COMMUNICATIONS WITH THE DEAD
1
The spiritualists communicate or think that they communicate with the
dead by means of what they call automatic speech and writing. These are
obtained by the agency of a medium[6] in a state of ecstasy or rather of
“trance,” to employ the vocabulary of the new science. This condition is
not one of hypnotic sleep, nor does it seem to be an hysterical
manifestation; it is often associated, as in the case of the medium Mrs.
Piper, with perfect health and complete intellectual and physical
balance. It is rather the more or less voluntary emergence of a second
or subliminal personality or consciousness of the medium; or, if we
admit the spiritualistic hypothesis, his occupation, his “psychic
invasion,” as Myers calls it, by forces from another world. In the
“entranced” subject, the normal consciousness and personality are
entirely done away with; and he replies “automatically,” sometimes by
word of mouth, more often in writing, to the questions put to him. It
has happened that he speaks and writes simultaneously, his voice being
occupied by one spirit and his hand by another, who thus carry on two
independent conversations. More rarely, the voice and the two hands are
“possessed” at one and the same time; and we receive three different
communications. Obviously, manifestations of this sort lend themselves
to frauds and impostures of every kind; and the distrust aroused is at
first invincible. But there are some that make their appearance
encompassed with such guarantees of good faith and sincerity, so often,
so long and so rigorously checked by scientific men of unimpeachable
character and authority and of originally inflexible scepticism that it
becomes difficult to maintain a suspicion at the finish.[7]
Unfortunately, I am not able to enter here into the details of some of
these purely scientific sittings, those for instance of Mrs. Piper, the
famous medium with whom F. W. H. Myers, Richard Hodgson, Professor
Newbold, of the University of Pennsylvania, Sir Oliver Lodge and William
James worked during a number of years. On the other hand, it is
precisely the accumulation and coincidences of these abnormal details
which gradually produce and confirm the conviction that we are in the
presence of an entirely new, improbable, but genuine phenomenon, which
is sometimes difficult of classification among exclusively terrestrial
phenomena. I should have to devote to these “communications” a special
study which would exceed the limits of this essay; and I will therefore
content myself with referring those who care to know more of the subject
to Sir Oliver Lodge’s book, _The Survival of Man_, recently translated
into French under the title of _La Survivance humaine_; and, above all,
to the twenty-five bulky volumes of the _Proceedings_ of the S.P.R.,
notably to the report and comments of William James on the Piper-Hodgson
sittings in Vol. XXIII. and to Vol. XIII., where Hodgson examines the
facts and arguments that may be adduced for or against the agency of the
dead; and, lastly, to Myers’ great work, _Human Personality and its
Survival after Bodily Death_.
-----
Footnote 6:
Those who take up the study of these supernormal manifestations
usually ask themselves:
“Why mediums? Why make use of these often questionable and always
inadequate intermediaries?”
The reason is that, hitherto, no way has been discovered of doing
without them. If we admit the spiritualistic theory, the discarnate
spirits which surround us on every side and which are separated from
us by the impenetrable and mysterious wall of death seek, in order to
communicate with us, the line of least resistance between the two
worlds and find it in the medium, without our knowing why, even as we
do not know why an electric current passes along copper wire and is
stopped by glass or porcelain. If, on the other hand, we admit the
telepathic hypothesis, which is the more probable, we observe that the
thoughts, intentions or suggestions transmitted are, in the majority
of cases, not conveyed from one subconscious intelligence to another.
There is need of an organism that is, at the same time, a receiver and
a transmitter; and this organism is found in the medium. Why? Once
more, we know absolutely nothing about it, even as we do not know why
one body or combination of bodies is sensitive to concentric waves in
wireless telegraphy, while another is not affected by it. We here
grope, as, for that matter, we grope almost everywhere, in the obscure
domain of undisputed, but inexplicable facts. Those who care to
possess more precise notions on the theory of mediumism will do well
to read the admirable address delivered by Sir William Crookes, as
president of the S.P.R., on the 29th of January 1897.
Footnote 7:
These questions of fraud and imposture are naturally the first that
suggest themselves when we begin to study these phenomena. But the
slightest acquaintance with the life, habits and proceedings of the
three or four great mediums of whom we are going to speak is enough to
remove even the faintest shadow of suspicion. Of all the explanations
conceivable, that one which attributes everything to imposture and
trickery is unquestionably the most extraordinary and the least
probable. Moreover, by reading Richard Hodgson’s report entitled,
_Observations of certain Phenomena of Trance_ (_Proceedings_, Vols.
