Besides which, the telepathic basis of clairvoyance has been experimentally demonstrated. One of the investigators for the Society for Psychical Research, Mr. G. A. Smith, once hypnotized a lady and requested her to “look into” the business office of a friend of his and tell him what she saw there. Much to his surprise she immediately began to describe the office with great exactness, although he was positive she had never visited it.
It then occurred to him that possibly she was acquiring her knowledge of it by telepathy from his own mind, and to test this theory he thought of an imaginary umbrella, which he pictured to himself as lying open on his friend’s writing table. In a minute or so, the clairvoyant uttered a cry of astonishment, and exclaimed:
“Why, how strange! There’s a large umbrella open on the table!”
Usually, however, experiments like this fail, the entranced clairvoyant being able to discriminate between the thoughts which correspond to reality and those which are wholly imaginary. But that the process involved in clairvoyance is unquestionably telepathic has been otherwise proved by the fact that when conditions are imposed on clairvoyants absolutely excluding the possibility of thought transference from one mind to another, they are conspicuously unsuccessful in their efforts to obtain results. If, as often happens, they are able to describe distant places which they have never seen but with which other persons are necessarily familiar, they are nevertheless unable to state, for example, the number on a bank note, chosen at random from among others and placed in their hands in a sealed box without anybody previously ascertaining just what the number is.
Such a test, if successful, would be decisive proof of independent clairvoyance; but I have yet to learn of any clairvoyant who has been able to meet it, although the effort has been frequently made. It should be pointed out that, in order to give it evidential value, there must not be the slightest possibility of any one even glancing at the bank note before it is put into the sealed box; for, as has already been said, it is now known that the eye is far keener than we usually realize, and that the merest glance may often put us in possession of facts which, sinking into the memory, may afterward emerge to astonish and perhaps mystify us. Once they were lodged in the mind, a clairvoyant could, of course, obtain these facts from us telepathically, and thus achieve a seeming success even in the bank note or some similar test.
Indeed, this power of subconscious perception is of itself sufficient to explain many undoubtedly genuine instances of clairvoyance. There is obviously no need to go beyond it to account for such a clairvoyant dream as the following, reported by a lady who has declined to allow her name to be published:
“A number of years ago I was invited to visit a friend who lived at a large and beautiful country seat on the Hudson. Shortly after my arrival I started, with a number of other guests, to make a tour of the very extensive grounds. We walked for an hour or more, and thoroughly explored the place. Upon my return to the house, I discovered that I had lost a gold cuff-stud, which I valued for association’s sake. I merely remembered that I wore it when we started out, and did not think of or notice it again until my return, when it was missing. As it was quite dark, it seemed useless to search for it, especially as it was the season of autumn and the ground was covered with dead leaves.
“That night I dreamed that I saw a withered grapevine clinging to a wall, and with a pile of dead leaves at its base. Underneath the leaves, in my dream, I distinctly saw my stud gleaming. The following morning I asked the friends with whom I had been walking the previous afternoon if they remembered seeing any such wall and vine, as I did not. They replied that they could not recall anything answering the description. I did not tell them why I asked, as I felt somewhat ashamed of the dream; but, during the morning, I made some excuse to go out on the grounds alone. I walked hither and thither, and, after a long time, I suddenly came upon the wall and vine exactly as they looked in my dream.
“I had not the slightest recollection of seeing them, or passing by them on the previous day. The dead leaves at the base were lying heaped up, as in my dream. I approached cautiously, feeling rather uncomfortable and decidedly silly, and pushed them aside. I had scattered a large number of the leaves when a gleam of gold struck my eye, and there lay the stud, exactly as in my dream.”[20]
Akin to this is an exceptionally interesting case that was reported to me by a young lady attending college at Greeley, Colorado. Her father, it appears, had sent her a check, which for a day or two she delayed cashing. Then, being without money, she looked for it in the place where she supposed she had put it, but, to her dismay, discovered that it was not there. A thorough search of her room failed to bring it to light, and, as it was not a personal check of her father’s, she was greatly worried, thinking that it might be impossible to duplicate it.
A couple of nights later she had a curious dream in which she saw herself standing in front of a bookcase in the college library. On a certain shelf were five books, one bound in blue, another in yellow, and between them three with a white binding. She took down one of the white-covered volumes, opened it idly, and in the middle of the book found her check.
Next morning she awoke with no memory of the dream, nor did she recall it when, later in the day, she visited the college library and came across this identical placing of books. It recurred to her only when she glanced into one of the white-covered volumes. Feeling rather “foolish,” and also not a little apprehensive, she took down a second volume of the same set, opened it, and there, sure enough, was the missing check!
She then remembered that the book in which it was found had been in her room for some hours the day she received her father’s letter. What happened, I have no doubt, was that she absentmindedly slipped the check into the book, and then, so far as her upper consciousness was concerned, forgot all about it. But subconsciously she would remember and subconsciously would be reminded of it the day before the dream when, in the college library, she happened to see the same book again, without, perchance, any conscious knowledge of seeing it. That night, in sleep, her mind busied itself once more with the problem of the missing check, this time to good purpose.
Very similar is a dream for which I am indebted to Mr. Andrew Lang, who got it from the dreamer, an English lawyer. This gentleman had sat up late to write letters, and about half-past twelve went out to post them. On his return he missed a check for a large amount received by him during the day. He searched everywhere in vain, went to bed, and soon fell asleep. Then he dreamed that he saw the check curled around an area railing not far from his own door. Waking, he was so impressed that, although it was not yet daylight, he got up, dressed, walked out of the house, and found the check at the spot indicated by his dream.
In another case a Californian, visiting in Sullivan County, New York, lost a gold ring given him by his sister. That night he dreamed he saw it lying in the sand beneath a swing, in which he had been sitting in the afternoon. It was actually there, as he ascertained by looking next day. Similarly, a clerk in a customs house recovered a valuable document, the loss of which would have cost him his position. And the wife of a clergyman, the Reverend W. F. Brand, of Emmorton, Maryland, had revealed to her in a dream the hiding-place of a sum of money which, six months before, she had put away at her husband’s request, but had afterward accidentally slipped into a bundle of shawls.
Decidedly, we not only see more than we are aware of, but we also remember more and for a far longer time than is usually supposed.
