SPIRITISM
During the subsequent winter the subject of spiritism occupied the
world of the curious and the thoughtful a good deal; and, with my
brother Paul, who was a disciple of Swedenborg, I took every occasion
that offered to investigate it. Many of my friends were interested in
it, and I soon became convinced that it was not the foolish delusion
which the scientific world and most religious people pronounced it. In
fact, if there be any basis of reality in the phenomena, it is hard to
conceive a subject of such vital importance as the determination of
the actuality of an individual existence after the physical death. It
had always been evident to me that the immense majority of men had no
real belief in human immortality, all their pursuits and acquisitions
being of a purely material character. My own convictions were
ingrained and immovable, but a physical demonstration of their verity
seemed to me an eminently desirable result, if attainable, and I
entered into the investigation with earnestness and all my patience.
Society was largely occupied by the table-tippings and the "rappings."
"Circles" were forming amongst all classes, and the mediums became an
important element in the world of New York. I very soon came to the
conclusion that the professional, paid mediums were, in many cases,
the worst kind of impostors, and, in all cases, so far as any
intellectual evidence was concerned, of an absurd triviality. Even in
the private circles, where no trace of fraud could be suspected, the
good faith of all entering them being assured, I found sometimes such
extraordinary credulity that the subject would have been offensive to
any dispassionate investigator who was not, like myself, determined to
get to the bottom of it. The majority of the persons who entered into
a circle were ready to believe any extraordinary thing that came to
them, and the inanity of the general proceedings, even when fraud was
excluded, was sufficient to indispose serious people to take part
in them. To me the question had such vital importance that I was
determined that neither fraud nor the inconsequent nature of the
pretended communications should dissuade me from the most thorough
investigation possible.
This investigation lasted several years, and included, to greater or
less extent, every form of psychological and physical phenomenon which
was offered by spiritism. My experience with the professional mediums
was such that I soon ceased to pay any attention to them, finding
that, what with the frivolity of their utterances and the evident
imposture which, in the case of some of them, invariably marked the
display of their powers, the sittings were simply farcical; nor did I
ever find, in the doings of the mediums, or in the revelations of the
regular spiritistic circles (and I sat in the most important one of
them, that over which Judge Edmonds presided, during the two winters)
in which no paid medium took part, anything which was not, or could
not have been, imposture.
The reason is simple. The professional medium, paid to display certain
powers, which are in any case extremely uncertain in their response to
the call for them, invariably begins to imitate them when they fail.
The mediums are invariably persons of an inferior order of intellect,
avid of notoriety, and mostly mercenary, so that the results of the
consultations with them were almost sufficient to deter serious-minded
people from dealing with them a second time, while the people who
formed the regular circles and had made a sect with a devotional
character in it, rapidly degenerated into a credulity and materialism
which were more discouraging than the most arid skepticism. Physical
phenomena which met every demand for absolute guarantee of their
genuineness, were very rare, and to meet with them required great
patience and persistence, while the scientific student, in the habit
of dealing with experiments that had definite results, obeying known
or conjectured laws, if entering into an investigation which met at
the threshold a frivolous, and possibly fraudulent, "manifestation,"
threw up the subject, the more readily that in general the student of
physical science has no sympathy with psychical research.
Recognizing the correctness of this attitude and the unreliability
as well as the utter want of essential importance in the physical
manifestations and the invariable inconsequence and silliness of
the intellectual results, I withdrew entirely from circles in which
mediums took part or in which physical phenomena were sought for, and
limited my investigations to the cases in which the good faith of all
the company was unquestionable, and the investigation conducted
in privacy and sincerity. Here, of course, there was still great
uncertainty, and often the most curious triviality and low
intelligence, but we were able to check the possible tendency to the
simulation of the supra-normal activity. And even so the character
of the "manifestation" was generally so trivial and opposed to all
preconceived ideas of spiritual intelligence as to justify the
conclusion that the departed had left their wits behind them, so that
even in those "circles" which included only personal friends and
individuals of unquestionable sincerity the results rarely had any
intellectual importance. And I came to the conclusion that that form
of the phenomena which alone gave any intellectual result, i.e. which
manifested ideas in any way transcending the commonplace capacities
of commonplace minds, had nothing in common with the physical
manifestations, but seemed rather to consist in an exaltation of
the intellectual powers of the subject, so that the evidence of any
supra-normal power was rather moral than scientific, and had value
only according to the relation between the subject and the hearer, and
therefore no determinable value to physical science.
The most remarkable of the subjects of this character with whom I
became acquainted, which was during the later years of this study, was
Mrs. H.K. Brown, the wife of our ablest sculptor of that day. Mrs.
