Chapter IX
QUALITY OF THE ALLEGED MESSAGES
When a Spiritualist tells us that he receives messages from discarnate human beings through the medium and the medium’s “control” certain questions immediately arise. “Of what nature are these messages? What have you learned from them? How have they affected your judgment of this world and the next? Are they likely to help mankind in its upward progress?”
I
A twofold answer reaches us from within the ranks of Spiritualism.
(1) At an early stage of the inquiry, as Mr. A. E. Waite points out, the belief was accepted that “life for man on the other side of the screen of material things was, specifically, neither better nor worse than our own … it was so entirely human, with all the folly that resides in humanity.”
Spiritualist leaders of to-day would not dispute that point. “Yes, of course,” they would say, “it is always possible that the inquirer may get in touch with ‘naughty boys’ on the other side. The spirit passes over just as it was on earth. Bad influences as well as good are present in every séance.” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has said plainly: “We have, unhappily, to deal with absolute cold-blooded lying on the part of wicked or mischievous intelligences. Every one who has investigated the matter has, I suppose, met with examples of wilful deception, which occasionally are mixed up with good and true communications.”
Aside from wilful deception, there seems to be a certain mocking malevolence, where we should least expect it, on the part of the supposed spirits. “We do not want to make it too easy for you” is a strange utterance from the other side to bereaved parents.[40]
Speaking at Manchester on May 28, 1919, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle reported a singular experience of his own in Glasgow a few weeks earlier.
“I had to address a very large meeting,” he said, “exactly double the size of this one, and in the morning I went to a séance; we had a number of wonderful manifestations, and finally we had a message sent in a direct voice. The message which came to me was: ‘You are going to have a very good meeting to-night.’ I said, ‘Thank you.’ The voice then said, ‘It won’t be quite the same as you are accustomed to; we have a little surprise for you.’ I said, ‘Not unpleasant, I hope?’ They just chuckled at that, and that was all I got.” When the lecturer faced his audience everything he had intended to say passed entirely out of his head. Preachers and platform orators can tell something of the agony of that experience, which has not infrequently been the premonitory symptom of a nervous illness. “I don’t know how long I stood; I suppose about a minute, though it seemed like a week, and all the time I was struggling in the endeavour to find something to say.” The lecturer recovered himself, and all went well; but is there not here a parallel with the Celtic superstition that the powers of nature are malicious, and will do us a bad turn if they can? Alexander Smith writes of “that sense of an evil will, and an alienation from man in nature,” which is found in ancient fragments of Scottish river-lore.
(2) A cautious attitude might seem advisable under such conditions, and we are surprised to note a tendency on the part of our newer Spiritualist teachers to dogmatise on theological matters. “Spirit Teachings,” by Stainton Moses, has become a sort of Bible to the sect. Sir Oliver Lodge reprints passages from it in “Raymond.” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle takes the rubbish received through “Imperator” and his fellows with the utmost seriousness, though the genius which created Sherlock Holmes has not otherwise been dulled in psychical studies. Sir Arthur is quick enough to criticise the famous “cross-correspondence” analysed by Mr. Gerald Balfour in “The Ear of Dionysius.” Two eminent Greek scholars, Professor Verrall and Professor Butcher, are supposed to have collaborated to produce a Greek problem. “It may be remarked, in passing,” says Sir A. Conan Doyle, “that these and other examples show clearly, either that the spirits have the use of an excellent reference library, or else that they have memories which produce something like omniscience. No human memory could possibly carry all the exact quotations which occur in such communications as ‘The Ear of Dionysius.’”
The Churches must, however, in Sir Arthur’s view, accept the tenets of Spiritualism or perish.
II
Impartial students of the literature—a growing mass of documentary evidence—are impressed (1) by the triviality of the messages. Punsters would seem to carry on their jokes from the other side. A message which was presumed to come to Mrs. Holland from Myers contained a mysterious allusion to “a peck of pickled pepper.” In the opinion of the best S.P.R. critics the words conveyed a punning allusion to Mrs. Piper. Is there not something pitiable in the thought that the great writer who gave us “St. Paul” and the “Classical” and “Modern” Essays should be occupied in the unseen life in trying to transmit to earth punning references to the name of a medium? Professor William James remarked on the extreme triviality of the supposed communications.
“What real spirit,” he wrote, “at last able to revisit his wife on this earth, but would find something better to say than that she had changed the place of his photograph? And yet that is the sort of remark to which the spirits introduced by the mysterious Phinuit are apt to confine themselves.”
A woman writer passed away not long ago in early middle life. Her mother tried to get in touch through a medium with the departed spirit, and received a message to the effect that some valuable old lace had been forgotten in the top drawer of a tallboy, and that it ought to be taken out and washed! In a recent newspaper article by an eminent Spiritualist, reference was made to a supposed authentic communication lately received from the other side. It concerned a pair of grey suède shoes and a fountain pen.
Spiritualists tell us that such “trivial fond records” as we find, for instance, in “Raymond,” are of more value as evidence than graver talk of a general kind. Sir Oliver Lodge says, for instance, “The idea that a departed friend ought to be occupied wholly and entirely with grave matters, and ought not to remember jokes and fun, is a gratuitous claim which has to be abandoned. Humour does not cease with earth life. Why should it?”[41]
With the utmost respect, we reply that Sir Oliver misses the point. The solemn platitudes of “Imperator” are, if possible, even less convincing than the descriptions of life in the unseen world given in “Raymond,” over which Mr. Wells makes merry in “The Undying Fire.” Why is it that the outpourings of Spiritualism almost invariably, as Dr. Barnes points out, “reflect the commonplace thoughts of commonplace minds”?
If spirits were indeed communicating with men from within the veil, would not their language bear some trace of the mighty change they have undergone? Mr. Birrell, in one of his Bristol speeches, raised a question which must occur to every thoughtful inquirer. “The records of Spiritualism,” he said, “leave me unconvinced. They lack the things of morality, of grandeur, of emotion; in a word, of religion. They deal with petty things, mere prolonged egoism, as if the one thing we want to be assured of is continued existence, and an endless capacity to exchange platitudes. A revelation of the life beyond the grave ought surely, if it is to do any good in the world, to be more stupendous than that—something of really first-class importance. Otherwise we are just as well without it.”
(2) Among Spiritualists themselves we hear constant discussion as to the singular failure of the “spirits” to give names. Dr. L. P. Jacks examines this problem in the Journal of the S.P.R. for May, 1919.[42]
He had been “struck by the fact that a spirit who manifested his former personal appearance with great accuracy, even to minute details, was yet apparently unable to manifest his name, except in an imperfect and doubtful manner.” Why was his old coat manifested and his name not?
“Our names, while unessential to our self-consciousness, do play a prominent part in our sensible experience, especially with those of us who are cursed with an interminable correspondence, and one would think that a mind returning to its old tracks, as Sir Oliver Lodge suggests the spirits do, would find his name one of the easiest things to pick out.”
Professor Jacks is disposed to find a solution of the puzzle in telepathy. “It is easier,” he says, “to understand how a telepathist, having succeeded in reading one part of my mind, should fail or omit to read another, than it is to understand how an educated man in the other life should be able to reproduce his coat, but unable to trace the letters of his own name.”
The failure of the “spirits” to give names is a highly suspicious fact. How is it, asks Dr. Jacks, that the “control” which reproduces through the medium long messages as given by the communicating spirit, should fail to “catch” the name, in spite of the effort of all parties to get it through?[43]