The case against spiritualism

Table-turning, as we meet it in literature, belongs to the older class of parlour games. Sir W. F. Barrett quotes the testimony of Delitzsch that it was practised in Jewish circles in the seventeenth century: “the table springs up even when laden with many hundred-weight.” Zebi, in 1615, defended the practice as not due to magic, but to the power of God, “for we sing to the table sacred psalms and songs, and it can be no devil’s work where God is remembered.”

I

Mrs. De Morgan, in that curious book, “From Matter to Spirit,” describes her experience in table-turning circles about the year 1853. The medium was Mrs. Hayden, whose séances in West London were attended by such men as Professor Huxley and Robert Chambers. Mrs. Hayden was an educated lady, the wife of W. R. Hayden, editor of the Star-Spangled Banner. Her rooms were crowded with visitors, at a minimum fee of half a guinea each, and her services were in great demand for evening parties and private sittings. According to Mrs. De Morgan, the circle gathered round an old Pembroke table. The illustrations in the book show a spirit appearing to a man and woman who are seated at a rather large round table. Very strange and absurd communications, as Mrs. De Morgan admitted, were given by table-tipping, “as, indeed, by all methods.” “I have seen instances,” she writes, “and been told of others, in which long incongruous strings of names and titles have been spelt out, such as Richard Cœur de Lion, Pythagoras, Byron, Cheops, and Mr. Fauntleroy, the list, perhaps, ending with T. Browne or J. Smith. The givers of these names seem to delight only in buffoonery and abuse; and, perhaps, after playing absurd and mischievous tricks for days or even weeks, will seem to come in a body, giving all their names, with the information that they are come to say good-bye for ever.”

Phenomena not unlike the “exuberant” table activities at Mariemont, as described in “Raymond,” were familiar over half a century ago to the sitters with Mrs. Hayden. Mrs. De Morgan tells of a case in which the watchers were directed by raps to join hands and stand up round the table without touching it. They stood patiently for a quarter of an hour, and just as one or two of the party talked of sitting down, the old table “moved entirely by itself as we surrounded and followed it with our hands joined, went towards the gentleman out of the circle, and literally pushed him up to the back of the sofa, till he called out ‘Hold, enough!’”

Robert Chambers, who was a close examiner of the table phenomena of his day, formed an opinion which would be accepted, as we shall show, by thoughtful writers of our own time who are on other grounds believers in Spiritualism.

“I am satisfied,” Robert Chambers wrote in Chambers’s Journal, “that the phenomena are natural, but to take them in I think we shall have to widen somewhat our ideas of the extent and character of what is natural.”

In 1853 a committee of British medical men held an investigation on table-turning. They decided that the table-motion was due to muscular action, mostly exercised unconsciously. Faraday, as Mr. Podmore shows in “Modern Spiritualism,” was able to prove that the table movements were due to muscular action, exercised in most cases without the consciousness or volition of the sitters. Table-turning, in the remoter towns and villages of Europe, was a favourite drawing-room amusement as late as 1876.

II

Sir Oliver Lodge, in his deeply interesting address to the Dublin section of the Society for Psychical Research,[19] delivered more than ten years ago, spoke wise words on the physical phenomena of the séance. “There is but little doubt in my mind,” he says, “that such movements do take place; I have had personal experience of them. Nevertheless they are not yet really established as facts, and if they were there would still be a question whether these movements are due to some independent intelligent agency, or whether, as is most likely, they are an extension of the ordinary power of the organism through which they are produced.”

Sir Oliver Lodge, eleven years ago, took practically the same view as Robert Chambers in 1853. “I can move this tumbler with my hand,” he said, “but the question remains whether I can move the same tumbler at a distance of a couple of feet from my hand without actually touching it. Note that there is nothing inconceivable about this. The boundary of an organism, as of everything else, is more or less arbitrary; we know that in a sense a vortex ring exists, not only where it is seen, but at some distance also, and that the influence of every atom extends throughout the visible universe. And so, perhaps, on analogous lines, we may look for some explanation of these curious occurrences which will not take them altogether beyond the reach of more ordinary experience.”

III

We have given the opinion of scientific men in 1853 and in 1908 with regard to the phenomena of table-turning. Spiritualists to-day are much interested in the experiments of a distinguished Belfast scientist, Dr. W. J. Crawford, with the Goligher family, whose table experiments have satisfied him that “the invisible operators” are “the spirits of human beings who have passed into the beyond.” Sir William Barrett, who has personally watched the Belfast experiments, suggests that “many of the physical manifestations witnessed in a Spiritualistic séance are the product of human-like, but not really human, intelligences. Good or bad dæmonia they may be; elementals some have called them, which aggregate round the medium—drawn from that particular plane of mental and moral development in the unseen which corresponds to the mental and moral plane of the medium.”

Sir Oliver Lodge, in a recent article,[20] speaks of “many grades of development” in the other world, “some lower than humanity.”

Mr. Arthur E. Waite, writing more than twenty years ago on Spiritualistic phenomena, set forth the theory of the Kabalists that “shells and elementals,” the “low life deeps of the world of souls,” might exercise a baneful influence on humanity. “The revelations of the unseen world which have come to us through Spiritualism,” he says, “can have come only from the dregs and lees of the unseen, or, as I should prefer to put it, from the roots and the rudiments of that house which, however, on account of those rudiments, may not be less the House of God.”

Scientific students of to-day seem divided between two theories as they examine the table phenomena. These are ascribed (1) to supernormal and little understood powers of the human personality, or (2) to the intervention of irresponsible and, it may be, sub-human intelligences.

Readers of “Raymond” will remember Sir Oliver Lodge’s reference to the difficulties of “table-sittings.” Various passages show that he himself has been greatly puzzled. Accounts of sittings at “Mariemont,” Sir Oliver Lodge’s home, tell of obstreperous doings on the part of the tables. Two got broken, and “a stronger and heavier round table with four legs was obtained, and employed only for this purpose.” In one of the séances with “Feda,” the alleged spirit of Raymond referred through the “control” to table-doings at Mariemont.

“Other spirits get in, not bad spirits, but ones that like to feel they are helping. The peculiar manifestations are not him, and it only confuses him terribly. Part of it was him, but when the table was careering about it was not him at all. He started it, but something comes along stronger than himself, and he loses the control.”[21]

In a later sitting with the same medium and control we find the sentence (supposed to come from Raymond), “The Indians have got through their hanky-panky.” The reference was understood by his brother to mean “playing with the table in a way beyond his control.”[22]

Mr. J. Arthur Hill has some sensible remarks on the general subject of table phenomena. “There seems no particular point,” he says, “in physical phenomena alone, except as providing a problem for the physicist and psychical researcher. A table or other object may move in some inexplicable way, but that is no proof of ‘spirits’; the energy is supplied from physical matter—mainly the medium’s and sitters’ bodies, apparently—and it is only through evidential messages conveyed by the phenomena that spirit agency can reasonably be inferred.” Mr. Hill disapproves of “private circles,” except when held for investigation by qualified persons.

Table phenomena, of whatever kind, afford no proof that discarnate human spirits are seeking to communicate with friends on earth.

We close this chapter with the words of Camille Flammarion, the French astronomer, whose name is so highly honoured in Spiritualistic circles:—

“The physical phenomena … do not prove the existence of spirits, and may possibly be explained without them … that is, by unknown forces, emanating from the experimenters, and especially from the mediums.”