Which brings me to another point of great importance to the student of clairvoyance and other psychical problems, and also, as will appear in a later chapter, of tremendous significance in affairs of everyday life. The tenacity of memory is such that nothing one sees is really forgotten. It merely slips, as it were, into some subterranean region of the mind, whence, days and months and even years afterward, it may be recalled. Of this we have incontrovertible proof in the phenomena of crystal-gazing, a species of clairvoyance in which, by gazing into a crystal or a glass of water, or any small body with a reflecting surface, it is sometimes possible to perceive hallucinatory pictures of people and places situated far beyond the gazer’s normal field of vision, and occasionally depicting events occurring at the moment they are seen in the crystal.
Occultists, as will readily be understood, set great store by crystal-gazing, finding in it positive proof of spirit action. But again it is unnecessary, even in the most extraordinary instances recorded, to adopt any other explanatory hypothesis than that of telepathy, and in most cases the source of the visions can be traced directly to latent memories in the gazer’s own mind.
This has been beautifully demonstrated by Miss Goodrich-Freer, a lady who developed the faculty of crystal-gazing for the express purpose of studying and analyzing its hallucinatory images. Not everybody, I should perhaps say, can attain the degree of mental passivity requisite to seeing pictures in the crystal, but fortunately for the cause of scientific progress, Miss Goodrich-Freer was eminently successful.
With the aid of her crystal, Miss Goodrich-Freer has frequently recalled dates and other information which she had forgotten and wished to remember; and on at least one occasion, under exceptionally peculiar circumstances, she was enabled to supply an address which was of no special interest to her, but was of special interest to a relative. Here is her own account of the episode:[21]
“A relative of mine was talking one day with a caller in the room next to that in which I was reading, and beyond wishing that they were farther, I paid no attention to anything they said, and certainly could have declared positively that I did not hear a word. Next day I saw in a polished mahogany table, ‘1, Earl’s Square, Notting Hill.’ I had no idea whose this address might be; but some days later my relative remarked: ‘H. (the caller aforesaid) has left Kensington. She told me her address the other day, but I did not write it down.’ It occurred to me to ask: ‘Was it, 1, Earl’s Square?’ And this turned out to be the case.”
On another occasion, she says in the long report she has made on the subject to the Society for Psychical Research, she saw in the crystal the picture of a dark-colored wall, covered with white jessamine. She had been taking a walk that morning through the streets of London, and she thought that perhaps the crystal image represented some spot she had passed in her walk, though this seemed unlikely, both because she could not remember having seen such a wall, and because jessamine-covered walls are by no means common in London streets. But the next day she retraced her steps, and presently came to the identical scene of her crystal vision, the sight of it bringing the immediate recollection that at the moment she passed this spot the day before she had been engaged in absorbing conversation with a friend, and her attention was wholly preoccupied. The fact, however, of its reproduction in the crystal made it evident that, by the subtle power of subconscious perception she had obtained a perfect mental image of it.
Similarly, while busied one day with household accounts, she opened the drawer of her writing table to get her bank-book, and her hand came in contact with her crystal. Welcoming the suggestion of a change in occupation, she took it up, and began to gaze into it. But, she says:
“Figures were still uppermost, and the crystal had nothing more attractive to show me than the combination seven-six-nine-four. Dismissing this as probably the number of the cab I had driven in that day, or a chance grouping of the figures with which I had been occupied, I laid aside the crystal and took up my bank-book, which I certainly had not seen for some months, and found, to my surprise, that the number on the cover was 7694. Had I wished to recall the figures, I should, without doubt, have failed, and could not even have guessed at the number of digits or the value of the first figure.”
It is not surprising to find Miss Goodrich-Freer adding:
“Certainly, one result of crystal-gazing is to teach one to abjure the verb ‘to forget’ in all its moods and tenses.”
Still it is possible that in the act of opening the drawer, she caught a glimpse, without realizing it, of the number on the bank-book. There are many cases, though, in her experience and in the experience of other crystal-gazers, proving absolutely that latent memories dating back even to childhood may be thus recalled; and similar evidence is forthcoming from hallucinations experienced without the aid of a crystal. A “psychic” with whom Professor Hyslop has often experimented, and whose home is in Brooklyn, used to have a recurrent visual hallucination of a bright blue sky overhead, a garden with a high fence, and a peculiar chain pump in the garden, situated at the back of the house.
Some time later she left Brooklyn to pay a visit to her girlhood home in Ohio, where she met a lady who invited her to tea. After tea they went into the garden, and there, to her amazement, she saw the high fence and the chain pump of her hallucination. She felt quite sure that she had never been in the place until that day, and it looked very much as though she had been given a supernatural revelation of it. But the mystery was solved on her return to Brooklyn.
Telling her mother of her odd experience, she asked if she thought there was any possibility she could have visited that particular house and garden in her younger days.
“Why, yes,” was the unexpected reply. “When you were a little girl, two or three years old, I often took you to it.”
But not all crystal visions may thus be attributed to the emergence of subconscious perceptions or the recrudescence of forgotten memories. There are some in which the telepathic action of mind upon mind is clearly manifested, and in which the crystal seems to serve as a mechanical aid, enabling the percipient to become aware of the telepathic message. In no case, however, as I have already said, is it necessary to go beyond telepathy to find an adequate explanation.
The same applies to the still more singular phenomena to which we shall turn next—the phenomena of automatic speaking and writing, regarded by many as affording incontrovertible proof of the validity of the spiritistic belief that the dead can and do communicate with the living.
There is a widespread belief that spiritism—or spiritualism, as it is more commonly known—is on the wane, and will soon be relegated to the limbo of extinct religions. But the facts indicate otherwise. At a conservative estimate, there are to-day, in the United States alone, no fewer than 75,000 avowed spiritists, in more or less regular attendance at the meetings of nearly 450 spiritist societies, and possessing church property valued at $2,000,000; and more than 1,500,000 believers who, without openly identifying themselves with any society, accept the ministrations of 1,500 public and 10,000 private mediums. Spiritism has even “followed the flag” into the Philippines, séances being held at Manila and elsewhere.
This certainly is a remarkable showing for a moribund religion, and what makes it more remarkable is the fact that spiritism, from its very beginnings sixty years ago, has been permeated with fraud. Its founders, the Fox sisters, daughters of a New York farmer, were naughty little girls who amused themselves by making strange noises which superstitious persons interpreted as communications from the dead. This proving profitable to the sisters Fox, the business of producing “spirit knockings” spread from town to town, and forthwith modern spiritism was born. Since then its record has been a long and dismal catalogue of swindles exposed by skeptical investigators. Scarcely a month passes without a story of some sensational exposé; yet, disproving all predictions to the contrary, spiritism continues to expand, constantly welcoming new recruits to its ranks.
