Part 4

What are we to think of “Dr. Phinuit,” that singular control of Mrs. Piper, who described himself as a French doctor born at Marseilles about 1790? He gave particulars of his birth, education, and life in Paris, where, according to his own account, he died about 1860. Enquiries failed to reveal any trace of his existence. He gave no indication of possessing any scientific knowledge of medicine. More surprising still, his knowledge of French appeared to extend only to a few simple phrases, which might have been familiar to the medium. As Mr. J. Arthur Hill remarks, “The French doctor spoke no more French than Mrs. Piper herself might be supposed to know.”

How many Spiritualists believe to-day that William Grocyn, the teacher of Erasmus, acted as a control to Mr. Stainton Moses? Or that the group of Broad Church controls--Imperator, Rector and the rest--who inculcated their theology through the mediumship of Mr. Moses, afterwards invaded the personality of Mrs. Piper?

Responsible leaders of the Spiritualist movement incline to a verdict of Not Proven, while impartial students, among whom Mrs. Sidgwick is pre-eminent, have expressed the strongest doubts as to the real nature of the controls. Writing of Mrs. Piper’s trance phenomena (which were closely observed by experts) Mrs. Sidgwick says that the trance “is probably a state of self-induced hypnosis in which her hypnotic self personates different characters either consciously and deliberately or unconsciously and believing herself to be the person she represents, and sometimes probably in a state of consciousness intermediate between the two.” Sir William Barrett also believes that the messages “often spring from, and are invariably influenced by, the medium’s own subconscious life.” He agrees, on the whole, with Mrs. Sidgwick, and he gives examples of absurd communications. Thus, in a sitting with Mrs. Piper, in 1899, the Jewish lawgiver Moses purported to communicate, and prophesied a great war in the near future, in which Russia and France would be on one side, Britain and America on the other. Germany, according to “Moses,” would not take any serious part in the war. Another time “Sir Walter Scott” announced to Dr. Hodgson that he had visited all the planets and could give information about Mars. “Asked if he had seen a planet further away than Saturn, the soi-disant novelist answered, ‘Mercury.’” Julius Cæsar, Madame Guyon and George Eliot were personated, and George Eliot is reported as saying: “I hardly know as there is enough light to communicate,” and “do not know as I have ever seen a haunted house.”

Mr. J. Arthur Hill says: “I am not convinced that the regular trance-controls are spirits at all.” His views on certain aspects of the problem may be gathered from the following passage: “At Spiritualist meetings a trance-control or inspirational speaker will sometimes hold forth with surprising fluency at incredible length. The secretary of the Spiritualists’ National Union once backed the late W. J. Colville to talk ‘till this time next week without intervals for meals,’ yet with a dullness and inanity that would drive any but a very tolerant audience mad. Spiritualists certainly have the virtue of patience.”

Mr. Hill thinks it probable that in many mediums there is a dissociation of consciousness, and no external spirit-agency at all. He warns Spiritualist societies against “encouraging the flow of platitudinous or almost meaningless verbiage which, whether it comes from a medium’s subliminal or from a discarnate spirit, can hardly be helpful to anybody, and must be very bad for the minds of most hearers.” He admits that in “at least some cases of trance-control there is no reason to believe the control to be other than a subliminal fraction of the automatist’s mind.”

How can the impartial inquirer hope to discern the truth amid heaps of lies? The cheating medium could be detected and cast out; the “controls” are as irresponsible as the fairies of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

Sir Oliver Lodge’s views on the “controls” are of extreme interest, though he is fully committed to the defence of Spiritualism. “The dramatic semblance of the control,” he says, “is undoubtedly that of a separate person--a person asserted to be permanently existing on the other side, and to be occupied on that side in much the same functions as the medium is on this.” It is true, he admits, that in the case of some mediums “there are evanescent and absurd obtrusions every now and then, which cannot be seriously regarded. These have to be eliminated, and for anyone to treat them as real people would be ludicrous.” The excuse given for their appearance is that the medium may be “overdone or tired.” Sir Oliver Lodge advises “sitters,” nevertheless, to “humour” the controls by “taking them at their face value.” With the utmost respect for so great a scientist, the task of discrimination, we may safely say, lies beyond the capacity of ordinary men and women. Sir Oliver Lodge thinks that “the more responsible kind of control is a real person,” and he has much to say of “the serious controls,” but he admits the occurrence of “mischievous and temporary impersonations.”