VIII. and XIII.; and also J. H. Hyslop’s report, Vol. XVI.), we can
observe the precautions taken, even to the extent of employing special
detectives, to make certain that Mrs. Piper, for instance, was unable,
normally and humanly speaking, to have any knowledge of the facts
which she revealed. I repeat, from the moment that one enters upon
this study, all suspicions are dispelled without leaving a trace
behind them; and we are soon convinced that the key to the riddle must
not be sought in imposture. All the manifestations of the dumb,
mysterious and oppressed personality that lies concealed in every one
of us have to undergo the same ordeal in their turn; and those which
relate to the divining-rod, to name no others, are at this moment
passing through the same crisis of incredulity. Less than fifty years
ago, the majority of the hypnotic phenomena which are now
scientifically classified were likewise looked upon as fraudulent. It
seems that man is loth to admit that there lie within him many more
things than he imagined.
-----
2
The “entranced” mediums are invaded or possessed by different familiar
spirits to whom the new science gives the somewhat inappropriate and
ambiguous name of “controls.” Thus, Mrs. Piper is visited in succession
by Phinuit, George Pelham, or “G.P.,” Imperator, Doctor and Rector. Mrs.
Thompson, another very celebrated medium, has Nelly for her usual
tenant, while graver and more illustrious personages would take
possession of Stainton Moses the clergyman. Each of these spirits
retains a sharply defined character, which is consistent throughout and
which, moreover, for the most part bears no relation to that of the
medium. Amongst these, Phinuit and Nelly are undoubtedly the most
attractive, the most original, the most living, the most active and,
above all, the most talkative. They centralize the communications after
a fashion; they come and go officiously; and, should any one of those
present wish to be brought into touch with the soul of a deceased
relative or friend, they fly in search of it, find it amid the invisible
throng, usher it in, announce its presence, speak in its name, transmit
and, so to speak, translate the questions and replies; for it seems that
it is very difficult for the dead to communicate with the living and
that they need special aptitudes and a concurrence of extraordinary
circumstances. We will not yet examine what they have to reveal to us;
but to see them thus fluttering to and fro amid the multitude of their
discarnate brothers and sisters gives us a first impression of the next
world which is none too reassuring; and we say to ourselves that the
dead of to-day are strangely like those whom Ulysses conjured up out the
Cimmerian darkness three thousand years ago: pale and empty shades,
bewildered, incoherent, puerile and terror-stricken, like unto dreams,
more numerous than the leaves that fall in autumn and, like them,
trembling in the unknown winds from the vast plains of the other world.
They no longer even have enough life to be unhappy and seem to drag out,
we know not where, a precarious and idle existence, to wander aimlessly,
to hover round us, slumbering or chattering among one another of the
minor matters of the world; and, when a gap is made in their darkness,
to come up in haste from all sides, like flocks of famished birds,
hungering for light and the sound of a human voice. And, in spite of
ourselves, we think of the _Odyssey_ and the sinister words of the shade
of Achilles as it issued from Erebus:
“Do not, O illustrious Ulysses, speak to me of death; I would wish,
being on earth, to serve for hire with another man of no estate, who had
not much livelihood, rather than rule over all the departed dead.”
3
What have these latter-day dead to tell us? To begin with, it is a
remarkable thing that they appear to be much more interested in events
here below than in those of the world wherein they move. They seem,
above all, jealous to establish their identity, to prove that they still
exist, that they recognize us, that they know everything; and, to
convince us of this, they enter into the most minute and forgotten
details with extraordinary precision, perspicacity and prolixity. They
are also extremely clever at unravelling the intricate family connexions
of the person actually questioning them, of any of the sitters, or even
of a stranger entering the room. They recall this one’s little
infirmities, that one’s maladies, the eccentricities or tendencies of a
third. They have cognizance of events taking place at a distance: they
see, for instance, and describe to their hearers in London an
insignificant episode in Canada. In a word, they say and do almost all
the disconcerting and inexplicable things that are sometimes obtained
from a first-rate medium; perhaps they even go a little further; but
there comes from it all no breath, no glimmer of the hereafter, not even
the something vaguely promised and vaguely waited for.
