II
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.”[15] 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.[16] 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.”[17]
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.”[18] 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.