Part 3

Podmore revealed several defects in the alleged safeguards against fraud accepted in certain experiments with Florence Cook and even D. D. Home; and quotes a serious instance of careless description in the record of the famous experience of the London Dialectical Society with the latter medium: where the statement that “the room was illumined by moonlight” is shewn from the calendar (as in the parallel of Sir John Moore’s burial) to have been incorrect. In more recent times the conditions observed in Warsaw and in Paris with the mediums Kluski and Gujik have been sometimes unsatisfactory. Nor can any impartial critic, in view of the surprisingly lax conditions which prevailed, necessarily accept the widely recorded successes of Professor Gilbert Murray in thought-transference as manifestations of anything abnormal or unusual. In the case of any less distinguished performer it would have been difficult to regard such experiments, in the absence of any repetition of them under test conditions, as worth the serious consideration of a scientific body.

The collection of fresh facts is, to a large extent, conditioned by the supply of sensitives and by the provision of adequate funds for such research. Apart from the existing opportunities provided by University chairs of Mental Science, Mental Philosophy and the like, which have already contributed largely to this study when held by men like McDougall, James, Schiller, and Broad in Great Britain and America, private generosity will always apparently be ready to assist in some measure the experimental work of psychical research. The most serious obstacle arises not from the absence of monetary assistance but from the fact that the feelings entertained towards one another by the warring sects of religion are reflected in the rivalries and disputes of the societies engaged in the study of psychic phenomena. That regular supply of sensitives which is required for an adequate collection of empirical facts is seriously hindered by the violent animosities of leaders who fight over the bodies of well-known mediums and sometimes tempt them, like football professionals, by the dangerous offer of a higher fee.

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If we accept the view that psychical research holds ample promise of a useful future, we may next consider the various lines of our advance.

Any serious study of psychical research demands as its first essential a knowledge of the results secured from a careful consideration of telepathic phenomena. Many researchers would, indeed, maintain that their investigations need not extend beyond these limits. They regard telepathy, once scientifically established, as a working hypothesis which will cover the whole field of those abnormal phenomena which form our subject-matter. From this point of view, apparitions, clairvoyance, crystal-visions, even the physical phenomena of the séance-room――these and other abnormal happenings can be explained by the exercise in one shape or another of the transference of human thought and volition outside the ordinary channels of sense.

Those who hold that thought-transference is the solvent of all our perplexities in psychical research may point to the fact that down the centuries one marvel after another appears to have been directly attributable to this cause. A useful monograph might be written on this fascinating theme. To go no farther, it is easy to see how the miracles recorded in Biblical and ecclesiastical literature, and the amazing records of witchcraft and sorcery, may to a large extent be brought within the compass of the telepathic solution.

No serious attempts to investigate the conditions or results of thought-transference appear to have been undertaken before the middle of last century. It was not indeed until 1876 that Sir William Barrett really initiated the careful and scientific study of telepathic phenomena which has been continued by the Society for Psychical Research in England and on the Continent by Boirac, Osty, Tischner, and many other distinguished savants. The results obtained have been, it is true, questioned and criticized at every turn by certain scientists who deny that telepathy is either proven or indeed possible. Professor Jodl (quoted by Tischner) goes so far as to say: “Such a direct transmission of ideas from one mind to another, without any perceptible physical method of communication, would indicate the presence of a crack in the very foundations of all our views on Nature.” “Psycho-physics”, writes Dr Henning, “yes, even psychology as a science must be utterly wrecked before we have recourse to telepathy.” It is, however, useless to indulge in mere a priori refutations or, in the case of telepathic experiments, to concentrate on the failures and ignore the successes. It is of course impossible within the very narrow space-limits of this little book to furnish any detailed reference of such experiments. Suffice it to say that evidence varied, cumulative and irresistible now exists which has established telepathy as a scientific fact.