We shall be told that the mediums are visited only by inferior spirits,
incapable of tearing themselves from earthly cares and soaring towards
greater and loftier ideas. It is possible; and no doubt we are wrong to
believe that a spirit stripped of its body can suddenly be transformed
and reach, in a moment, the level of our imaginings; but could they not
at least inform us where they are, what they feel and what they do?
4
And now it seems that death itself has elected to answer these
objections. Frederic Myers, Richard Hodgson and William James, who so
often, for long and ardent hours, questioned Mrs. Piper and Mrs.
Thompson and obliged the departed to speak by their mouths, are now
themselves among the shades, on the other side of the curtain of
darkness. They at least knew exactly what to do in order to reach us,
what to reveal in order to allay men’s uneasy curiosity. Myers in
particular, the most ardent, the most convinced, the most impatient of
the veil that parted him from the eternal realities, formally promised
those who were continuing his work that he would make every imaginable
effort out yonder, in the unknown, to come to their aid in a decisive
fashion. He kept his word. A month after his death, when Sir Oliver
Lodge was questioning Mrs. Thompson in her trance, Nelly, the medium’s
familiar spirit, suddenly declared that she had seen Myers, that he was
not yet fully awake, but that he hoped to come, at nine o’clock in the
evening, and “communicate” with his old friend of the Psychical Society.
The sitting was suspended and resumed at half past eight; and Myers’
“communication” was at last obtained. He was recognized by the first few
words he spoke; it was really he; he had not changed. Faithful to his
idiosyncracy when on earth, he at once insisted on the necessity for
taking notes. But he seemed dazed. They spoke to him of the Society for
Psychical Research, the sole interest of his life. He had lost all
recollection of it. Then memory gradually revived; and there followed a
quantity of post-mortem gossip on the subject of the society’s next
president, the obituary article in the _Times_, the letters that should
be published and so on. He complained that people would not let him
rest, that there was not a place in England where they did not ask for
him:
“Call Myers! Bring Myers!”
He ought to be given time to collect himself, to reflect. He also
complained of the difficulty of conveying his ideas through the mediums:
“they were translating like a schoolboy does his first lines of
Virgil.”[8] As for his present condition, “he groped his way as if
through passages, before he knew he was dead. He thought he had lost his
way in a strange town ... and, even when he saw people that he knew were
dead, he thought they were only visions.”
This, together with more chatter of a no less trivial nature, is about
all that we obtained from Myers’ “control” or “impersonation,” of which
better things had been expected. The “communication” and many others
which, it appears, recall in a striking fashion Myers’ habits, character
and ways of thinking and speaking, would possess some value if none of
those by whom or to whom they were made had been acquainted with him at
the time when he was still numbered among the living. As they stand,
they are most probably but reminiscences of a secondary personality of
the medium or unconscious suggestions of the questioner or the sitters.
-----
Footnote 8:
In this and other “communications,” I have quoted the actual English
words employed, whenever I have been able to discover
them.—_Translator._
-----
5
A more important communication and a more perplexing, because of the
names connected with it, is that which is known as “Mrs. Piper’s
Hodgson-Control.” Professor William James devotes an account of over a
hundred and twenty pages to it in Vol. XXIII. of the _Proceedings_. Dr.
Hodgson, in his lifetime, was secretary of the American branch of the
S.P.R., of which William James was vice-president. For many years, he
devoted himself to the medium Mrs. Piper, working with her twice a week
and thus accumulating an enormous mass of documents on the subject of
posthumous manifestations, a mass whose wealth has not yet been
exhausted. Like Myers, he had promised to come back after his death;
and, in his jovial way, he had more than once declared to Mrs. Piper
that, when he came to visit her in his turn, as he had more experience
than the other spirits, the sittings would take a more decisive shape
and that “he would make it hot for them.” He did come back, a week after
his death, and manifested himself by automatic writing (which, with Mrs.
Piper as medium, was the most usual method of communication) during
several sittings at which William James was present. I should like to
give an idea of these manifestations. But, as the celebrated Harvard
professor very truly observes, the shorthand report of a sitting of this
kind at once alters its aspect from start to finish. We seek in vain for
the emotion experienced on thus finding one’s self in the presence of an
invisible but living being, who not only answers your questions, but
anticipates your thoughts, understands before you have finished
speaking, grasps an allusion and caps it with another allusion, grave or
smiling. The life of the dead man, which, during a strange hour, had, so
to speak, surrounded and penetrated you, seems to be extinguished for
the second time. Stenography, which is devoid of all emotion, no doubt
supplies the best elements for arriving at a logical conclusion; but it
is not certain that here, as in many other cases where the unknown
predominates, logic is the only road that leads to the truth.