Several reasons account for its amazing progress under what would appear to be the most adverse conditions imaginable. One is the innate tendency of many people to dabble with the occult and mysterious. Another is the appeal spiritism makes to the most sacred emotions of humanity. Its central doctrine is that it is possible for the dead to communicate with their surviving relatives and friends, through the mediumship of “psychics” gifted with extraordinary powers. Thus the hope is raised that messages of good cheer may be received from loved ones who have passed to the great Beyond—that their voices may be heard, their faces seen, and their hands clasped by those from whom death has separated them.
To the spiritistic séance, consequently, go grief-stricken men and women, skeptical perhaps, but fervently hopeful that their skepticism will be overcome. To borrow Professor James’s striking phrase, they are already deeply imbued with “the will to believe,” and are in no mood for close observation of what happens in the séance room. Usually, to speak plainly, they are utterly lacking in the qualities that make a scientific investigator. The sense of their loss is all-absorbing, and in this state of mind it is easy for any trickster who poses as a medium to delude them into fancying that they have actually been in touch with the dead.
But the main reason why spiritism has survived repeated exposés, and persists as a force to be reckoned with in the religious life of to-day, is the fact that it is by no means altogether synonymous with swindling. There are certain phenomena, particularly so-called automatic speaking and writing, which it is out of the question to attribute invariably to trickery and deceit. While one need have no hesitation in dismissing as fraudulent[22] all “physical” mediums—that is to say, mediums whose stock in trade is the production of such phenomena as the “materialization” of spirit forms and faces, the levitation and flinging about of furniture, and the striking of the “sitters” by unseen hands—the case of the automatists, or “psychical” mediums, is decidedly different.
These are mediums who, after passing into a peculiar condition of trance, and occasionally while seemingly in their usual waking state, appear to be controlled by some outside intelligence, and, when so controlled, utter or write information which it is hard, if not impossible, to believe they could have obtained by any ordinary means. To be sure, there is a host of spurious automatists, against whom one cannot be too watchfully on guard. Some of these are out and out cheats, as brazen as the most rascally materializers. Some depend for their success on guessing and on inferences shrewdly drawn from hints unconsciously dropped by their patrons. Quite a number, however, undoubtedly seem to exercise a gift not possessed—or, at all events, not utilized—by everyday men and women.
One Sunday evening, in the late nineties, I visited the spiritist church on Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn, of which the late Ira Moore Corliss was then pastor. In his day Mr. Corliss was probably the most prominent medium in Brooklyn, a city where spiritism has always flourished. He was an obviously religious-minded man, and one who sincerely believed that it was his mission to act as an intermediary between this world and the next. That evening the usual order of services in spiritist churches was followed—a prayer, some hymn singing, a sermon, or “inspirational discourse,” and, lastly, the giving of “test messages,” in which the medium passed rapidly up and down the aisles, pausing here and there to deliver oral communications alleged to come from the world of spirits.
Seated next to me was an elderly gentleman of dignified appearance, who watched the proceedings with a quiet smile of contempt. It was evident that this was the first time he had ever seen anything of the kind, and that he was both amused and disgusted. Suddenly Mr. Corliss, halting directly in front of him, said, in the quick, nervous way common to him when under “spirit control”:
“I have a message for you, sir.”
“For me?” repeated the elderly gentleman, incredulously.
“Yes, sir, for you. There is a spirit here that wants to thank you for your kindly thought of him to-day. It is the spirit of a rather tall man, heavily built, clean-shaven, with bright, tender eyes. He says his name is Henry Ward Beecher.”
The smile faded from the other’s face. He bent forward, listening intently.
“Go on,” he said.
“This spirit,” continued the medium, “says that he is glad to know you have not forgotten him. He says that he was with you this afternoon, when you went to the cemetery and took this flower from his grave.”
With a dramatic gesture Mr. Corliss drew from the lapel of his astonished auditor’s coat a sprig of geranium, and held it up so that all could see it.
“Am I not right?” he demanded.
“You are. Quite right.”
Afterward I joined the elderly gentleman on the sidewalk, and plied him with questions. I found him greatly mystified.
“This is too much for me,” said he. “I am a stranger to Brooklyn, and had never attended a spiritualist meeting until to-night. I only dropped in out of curiosity. But it is true that this afternoon I visited the cemetery where Henry Ward Beecher is buried, and picked this flower from near his grave, as a memento of my visit. Mr. Beecher was a very good friend to me in my younger days. How the medium could know these facts I cannot imagine. I had told nobody of my trip to the cemetery, and I am positive that no one saw me pick the flower.”
On another occasion I took an artist friend to the first séance he ever attended. The medium was a psychic of the Corliss type, an automatist who delivered his “spirit messages” by word of mouth. There were perhaps a dozen other sitters present. To one of these, a thin, gaunt, haggard-looking young woman, the entranced medium announced the presence of “a spirit named Wagner.” It was none other, it appeared, than the spirit of the great musician, who promised he would aid her with her musical compositions. A smile of infinite content transformed her careworn features, as she leaned over and whispered to my friend:
“The spirit of Liszt is already helping me. With Wagner’s aid I cannot fail.”
One could not smile in face of the story of boundless faith and pitiful struggle these few words told. And with the next sitter pathos rose to positive tragedy.
“There is the spirit of a man here, whose name is Frederick,” the medium declared, “and he comes to you, madam. Take my hand.”
Slowly a woman, dressed in deep mourning, stood up and extended her hand. Intensity was written in every line of her face.
“There were two Fredericks,” she said. “Which is it?”
“It is the Frederick—it is the Frederick, who, while on earth, did this.”
And he struck her sharply on the arm. Tears filled her eyes.
“I understand,” she murmured, “I understand. What does he say?”
All this was interesting, but not convincing. For aught we could tell to the contrary, the medium had familiarized himself with the life stories of these women, who doubtless were regular attendants at his séances. But now he passed to the friend by my side.
“A message for you, sir,” said he, “from the spirit of a military-looking man. Yes, he says that when he was in this sphere he was a commander of soldiers, a general. This is what he looks like.”
He launched into a long description, which I could see was making a profound impression on my friend.
“Has he anything particular to say to me?” he asked.
“He says that you must on no account decline the offer that has been made to you to go West—that you will never regret going.”
Less than two hours earlier my companion had told me of a commission unexpectedly tendered him, involving a long sojourn in California. At the medium’s words he turned pale, and glanced around as though half expecting to see a ghost standing behind his chair.