The study of telepathic phenomena suggests the interesting question whether telepathy is a psychic factor of permanent and regular character or whether it represents merely the dying embers of a once more active force. Can the transference of human thought apart from physical media be developed and systematized on such a scale as to suggest immense possibilities in the human relationships of the future? Or will such development be inevitably retarded by the fact that telepathy is a dying sense to be classed with various obscure eccentricities of the human body which serve merely as vestigial landmarks in the long history of the race? Despite the alluring possibilities of the first suggestion, indications certainly exist which lend colour to the pathetic belief that research has only discovered this force in the evening of its existence.

This view of telepathy as a “rudimentary survival” seems to be strengthened by the admitted fact that manifestations of telepathy are far more certain and more striking when the percipient is under hypnotic suggestion; for, if it be the subliminal self which rises above the threshold in hypnotic slumber and obeys the suggestion of the agent’s mind, this is itself in all probability a manifestation of race-experience rather than that of the individual. The everyday self, the product of normal experience, is influenced to a much slighter degree by hypnotic suggestion than that mysterious entity, the secondary self, trailing its clouds of precarnate existence.

In the dim recesses of our race-history our pithecoid ancestors in default of language may well have possessed telepathic powers for the communication of their simple ideas, which powers have gradually been rendered less necessary as language developed, and may ultimately, unless stimulated and exercised, finally perish from atrophy. Such a theory would be illustrated by those stories which are furnished by reliable travellers and missionaries with reference to the amazing transmission of news which at times appears to take place amongst native races of a low level of civilization under circumstances which preclude any opportunity for normal methods of communication.

Nor, again, is it easy to avoid the conclusion that some form of telepathy exists among various forms of animal life. The “homing instinct” of the cat and the pigeon, and bewildering facts connected with the flight of birds of passage, inexplicable from any ordinary laws of experience, may conceivably be examples of a form of telepathy infinitely more regular and efficient than the fitful manifestations on the part of homo sapiens which engage the attention of psychical researchers. It is not easy to find any ordinary explanation for the immediate rush of a scattered herd of cattle to any available shelter, when one of their number has been struck by the noiseless warble-fly. Or when I watch the curving flight of the beautiful ruffs and reeves round a Norwegian lake――the absolutely simultaneous rise, the instantaneous wheel of the whole flock in the fraction of a second――or, again, when I see hundreds of starlings rise together and afterwards return to their trees in complete unison, I find it difficult to regard these charming incidents as due to normal or even abnormal sight or hearing, and wonder whether here again some rudimentary but efficient form of telepathy may not be at work.

Can we go further, and suggest that some of the baffling phenomena of heredity and instinct may ultimately find their origin in the telepathic transference of thought? We accept the word ‘instinct’ as an adequate explanation of the habits of sentient creatures, but it explains nothing. Every manifestation of instinct is obviously due to volition, however rudimentary――is, in other words, a mental as distinct (so far as such distinction goes) from a physical phenomenon. It is difficult to trace an “instinctive” movement to material spermatozoa or germ-cells. “The burnt child dreads the fire” as the result of its own experience, but no experience taught the baby how to use its lips at its first meal, any more than it taught the chicken how to escape from the eggshell. The “collective experience of the race”, the alleged source of these phenomena, may sooner or later be recognized as the telepathic transference from the mind of the parents of concepts derived from the previous telepathy of successive generations. It may appear at first sight fantastic to suggest that the mechanically exact habits of a mother-wasp may be the result of mental telepathy, but after all this seems a better vera causa than the wasp’s-egg, a minute fraction of matter which can explain nothing in the realms of thought or of volition.

Charcot’s telepathic suggestion of a hot iron by the application of a wooden ruler elicited a cry of agony, and produced a blister filled with lymph on the percipient’s arm; other experiments at the Salpêtriêre and elsewhere raised weals and other stigmata on human bodies. Can it be that this same mysterious and powerful force may come to be accepted as at any rate a partial solution of the vexed question of heredity? A baby is born with marked physical characteristics of its father or mother. During its prenatal existence you have two main factors: the minds of the parents on the one side, on the other the mind of the unborn child. The future of the little being lying under her heart forms the constant thought of the expectant mother. She thinks of it as reproducing certain characteristics of herself or of the husband she loves; the husband applies his thoughts in the same direction: and such concentrated suggestion, consciously or unconsciously conveyed, may serve to shape the child’s body as well as its mind, in accordance with the maternal or paternal hopes and desires.