The question may fairly be asked, Cannot the fourth personality in that strange group--composed of the inquirer on this side, the medium, the medium’s control, and the spirit communicator--speak directly from within the veil? Sir Oliver Lodge, while admitting that an exceptional more direct privilege is occasionally vouchsafed to persons in extreme sorrow, gives his answer, on the whole, in the negative. The normal process “involves the activity of several people,” and we conclude from his writings that he desires to uphold professional mediumship.

FOOTNOTES:

At Denison House, Vauxhall Bridge Road, on June 11th, 1919.

“Raymond,” p. 86.

ibid., p. 357.

ibid., p. 235.

ibid., p. 166.

“Spiritualism,” p. 74.

“On the Threshold of the Unseen,” p. 33.

ibid., p. 240.

“Spiritualism,” p. 172.

“Raymond,” p. 357.

Chapter V

TABLE PHENOMENA

Table-turning, as we meet it in literature, belongs to the older class of parlour games. Sir W. F. Barrett quotes the testimony of Delitzsch that it was practised in Jewish circles in the seventeenth century: “the table springs up even when laden with many hundred-weight.” Zebi, in 1615, defended the practice as not due to magic, but to the power of God, “for we sing to the table sacred psalms and songs, and it can be no devil’s work where God is remembered.”

Mrs. De Morgan, in that curious book, “From Matter to Spirit,” describes her experience in table-turning circles about the year 1853. The medium was Mrs. Hayden, whose séances in West London were attended by such men as Professor Huxley and Robert Chambers. Mrs. Hayden was an educated lady, the wife of W. R. Hayden, editor of the Star-Spangled Banner. Her rooms were crowded with visitors, at a minimum fee of half a guinea each, and her services were in great demand for evening parties and private sittings. According to Mrs. De Morgan, the circle gathered round an old Pembroke table. The illustrations in the book show a spirit appearing to a man and woman who are seated at a rather large round table. Very strange and absurd communications, as Mrs. De Morgan admitted, were given by table-tipping, “as, indeed, by all methods.” “I have seen instances,” she writes, “and been told of others, in which long incongruous strings of names and titles have been spelt out, such as Richard Cœur de Lion, Pythagoras, Byron, Cheops, and Mr. Fauntleroy, the list, perhaps, ending with T. Browne or J. Smith. The givers of these names seem to delight only in buffoonery and abuse; and, perhaps, after playing absurd and mischievous tricks for days or even weeks, will seem to come in a body, giving all their names, with the information that they are come to say good-bye for ever.”

Phenomena not unlike the “exuberant” table activities at Mariemont, as described in “Raymond,” were familiar over half a century ago to the sitters with Mrs. Hayden. Mrs. De Morgan tells of a case in which the watchers were directed by raps to join hands and stand up round the table without touching it. They stood patiently for a quarter of an hour, and just as one or two of the party talked of sitting down, the old table “moved entirely by itself as we surrounded and followed it with our hands joined, went towards the gentleman out of the circle, and literally pushed him up to the back of the sofa, till he called out ‘Hold, enough!’”

Robert Chambers, who was a close examiner of the table phenomena of his day, formed an opinion which would be accepted, as we shall show, by thoughtful writers of our own time who are on other grounds believers in Spiritualism.

“I am satisfied,” Robert Chambers wrote in Chambers’s Journal, “that the phenomena are natural, but to take them in I think we shall have to widen somewhat our ideas of the extent and character of what is natural.”

In 1853 a committee of British medical men held an investigation on table-turning. They decided that the table-motion was due to muscular action, mostly exercised unconsciously. Faraday, as Mr. Podmore shows in “Modern Spiritualism,” was able to prove that the table movements were due to muscular action, exercised in most cases without the consciousness or volition of the sitters. Table-turning, in the remoter towns and villages of Europe, was a favourite drawing-room amusement as late as 1876.

Sir Oliver Lodge, in his deeply interesting address to the Dublin section of the Society for Psychical Research, delivered more than ten years ago, spoke wise words on the physical phenomena of the séance. “There is but little doubt in my mind,” he says, “that such movements do take place; I have had personal experience of them. Nevertheless they are not yet really established as facts, and if they were there would still be a question whether these movements are due to some independent intelligent agency, or whether, as is most likely, they are an extension of the ordinary power of the organism through which they are produced.”