When the séance had come to an end, and we were walking home together, he solemnly assured me that the medium had accurately described a dead friend, an army officer of the rank of general, whose advice, had he been alive, he would have sought with regard to his projected journey to California.
Again, there is an interesting case reported from New England by the Reverend Willis M. Cleaveland. Among Mr. Cleaveland’s parishioners was a young woman, Miss Edith Wright, who developed mediumistic abilities, being controlled at times by what purported to be a discarnate spirit. Dreading notoriety, Miss Wright gave very few séances, and then only to her closest friends or to sitters with whom her friends were well acquainted, and in whose discretion they could place reliance.
One of these was Mr. Cleaveland, who, being interested in psychical research, undertook to obtain, if possible, proof of the identity of the supposed communicating spirit. If you really are a spirit, he said in effect, you ought to be able to give us some facts about yourself, something about your history while you were on earth, with data that will enable us to obtain confirmation of what you say. The “control” readily conceded the reasonableness of this, and in the course of several séances made twenty-six personal statements, of which the most significant were:
That her name was Amelia B. Norton.
That she had been the daughter of an orthodox clergyman, of the “water type.”
That she had lived near the Kennebec River, in the State of Maine.
That when writing letters it had been her custom to sign herself by the initials N. N., meaning Nellie Norton.
That she had died in middle life.
That when quite young she had had a love affair with a Mr. L. C. Brown, who was still living and engaged in business in Boston, at an address which the “spirit” gave.
As goes without saying, Mr. Cleaveland at once wrote to Mr. Brown, and in a few days received a reply from him, in which he said:
“I was out in the town of Sharon very recently, and called on an elderly gentleman who was a manufacturer there when I resided there as a boy in my teens. To my surprise, as we were reviving old recollections of fifty years ago, he spoke of a Miss Norton that he said I was sweet on at that time.
“The facts of the case are that Mary B. Norton, who always signed herself Nellie B. Norton, came there, a young miss about my age. We were, I guess, ardent lovers, but in the course of two years I left the town and she did, and I knew very little of her for a few years after that. I think it was about five years later that on my way home from the White Mountains I stopped off at her home in Maine, which was beside a large river. I feel sure this was the Kennebec River. Her father was an orthodox minister, but I do not understand the meaning of the ‘water type.’ I think some two years later she was residing in Fairhaven and sent me some papers that contained letters written by Mary B. Norton, but from that time—some over forty years—I have not seen her. I heard that she died some years ago, and think she must have been about fifty years of age.”
Later Mr. Brown wrote again, saying that on second thought he was not certain that her name might not have been Amelia instead of Mary, as he had always known her “only as Nellie B.”[23]
It is to the constant occurrence of incidents like these that the vitality of spiritism is mainly due. To many people it seems impossible to account for such detailed and abundantly corroborated proofs of personal identity on any hypothesis short of actual spirit control. Yet in the last analysis, when viewed in the sober light of latter-day scientific knowledge of the workings of the human mind, it will be found that they do not afford the conclusive demonstration of the validity of the spiritistic doctrine which on the surface they appear to yield. For there is always the possibility—amounting, I feel warranted in saying, to certainty—that what they really indicate is not communication with the dead, but thought transference between living minds.
In fact the telepathic connection between the mind of the medium and the mind of the sitter is often most obvious. Take the three cases just cited, and which are typical of mediumistic communications. The statements made by the medium Corliss to the friend of Henry Ward Beecher were statements relating to an incident fresh in the latter’s memory, and therefore easily obtainable by the telepathic process, which, there is reason to believe, is exceptionally at the command of genuine psychics. Likewise, my artist friend was much occupied mentally with the problems involved in the California offer, and was doubtless thinking of it, consciously or subconsciously, at the time the medium invoked the “spirit” of the army officer whose advice my friend would have sought had that officer still been in the flesh. All the medium had to do was to tap telepathically my friend’s subconsciousness and extract from it every detail of the “revelation” so sensationally made to him in the séance room.
Slightly different, however, is the case of Miss Edith Wright. Here the facts thought to emanate from the dead Amelia B. Norton were facts concerning which Miss Wright’s sitter, the Reverend Mr. Cleaveland, was ignorant. But it is most significant that, continuing his researches, Mr. Cleaveland made the discovery that Miss Norton’s old sweetheart, Mr. Brown, had had at least one sitting with Miss Wright. Mr. Brown denied that he had ever said anything about Miss Norton in Miss Wright’s presence; but his memory may have played him false, and, in any event, she could have got from him by telepathy the data with which she afterward astonished both him and Mr. Cleaveland. Let me remind the reader that among the few definitely ascertained laws of telepathy is the fact that it is possible for telepathic messages to lie long latent in the recipient’s mind before emerging above the threshold of consciousness.
This is of even greater significance in connection with the rarer, but still quite numerous, instances in which the mediumistic communications offered as evidence of spirit identity refer to incidents not known by the medium or by the sitter or by any previous sitter. These, spiritists insist, are absolutely inexplicable on the telepathic basis. I can make their position clearer by citing an illustrative case taken from the experience of that greatest of automatists, the New England medium, Mrs. Leonora E. Piper, whose remarkable mediumistic faculty was first made known to the scientific world by Professor James thirty years ago, and who has since been repeatedly investigated by leading members of the Society for Psychical Research. Detectives have been employed to dog her footsteps, open her mail, watch her every move. But not once have they detected her in fraudulent practices; and, on the other hand, she has given such convincing proof of the genuineness of her power that some of the most skeptical among her investigators have ended by accepting at face value her “messages from the dead.”
On one occasion, while she was being investigated in England by a committee of experts, that famous English psychical researcher, Sir Oliver Lodge, placed in her hands, while she was entranced, a gold watch once the property of an uncle of his who had died some twenty years before. It was now owned by another uncle, a twin brother of the dead man.
“I was told almost immediately,” says Sir Oliver, “that it had belonged to one of my uncles—one that had been very fond of Uncle Robert, the name of the survivor—that the watch was now in the possession of this same Uncle Robert, with whom its late owner was anxious to communicate. After some difficulty and many wrong attempts, Doctor Phinuit—a ‘spirit’ alleged to be controlling Mrs. Piper—caught the name Jerry, short for Jeremiah, and said emphatically, as if impersonating him: ‘This is my watch, and Robert is my brother, and I am here. Uncle Jerry, my watch.’
“All this at the first sitting on the very morning the watch had arrived by post, no one but myself and a shorthand clerk, who happened to have been introduced for the first time at this sitting by me, and whose antecedents were well known to me, being present.
“Having thus ostensibly got into communication through some means or other with what purported to be Uncle Jerry, whom I had indeed known slightly in his later years of blindness, but of whose early life I knew nothing, I pointed out to him that to make Uncle Robert aware of his presence it would be well to recall trivial details of their boyhood, all of which I would faithfully report.
“He quite caught the idea, and proceeded during several successive sittings ostensibly to instruct Doctor Phinuit to mention a number of little things such as would enable his brother to recognize him. References to his blindness, illness, and main facts of his life were comparatively useless from my point of view; but these details of boyhood, two-thirds of a century ago, were utterly and entirely out of my ken.
“‘Uncle Jerry’ recalled episodes such as swimming the creek when they were boys together, and running some risk of getting drowned; killing a cat in Smith’s field; the possession of a small rifle, and of a long, peculiar skin, like a snakeskin, which he thought was now in the possession of Uncle Robert.
“All these facts have been more or less completely verified. But the interesting thing is that his twin brother, from whom I got the watch and with whom I was thus in correspondence, could not remember them all. He recollected something about swimming the creek, though he himself had merely looked on. He had a distinct recollection of having had the snakeskin, and of the box in which it was kept, though he did not know where it was then. But he altogether denied killing the cat, and could not recall Smith’s field.
“His memory, however, was decidedly failing him, and he was good enough to write to another brother, Frank, living in Cornwall, an old sea captain, and ask if he had any better remembrance of certain facts—of course not giving any inexplicable reason for asking. The result of this inquiry was triumphantly to vindicate the existence of Smith’s field as a place near their home, where they used to play in Barking, Essex; and the killing of a cat by another brother was also recollected; while of the swimming of the creek, near a mill-race, full details were given, Frank and Jerry being the heroes of that foolhardy episode.”
Sir Oliver Lodge himself appears to believe that he was actually in communication, through Mrs. Piper, with his dead Uncle Jerry; and by spiritists generally this is alluded to as a characteristic instance impossible of explanation on the theory of telepathy between living minds. But it is pertinent to point out that possibly, in his childhood, Sir Oliver may have heard his uncles, in some moment of reminiscence, discussing these very incidents. He would naturally have forgotten the episode, so far as conscious recollection of it was concerned; but he would none the less have retained some memory of their conversation in his subconsciousness, whence Mrs. Piper could have gained knowledge of it telepathically. And, even had he never heard of the incidents, they might indeed have been transmitted to him telepathically from the surviving uncles, and been by him retransmitted to Mrs. Piper.
This last possibility, involving as it does telepathy between more than two persons, may seem to be far-fetched. But there is plenty of evidence that telepathy of this sort—known technically as telepathie à trois—is an actuality. I have in mind one particularly interesting case studied by Mr. Andrew Lang, the brilliant essayist and psychical researcher. It concerns a crystal-gazer named Miss Angus.
“Again and again,” to give Mr. Lang’s own words, “Miss Angus, sitting with man or woman, described acquaintances of theirs but not of hers, in situations not known to the sitters but proved to be true to fact. In one instance, Miss Angus described doings, from three weeks to a fortnight old, of people in India, people whom she had never seen or heard of, but who were known to her sitter. Her account, given on a Saturday, was corroborated by a letter from India, which arrived next day, Sunday. In another case she described—about ten P. M.—what a lady, not known to her, but the daughter of a matron present, who was not the sitter, had been doing about four P. M. on the same day. Again, sitting with a lady, Miss Angus described a singular set of scenes much in the mind, not of her sitter, but of a very unsympathetic stranger, who was reading a book at the other end of the room.
“I have tried every hypothesis, normal and not so normal, to account for these and analogous performances of Miss Angus. There was, in the Indian and other cases, no physical possibility of collusion; chance coincidence did not seem adequate; ghosts were out of the question, so was direct clairvoyance. Nothing remained for the speculative theorizer but the idea of cross currents of telepathy between Miss Angus, a casual stranger, the sitters, and people far away, known to the sitters or the stranger, but unknown to Miss Angus.
“Now,” adds Mr. Lang, in a paragraph that every attendant at spiritistic séances would do well to learn by heart, “suppose that Miss Angus, instead of dealing with living people by way of crystal-visions, had dealt by way of voice or automatic handwriting, and had introduced a dead ‘communicator.’ Then she would have been on a par with Mrs. Piper, yet with no aid from the dead.”
That automatists “read the mind” of their sitters, or draw upon the contents of their own subconsciousness in obtaining the facts which they give out as coming from the spirit world, is further evident from experiments in automatic writing conducted by several American and English psychical researchers.[24]
But when they are genuine automatists, it would be unjust to accuse them of conscious deception in attributing their communications to discarnate spirits. The trance state into which they usually fall is an abnormal condition, and is not unlike, if not identical with, the hypnotic state. As will be shown in detail later, one of the distinctive characteristics of hypnosis is the preternaturally increased suggestibility of the person hypnotized. He will accept and act upon the slightest suggestion of the hypnotist, no matter how ridiculous and absurd the suggestion may be, so long as it is not repugnant to his moral sense. Moreover, he can be induced to think that he is some one other than his real self, and will often assume the traits of the suggested personality with a fidelity that is astounding.
So, likewise, we must believe, with the automatist, who will impersonate anybody suggested—albeit suggested quite unconsciously—by the sitters, whether it be the “spirit” of a Greek philosopher, an Indian chief, or the deceased friend of some one present. Usually he is so deeply entranced as to have no knowledge of what he is doing, just as the hypnotized subject remains in ignorance of the actions he carries out in response to the operator’s suggestions. But there is a record of at least one instance in which the automatist, an amateur psychical researcher named Charles H. Tout, of Vancouver, clearly recognized that his various impersonations were suggested to him by the spectators.
Mr. Tout relates that after attending a few séances with some friends he felt an impulse to play medium himself and assume an alien personality. Yielding to this impulse, he discovered that, without losing complete control of his consciousness, he could develop a secondary self that would impose on the beholders as a discarnate spirit. On one occasion he thus impersonated the “spirit” of a dead woman, the mother of a friend present, and his impersonation was accepted as a genuine case of spirit control. On another, after having given several successful impersonations, he suddenly felt weak and ill. At this point, he states:
“One of the sitters made the remark, which I remember to have overheard, ‘It is father controlling him,’ and I then seemed to realize who I was and whom I was seeking. I began to be distressed in my lungs, and should have fallen if they had not held me by the hands and let me back gently upon the floor. I was in a measure still conscious of my actions, though not of my surroundings, and I have a clear memory of seeing myself in the character of my dying father lying in the bed and in the room in which he died. It was a most curious sensation. I saw his shrunken hands and face, and lived again through his dying moments; only now I was both myself—in some indistinct sort of way—and my father, with his feelings and appearance.”
All of which Mr. Tout rightly attributes to “the dramatic working out, by some half-conscious stratum of his personality, of suggestions made at the time by other members of the circle, or received in prior experiences of the kind.”
Add to this the known facts of telepathic action, and there is no need of looking further for a comprehensive explanation of the otherwise perplexing and supernatural-seeming phenomena of psychic automatism. This applies even to the phenomenon of so-called “cross-correspondence,” which has been especially stressed the past few years by certain members of the Society for Psychical Research as affording proof positive of survival.
With reference to this particular problem, it should in the first place be said that, in addition to Mrs. Piper, there are a number of other automatic writers who have been similarly investigated by the Society for Psychical Research for a long term of years, and whose trustworthiness has likewise been definitely established. They include a Mrs. Holland, a Mrs. Forbes, a Mrs. Thompson, Mrs. Verrall, of Newnham College, Cambridge, England, and Mrs. Verrall’s daughter, Miss Helen Verrall. Through these ladies thousands of alleged “spirit messages” have been received, including many purporting to come from Edmund Gurney, Henry Sidgwick, Frederic Myers, and Richard Hodgson, who in their lifetime were the most active and prominent members of the Society for Psychical Research. And among the automatic writings supposed to emanate from them there have been not a few so peculiarly conditioned as to suggest not only that the “spirits” of the four great psychical researchers are in touch with their living friends, but that they are working hard to devise special tests to prove their identity.
To put the matter more concretely, let me cite the case of Mrs. Holland. This lady is a resident of India. In 1893, having seen in the Review of Reviews a reference to automatic writing, she experimented in it herself, and found that she possessed the faculty of penning coherent sentences without being conscious of what she was writing. She continued these experiments for ten years, or until 1903, when, after reading Myers’s “Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death,” she one day discovered that her automatic writing was seemingly no longer spontaneous, but controlled by two outside intelligences that called themselves “Myers” and “Gurney.” Each “control,” alternating with the other, caused her to write long communications, in which there was mingled with much that seemed unintelligible and nonsensical long descriptions of unnamed persons and places. Her interest aroused, Mrs. Holland collected a number of these communications and mailed them to Miss Alice Johnson, Research Officer of the English Society for Psychical Research.
Examining them carefully, Miss Johnson discovered, much to her surprise, that they contained unmistakable references to people and the homes of people whom Myers and Gurney had known intimately, but of whom, as Miss Johnson satisfied herself by searching inquiry, Mrs. Holland had no knowledge. Thus there was an excellent description of Mrs. Verrall, her husband, Dr. A. W. Verrall, and the Verrall dining-room, in which Myers had often been entertained. Even the street address of the Verralls was correctly given. Miss Johnson, as may be imagined, at once wrote, urging Mrs. Holland to continue her automatic writing, and to forward all her script to the offices of the Society. This was done, with the result that much else of a seemingly evidential value was soon obtained. It was especially noted that, although Mrs. Holland knew nothing of Latin and Greek, her communications from the Myers control occasionally contained passages written in both these languages, with which Myers had been well acquainted.
November 25, 1903, the Gurney control wrote in the automatic script: “Now there is an experiment I want you to make—Suggest to the P. R.—to Miss J.—that some one with a trained will—she will have no difficulty in finding some one of the sort—is to try—for a few minutes—every morning for at least a month—to convey a thought—a phrase—a name—anything they like—to your mind.” In due course this suggestion was sent by Mrs. Holland to Miss Johnson, who arranged for a series of such experiments, with Mrs. Verrall acting as the second medium.
The experiments began in March, 1905, were continued until towards the end of May, and were resumed for a few weeks in the spring of the following year. The scheme adopted, however, was not exactly that suggested by the Gurney control. Instead of simply attempting to convey some thought to Mrs. Holland’s mind, Mrs. Verrall, at Miss Johnson’s suggestion, wrote automatically herself on each day that Mrs. Holland was to write. Neither medium was to hold the slightest communication with the other, but both were to forward their automatic scripts to Miss Johnson as soon as written. In fact, in order to prevent any loophole for fraud, Miss Johnson throughout the 1905 experiments kept Mrs. Holland in ignorance of the identity of her fellow-experimenter, who, on her side, was ignorant of Mrs. Holland’s real name—the “Holland” being a pseudonym. Some exceedingly interesting results were secured.
March 1, 1905, Mrs. Holland’s script contained these sentences, “There are cut flowers in the blue jar—jonquils I think and tulips—growing tulips near the window. A dull day, but the sky hints at spring, and one chirping bird is heard above the roar of the traffic.” In reply to a questioning letter from Miss Johnson, Mrs. Verrall wrote:
“On March 1 the only cut flowers in my drawing-room were in two blue china jars on the mantelpiece; the flowers were large single daffodils. On the ledge of the window ... were three pots of growing yellow tulips—the only flowers near any window. The day was dull in the morning, but about twelve the sun came out and it was warm; it rained heavily in the afternoon.”
There was no “cross-correspondence” in the writings of the two scripts for this or the next two weeks—the experimenters wrote only once a week—but in the scripts of the week following Miss Johnson found a curious coincidence—the presence of notes of music. Only once before or since, she testifies, have notes of music appeared in the script of either Mrs. Verrall or Mrs. Holland. In Mrs. Holland’s script of that same date, March 22, there was also a reference to “the ivory gate through which all good dreams come.” Mrs. Verrall, it was learned, on March 19 or 20, had been reading Virgil’s passage in the “Æneid” about the gates of horn and ivory. She had been reading Dante, too, in the original Italian, the first time she had read anything in Italian for months; and, oddly enough, Mrs. Holland’s script for March 22 contained a sentence in Italian.
Later scripts were characterized by even more striking correspondences, and—which is not without interest—on more than one occasion the “controls” issued warnings against placing faith in Eusapia Paladino. For instance, on December 1, 1905, the Myers control wrote through Mrs. Holland: “There may be raps genuine enough of their kind—I concede the raps—poltergeist merely—but the luminous appearances—the sounds of a semi-musical nature—the flower falling upon the table—trickery—trickery.” And the Gurney control added: “Her feet are very important—Next time can’t Miss J. sit with the sapient feet both touching hers—Let her fix her thoughts on the feet and prevent the least movement of them.”
As American investigators have since discovered, Eusapia’s feet are indeed important.
These first experiments were followed by others, in which, besides Mrs. Holland and Mrs. Verrall, all four of the other mediums mentioned above took part, and again suggestive cross-correspondences were secured. Besides which, having been induced by the results of the Verrall-Holland experiments to study more closely earlier scripts stored in the Society’s archives, Miss Johnson discovered what seemed to be similar cross-correspondences that occurred before any experiments of this kind were undertaken. I can give only one or two illustrations. August 28, 1901, Mrs. Forbes wrote a message purporting to come from her dead son Talbot, to the effect that he had to leave her in order to control another “sensitive,” and through her obtain corroboration of Mrs. Forbes’s own automatic writing. On the same day Mrs. Verrall wrote in Latin of a fir tree planted in a garden, and the script was signed with a sword and a 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, according to Miss Johnson, were unknown to Mrs. Verrall.
In another case Mrs. Forbes wrote, on November 26 and 27, 1902, references, absolutely meaningless to herself, to a passage in a book which Mrs. Verrall had been reading on those days; and the references also applied appropriately to an obscure sentence in Mrs. Verrall’s own script of November 26.
But undoubtedly the most impressive cross-correspondences were obtained in a series of experiments extending from November, 1906, to June, 1907, and involving concordant automatism between Mrs. Holland, in India, and Mrs. Piper, Mrs. Verrall, and Miss Verrall, in England. A full report on this series is given in the October, 1908, issue of the Society’s Proceedings. The plan followed was to suggest to the controls of Mrs. Piper—in her case the alleged “spirits” of Myers, Sidgwick, and Hodgson—that they transmit to one or more of the other automatists some test word or message. There were many failures, but there were also many seeming successes.
January 16, 1907, the Myers control promised that it would, as a proof of its identity, cause Mrs. Holland and Mrs. Verrall to sign a piece of automatic writing with a triangle drawn within a circle. A circle with a triangle inside it actually appeared in Mrs. Verrall’s script of January 28, while a script from Mrs. Holland exhibited several geometrical figures, including a circle with a triangle outside it. February 6 the same control said that it had just been referring, through Mrs. Verrall, to a “library matter,” and investigation showed that half an hour earlier Mrs. Verrall, writing at her home in Cambridge, had begun a script in which the word “library” occurred three times—the only time during the period of the experiments that “library” was mentioned in her automatic writing or in Mrs. Piper’s trance statements. The Myers control again, on February 11, announced that it had given “hope, star, and Browning” to Mrs. Verrall, and her script showed that this was correct. February 12 the Hodgson control declared it had been trying to impress the word “arrow” on Mrs. Verrall. Her script for the previous day, when received at the Society’s offices in London, proved to be decorated with a drawing of three arrows.
It is the multiplicity of coincidences like these—and I have given only the merest fragment of the evidence in hand—that has recently persuaded many hitherto hesitating psychical researchers, notably Sir Oliver Lodge, that scientific proof of spirit communication has veritably been obtained. For myself, I must frankly say, however, that I cannot accept this view of the case. Fraud, I admit, is out of the question as an explanatory hypothesis. Nor does it seem possible to explain away the evidence on the theory of mere chance, guessing, “lucky hits,” etc. But there remains the hypothesis of telepathy between living minds; and, as it seems to me, there is nothing whatever in the evidence presented incompatible with the view that the cross-correspondences in question resulted from direct thought transference between the automatists themselves.
We have now to consider a very different class of spiritistic manifestations, the so-called “physical phenomena,” which are historically among the earliest on record, and at the same time are far more spectacular and sensational than the phenomena produced by the automatic speakers and writers. They include such weird occurrences as the appearance in the séance room of ghostly forms alleged to be spirits “materialized” by the power of the medium; the lifting of the latter from the floor by an invisible force; the touching, pinching, and striking of the sitters by unseen hands, and the movement of small articles of furniture as though alive.
Occasionally, when the medium is particularly gifted, still more striking happenings take place. Thus, at a séance with Eusapia Paladino, attended by such eminent scientists as Professors Lombroso, Bianchi, Tamburini, Vizioli, and Ascensi, men whose veracity is beyond question, it is recorded by Lombroso[25] that:
“We saw a great curtain, which separated our room from an alcove adjoining, and which was more than three feet distant from the medium, suddenly move out toward me, envelop me, and wrap me close. Nor was I able to free myself from it except with great difficulty.
“A dish of flour had been put in the little alcove room, at a distance of more than four and a half feet from the medium, who, in her trance, had thought, or, at any rate, spoken, of sprinkling some of the flour in our faces. When light was made, it was found that the dish was bottom side up, with the flour under it. This was dry, to be sure, but coagulated, like gelatine. This circumstance seems to me doubly irreconcilable—first, with the laws of chemistry, and, second, with the power of movement of the medium, who had not only been bound as to her feet, but had her hands held tight by our hands.
“When the lights had been turned on, and we were all ready to go, a great wardrobe that stood in the alcove room, about six and a half feet away from us, was seen advancing slowly towards us. It seemed like a huge pachyderm that was proceeding in leisurely fashion to attack us.”
Other investigators, men of equally high character, report marvels no less amazing. On one occasion, Eusapia Paladino is credited with having created an invisible man, a being which the sitters could distinctly feel, although they could not see it, and which, annoyed by their inquisitive prodding, finally turned on one of them and bit him in the thumb. For this we have the authority of Professors Morselli and Barzini, the latter being the investigator whose thumb was bitten.
Again, two English noblemen, Lords Dunraven and Crawford, affirm that they several times saw another medium, the late D. D. Home, floating through the air; once at a height of more than seventy feet above the ground; and that the same medium, by some “spiritual” agency, was elongated in full view of them, so that they beheld his stature visibly increase, to decrease again to normal height only when he came out of the trance condition.[26]
Unfortunately, the “spirits” that perform these uncanny feats have a strong liking for darkness, a circumstance which has led to wholesale, and repeatedly substantiated, accusations of fraud. In fact, there is no other department of spiritism to which the taint of fraud has so thoroughly attached itself. It is obvious that any clever charlatan, by persuading his sitters that darkness is necessary for the development of occult phenomena, can produce most mystifying effects, and the records of scientific investigations, to say nothing of the records of our police courts, abound in evidence that swindlers have not been slow in availing themselves of this opportunity to prey on the credulous and superstitious. The lengths to which bogus mediums will sometimes go, and the extreme gullibility which renders their operations ridiculously easy and highly profitable, are amusingly illustrated by a story told by Mr. Hereward Carrington, an investigator who has done much to make the public acquainted with the ways of fraudulent “psychics.”
One of these, according to Mr. Carrington, had among his patrons an elderly business man, the head of a large concern that manufactured farming implements. After several months of intercourse, during which the medium deftly led him on from marvel to marvel, until at last there was no “phenomenon” too incredible for him to swallow, he was informed that at the next séance he would have the unique experience of conversing with the spirit of a deceased inhabitant of the planet Jupiter.
Sure enough, after the lights had been carefully turned low, he was accosted by a tall, shadowy figure, which announced itself as a spirit from Jupiter, and which, speaking excellent English, proceeded to describe the conditions of life in that far-off sphere. The Jupiterians, it appeared, were a poor, ignorant lot, scarcely removed from barbarism; they were greatly in need of civilization, and any one who should help in civilizing them would be generously rewarded in the future life.
“I should be glad to do all in my power,” the business man eagerly volunteered, “but I’m afraid there’s nothing I could do.”
“Yes, indeed, there is. I understand that you make farm implements and machinery. Well, they haven’t as much as a spade on Jupiter. If you would send a few tools there, it would be a great step toward civilizing them.”
“But how in the world could I get anything to them?”
“That is quite simple,” the “spirit” glibly explained. “Just send the things to the medium here, and he will dematerialize them and ship them to Jupiter, where they will be rematerialized.”
Instead of seeing in this a daring attempt to fleece him, the victim joyfully acquiesced, and sent a number of spades, plows, harrows, etc., to the medium, who promptly disposed of them, not to the people of Jupiter, but to a dealer in such articles. Other séances followed, the spirit from Jupiter again appearing and describing in picturesque language the beneficent consequences of the welcome presents. This meant more gifts, which steadily increased in number and value, until the confederate who had been playing the part of the dead Jupiterian finally became frightened.
“Look here,” he told the medium, “this has got to stop. It was all very well when you were satisfied with plows, and rakes, and little things like that, but now that you have got him giving you horses and harvesters there’s bound to be trouble. He’s sure to find out in the end, and some fine morning we’ll wake up on the inside of a jail.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” said the medium. “He’ll never find out anything.”
“I’m not so certain of that. At any rate, you’ll have to get somebody to take my place.”
One word led to another, and ended in a violent quarrel. The confederate, vowing vengeance, called on the business man, and told him how he had been duped. He was met with the astonishing reply:
“I don’t believe a word you say.”
“You don’t?” he cried. “Didn’t you send the medium, only yesterday, a horse and cart to be dematerialized?”
“Yes.”
“Well, if you wish to know where they are, come with me. He has them in a stable near his house, waiting to find a buyer.”
Together they went to the stable, where the confederate pointed out the horse and cart that had been given to the medium. In particular, he identified the cart by the number painted on it.
“Come, now,” said he, “you can’t deny that’s your cart, can you?”
“Why,” was the answer, “it does indeed look like my cart. But I know it isn’t.”
“How do you know it isn’t?”
“Because”—in a tone of solemn conviction—“I know that by this time my cart is on Jupiter.”
In another case, drawn to my attention by a lawyer friend, the victim was a well-to-do Boston merchant, who had become interested in spiritism shortly after the death of his wife, to whom he had been devotedly attached, and with whose spirit he hoped to be brought into communication. A medium, learning this, determined to profit from his grief and longing, and hired a young woman to pose as the spirit of the dead wife. He was then told that before long it would be possible to “materialize” his wife from the spirit world with such substantiality that he would be able to clasp her in his arms.
When the appointed time came, a slender form, draped in gauze, emerged from the mediumistic cabinet into the darkened séance room, and saluted him with a joyful cry of “Husband!” There was not light enough to see the “spirit’s” face, but he did not for an instant doubt that he was really gazing at his wife, and rose to embrace her. At once the figure vanished, and after the lights were turned up the medium explained that there would have to be a good many “materializations” before the spirit form would be solid enough for him to touch it.
This meant, of course, numerous séances, for which the deluded husband paid handsomely. It also helped to blind him to the true state of affairs, and increased his infatuation to such an extent that when at length the “spirit” submitted to his caresses, it did not seem at all incongruous to find that he was pressing to his breast a flesh-and-blood woman.
The medium now resolved on a bold stroke. Acting under her instruction, the “spirit” bitterly complained one evening that she did not possess any jewelry.
“What!” her “husband” exclaimed. “Do you mean to say that they wear jewelry in the other world?”
“Oh, yes. But nothing to compare with what I had while on earth. What have you done with mine?”
“I have it all—every piece—put away in a little box.”
“Good. Then if you will bring it to-morrow night, I can take it with me when I leave you. The medium, you know, can dematerialize it for us.”
“I will bring it. Rest assured of that.”
Alas for husbandly devotion! The séance at which he turned over the jewelry to the affectionate “spirit” of his wife was the last at which he held communion with her. When he next called, he was told that the medium had been unexpectedly summoned out of town. She never came back.
These two episodes are typical rather than exceptional instances of the sort of thing that has been going on for years in connection with the physical phenomena of spiritism. Its continuance has been made possible largely by a widespread belief, entertained not by the ignorant and superstitious merely, but by men of distinction in the intellectual and scientific world, that, notwithstanding the prevalence of fraud, there are at least some physical phenomena which must be accounted genuine.
Men like the Italian savants already named, the English naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace; the great chemist, Sir William Crookes; the French astronomer, Camille Flammarion, and many others who might be mentioned, are satisfied that they have witnessed in the séance room occurrences out of all accord with natural laws, and not to be attributed to fraud.
In support of this view, emphasis is laid on the fact that, leaving out of consideration all mediums who employ their powers as a means of livelihood, physical phenomena of the most bizarre sort have been manifested through men and women in private life, who cannot possibly have a pecuniary motive for deception, and whose character is beyond reproach.
One of the most celebrated of physical mediums, in fact, was a clergyman of the Church of England, the Reverend W. Stainton Moses, a gentleman respected and warmly esteemed by all who knew him.[27]
As a further argument in behalf of the authenticity of certain of the phenomena, attention is also called to the interesting circumstance that, long before spiritism and spiritistic mediums were heard of, similar marvels—including seemingly spontaneous movements of furniture, and the occurrence of mysterious raps, knockings, and other noises—were frequently reported by thoroughly reputable witnesses.