"On the other hand, if the hypothesis be seriously entertained
that Hodgson's spirit was there in a confused state, using the
permanent Piper automatic machinery to communicate through, the
whole record is not only plausible but natural. It presents just
that mixture of truth and groping which we ought to expect.
Hodgson has the ring 'on his mind' just as Mrs. Lyman has. Like
her, he wishes its source not to be bruited abroad. He describes
it accurately enough, truly tells of his taking it to the fatal
boat-club [He died while playing hand-ball there. Ed.], and of
putting it into his waistcoat-pocket there, of the waistcoat
being taken from the locker, and vaguely, but not quite
erroneously, indicates its present position."
And why should it not be even "_quite_ erroneously"? Nearly all the
reasoning I have seen on these matters is vitiated by the entirely
gratuitous traditional assumption that if a soul survives death, it
enters at once into measureless wisdom. Hodgson (?) and the rest seem
pretty much the same sort of people that they were here, and I for one
am glad of it.
In the sittings of many others of Hodgson's friends the control showed
a similar abundant knowledge of their experiences with Hodgson living,
and, most important of all, it seems to me, all of Hodgson's
exceptionally marked habits of thought and expression. We have room
for but little more. James says (Pr. XXIII, 36):
"Hodgson was distinguished during life by great animal spirits.
He was fond of argument, chaff, and repartee, a good deal of a
gesticulator, and a great laugher.... Chaff and slang from a
spirit have an undignified sound for the reader, but to the
interlocutors of the R. H. control they seem invariably to have
been elements of verisimilitude."
God save me from a heaven where there is no "chaff and slang"! I
should fail to recognize some of my best friends among the loftiest
souls who have escaped the flesh, Hodgson not the least. However
intense the interest heretofore taken in a future world, I doubt if it
has ever been thoroughly healthy, or ever will be before we get our
conceptions of that world off stilts. James continues (pp. 37-8):
"This, however, did not exclude very serious talk with the same
persons--quite the reverse sometimes, as when one sitter of this
class notes: 'Then came words of kindness which were too intimate
and personal to be recorded, but which left me so deeply moved
that shortly afterwards, at the sitting's close, I fainted dead
away--it had seemed as though he had in all reality been there
and speaking to me.'"
If James ran any one of his virtues into the ground, perhaps it was
his modesty concerning anything connected with himself. Instance the
following introduction and what it introduces:
_W. J.'s Sitting._ (May 21st, 1906). (Pr. XXIII, 8of.)
"[J.] The evidence is so much the same sort of thing throughout,
and makes such insipid reading, that I hesitate to print more of
it in full. But I know that many critics insist on having the
largest possible amount of _verbatim_ material on which to base
their conclusions, so I select a specimen of the R. H. control's
utterances when he was less 'strong.' The reader, I fear, will
find it long and tedious, but he can skip.
"(R. H. enters, saying:) 'Well, well, well, well! Well, well,
well, that is--here I am. Good morning, good morning, Alice.'
Mrs. W. J.:'Good morning, Mr. Hodgson.' R. H.: 'I am right here.
Well, well, well! I am delighted!' W. J.: 'Hurrah! R. H.! Give us
your hand!' R. H.: 'Hurrah, William! God bless you. How are you?'
W. J.: 'First rate.' R. H.: 'Well, I am delighted to see you.
Well, have you solved those problems yet?' W. J.: 'Which problems
do you refer to?' R. H.: 'Did you get my messages?' W. J.: 'I got
some messages about your going to convert me.' ... [R. H. had
already sent me, through other sitters, messages about my little
faith. W. J.] W. J.: 'Yes.' R. H.: 'Well, it has amounted to
this,--that I have learned by experience that there is more truth
than error in what I have been studying.' W. J.: 'Good!' R. H.:
'I am so delighted to see you to-day that words fail me.' W. J.:
'Well, Hodgson, take your time and don't be nervous.' R. H.: 'No.
