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.