“When I first undertook,” says William James, “to collate this series of
sittings and make the present report, I supposed that my verdict would
be determined by pure logic. Certain minute incidents, I thought, ought
to make for spirit-return or against it in a ‘crucial’ way. But watching
my mind work as it goes over the data, convinces me that exact logic
plays only a preparatory part in shaping our conclusions here; and that
the decisive vote, if there be one, has to be cast by what I may call
one’s general sense of dramatic probability, which sense ebbs and flows
from one hypothesis to another—it does so in the present writer at
least—in a rather illogical manner. If one sticks to the detail, one may
draw an anti-spiritist conclusion; if one thinks more of what the whole
mass may signify, one may well incline to spiritist interpretations.”[9]
And, at the end of his article, he sums up in the following words:
“_I myself feel as if an external will to communicate were probably
there_, that is, I find myself doubting, in consequence of my whole
acquaintance with that sphere of phenomena, that Mrs. Piper’s
dream-life, even equipped with ‘telepathic’ powers, accounts for all the
results found. But if asked whether the will to communicate be
Hodgson’s, or be some mere spirit-counterfeit of Hodgson, I remain
uncertain and await more facts, facts which may not point clearly to a
conclusion for fifty or a hundred years.”[10]
As we see, William James is inclined to waver; and at certain points in
his account he appears to waver still more and indeed to say
deliberately that the spirits “have a finger in the pie.” These
hesitations on the part of a man who has revolutionized our
psychological ideas and who possessed a brain as wonderfully organized
and well-balanced as that of our own Taine, for instance, are very
significant. As a doctor of medicine and a professor of philosophy,
sceptical by nature and scrupulously faithful to experimental methods,
he was thrice qualified to conduct investigations of this kind to a
successful conclusion. It is not a question of allowing ourselves, in
our turn, to be unduly influenced by those hesitations; but, in any
case, they show that the problem is a serious one, the gravest, perhaps,
if the facts were beyond dispute, which we have had to solve since the
coming of Christ; and that we must not expect to dismiss it with a shrug
or a laugh.
-----
Footnote 9:
_Proceedings_, Vol. XXIII, p. 33.
Footnote 10:
_Ibid._ p. 120.
-----
6
I am obliged, for lack of space, to refer those who wish to form an
opinion of their own on the “Piper-Hodgson” case to the text of the
_Proceedings_. The case, at the same time, is far from being one of the
most striking; it should rather be classed, were it not for the
importance of the sitters concerned, among the minor successes of the
Piper series. Hodgson, according to the invariable custom of the
spirits, is, first of all, bent on making himself recognized; and the
inevitable and tedious string of trifling reminiscences begins twenty
times over again and fills page after page. As usual in such instances,
the recollections common to both the questioner and the spirit who is
supposed to reply are brought out in their most circumstantial, their
most insignificant and also their most private details with astonishing
eagerness, precision and vivacity. And observe that, for all these
details, which he discloses with such extraordinary facility, the dead
man speaking goes by preference, one would say, to the most hidden and
forgotten treasures of the living listener’s memory. He spares him
nothing; he harps on everything with childish satisfaction and
apprehensive solicitude, not so much to persuade others as to prove to
himself that he still exists. And the obstinacy of this poor invisible
being, in striving to manifest himself through the hitherto uncrannied
doors that separate us from our eternal destinies, is at once ridiculous
and tragic:
“Do you remember, William, when we were in the country at So-and-so’s,
that game we played with the children; do you remember my saying
such-and-such a thing when I was in that room where there was
such-and-such a chair or table?”
“Why, yes, Hodgson, I do remember now.”
“A good test, that?”
“First-rate, Hodgson!”
And so on, indefinitely. Sometimes, there is a more significant incident
that seems to surpass the mere transmission of subliminal thought. They
are talking, for instance, of a frustrated marriage which was always
surrounded with great mystery, even to Hodgson’s most intimate friends:
“Do you remember a lady-doctor in New York, a member of our society?”
“No, but what about her?”
“Her husband’s name was Blair ... I think.”
“Do you mean Dr. Blair Thaw?”