Well, I think I could ask the same of you! Well, now, tell me,--I
am very much interested in what is going on in the society, and
Myers and I are also interested in the society over here. You
understand that we have to have a medium on this side, while you
have a medium on your side, and through the two we communicate
with you.' ... W. J.: 'You don't mean Rector?' R. H.: 'No, not at
all. It is----do you remember a medium whom we called Prudens?'
'Yes.'"
From one point of view, his not naming G. P. or Rector gives food for
skepticism. But why didn't Mrs. Piper do the job consistently, if it
was she who did it?
"R. H.: 'What I want to know first of all is about the society. I
am sorry that it could not go on.' W. J.: 'There was nobody to
take your place....' R. H.: 'William, can't you see, don't you
understand, and don't you remember how I used to walk up and down
before that open fireplace trying to convince you of my
experiments?' W. J.: 'Certainly, certainly.' R. H.: 'And you
would stand with your hands in your trousers pockets. You got
very impatient with me sometimes, and you would wonder if I was
correct. I think you are very skeptical.' W. J.: 'Since you have
been returning I am much more near to feeling as you felt than
ever before.' R. H.: 'Good! Well, that is capital.' W. J.: 'Your
"personality" is beginning to make me feel as you felt.' R. H.:
'If you can give up to it, William, and feel the influence of it
and the reality of it, it will take away the sting of death....
Now tell me a little bit more about the Society. That will help
me keep my thoughts clear. I think, William--are you standing?'
W. J.: 'Yes, I am standing.' R. H.: 'Well, can't you sit?' W. J.:
'Yes.' R. H.: 'Well, sit. Let's have a nice talk.'..."
There is nothing "evidential" about the last couple of lines in the
scientific sense, but there are several kinds of sense. James
continues:
(Pr. XXIII, 109): "The following incident belongs to my wife's
and Miss Putnam's sitting of June 12th, 1906:--Mrs. J. said: 'Do
you remember what happened in our library one night when you were
arguing with Margie [Mrs. J.'s sister]?'--'I had hardly said
"remember,"' she notes, 'in asking this question, when the
medium's arm was stretched out and the fist shaken
threateningly,' then these words came:
"R. H.: 'Yes, I did this in her face. I couldn't help it. She was
so impossible to move. It was wrong of me, but I couldn't help
it.' [I myself well remember this fist-shaking incident, and how
we others laughed over it after Hodgson had taken his leave. What
had made him so angry was my sister-in-law's defense of some
slate-writing she had seen in California.--W. J.]"
(Pr. XXIII, 112): "On Jan. 30, 1906, Mrs. M. had a sitting. Mrs.
M. said:
"'Do you remember our last talk together, at N., and how, in
coming home we talked about the work?' (R. H.): 'Yes, yes.' Mrs.
M.: 'And I said if we had a hundred thousand dollars--'R. H.:
'Buying Billy!!' Mrs. M.: 'Yes, Dick, that was it--"buying
Billy."' R. H.: 'Buying only Billy?' Mrs. M.: 'Oh no--I wanted
Schiller too. How well you remember!'
"Mrs. M., before R. H.'s death, had had dreams of extending the
American Branch's operations by getting an endowment, and
possibly inducing Prof. Newbold (Billy) and Dr. Schiller to
co-operate in work.
This buying Billy and Schiller brought Podmore squarely around, for
the first time, I think, from his previous life-long fight against
telepathy. He says (_Newer Spiritualism_, p. 222):
"It is impossible to doubt that we have here proof of a
supernormal agency of some kind--either telepathy by the trance
intelligence from the sitter or some kind of communication with
the dead."
Two pages farther on, however, appears the _advocatus diaboli_ (_Op.
Cit._, p. 224):
"When asked to give the contents of any sealed letters written in
his life-time for the express purpose of being read by him after
death the two sentences were given: 'There is no death' and 'out
of life into life eternal' (p. 102). Whatever Hodgson may have
written, it was surely not quite so commonplace as that."
To my gullible apprehension, it seems eminently appropriate.