Well established as it is in the simpler forms of direct communication between agent and percipient, telepathy is sometimes called upon to explain the whole series of phenomena which are grouped under such heads as clairvoyance, psychometry, crystal-gazing, automatic writing, etc. The more or less public exhibitions of alleged clairvoyance which form the central feature of innumerable spiritualist services in this and other countries do not, as a rule, furnish convincing indications of supernormal activity. I have never myself seen any public “trance-speaker” who, despite the conventional twitchings and contortions which herald the ingress of the Red Indian or other spirit-control, did not appear to be in complete possession of his or her normal consciousness. But the prolonged and careful investigations of Mrs Piper’s mediumship and those more recently undertaken with continental clairvoyants by Drs Tischner, Osty, and others, stand on a very different footing. In the face of the accumulated evidence furnished by such research, those who rely on telepathy as the universal solvent of psychic difficulties must often falter where they firmly stood. Leaving for the moment all the concrete evidence derived from experiments with the British Mrs Leonard or continental mediums like “Mrs van B.”, or Mademoiselle de Berly, the records of the Piper séances form a rich store of evidential facts. Amid all the various deceptions and failures of the quaint “Dr Phinuit” or the more precise “George Pelham,” detailed and accurate messages are found, some of which appear inexplicable by any conceivable exercise of telepathy between living persons.

Nor again can the agency of living minds always furnish a satisfactory explanation in the rare but indubitable cases of prevision or precognition exhibited by clairvoyance. From what source come those precise statements made from time to time by trustworthy mediums, under strict test-conditions, with respect to certain articles placed in their hands? Clairvoyance of this type, often called psychometry, might almost suggest the validity of Fechner’s theory of “odylic” influences, which may appear less fantastic in an age when the dividing line between matter and mind is becoming theoretically obsolete. Moreover, to psychometry, once accepted as a scientific fact, an interesting corollary would attach; for, if mere contact with a man’s cravat can produce from the medium a detailed and accurate account of the suicide of an unhappy prisoner who had worn the cravat, masonry and woodwork might in the same inscrutable fashion be responsible for suggesting the auditory and visual phenomena of a “haunted house.” Some well-attested cases exist in which alteration of structure in a house has been followed by the cessation of the “hauntings.”

If telepathy from the living breaks down when called upon to explain all the facts of clairvoyance, there exists another explanation which has received the enthusiastic support of those investigators who, while they reject transference between normal minds, point enthusiastically to the alleged efficiency of the “secondary” or “subliminal” self. Fascinating descriptions are given of this “mysterious Mr Hyde which lurks in each of us,” this subconscious mind working in the inner sanctum, as director and controller, while the normal work-a-day self transacts the conventional business of life in the open shop. The amazing performances of a “calculating boy,” the sudden conversion of a Bunyan or a Paul, the supreme genius of a Shakespeare or a Handel, are alike referred to that comprehensive source of all things supernormal, the secondary self! This subliminal self can, we are assured, furnish a sensitive with information which otherwise could not possibly be possessed by any other living person. It can not only explore the dim recesses of past experience but foretell with accuracy the events of the future. Driven from the outer trenches of telepathic defence, some modern protagonists of psychical research find, as they think, an impregnable stronghold in the limitless efficiency of the subliminal self. The soi-disant George Pelham may convince his friends that he is what he claims to be, but he is only a manifestation of Mrs Piper’s subconscious self――in other words, George Pelham in Mrs Piper. If a medium announces in England the death in battle of an officer hours before the bad news has even reached his battalion’s base, this (if not a ‘happy shot’) is merely a striking instance of those abnormal powers of cognition possessed by the medium’s subliminal consciousness.

Can this hypothesis bear the heavy strain put upon it? After all the phrase “subliminal self”, “unconscious mind”――call it what you will――embodies nothing at all beyond a hypothesis. Nobody has yet demonstrated the existence of such a division of the mind attached to each living personality, or defined its qualities or capacities. There are indubitably certain depths in the human mind which may be reached by the processes of psycho-analysis, but in these cases there appears to be no compelling reason for any bewildering thesis of two or more distinct minds attached to the same human organism. There may be diversities of mental operation, but the same mind: the θεός and θηρίον can form a composite mentality capable of moral excellence on the one hand, and on the other exposing to the Freudian probe the lower levels of a non-moral animal existence.