“Oh, yes. Ask Mrs. Thaw if I did not at a dinner-party mention something
about the lady. I may have done so.”
James writes to Mrs. Thaw, who declares that, as a matter of fact,
fifteen years before, Hodgson had said to her that he had just proposed
to a girl and been refused. Mrs. Thaw and Dr. Newbold were the only
people in the world who knew the particulars.
But to come to the further sittings. Among other points discussed is the
financial position of the American branch of the S.P.R., a position
which, at the death of the secretary, or rather factotum, Hodgson, was
anything but brilliant. And behold the somewhat strange spectacle of
different members of the society debating its affairs with their defunct
secretary. Shall they dissolve? Shall they amalgamate? Shall they send
the materials collected, most of which are Hodgson’s, to England? They
consult the dead man; he replies, gives good advice, seems fully aware
of all the complications, all the difficulties. One day, in Hodgson’s
life-time, when the society was found to be short of funds, an anonymous
donor had sent the sum necessary to relieve it from embarrassment.
Hodgson alive did not know who the donor was; Hodgson dead picks him out
among those present, addresses him by name and thanks him publicly. On
another occasion, Hodgson, like all the spirits, complains of the
extreme difficulty which he finds in conveying his thought through the
alien organism of the medium:
“I find now difficulties such as a blind man would experience in trying
to find his hat,” he says.
But, when, after so much idle chatter, William James at last puts the
essential questions that burn our lips—“Hodgson, what have you to tell
us about the other life?”—the dead man becomes shifty and does nothing
but seek evasions:
“It is not a vague fantasy but a reality,” he replies.
“But,” Mrs. William James insists, “do you live as we do, as men do?”
“What does she say?” asks the spirit, pretending not to understand.
“Do you live as men do?” repeats William James.
“Do you wear clothing and live in houses?” adds his wife.
“Oh yes, houses, but not clothing. No, that is absurd. Just wait a
moment, I am going to get out.”
“You will come back again?”
“Yes.”
“He has got to go out and get his breath,” remarks another spirit, named
Rector, suddenly intervening.
It has not been waste of time, perhaps, to reproduce the general
features of one of these sittings which may be regarded as typical. I
will add, in order to give an idea of the farthest point which it is
possible to attain, the following instance of an experiment made by Sir
Oliver Lodge and related by him. He handed Mrs. Piper, in her “trance,”
a gold watch which had just been sent him by one of his uncles and which
belonged to that uncle’s twin brother, who had died twenty years before.
When the watch was in her possession, Mrs. Piper, or rather Phinuit, one
of her familiar spirits, began to relate a host of details concerning
the childhood of this twin brother, facts dating back for more than
sixty-six years and of course unknown to Sir Oliver Lodge. Soon after,
the surviving uncle, who lived in another town, wrote and confirmed the
accuracy of most of these details, which he had quite forgotten and of
which he was only now reminded by the medium’s revelations; while those
which he could not recollect at all were subsequently declared to be in
accordance with fact by a third uncle, an old sea-captain, who lived in
Cornwall and who had not the least notion why such strange questions
were put to him.
I quote this instance not because it has any exceptional or decisive
value, but simply, I repeat, by way of an example; for, like the case
connected with Mrs. Thaw, mentioned above, it marks pretty exactly the
extreme points to which people have up to now, thanks to spirit agency,
penetrated the mysteries of the unknown. It is well to add that cases in
which the supposed limits of the most far-reaching telepathy are so
manifestly exceeded are fairly uncommon.
7
Now what are we to think of all this? Must we, with Myers, Newbold,
Hyslop, Hodgson and so many others, who studied this problem at length,
conclude in favour of the incontestable agency of forces and
intelligences returning from the farther bank of the great river which
it was deemed that none might cross? Must we acknowledge with them that
there are cases ever more numerous which make it impossible for us to
hesitate any longer between the telepathic hypothesis and the
spiritualistic hypothesis? I do not think so. I have no prejudices—what
were the use of having any, in these mysteries?—no reluctance to admit
the survival and the intervention of the dead; but it is wise and
necessary, before leaving the terrestrial plane, to exhaust all the
suppositions, all the explanations there to be discovered. We have to
make our choice between two manifestations of the unknown, two miracles,
if you prefer, whereof one is situated in the world which we inhabit and
the other in a region which, rightly or wrongly, we believe to be
separated from us by nameless spaces which no human being, alive or
dead, has crossed to this day. It is natural, therefore, that we should
stay in our own world, as long as it gives us a foothold, as long as we
are not pitilessly expelled from it by a series of irresistible and
irrefutable facts issuing from the adjoining abyss. The survival of a
spirit is no more improbable than the prodigious faculties which we are
obliged to attribute to the mediums if we deny them to the dead; but the
existence of the medium, contrary to that of the spirit, is
unquestionable; and therefore it is for the spirit, or for those who
make use of its name, first to prove that it exists.