* * * * *
Among the interesting phenomena investigated by the S. P. R., have
been the automatic, or I should prefer to say heteromatic, writing of
Mrs. Verrall and Mrs. Holland, which were not made in trance. Vol. XX
of the Proceedings is entirely given up to the consideration of it by
Mrs. Verrall. She is the wife of a professor in Cambridge, and herself
lecturer in Newnham College. The phenomena themselves are of moderate
interest beside most of those described in these pages, but their
evidential value is high, and their implications most important, and
the treatment of them is pervaded by wide scholarship, and is
charming. The experiences, however, do not connect with the main
Moses--Piper--G. P.--Hodgson--Myers thread on which these brief
extracts have naturally strung themselves, and I will not attenuate
that thread to make room for this outside strand. I especially commend
Mrs. Verrall's volume, however, to anybody who combines with an
interest in Psychical Research, an interest in really "elegant
letters."
* * * * *
The following scrap relating to Hodgson is from an account by Miss
Johnson (Research officer of the S. P. R.) of Mrs. Holland (pseudonym)
(Pr. XXI, 303f.):
"In February, 1905 ... Mrs. Holland found that the automatic
writing was beginning to make her feel faint or sleepy. The
condition was obviated at the time.... It now began to recur.
[This sort of thing is noted in several places as preceding the
advent of a new, and especially a strong control. Ed.]
"Mrs. Holland learned of Hodgson's death on January 2, 1906. Her
script on Friday, February 9, 1906, 9 P. M., is as follows (Pr.
XXI, 304):
"... S j d i b s e I p e h t p o--Only one letter further on--
18 8
9 15
3 4
8 7
1 19
18 15
4 14
-- --
"They are not haphazard figures read them as letters--....
"K. 57. [a Christian name]--Gray paper--
"I found that in spite of the rather obvious hints....--'Only one
letter further on' and 'Not haphazard figures read them as
letters,'--Mrs. Holland had not deciphered the initial
conundrums. The first letters are formed from the name 'Richard
Hodgson' by substituting for each letter of the name the letter
following it in the alphabet; the numbers represent the same name
by substituting for each letter the number of its place in the
alphabet.
"I asked Mrs. Holland if she had ever played at conundrums of
this kind. She told me that as a child in the nursery she had
played at a 'secret language' made by using either the letter
before or the letter after the real one. But she had never
practised or thought of using numbers in this way. She noted
afterwards: 'When my hand wrote them I thought they were an
addition sum and hoped [my subliminal] would add it very
correctly and quickly. [My supraliminal] is _very_ poor at
figures.'"
Hodgson in life was very fond of these puzzles.
All this anticipates a scrap of explanation out of a much longer and
more interesting manifestation. Mrs. Holland wrote to Miss Johnson
(Pr. XXI, 171f.):
"Any automatic writing that comes to me is nearly always in
verse, headed--
"'Believe in what thou canst not see,
Until the vision come to thee.'
"The verses, though often childishly simple in wording and
jingling in rhyme, are rarely trivial in subject. I once wrote
down fourteen poems in little over an hour.... When I write
original verse I do so slowly and carefully, with frequent
erasures: automatic verse is always as if swiftly dictated and
there are never any erasures. I am always fully conscious, but my
hand moves so rapidly that I seldom know what words it is
forming.
"... I copy one set of verses.... I wrote it down as quickly as
it was possible for my hand to move, and was surprised afterwards
to find that it had a definite form of its own. It is exactly as
it came to me, not 'polished' or altered in the least.
"'I whom he loved, am a ghost,
Wandering weary and lost.
I dare not dawn on his sight,
(Windblown weary and white)
He would shudder in hopeless fright,
He who loved me the best.
I shun the paths he will go,
Because I should frighten him so.
(Weary and lacking rest).
Two stanzas are omitted from lack of space.
"'Should I beat on the window pane,
He would think it the wind and rain,
If he saw my pale face gleam
He would deem it a stray moonbeam
Or the waft of a passing dream.
No thought for the lonely dead,
Buried away out of sight.
And I go from him veiling my head, (1896)
Windblown weary and white.'
