Dr Richard Hodgson--Description of the trance--Mrs Piper not a good
hypnotic subject.
Before proceeding further, I must ask my readers' permission to
introduce Dr Hodgson, the man who has studied Mrs Piper's case with the
greatest care and with the most perseverance. Dr Richard Hodgson went to
America expressly to observe this medium, and during some fifteen years
he has, so to say, hardly lost sight of her for a moment. All the
persons who have had sittings for a long time past have passed through
his hands; he introduces them by assumed names, and takes all possible
precautions that Mrs Piper, in her normal state, shall not obtain any
information about them. These precautions are now superfluous. Mrs Piper
has never had recourse to fraud, and everyone is thoroughly convinced of
the fact. But the slightest relaxation of supervision would lay the most
decisive experiments open to suspicion.
Dr Hodgson is one of the earliest workers for the Society for Psychical
Research. He has been a terrible enemy to fraud all his life. At the
time of the formation of the Society, Mme. Blavatsky, foundress of the
Theosophical Society, was making herself much talked about. The most
extraordinary phenomena were supposed to have occurred at the
Theosophical Society's headquarters in India. Dr Hodgson was sent there
to study them impartially. He quickly made the discovery that the whole
affair was charlatanry and sleight-of-hand. On his return to England he
wrote a report--which has not killed Theosophy, because even new-born
religions have strong vitality--but which has discredited this doctrine
for ever in the eyes of thoughtful people.
After this master stroke, Dr Hodgson continued to hunt down fraudulent
mediums. He learned all their tricks, and acquired a conjurer's skill.
It was he again who discovered the unconscious[4] frauds of Eusapia
Paladino during the sittings which this Italian medium gave at
Cambridge. When such a man, after long study of Mrs Piper's phenomena,
affirms their validity, we may believe him. He is not credulous, nor an
enthusiast, nor a mystic. I have written of him somewhat at length,
because, by force of circumstances, his name will often appear in these
pages.
To return to Mrs Piper and the phenomena which specially interest us.
Mrs Piper falls into trance spontaneously, without the intervention of
any magnetiser. I shall explain later, at length, what must be
understood by "trance."
Professor Charles Richet was one of the persons who had a sitting with
our medium while she was staying at Cambridge. He describes the trance
in these terms:--
"She is obliged to hold someone's hand in order to go into a trance. She
holds the hand several minutes, silently, in half-darkness. After some
time--from five to fifteen minutes--she is seized with slight spasmodic
convulsions, which increase, and terminate in a very slight epileptiform
attack. Passing out of this, she falls into a state of stupor, with
somewhat stertorous breathing; this lasts about a minute or two; then,
all at once, she comes out of the stupor with a burst of words. Her
voice is changed; she is no longer Mrs Piper, but another personage, Dr
Phinuit, who speaks in a loud, masculine voice in a mingling of negro
patois, French, and American dialect."
Sir Oliver Lodge, F.R.S., well-known among English men of science, and
at the time Professor of Physics at Liverpool, describes the opening of
the trance in very nearly the same words as Professor Richet in the
remarkable report which he published in 1890 on the sittings he had with
Mrs Piper. He also notices the slight epileptiform attack, although he
adds that he is not "pretending to speak medically."[5]
The Phinuit personality, of which Professor Richet speaks in the passage
above quoted, is what the Spiritualists call a "control." By "control"
is meant the mysterious being who is supposed to have temporarily taken
possession of the organism of the medium. Are these controls only
secondary personalities, or are they, as they themselves declare,
disincarnated human spirits, spirits of dead men who come back to
communicate with us by using an entranced organism as a machine? In
either case they must have a name. Phinuit has been one of Mrs Piper's
principal controls, but he is far from having been the only one. On the
contrary, they have been legion, and, what is strange, these controls
appear to be personalities as distinct from each other as possible, each
with his own style of language, his belief, his opinions, his tricks of
speech or manner.
Mrs Piper's trance has changed its aspect a little with the development
and perfecting of her mediumship. Formerly the controls communicated
only by using her voice; then some of them began to write. In some of
the sittings one personality communicated through the voice, while
another, entirely different, and speaking of utterly different matters,
communicated simultaneously in writing. For some years now the controls
have only communicated in writing, and have used the right hand only.
The right arm of the medium is in lively movement, while the rest of her
body lies inert, leaning forward upon cushions.
In a long report which has just appeared,[6] Mr James Hyslop, Professor
of Logic and Ethics at the University of Columbia, in the State of New
York, describes the beginning of the trance in detail as it now takes
place. At the first sitting he had with Mrs Piper he seated himself more
than a yard from her, in a position which enabled him to observe
attentively all that happened.
The medium remained quietly seated in an armchair for three or four
minutes. Then her head shook and her right eyebrow twitched; all this
time she was trimming her nails. She then leant forward on the cushions
which had been placed on the table for her head to rest upon, and closed
and rubbed her eyes; her face was slightly congested for some instants.
She opened her eyes again, and the ocular globes were visible, slightly
upturned; she blew her nose, and began to attend to her nails again. Her
gaze became slightly fixed. Her face once more changed; the redness
disappeared, and she grew slightly pale. The muscles relaxed, the mouth
was a little drawn on one side, and the stare became more fixed. Finally
her mouth opened and the trance came on gently, like a fainting fit,
without struggle. Then Dr Hodgson arranged her head on the cushions with
her right cheek on her left hand, so that her face was turned to the
left, and she was unable to see her right hand, which soon began to
write automatically.
During the trance the sensibility of Mrs Piper's organism to exterior
excitation is much blunted. If her arm is pricked, even severely, it is
withdrawn but slowly; if a bottle of ammonia is put to her nostrils, and
care is taken that it is inhaled, her head does not betray sensation by
the least movement. One day, if I am not mistaken, Dr Hodgson put a
lighted match to her arm, and asked Phinuit if he felt it.[7]
"Yes," replied Phinuit, "but not much, you know. What is it? Something
cold, isn't it?"
These and numerous other experiments show that if sensibility is not
abolished, it is at least very much blunted.
It might be concluded from the above that Mrs Piper would be an
excellent hypnotic subject. She is nothing of the kind. Without being
precisely refractory to hypnotism, she is only an indifferently good
hypnotic subject. Professor William James of Harvard has made
experiments to elucidate this point. His two first attempts to hypnotise
Mrs Piper were entirely fruitless. Between the second and third,
Professor William James asked Phinuit, during a mediumistic trance, to
be kind enough to help him to make the subject hypnotisable. Phinuit
promised; in fact, he always promises all that is asked. At the third
attempt Mrs Piper fell slightly asleep, but only at the fifth sitting
was there a real hypnotic sleep, accompanied by the usual automatic and
muscular phenomena. But it was impossible to obtain anything more.
Hypnosis and trance, in Mrs Piper, have no points of resemblance. In the
trance, muscular mobility is extreme. In hypnosis, just the contrary is
the case. If she is ordered during hypnosis to remember what she has
said or done, she remembers. During the trance, the control has more
than once been asked to arrange that Mrs Piper should recall, on waking,
what she had said; but this has never succeeded. During the mediumistic
trance she seems to read the deepest recesses of the souls of those
present like a book. During hypnosis there is no trace of this
thought-reading. In short, the mediumistic trance and the hypnotic sleep
are not one and the same thing. Whatever may be the real nature of the
difference, this difference is so great that it strikes the least
attentive observer at once.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] In the opinion of the chief witnesses of the Cambridge sittings the
frauds of Eusapia Paladino were not unconscious. Mr Myers said, in the
report to the Society immediately after the sittings:--"I cannot doubt
that we observed much conscious and deliberate fraud, of a kind which
must have needed long practice to bring it to its present level of
skill."--_Journal of Society for Psychical Research_ for 1895, p. 133,
_Trans._
[5] _Proc. of the S.P.R._, vol. vi. p. 444.
[6] _Proc. of S.P.R._, vol. xvi.
[7] _Proc. of S.P.R._, vol. viii. p. 5.