Brown was, apart from the peculiar powers she possessed, one of
the most remarkable women I have ever known, both morally and
intellectually, and the peculiar mental powers she manifested were
well known to all the large and thoughtful circle of friends which
gathered round her. No physical "manifestation" took place in her
presence, and we never "sat" as a "circle," but her telepathic and
thought-reading powers in ordinary social intercourse were most
surprising. She answered readily any questions proposed in the minds
of her interlocutors, often even before they were completely formed,
and she possessed the power attributed to Zschokke, of reading, or
seeing, past events in the lives of those who were placed _en rapport_
with her. Bryant, the poet, assured me that she had recounted to him
events in his past life not known to any living person except himself,
and I had, myself, the evidence that in her presence there was nothing
in my past life beyond her perception. On simple contact with a letter
from an unknown person she gave me the most remarkable analysis of the
character of the writer, and though this evidence is always open to
criticism, the disclosures she made were sometimes surprising. I gave
her one day a letter of Ruskin without disclosing the authorship, and
in the course of a long analysis she said that the writer was not
married, to which I replied that in this she was mistaken, and she
rejoined, "Then he ought _not_ to be." At that time Mr. and Mrs.
Ruskin were, so far as I knew, living together, and no rumor of their
incompatibility had come about.
Mrs. Brown explained the possession of her occult powers by a voice in
the manner of Socrates's demon, which, she said, was always present
with her, and which she recognized as entirely foreign to her. She
repeated what she heard, word for word as the words came, hesitating
and sometimes leaving a sentence incomplete, not hearing the sequence.
When she asked who was speaking to her, she received only the reply,
"We are spirit," and no indication of personality was ever offered. On
one occasion, when Mr. and Mrs. Brown were on a fishing trip into the
wild parts of New York State, and, returning, were on their way to the
railway station, the wheel of their wagon broke and they had to go to
a blacksmith on the road to have it repaired. She said to her husband
that they would lose the train, to which the voice replied that they
would be in time, for the train was late and they would arrive with a
minute to spare. And in fact as they drew up at the station the train
came in sight and they had a minute to spare. There were many
such instances in which Mrs. Brown showed to the circle of her
acquaintances, which was large and included many of the most
intellectual minds of the artistic and literary world whose centre was
New York, the possession of powers "not dreamed of in our philosophy,"
but, as she carefully avoided notoriety, they never came under public
notice. Her husband implicitly and always followed the directions
given her through her demon.
In one of the social gatherings which grew out of the study of
spiritism was a lady who, like myself, was a convinced believer in the
reality of the phenomena, but skeptical as to the value and personal
origin of the communications made in the "circles." Her daughter,
a child of seven, was in fact a hypnotic clairvoyant of singular
lucidity, and my brother, Dr. Jacob Stillman, obtained from the mother
permission to have a private séance, only the mother and child, the
doctor, and myself being present. I hypnotized the girl Fanny, and
when she opened her eyes in the hypnotic state the doctor made the
usual tests for coma, exposing the eyes to the sudden glare of a
brilliant light, sticking pins into her flesh, and so forth, and
pronounced the coma absolute when, as he stuck a pin in her arm, she
spoke, saying, "I wouldn't do that, it might hurt Fanny!" I asked if
she felt it, and she replied, "She does not feel it now, but she might
when she wakes." "But who are you?" I asked. She replied, "Oh, don't
you know? I am Dora." The mother informed us that a young playmate
of Fanny's, whose name was Dora Greenleaf, had died some months
previously, and that the impersonation through Fanny was always in
that name.
The physical test being declared conclusive by the doctor, I asked
"Dora" to tell me if there was any spirit friend of ours present, to
which she replied that there was a lady there who gave her name as
"Kate," and whom she described in terms sufficiently correct to
indicate a deceased cousin whose name was Catherine, familiarly called
Kate in the family, and this was followed by the names and
description of other relatives, all correct as far as names and such
identification could go; but to this kind of demonstration I could
never attach any importance as to personality, which is indeed a
point as to which I have found that reliance can rarely be placed on
affirmation, and as to which absolute proof can scarcely be given. As
in the case of Mrs. Brown, she replied with lucidity and promptness to
every interrogation, and I then began a series of mental questions,
being sure at least that the child could not draw from the question
matter for an indicated reply. She replied promptly to my questions,
and from time to time I explained to my brother what had been asked,
that he might follow the conversation. After several relatives had
been named, I asked if our brother Alfred was there, to which she
instantly replied, "There is a gentleman sitting on the corner of
the table by you who says his name is Alfred." The opportunity then
occurred to me of asking a "test question," which was, "If Alfred is
here, will he tell me when he last saw Harvey?" The relevance of this
question will appear from the fact that they were together on the
steamer whose boiler burst on the Mississippi, killing my brother and
causing injury to the cousin such that he committed suicide a month
later. The reply was, "He says he does not remember." At this I
remarked guardedly to the doctor, "I asked Alfred when he last saw
Harvey, and he replies that he doesn't remember, but he must have
seen him on board the boat." To this she instantly replied, with an
explosive laugh, "He says that if he did it was all blown out of him!"