"... Automatic verses do not deal much with facts, but once when
I was staying in Italy, in an old palazzo I had never before
seen, the day after my arrival, and before I had been into the
garden, the impulse to write came on me, and I yielded to it,
without however ceasing to take part in the conversation of two
friends who were with me. One of them, who knew about my
automatic writing, asked me to read what had come to me. I did
so:--
"'Under the orange tree
Who is it lies?
Baby hair that is flaxen fair,
Shines when the dew on the grass is wet,
Under the iris and violet.
'Neath the orange tree
Where the dead leaves be,
Look at the dead child's eyes!' (1901)
"'This is very curious,' said my friend, 'there is a tradition
that a child is buried in the garden here, but I know you have
never heard it.'"
These heteromatic poems appear to be but extreme illustrations of the
"inspiration" that poets have generally claimed for themselves. The
author's modest deprecations seem to me unjust to her own.
* * * * *
Mrs. Holland continues (p. 173f.):
"I have said that automatic verses do not deal much with facts,
but once, when I was sensitive after illness, I experienced a new
form of automatic writing, in the shape of letters which my hand
insisted on writing to a newly-made acquaintance.
"The first of these letters began with a pet name I did not know,
and was signed with the full name of someone I had never heard
of, and who I afterwards learnt had been dead some years. It was
clearly impressed upon me for whom the letter was intended, but
thinking it due to some unhealthy fancy of my own, I destroyed
it. Having done so I was punished by an agonizing headache, and
the letter was repeated, till in self-defense I sent it and the
succeeding ones to their destination."
This is perhaps the most "evidential" thing I know.
* * * * *
It has been natural to follow the career of Hodgson both incarnate and
alleged post-carnate, without interrupting for the post-carnate career
of Myers who had died in 1901, four years before Hodgson. Myers was
perhaps the leading English spirit in the S. P. R., and everybody
interested in Psychical Research--the skeptical as well as the
credulous--was looking with great interest for manifestations
professing to come from that spirit in a post-carnate state. As usual,
they are a terrible jumble. Myers was not a demonstrative person. He
had not, like Hodgson, salient characteristics of manner or
expression. In that respect the communicating personality resembles
him. His absorbing interests were the S. P. R., poetry, and classical
literature. In those respects, too, the personality resembles him.
Mr. George Dorr of Boston got from the Myers control, through Mrs.
Piper, a large mass of classical lore which Mr. Dorr asserts he never
could have possessed himself, and which certainly Mrs. Piper never did
(Pr. XXIV).
Myers' appearances, though of great interest to students, do not make
as good general reading as G. P.'s and Hodgson's, and we will make
space for only one.
On September 16, 1903, nearly three years after Myers' death and his
first alleged appearance through Mrs. Thompson, there was apparently
the first appearance of a Myers control through Mrs. Holland. Myers,
as his control intimates later, wrote, like Hodgson, for evidential
purposes in cryptic ways that the heteromatist probably never would
have deliberately used. The writing was, says Miss Johnson (Pr. XXI,
178):
"On two sides of a half-sheet of paper; the first side begins
with the initial 'F.,' and the second ends with the initial 'M.';
the whole passage is divided into four short sections, the first
three ending respectively in '17/,' '/1' and '/01.' January 17th,
1901, was the date of Mr. Myers's death, mentioned in _Human
Personality_; but the simple device of separating these initials
and items from one another was completely effective in its
apparent object. I read the passage a good many times before I
saw what they meant and I found that the meaning had entirely
escaped Mrs. Holland's notice."
This refers to the script containing the notorious stanza (Pr. XXI,
192) which excited the derision of the Philistine world of both
continents, and disturbed not a small portion of the enlightened
world:
"Friend while on earth with knowledge slight
I had the living power to write
Death tutored now in things of might
I yearn to you and cannot write."
Why the stanza excited so much adverse comment I cannot clearly make
out: for what is it but a demonstration of what it claims, "I ...
cannot write," unless it be also a demonstration that the tired shade,
or befogged subliminal, or impotent group of world-soul elements, or
what you please, could not criticise either?