Not only have we failed to prove conclusively the existence or determine the activities of an entity so improbable a priori as a second self, but this popular hypothesis cannot always justify itself by fitting the facts, unless indeed we are prepared to assign to such an additional human mind a considerable measure of omniscience. How much further do we get by declaring that such intelligences as Phinuit, George Pelham, or Feda are mere manifestations of a medium’s “secondary self”?

The messages which we receive from clairvoyant experiments with entranced or controlled mediums, table tiltings, planchette, ouija boards, etc., present a bewildering congeries of good sense and stupidity, relevancy and irrelevancy, truth and falsehood, sobriety and flippancy. Such communications possess two marked characteristics. They display intelligence, however low the level of that intelligence may sink; and they invariably claim to proceed from the surviving minds of dead men and women, or at any rate from discarnate beings or “spirits”.

These messages fall into two classes; in the first place, the most important of them, which offer evidential matter either spontaneously or in compliance with a sitter’s request. In such dark and unaccustomed paths the thoughtful researcher must walk warily and form his judgments dispassionately. Suffice it to say that persons of real ability and calm judgment are to be found who are intellectually convinced that in certain instances the agencies which have communicated with them through mediums are actually what they claim to be, the surviving personalities of dead friends or relatives. I found it difficult during some sittings under an assumed name with Mrs Piper to resist the belief that I was being addressed by two lost friends, so amazing was the relevancy of a single message in the one case, and the force of accumulated details in the other. Of a communication through the same medium given to his sister-in-law for transmission to himself Professor William James of Harvard writes as follows:

“The point is that the message is an allusion to a matter known (so personal is it to myself) to no other individual in the world but me――not possibly either to the medium or to my sister-in-law; and an allusion so pertinent and intimate, and tender and helpful, and yet so unhelped by any actual earthly knowledge on anyone’s part, that it quite astounds as well as deeply touches me. If the subject of the message had been conceivably in my sister-in-law’s mind, it would have been an interesting but not infrequent case of telepathy; but as I say it could not possibly have been, and she only transmits it to me after the fact not even understanding it.”

The second group of messages possess little or no evidential value with regard to the personal survival of individuals, though they too always claim to proceed from “spirits” of some kind. Trivial, vulgar, and unworthy as they often are, these communications cannot be ignored by the student of psychical research. When we have eliminated trickery, collusion and self-deception from these experiments, there remains a residuum of communications more or less intelligent which obviously do not proceed from the normal consciousness of either sitter or medium; in most cases, indeed, there is no medium employed, for the messages are spelt out through movements of a table or an instrument of the planchette type.

Many of these messages are of a perplexing character. Some show indications of a rather colourless goodwill, others are freakish and deceptive with a flavour of feeble practical joking. Occasionally they are blasphemous or indecent. A very common feature is the giving of addresses connected with the sitter or with the former life of the alleged spirit-communicator. Full names of individuals, the names of streets and the numbers of houses are freely given. Nevertheless, in nearly every instance it is found that the facts as given are partially or entirely inaccurate. The whole procedure is baffling and obscure. If on the one hand the false information is due to the conscious action of any of the sitters, why does not the person in question take the trouble to provide a more complete deception? How easy it would be for such devotees of trickery to equip themselves with a stock-in-trade of really accurate names and addresses from any list of obituary notices contemporary or of older date. If these tiresome and misleading statements proceed from the subliminal consciousness of the sitter or medium, it is obvious that this entity is unable to secure various simple items of current information; and in that case, again, what is the motive of such transparent deception?

