelham control, and the whole tone of the communications was raised by
the change. George Pelham was a young literary man who was killed at the
age of thirty-two by a fall from his horse. He had taken an interest in
psychic study, and had actually promised Dr. Hodgson that if he should
pass away he would endeavour to furnish evidence. It was a promise which
he very amply fulfilled, and the present author would wish to express his
gratitude, for it was the study of the George Pelham records * which made
his mind receptive and sympathetic until final proofs came to him at the
time of the Great War.
* Dr. Hodgson's Report. PROCEEDINGS of S.P.R., Vol. XIII, pp. 284-582.
M. Sage. "Mrs. Piper and the S.P.R." p. 98.
Pelham preferred to write through Mrs. Piper's hand, and it was no
unusual thing for Phinuit to be talking and Pelham to be writing at the
same moment. Pelham established his identity by meeting thirty old
friends who were unknown to the medium, recognizing them all, and
addressing each in the tone which he had used in life. Never once did he
mistake a stranger for a friend. It is difficult to imagine how
continuity of individuality and power of communication-the two essentials
of Spiritualism-could be more clearly established than by such a record.
It is instructive that the act of communication was very pleasant to
Pelham. "I am happy here, and more so since I find I can communicate with
you. I pity those people who cannot speak." Sometimes he showed ignorance
of the past. M. Sage, commenting upon this, wisely says: "If there is
another world, spirits do not go there to ruminate on what has happened
in our incomplete life: they go there to be carried away in the vortex of
a higher and greater activity. If, therefore, they sometimes forget, it
is not astonishing. Nevertheless, they seem to forget less than we do."
It is clear that if Pelham has established his identity, then all that he
can tell us of his actual experience of the next world is of the utmost
importance. This is where the phenomenal side of Spiritualism gives way
to the religious side, for what assurance from the most venerable of
teachers, or of writings, can give us the same absolute conviction as a
first-hand account from one whom we have known and who is actually
leading the life which he describes? This subject is treated more fully
elsewhere, and so it must suffice here to say that Pelham's account is,
in the main, the same as that which we have so often received, and that
it depicts a life of gradual evolution which is a continuation of earth
life and presents much the same features, though under a generally more
agreeable form. It is not a life of mere pleasure or selfish idleness,
but one where all our personal faculties are given a very wide field of
action.
In 1898 James Hervey Hyslop, Professor of Logic and Ethics at Columbia
University, took the place of Dr. Hodgson as chief experimenter. Starting
in the same position of scepticism, he in turn was forced by the same
experiences to the same conclusions. It is impossible to read his
records, which are given in his various books and also in Vol. XVI of the
S.P.R. Proceedings," without feeling that he could not possibly withstand
the evidence. His father and many of his relatives returned and held
conversations which were far beyond every alternative explanation of
secondary personality or of telepathy. He does not beat about the bush in
his conversation, but he says: "I have been talking with my father, my
brother, my uncles," and everyone who reads his account will be forced to
agree with him. How this society can have such evidence in its own
"Proceedings," and yet, so far as the majority of its Council is
concerned, remain unconverted to the spiritual view, is indeed a mystery.
It can only be explained by the fact that there is a certain self-centred
and limited-though possibly acute type of mind which receives no
impression at all from that which happens to another, and yet is so
constituted that it is the very last sort of mind likely to get evidence
for itself on account of its effect upon the material on which such
evidence depends. In this lies the reason for that which would otherwise
be inexplicable.
No memory was too small or too definite for the father Hyslop to bring
back to his son. Many of the facts had been forgotten and some never
known by the latter. Two bottles upon his writing-desk, his brown
penknife, his quill pen, the name of his pony, his black cap-people may
describe such things as trivial, but they are essential in establishing
personality. He had been a strict member of some small sect. Only in this
did he seem to have changed. "Orthodoxy does not matter over here. I
should have changed my mind in many things if I had known."
It is interesting to note that when on his sixteenth interview Professor
Hyslop adopted the methods of the Spiritualists, chatting freely and
without tests, he obtained more actual corroboration than in all the
fifteen sittings in which he had adopted every precaution. The incident
confirms the opinion that the less restraint there is at such interviews
the more successful are the results, and that the meticulous researcher
often ruins his own sitting. Hyslop has left it on record that out of 205
incidents mentioned in these conversations he has been able to verify no
fewer than 152.
Perhaps the most interesting and dramatic conversation ever held through
Mrs. Piper is that between her two researchers after the death of Richard
Hodgson in 1905. Here we have two men of first-class brain-Hodgson and
Hyslop--the one "dead," the other with his full faculties, keeping up a
conversation at their accustomed level through the mouth and hand of this
semi-educated and entranced woman. It is a wonderful, almost an
inconceivable situation, that he who had so long been examining the
spirit who used the woman should now actually be the spirit who used the
woman, and be examined in turn by his old colleague. The whole episode is
worthy of careful study.*
* "The Psychic Riddle." Funk, p. 58 and onwards.
So, too, is the succeeding message, alleged to be from Stainton Moses.
The following passage in it should give thought to many of our more
material psychic researchers. The reader can decide for himself whether
it is likely to have had its origin in the mind of Mrs. Piper:
This thought we all wish to impress upon you and upon the friends on
earth, that there is a difference between the entrance into the Spirit
World of those who seek for spiritual unfolding and those who simply seek
for scientific knowledge. Dr. Hodgson says that I shall tell you that it
was a great error that he kept himself so largely attuned to material
life and material things. You will understand he means that he did not
move in the realm of the higher or spiritual. He did not view these
psychic matters from the standpoint that I did. He sought to base
everything mainly on material facts, and did not seek to interpret
anything wholly as spiritual. One that comes over as he came over is
transplanted from one sphere of life into another like a babe just born.
He has been besieged since he is here with messages started from your
side. All manner of questions are being carried to him by messengers.
This is all in vain: he cannot answer. He repeats that I shall tell you
he realizes now that he saw only one side of this great question, and
that the lesser important.
Some description of this remarkable medium may interest the reader. Mr.
A. J. Philpott says of her:
I found her a comely, well-built and healthy-looking woman of middle age,
above the medium height, with brownish hair and a rather good-natured and
matronly cast of countenance. She looked like a well-to-do woman without
any particularly marked characteristics, either intellectual or
otherwise. I had rather expected to find a different type of woman,
somebody that would show more evidence of nerves; this woman looked as
calm and phlegmatic as a German HAUSFRAU. She evidently never had
bothered herself with metaphysical or any other kind of questions of a
vague or abstract character. Somehow, she reminded me of a nurse I had
seen in a hospital at one time-a calm, self-possessed woman.
Like many other great mediums, such as Margaret Fox-Kane, she was very
agnostic as to the source of her own powers, which is the more natural in
her case since she was always in deep trance, and had only second-hand
accounts from which to judge what occurred. She was inclined herself to
some crude and superficial telepathic explanation. As in the case of
Eusapia Palladino, her mediumship came on after an injury to the head.
Her powers seem to have left her as suddenly as they carne. The author
met her in New York in 1922, at which time she seemed to have completely
lost all her personal gifts, though she still retained her interest in
the subject.
The society has devoted an enormous amount of patient work to the
consideration of what are known as "cross correspondences." Many hundreds
of pages in the society's "Proceedings" are given to this subject, which
has aroused acute controversy.
It has been suggested that the scheme was originated on the Other Side by
F. W. H. Myers as a method of communication that would eliminate that
bugbear of so many psychic researchers-telepathy from the living. It is
at least a certainty that while he was on earth Myers had considered the
project in a simpler form, namely, to get the same word or message
through two mediums.
But the cross correspondence of the S.P.R. is in the main of a much more
complicated character. In this, one script is not a mere reproduction of
statements made in another; the scripts seem rather designed to represent
different aspects of the same idea, and often the information in one is
explanatory and complementary of that in another.
Miss Alice Johnson, the Research Officer of the S.P.R., was the first to
notice this link between the scripts. She cites this simple instance:
In one case, Mrs. Forbes's script, purporting to come from her son
Talbot, stated that he must now leave her, since he was looking for a
sensitive who wrote automatically, in order that he might obtain
corroboration of her own writing.
Mrs. Verrall, on the same day, wrote of a fir tree planted in a garden,
and the script was signed with a sword and suspended bugle. The latter
was part of the badge of the regiment to which Talbot Forbes had
belonged, and Mrs. Forbes had in her garden some fir trees, grown from
seed sent to her by her son. These facts were unknown to Mrs. Verrall.
Miss Johnson, who made a close study of the scripts coming through Mrs.
Thompson, Mrs. Forbes, Mrs. Verrall, Mrs. Willett) Mrs. Piper, and
others, thus describes the conclusion to which she came:
The characteristic of these cases-or, at least, some of them-is that we
do not get in the writing of one automatist anything like a mechanical
verbatim reproduction of phrases in the other. We do not even get the
same idea expressed in different ways-as might well result from direct
telepathy between them. What we get is a fragmentary utterance in one
script, which seems to have no particular point or meaning, and another
fragmentary utterance in the other, of an equally pointless character;
but when we put the two together, we see that they supplement one
another, and that there is apparently one coherent idea underlying both,
but only partially expressed in each.
She says*--what is by no means the fact, because hundreds of cases to the
contrary can be cited--that:
* S.P.R. Proceedings, Vol. XXI, p. 375.
The weakness of all well-authenticated cases of apparent telepathy from
the dead is, of course, that they can generally be explained by telepathy
from the living.
And she adds:
In these cross correspondences, however, we find apparently telepathy
relating to the present-that is, the corresponding statements are
approximately contemporaneous, and to events in the present which, to all
intents and purposes, are unknown to any living person, since the meaning
and point of her script is often uncomprehended by each automatist until
the solution is found through putting the two scripts together. At the
same time we have proof of what has occurred in the scripts themselves.
Thus it appears that this method is directed towards satisfying our
evidential requirements.
The student who will undertake the immense labour of carefully examining
these documents-they run into hundreds of printed pages-may perhaps be
satisfied by the evidence presented.
But, as a matter of fact, we find that many able and experienced psychic
researchers consider it unsatisfactory. Here are a few opinions on the
subject.
Richet says:
These are certainly well-marked cases of cryptesthesia, but whether there
is cryptesthesia, or lucidity, or telepathy, these do not in any way
imply survival of a conscious personality.*
* "Thirty Years of Psychical Research."
It has to be remembered, however, that Richet is not an impartial
controversialist, since an admission of Spirit would contradict all the
teachings of his lifetime.
Dr. Joseph Maxwell is of the same school of thought as Richet. He says:
It is impossible to admit the intervention of a spirit. We want proof of
facts, and the system of cross correspondences is founded on negative
facts and is an unstable foundation. Only positive facts have an
intrinsic value, which cross correspondences cannot show, not at present,
at any rate.
It may be remarked that Maxwell, like Richet, has now come a long way
t