It is worth remarking, by the way, that the Myers control, despite
this and some other complaints of inefficiency, generally professed,
as do the controls generally, to be in a condition of great happiness.
* * * * *
A word should be said of the very instructive and tedious subject of
Cross-Correspondence, which has lately attracted more attention from
the S. P. R. than any other topic.
If Mrs. Verrall in London and Mrs. Holland in India both, at about the
same time, write heteromatically about a subject that they both
understand, that is probably coincidence; but if both write about it
when but one of them understands it, that is probably teloteropathy;
and if both write about it when neither understands it, and each of
their respective writings is apparently nonsense, but both make sense
when put together, the only obvious hypothesis is that both were
inspired by a third mind. The term Cross-Correspondence has been
reserved for such a phenomenon. There are many famous ones--famous in
a small circle, if that's not too Hibernian. The subject is entirely
too complex for any treatment in our space. The reader is referred to
Pr. XVIII, XX, XXI, XXII, XXIV and XXV.
* * * * *
The critics generally agree upon two points as the strongest against
the spiritistic hypothesis. They were not enough for Myers, Hodgson
and Sir Oliver Lodge, but they were strongest in suspending the
judgment of James, Newbold and others of eminence.
The first is that Myers and Miss Wilde, of Holyoke, Mass., left
sealed letters, the contents of which they purposed to announce should
they be able to do so in a post-carnate life. The words ostensibly
given by them through Mrs. Piper bore no relation to those found in
the envelopes. Apologists offer in explanation that the memories are
much confused by death, and means of communication at best very poor.
There are many other cases where there is no apparent need of such
apology: that there should be need of it in perhaps the most crucial
cases of all, is itself suspicious. Farther, the apologists say that
while it is well, and may be in the System of Things, that we should
have enough communication with the world beyond to give souls aspiring
that way, hope enough to keep their aspirations alive, it would not be
well, and apparently is not in the System of Things, that we should
have such certainty as to interfere with our living our lives here
"for all we are worth"; and in support of this contention are cited
the useless and worse than useless lives that, in spite of many cases
far to the contrary, have been led in direct consequence of assumed
certainty of a future life.
Hodgson was supposed to have left some sealed letters with intentions
like those of Myers and Miss Wilde, but no such letters have been
found. His control, however, gave some sentences alleged to be in them
which are quoted some pages back.
The other hard nut in the S. P. R. records which resists the
spiritistic hypothesis, is that Moses living told Myers that the
Imperator gang gave certain well known names as borne by them on
earth, and that Moses post-carnate (?) gave Professor Newbold an
entirely different set of names for the same individualities. Of
course the apologies for the envelope failures can be tried on this
case, whether they fit it or not. And there is also the ampler, though
perhaps less adequate one, that the whole Imperator business looks
like a complex telepathic freak of the imaginations of Moses, Mrs.
Piper, Professor Newbold, Hodgson and God knows how many others.
But a proof that the spiritistic hypothesis will not fit these cases,
is no proof that it will not fit the cases of G. P., Hodgson, Gurney,
Myers and hosts of others who were known to the witnesses, and whose
post-carnate manifestations tally with their incarnate ones, and yet
with occasional and, so far, unexplainable lapses and inconsistencies.
Perhaps the best opinion of the investigators who have not reached the
faith of Myers, Hodgson and Lodge, is that while failure of the sealed
letters, and the Moses inconsistencies, are unanswerable on the
negative side, there are other circumstances equally unanswerable on
the positive side--especially the cumulative weight of the evidence,
and the dramatic renderings which apparently would be impossible from
any source but the characters themselves; that the contradictions or
paradoxes are merely like many others in the borderland of our
knowledge: for instance, that between free will and determinism; and
that the only rational attitude is a suspense of opinion until more
evidence accumulates. This was the attitude of James, who served a
term as President of the S. P. R., and contributed voluminously to its
Proceedings.