I will only comment on this reply, that it was quite in accordance
with the character of my brother to joke on the most serious
subjects--he was an inveterate joker.
At this juncture, and while we discussed the strange reply, Fanny
exclaimed, "There is a young gentleman coming through the window; he
says his name is Harry--no," she added, holding her ear forward in the
direction she indicated as if to hear better, "not Harry, _Harvey_." I
then asked, "If Harvey is here, will he tell me if he was with me in
Paris, last winter?" She replied, "Yes, he says he was with you in
Paris, and that he saw you in the house where you lived with Mrs.
Fox--no, not Fox, Coxe--Mrs. Coxe--and he asks if you remember
magnetizing Mrs. Coxe at the restaurant?" Mrs. Coxe, as I have said
previously, was the lady from Alabama whose acquaintance, as well
as that of her husband and their young daughter, I had made when
traveling with them through Belgium, on my way to Hungary, and whom
Mr. Coxe, when he returned on business to America, left under my
protection for the winter. Mrs. Coxe was subject to violent and sudden
headaches, which came without warning, and for which during our trip
on the Meuse I had once hypnotized her successfully. This led to my
being called on subsequently so often that she became an easy subject,
and the headaches became less and less frequent and violent. I have
before said that it was our custom on Sunday to dine together at some
one of the restaurants, and on one of these occasions the headache
came on as we sat at the table and I hypnotized her across the table,
by simple exertion of my will without passes, and it passed off. The
incident was not in my mind, and had, not to cause gossip, never been
mentioned by me to any one; my mind was acting at the moment in quite
a different direction, and if my thought gave any clue to the answers
of Fanny, it would have been in another direction that she would have
looked. What was singular and accounted for by no evident circumstance
was the manner of the child in listening for the names which she had
clearly heard incorrectly--Harry for Harvey, and Fox for Coxe, and
after holding her ear forward as would one who heard imperfectly
something said to him. No forethought or attempt at deception on the
part of a child of seven under the eye of her mother, who was a woman
of singular sincerity of character, can be admitted to account for
these details in the dialogue, conducted on my part, be it remembered,
entirely by mental inquiries.
The evident fatigue of the child put an end to the séance. Neither
the mother nor Fanny knew at that time anything of my relatives, our
acquaintance being then of recent date, but our intimacy with the
family in after years enables me to say that any attempt at deception
is out of the question. Fanny died not long after of consumption, as
did the mother and two other children, one of whom, an elder sister,
had been influenced in the same manner as Miss A., who will be
mentioned later, but had never consented to take part in the
manifestations, which she regarded with great repugnance. While
sitting with us _en petit comité_, she used sometimes to be seized
with a convulsive and involuntary effort of her hand to write, but she
always refused to submit to the influence. Fanny in her normal state
showed no indications of mediumistic powers, nor did the mother.
During the investigation, we heard of a remarkable case in the circle
of our own acquaintance which had been kept from public knowledge as
far as possible by the aversion to publicity of the father of the
subject, my brother's chief foreman. She was a girl of fourteen, of a
timid and nervous organization, who had suffered great annoyance by
the persistence of the rappings about her wherever she might be;
at first in her bedroom, but finally to her great dismay in the
class-rooms of the primary public school of New York, in which she
held the position of assistant teacher and where she conducted the
recitations. The rappings caused such fright amongst the school
children that she was menaced with dismissal if they did not cease.
She implored the agency which was responsible for the sounds to leave
her alone at school and do what seemed best to it at home, and the
rappings did actually cease at school. As her father was a man
well-to-do in circumstances and annoyed by the occurrence, he
silenced the gossip about the matter as well as he could, and gave an
inflexible denial to the request for a séance which came from friends
who by chance heard of it. My brother Paul, who was a fellow-foreman
in the iron works, got permission, however, for a séance at which he
and I only were to be present with the girl. The phenomena were so
strange that I got permission for a repetition at which only my
brother Jacob and myself were present, and we preserved the notes of
what passed.