Do the extraordinary phenomena of which we have spoken—transmission of
thought from one subconscious mind to another, perception of events at a
distance, subliminal clairvoyance—occur when the dead are not in
evidence, when the experiments are being made exclusively between living
persons? This cannot be honestly contested. Certainly no one has ever
obtained among living people series of communications or revelations
similar to those of the great spiritualistic mediums, Mrs. Piper, Mrs.
Thompson and Stainton Moses, nor anything that can be compared with
these so far as continuity or lucidity is concerned. But, though the
quality of the phenomena will not bear comparison, it cannot be denied
that their inner nature is identical. It is logical to infer from this
that the real cause lies not in the source of inspiration, but in the
personal value, the sensitiveness, the power of the medium. For the
rest, Mr. J. G. Piddington, who devoted an exceedingly detailed study to
Mrs. Thompson, plainly perceived in her, when she was not “entranced”
and when there were no spirits whatever in question, manifestations
inferior, it is true, but absolutely analogous to those involving the
dead.[11] These mediums are pleased, in all good faith and probably
unconsciously, to give to their subliminal faculties, to their secondary
personalities, or to accept, on their behalf, names which were borne by
beings who have crossed to the farther side of the mystery: this is a
matter of vocabulary or nomenclature which neither lessens nor increases
the intrinsic significance of the facts. Well, in examining these facts,
however strange and really unparalleled some of them may be, I never
find one which proceeds frankly from this world or which comes
indisputably from the other. They are, if you wish, phenomenal border
incidents; but it cannot be said that the border has been violated. In
the story of Sir Oliver Lodge’s watch, for instance, which is one of the
most characteristic and one which carries us
farther than most, we must attribute to the medium faculties that have
ceased to be human. She must have put herself in touch, whether by
perception of events at a distance, or by transmission of thought from
one subconscious mind to another, or again by subliminal clairvoyance,
with the two surviving brothers of the deceased owner of the watch; and,
in the past subconsciousness of those two brothers, distant from each
other, she had to rediscover a host of circumstances which they
themselves had forgotten and which lay hidden beneath the heaped-up dust
and darkness of six-and-sixty years. It is certain that a phenomenon of
this kind passes the bounds of the imagination and that we should refuse
to credit it if, first of all, the experiment had not been controlled
and certified by a man of the standing of Sir Oliver Lodge and if,
moreover, it did not form one of a group of equally significant facts
which clearly show that we are not here concerned with an absolutely
unique miracle or with an unhoped-for and unprecedented concourse of
coincidences. It is simply a matter of distant perception, subliminal
clairvoyance and telepathy raised to the highest power; and these three
manifestations of the unexplored depths of man are to-day recognized and
classified by science, which is not saying that they are explained: that
is another question. When, in connexion with electricity, we use such
terms as positive, negative, induction, potential and resistance, we are
also applying conventional words to facts and phenomena of whose inward
essence we are utterly ignorant; and we must needs be content with
these, pending better. There is, I insist, between these extraordinary
manifestations and those given to us by a medium who is not speaking in
the name of the dead, but a difference of the greater and the lesser, a
difference of extent or degree and in no wise a difference in kind.
-----
Footnote 11:
For a discussion of these cases, which would take us too far from our
subject, see Mr. J. G. Piddington’s paper, _Phenomena in Mrs.
Thompson’s Trance_ (_Proceedings_, Vol. XVIII, pp. 180 _et seq._);
also Professor A. C. Pigou’s article in Vol. XXIII (pp. 286 _et
seq._), which treats of “Cross Correspondence” without the agency of
spirits.
-----
8
For the proof to be more decisive, it would be necessary that no one,
neither the medium nor the witnesses, should ever have known of the
existence of him whose past is revealed by the dead man, in other words,
that every living link should be eliminated. I do not believe that this
has actually occurred up to the present, nor even that it is possible;
in any case, it would be very difficult to control such an experiment.