But, however we may interpret the phenomena, or if we do not interpret
them at all, we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that they point to
modes of Force and reaches of Mind vastly wider than before suspected,
and promising well to repay farther investigation. To some they may
also suggest a recovery from the scrap-heap of abandoned things, and
an appropriation to new uses, of that sadly battered and misapplied
old virtue known as Faith.
* * * * *
And now we will give the attitude of the latest of James' successors,
so far as it can be conveyed by a few extracts from the inaugural
address of Professor Bergson.
As to his estimate of the labors of the Society: in thanking them for
the honor of his election, he said (Pr., Part LXVII, Vol. XXVI,
462-3):
Je ne connais que par des lectures les phénomènes dont la Société
s'occupe; je n'ai rien vu, rien observé moi-même. Comment alors
avez-vous pu venir me prendre, pour me faire succéder aux grands
savants, aux penseurs éminents qui ont occupé tour à tour le fauteuil
présidentiel.... Si j'osais plaisanter sur un pareil sujet, je dirais
qu'il y a eu ici un effet de télépathie ou de clairvoyance, que vous
avez senti de loin l'intérêt que je prenais à vos recherches, et que
vous m'avez aperçu, à travers les quatre cents kilomètres qui nous
séparaient, lisant attentivement vos comptes-rendus, suivant vos
travaux avec une ardente curiosité. Ce que vous avez dépensé
d'ingéniosité, de pénétration, de patience, de ténacité, à
l'exploration de la _terra incognita_ des phénomènes psychiques me
paraît en effet admirable. Mais, plus encore ... j'admire le courage
qu'il vous a fallu pendant les _premières_ années surtout, pour lutter
contre les préventions d'une bonne partie du monde savant et pour
braver la raillerie, qui fait peur aux plus intrépides. C'est pourquoi
je suis fier--plus fier que je ne saurais le dire--d'avoir été élu
président de la Société de recherche psychique. J'ai lu quelque part
l'histoire d'un officier subalterne que les hasards de la bataille, la
disparition de ses chefs tués ou blessés, avaient appelé à l'honneur
de commander le régiment: toute sa vie il y pensa, toute sa vie il en
parla, et du souvenir de ces quelques heures son existence entière
restait imprégnée. Je suis cet officier subalterne, et toujours je me
féliciterai de la chance inattendue qui m'aura mis--non pas pour
quelques heures, mais pour quelques mois--à la tête d'un régiment de
braves.
* * * * *
He accounted for the indifference long shown by men of science to the
phenomena studied by the S. P. R. by the fact that they do not square
with the widely accepted theory of parallelism between mental action
and brain function. This is of course especially the case with
phenomena indicating the mind's survival of the body. He then
proceeded to dispose of the doctrine of parallelism (_Op. cit._,
470-75):
Bref, l'hypothèse d'un _parallélisme_ rigoureux entre le cérébral et
le mental paraît éminemment scientifique. D'instinct, la philosophie
et la science tendent à écarter ce qui contredirait cette hypothèse ou
ce qui serait mal compatible avec elle. Et tel paraît être, à première
vue, le cas des faits qui relèvent de la "recherche psychique,"--ou
tout au moins le cas de bon nombre d'entre eux....
Pour une seule fonction de la pensée, en effet, l'expérience a pu
faire croire qu'elle était localisée en un certain point du cerveau:
je veux parler de la mémoire, et plus particulièrement de la mémoire
des mots. Ni pour le jugement, ni pour le raisonnement, ni pour aucune
autre faculté de la pensée proprement dite nous n'avons la moindre
raison de supposer qu'elle soit attachée à tels ou tels processus
cérébraux déterminés.... Si l'on examine de près tous les faits
allégués en faveur d'une exacte correspondance et d'une espèce
_d'adhérence_ de la vie mentale à la vie cérébrale (je laisse de côté,
cela va sans dire, les sensations et les mouvements, car le cerveau
est certainement un organe sensori moteur), on voit que ces faits se
réduisent aux phénomènes de mémoire, et que c'est la localisation des
aphasies, et cette localisation seule, qui semble apporter à la
doctrine paralléliste un commencement de preuve expérimentale.
* * * * *