II
Four names stand out on that side as specially authoritative: Sir W. F. Barrett, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mr. J. Arthur Hill, and Sir Oliver Lodge. Three of these men are eminent in the worlds of science and literature, while the Spiritualistic writings of Mr. Hill deserve attention for their knowledge, fairmindedness and sanity.
(1) Sir William Barrett refrains from citing any evidence obtained through paid professional mediums, and has evidently a low esteem for this class. He welcomes the action of the Psychical Society in clearing off “a number of those detestable professional rogues who prey on the grief and credulity of mankind.”[3] The very word “medium,” he acknowledges, is usually associated in the public mind with various degrees of rascality, and he says emphatically that “so long as paid mediums and dark séances are encouraged, and rogues and fools abound, the evil odour which surrounds the name ‘medium’ is likely to remain.”
He also recognises that many so-called communications from the unseen are merely the unconscious revelation of the medium’s own thoughts, or latent memory, or subliminal self.[4] Even with honest “psychics” there is a natural tendency not to disappoint the sitter when a fee is paid, “and the temptation arises to supplement genuine by spurious phenomena.”
Super-normal gifts, in the view of our most experienced authority, are rare and elusive, and require patience, knowledge and discrimination on the part of the inquirer.[5] Sir William Barrett dissuades uninstructed persons from resorting to mediums; and it is clear that he desires the total elimination of the commercial element.
We need to guard against self-deception, he thinks, even in people whose character is beyond reproach.
(2) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle greatly dislikes the commercial element in mediumship. In a letter to Light[6] he pleads for the “training and segregation of mediums.” Like Sir William Barrett, he condemns the whole system of paying by results. “It is only when the professional medium can be guaranteed an annuity which will be independent of results,” he says, “that we can eliminate the strong temptation to substitute pretended phenomena when the real ones are wanting.” He points out that mediumship in its lowest forms is a purely physical gift, with no relation to morality.
(3) Mr. J. Arthur Hill, as Sir A. Conan Doyle tells us,[7] has been for many years an invalid, stretched on his back in bed. A strong and athletic young man, he was suddenly reduced to absolute helplessness by a heart-wrench sustained while cycling up a hill. The volumes he has written under sad physical disabilities are among the most influential now read in Spiritualist circles, and their quiet, unfanatical tone commends them to outsiders. Mr. Hill, like the late Frank Podmore, whose place he has partly taken as the historian of the movement, has a thorough knowledge of the older literature and journalism, both American and British. He admits deliberate fraud on the part of professional mediums, and is sceptical with regard to “materialisation.” It is not unlikely, in his opinion, that sitters who await, in darkness and expectancy, the appearance of discarnate personalities, may “pass into a mental state not quite normal, and closely analogous to hypnosis.”
Mr. Hill thinks it inevitable that doubt should linger in the mind when the financial element enters at all into mediumship, and he advises that this element should be eliminated as far as possible. He discusses very frankly the evidence obtained from non-professionals. “We have subliminal memory to deal with, and that is more difficult to exclude than ordinary fraud.”
The best class of Spiritualist teachers are fully aware of the attitude of caution imposed upon them by the gradual progress of medical investigation into the workings of the unconscious mind.
“One of the principal difficulties in the way of admitting an element of super-normality—whether telepathy, clairvoyance or communication from the dead”—remarks Mr. Hill,[8] “is the unknown reach of subliminal memory.… Great care is necessary as to what we say to sensitives who are helping us in experimentation, also close knowledge of their lives, their reading, their associations, in order to estimate the probability or improbability of this or that piece of knowledge ever having reached them through normal channels.” He advises inquirers to err on the safe side, setting aside as non-evidential anything that the sensitive may reasonably be supposed to have ever known.
(4) Sir Oliver Lodge regards the medium as “a delicate piece of apparatus, wherewith we are making an investigation.” “The medium is an instrument whose ways and idiosyncrasies must be learnt, and to an extent humoured, just as one studies and humours the ways of some much less delicate piece of physical apparatus turned out by a skilled instrument maker.”
These words of Sir Oliver Lodge raise a serious question. Do our investigators care enough about the moral and physical injury which the “sensitive” may suffer under the trance condition? Sir William Barrett notes that D. D. Home suffered severely after a long series of séances. According to the testimony of Sir W. Crookes, he lay pale, speechless and almost fainting on the floor, “showing what a drain on his vital powers was caused by the evolution of the ‘psychic force.’” The Rev. Walter Wynn, in “Rupert Lives!” says of a medium that it took nearly ten minutes for him to pass under control “after many strange bodily contortions which are not pleasant to witness, but are quite natural if we are to assume that a discarnate spirit controls his body.”
Prostration occurred, as the New Testament records, when our Lord cast a spirit out of some poor human frame. The liberated were restored by Him to normal health and vigour. St. Mark’s words are in strange contrast to the recurrent trance experiences of modern mediumship. “And the spirit cried, and rent him sore, and came out of him, and he was as one dead, insomuch that many said, He is dead. But Jesus took him by the hand and lifted him up, and he arose.”
Would He not lift up and restore and revitalise those who at the séance seem to ignorant onlookers to be invaded by some alien personality?