Miss A., as I shall call her, told us in detail the development of the
case. After having been for some time troubled by the rappings she
began to feel involuntary motions in her right hand which increased to
constantly recurring violent exercise of the muscles, when it occurred
to her from the character of the motions that the hand wanted a pencil
to write and she laid paper and a pencil on the table. Her hand then
took possession of the pencil and began to scrawl aimlessly over the
paper until, after the interval of many days, the agency seemed to
have sufficient control over the muscles to form legible letters. This
was a source of amusement to her, and, at the time we made our entry
into the investigation, the hand wrote legibly and neatly in reply to
mental, i.e. unspoken, questions, she having no control of the muscles
so long as the "influence," which was the name she applied to whatever
it might be, chose to use it. She knew what was written only when the
writing was finished and she read it, as we did; and the writing was,
as we found by experiment, quite as regular and well formed when her
eyes were bandaged as when she was looking at her work. As a further
test of the involuntary character of this we not only tried her with
her eyes bandaged, but by my brother talking with her from one side of
the table, while she was writing in reply to my mental questions on
the other; she talked with him on one subject at the same moment in
which she wrote to me on another.
In what was given under these circumstances she wrote for us the
replies in conversations with what purported to be the spirits of
three deceased relatives, the wife of my brother, my brother Alfred,
and cousin Harvey, who had for several years been my most intimate
and beloved friend; and the handwriting of the three series of
communication was a better imitation of their writing than I, knowing
it, could have produced. That of my sister-in-law I was not so
familiar with, though my brother recognized it as that of his wife,
but that of our brother was a perfect reproduction down to the
smallest accidents, and that which was given as the responses of
my cousin equally so, and executed with a rapidity of which I was
incapable--a large scrawling hand, that of our brother being of a
character entirely opposed, slowly and laboriously formed, with
occasional omissions of the last line of a final _n_, quite common in
his writing. The girl had never known either of these relatives. One
of the questions I asked when conversing with Harvey was, "Will you
tell me how you died?" to which the only reply was a fixed stare on
the part of Miss A., though every other question was answered, by
pantomime, affirmative or negative signs, or writing, and always in
writing when it was insisted on. Miss A.'s pantomimic powers in this
state exceeded anything I have ever seen in professional pantomime,
and she employed them largely.
At the conclusion of the questions and replies with Harvey, I asked if
he had seen old Turner, the landscape painter, since his death, which
had taken place not very long before. The reply was "Yes," and I then
asked what he was doing, the reply being a pantomime of painting. I
then asked if Harvey could bring Turner there, to which the reply was,
"I do not know; I will go and see," upon which Miss A. said, "This
influence is going away--it is gone;" and after a short pause added,
"There is another influence coming, in that direction," pointing over
her left shoulder. "I don't like it," and she shuddered slightly, but
presently sat up in her chair with a most extraordinary personation of
the old painter in manner, in the look out from under the brow and the
pose of the head. It was as if the ghost of Turner, as I had seen him
at Griffiths's, sat in the chair, and it made my flesh creep to
the very tips of my fingers, as if a spirit sat before me. Miss A.
exclaimed, "This influence has taken complete possession of me, as
none of the others did. I am obliged to do what it wants me to." I
asked if Turner would write his name for me, to which she replied by
a sharp, decided negative sign. I then asked if he would give me some
advice about my painting, remembering Turner's kindly invitation and
manner when I saw him. This proposition was met by the same decided
negative, accompanied by the fixed and sardonic stare which the girl
had put on at the coming of the new influence. This disconcerted me,
and I then explained to my brother what had been going on, as, the
questions being mental, he had no clue to the pantomime. I said that
as an influence which purported to be Turner was present, and refused
to answer any questions, I supposed there was nothing more to be done.
But Miss A. still sat unmoved and helpless, so we waited. Presently
she remarked that the influence wanted her to do something, she knew
not what, only that she had to get up and go across the room, which
she did with the feeble step of an old man. She crossed the room and
took down from the wall a colored French lithograph, and, coming to
me, laid it on the table before me, and by gesture called my attention
to it. She then went through the pantomime of stretching a sheet of
paper on a drawing-board, then that of sharpening a lead pencil,
following it up by tracing the outlines of the subject in the
lithograph. Then followed in similar pantomime the choosing of a
water-color pencil, noting carefully the necessary fineness of the
point, and then the washing-in of a drawing, broadly. Miss A. seemed
much amused by all this, but as she knew nothing of drawing she
understood nothing of it. Then with the pencil and her pocket
handkerchief she began taking out the lights, "rubbing-out," as the
technical term is. This seemed to me so contrary to what I conceived
to be the execution of Turner that I interrupted with the question,
"Do you mean to say that Turner rubbed out his lights?" to which she
gave the affirmative sign. I asked further if in a drawing which I
then had in my mind, the well-known "Llanthony Abbey," the central
passage of sunlight and shadow through rain was done in that way, and
she again gave the affirmative reply, emphatically. I was so firmly
convinced to the contrary that I was now persuaded that there was a
simulation of personality, such as was generally the case with the
public mediums, and I said to my brother, who had not heard any of my
questions, that this was another humbug, and then repeated what had
passed, saying that Turner could not have worked in that way. After
this I did not care to follow the conversation further.
My object in maintaining the mental questioning was, of course, to
prevent Miss A. from getting any clue to the meaning of the questions,
and I carried the precaution so far as not to look at her while
forming the questions in my mind. I also ascertained that she knew
nothing of drawing, or of Turner; but while I could not resist the
evidence of a mental activity absolutely independent of that of Miss
A., I was convinced that there was no question of actual identity.
Both the doctor and I were, however, satisfied that on the part of
Miss A. there was no attempt at deception, and that the phenomenon,
whatever might be the case as to identity, was a genuine manifestation
of an intelligence independent of that of the girl. Six weeks later I
sailed for England, and, on arriving in London, I went at once to see
Ruskin, and told him the whole story. He declared the contrariness
manifested by the medium to be entirely characteristic of Turner, and
had the drawing in question down for examination. We scrutinized it
closely, and both recognized beyond dispute that the drawing had been
executed in the way that Miss A. indicated. Ruskin advised me to send
an account of the affair to the "Cornhill," which I did; but it was
rejected, as might have been expected in the state of public opinion
at that time, and I can easily imagine Thackeray putting it into the
basket in a rage.
I offer no interpretation of the facts which I have here recorded,
but I have no hesitation in saying that they completed and fixed my
conviction of the existence of invisible and independent intelligences
to which the phenomena were due. The question of the identity of these
intelligences--which we may, without prejudging their nature,
leaving that to be determined by more complete experiences, consider
_disembodied_--with the persons in the flesh whose names they use, is
one on which I have great difficulty in forming a conclusion, though,
as a rule, my experience in "circles" has been that the imposture was
too gross to deceive a person of ordinary intellectual power. The two
cases which I have related in the foregoing pages are the only ones in
which I have ever been able to find the color of an identification,
and of the probability of this I leave the reader to judge. More on
the internal than on the external evidence, I consider the probability
in the two cases narrated to be in favor of the identity; beyond that
I am unwilling to go.
Of the actuality of a disembodied and individual being which, for want
of more intelligence of its nature, we call a "spirit," I have no more
doubt than I have of my own embodied and individual existence. If,
to my philosophic and skeptical critics, this is an indication of
intellectual weakness, and excites contempt of my faculties, I cannot
help it. I will be honest with myself and the world, have the courage
of my convictions, and take the consequences; and I am of the opinion
that, if all the cultivated minds which, having studied the subject,
agree with me in my conclusions were to be as frank as I am, there
would be a large body of witnesses in accord with me. If the inference
of a disembodied intelligence, as the source of such phenomena, is
difficult of acceptation, that of fraud and collusion is inadmissible,
and that of hallucination more difficult than that of the spiritual
origin. Of the different hypotheses, then, I take that which seems the
most satisfactory one in view of the ascertained facts. But "seeing is
believing," and I can fully appreciate the incredulity of reasonable
minds as to phenomena which are not in line with our ordinary
experience of life, and which, at the same time, are of extreme
rarity, and require, for their investigation and actual observation,
great patience and the sacrifice of much time and the exercise of much
tolerance, surrounded, as the subject is, by gross charlatanry and
fraud. But if the beginnings of physical life are worth the years of
patient study which science has accorded them, I must believe that the
final issue of it is worth the time and study needed to arrive at such
results as would, I am convinced, finally crown them. If it were worth
while, I could, I am persuaded, define, _a priori_, the lines of
investigation along which we should move, but each investigator will
choose his own route, and better so.
Two conclusions I draw from my investigations as immovably
established, so far as I am concerned. The first is that there are
about us, and with certain facilities for making themselves understood
by us, spiritual individualities; and, second, that the human being
possesses spiritual senses, parallel with the physical, by which it
sees what the physical sense cannot see, and hears what is inaudible
to the physical ear. And my general and, I think, logical conclusion
is that the spiritual senses appertain to a spiritual body which
survives the death of the physical.