Be this as it may, Dr. Hodgson, who devoted part of his life to the
quest of specific phenomena wherein the boundaries of mediumistic power
should be plainly overstepped, believes that he found them in certain
cases, of which—as the others were of very much the same nature—I will
merely mention one of the most striking.[12] In a course of excellent
sittings with Mrs. Piper the medium, he communicated with various dead
friends
who reminded him of a large number of common memories. The medium, the
spirits and he himself seemed in a wonderfully accommodating mood; and
the revelations were plentiful, exact and easy. In this extremely
favourable atmosphere, he was placed in communication with the soul of
one of his best friends, who had died a year before and whom he simply
calls “A.” This A, whom he had known more intimately than most of the
spirits with whom he had communicated previously, behaved quite
differently and, while establishing his identity beyond dispute,
vouchsafed only incoherent replies. Now A “had been troubled much, for
years before his death, by headaches and occasionally mental exhaustion,
though not amounting to positive mental disturbance.”
The same phenomenon appears to recur whenever similar troubles have come
before death, as in cases of suicide.
“If the telepathic explanation is held to be the only one,” says Dr.
Hodgson (I give the gist of his observations), “if it is claimed that
all the communications of these discarnate minds are only suggestions
from my subconscious self, it is unintelligible that, after having
obtained satisfactory results from others whom I had known far less
intimately than A and with whom I had consequently far fewer
recollections in common, I should get from him, in the same sittings,
nothing but incoherencies. I am thus driven to believe that my
subliminal self is not the only thing in evidence, that it is in the
presence of a real, living personality, whose mental state is the same
as it was at the hour of death, a personality which remains independent
of my subliminal consciousness and absolutely unaffected by it, which is
deaf to its suggestions and draws from its own resources the revelations
which it makes.”
The argument is not without value, but its full force would be obtained
only if it were certain that none of those present knew of A’s madness;
otherwise it can be contended that, the notion of madness having
penetrated the subconscious intelligence of one of them, it worked upon
it and gave to the replies induced a form in keeping with the state of
mind presupposed in the dead man.
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Footnote 12:
_Proceedings_, Vol. XIII, pp. 349-350 and 375.
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9
Of a truth, by extending the possibilities of the medium to these
extremes, we furnish ourselves with explanations which forestall nearly
everything, bar every road and all but deny to the spirits any power of
manifesting themselves in the manner which they appear to have chosen.
But why do they choose that manner? Why do they thus restrict
themselves? Why do they jealously hug the narrow strip of territory
which memory occupies on the confines of both worlds and from which none
but indecisive or questionable evidence can reach us? Are there then no
other outlets, no other horizons? Why do they tarry around us, stagnant
in their little pasts, when, in their freedom from the flesh, they ought
to be able to wander at ease over the virgin stretches of space and
time? Do they not yet know that the sign which will prove to us that
they survive is to be found not with us, but with them, on the other
side of the grave? Why do they come back with empty hands and empty
words? Is that what one finds when one is steeped in infinity? Beyond
our last hour is it all bare and shapeless and dim? If it be so, let
them tell us; and the evidence of the darkness will at least possess a
grandeur that is all too absent from these cross-examining methods. Of
what use is it to die, if all life’s trivialities continue? Is it really
worth while to have passed through the terrifying gorges which open on
the eternal fields, in order to remember that we had a great-uncle
called Peter and that our Cousin Paul was afflicted with varicose veins
and a gastric complaint? At that rate, I should choose for those whom I
love the august and frozen solitudes of the everlasting nothing. Though
it be difficult for them, as they complain, to make themselves
understood through a strange and sleep-bound organism, they tell us
enough categorical details about the past to show that they could
disclose similar details, if not about the future, which they perhaps do
not yet know, at least about the lesser mysteries which surround us on
every side and which our body alone prevents us from approaching. There
are a thousand things, large or small, alike unknown to us, which we
must perceive when feeble eyes no longer arrest our vision. It is in
those regions from which a shadow separates us and not in foolish
tittle-tattle of the past that they would at last find the clear and
genuine proof which they seem to seek with such enthusiasm. Without
demanding a great miracle, one would nevertheless think that we had the
right to expect from a mind which nothing now enthrals some other
discourse than that which it avoided when it was still subject to
matter.