Nor, indeed, if the subliminal consciousness be accepted as the source of such perplexing messages, can we feel altogether happy in the possession of a secondary self or subconscious mind which is admittedly guilty in many instances of trickery, evasion, flippancy, deliberate and often cruel deception. Any clouds of glory that such a self may have trailed behind it are at times sadly tarnished, nor is the conviction either agreeable or inspiring that we harbour within us a force capable of præternatural knowledge and amazing achievement and yet characterized at times by conduct which the ordinary mind of any decent person would utterly condemn; for such a secondary self is frequently exhibited as “repressed, conative, infantile, unreasoning, predominantly sexual” and, one may add, sometimes fraudulent and usually non-moral. So many difficulties, indeed, appear to be involved in connecting these messages with any conscious activity that some investigators take refuge in the view that they consist only of the “stuff that dreams are made of,” proceeding from the lumber-room of the mind, and no more fraudulent or immoral than the elusive vagaries and incongruities of some fantastic dream.

One other source of the perplexing messages under discussion remains for our consideration. There is, as we have said, a feature common to them all: they invariably claim to proceed from disembodied personalities.

If the devotees of the ‘subliminal self’ hypothesis persist in bringing these agencies also within the broad compass of the human mind, conscious or unconscious, it may, I suppose, be urged that the claim to discarnate existence put forward by these animulae vagulae, blandulae, is a delusion which is built upon the accumulated mental experience of the human race, always believing, or striving to believe in a life beyond the grave. From the dim recesses of our racial history this pathetic protest against annihilation has, as it were, become a stereotyped portion of the human mind, and so it comes to pass that while the normal self may reject a personal survival, faint and fleeting echoes of the primaeval faith still rise from the depths of the unconscious self.

If it really be the case, however, as suggested above, that no activity of the human mind, whether normal or subliminal, can furnish an adequate explanation of the communications in question, we are left to face the facts and ask ourselves whether, after all, the claim put forward by the agencies involved may not be a valid one, viz., that they are what they invariably allege themselves to be, the product of discarnate intelligences. It is easy for those unacquainted with the accumulated phenomena of automatic writing, the planchette and ouija boards, and so on, to sneer at such an interpretation of the facts. But sneers have often dogged the earlier footsteps of scientific enterprise, and in any case――sneers or no sneers――the scientific researcher must, if he can, provide a solution of the phenomena which in this department of his work are so abundant and so easily repeated, that nothing else is needed beyond a careful sifting of the material, and above all, a mind as free as possible from any conscious bias towards either a normal or supernormal explanation. Once it is accepted that modern science does not necessarily preclude the existence of intelligences independent of those associated with the functions of the human brain, we may frankly admit that the theory of spirit-agencies in the case of these erratic messages does at least fit the facts. The existence would seem to be suggested of those alleged unseen entities, sometimes described as “elementals,” an order of low-grade spirits, able and apparently eager to communicate with us. The presence of such beings around us has, in earlier centuries, been widely accepted by a veritable consensus gentium; and the general characteristics of the communications in many a table-tilting or planchette experiment would seem to correspond closely to those of the fairies, efrits, demons, gnomes, “little folk,” et hoc genus omne――an intermixture of good humour and mischief coupled with a limited intelligence and the almost complete absence of any moral standard.

Before leaving the subject of telepathy, one more reference to this force as the origin of psychic phenomena must be briefly considered. The well-known “Census of hallucinations” conducted by the Society for Psychical Research revealed the fact that (a) 9.9 per cent. of the 17,000 persons questioned declared that they had at one time or another seen an apparition, (b) that very few recognizable phantasms were seen after the lapse of one year from the day of death, (c) that of the veridical cases the vast majority coincided more or less accurately with the moment of death. Modern research has also revealed a fact never before established, that phantasms of the living are far more frequent and generally far better attested than those of the dead. In summary, it may be claimed that men and women with sound minds in sound bodies do occasionally see phantasms of both living and dead persons under circumstances which entirely preclude malobservation or deception. No fact could, indeed, be better established than that ghosts are seen now as they have been seen all down the ages. What, however, is new in respect to this interesting phenomenon is the modern explanation that a ghost is a subjective impression conveyed to the mind of A by a conscious or unconscious suggestion from the mind of B. Deeply interesting as are the well-established and comparatively numerous telepathic images conveyed from the living to the living, these do not lead us outside the range of ordinary telepathic activity: