NOTE ON DIFFICULTY OF REMEMBERING NAMES
When operating indirectly in the ordinary way through a control and a medium, it usually appears to be remarkably difficult to get names transmitted. Most mediums are able to convey a name only with difficulty. Now plainly a name, especially the proper name of a person, is a very conventional and meaningless thing: it has very few links to connect it with other items in memory; and hence arises the normally well-known difficulty of recalling one. Conscious effort made to recover a name seems to inhibit the power of doing so: the best plan is to leave it, and let subconsciousness work. An example occurred to me the other day, when I tried to remember the name of a prominent statesman or ex-Prime Minister whom I had met in Australia. What I seemed to recollect was that the name began with "D," and I made several shots at it, which I recorded. The effort went on at intervals for days, since I thought it would be an instructive experiment. I know now, a month or two later, without any effort and without looking it up, that the name was Deakin; but what my shots at it were I do not remember. I will have the page in the note-book looked up and reproduced here, as an example of memory-groping, at intervals, during more than one day. Here they are:—D. Dering, Denman, Deeming, Derriman, Derring, Deeley, Dempster, Denting, Desman, Deering.
Now I knew the name quite well, and have known it for long, and have taken some interest in the gentleman who owns it; and I am known by some members of my family to have done so. Hence if I had been on 'the other side' and could only get as far as D, it would have seemed rather absurd to anyone whose memory for names is good. But indeed I have had times when names very much more familiar to me than that could not on the spur of the moment be recalled—not always even the initial letter; though, for some reason or other, the initial letter is certainly easier than the word.
The kind of shots which I made at the name before recalling it—which it may seem frivolous to have actually recorded—are reminiscent of the kind of shots which are made by mediums under control when they too are striving after a name; and it was a perception of this analogy which caused me to jot down my own guesses, or what, in the case of a medium, we should impolitely call 'fishing.' I think that the name was certainly in my memory though it would not come through my brain. The effort is like the effort to use a muscle not often or ever used—say the outer ear—one does not know which string to pull, so to speak, or, more accurately, which nerve to stimulate, and the result is a peculiarly helpless feeling, akin to stammering. In the case of a medium, I suppose the name is often in the mind of the communicator, but it will not come through the control. The control sometimes describes it as being spoken or shown but not clearly caught. The communicator often does not know whether a medium has successfully conveyed it or not.
CHAPTER XIV
VARIOUS PSYCHO-PHYSICAL METHODS
"If man, then, shall attempt to sound and fathom the depths that lie not without him, but within, analogy may surely warn him that the first attempts of his rude psychoscopes to give precision and actuality to thought will grope among 'beggarly elements'—will be concerned with things grotesque, or trivial, or obscure. Yet here also one handsbreadth of reality gives better footing than all the castles of our dream; here also by beginning with the least things we shall best learn how great things may remain to do."—F. W. H. M., Introduction to Phantasms of the Living
I MUST not shirk a rather queer subject which yet needs touching upon, though it bristles with theoretical difficulties; and that is the rationale of one of the most elementary methods of ultra-normal communication, a method which many find practically the easiest to begin with.
It is possible to get communication of a kind, not by holding a pencil in the fingers, but by placing the hand on a larger piece of wood not at all adapted for writing with. The movements are then coarser, and the code more elementary; but in principle, when the procedure is analysed, it is seen not to be essentially different. It may be more akin to semaphore-arm signalling or flag-wagging; but any device whereby mental activity can translate itself into movements of matter will serve for subliminal as well as for conscious action; and messages by tilting of a table, though crude and elementary, are not really so surprising or absurd as at first sight they seem. The tilts of a telegraphic operator's key are still more restricted; but they serve. A pen or pencil is an inanimate piece of matter guided by the fingers. A planchette is a mere piece of wood, and when touched it must be presumed to be guided by the muscles,—though there is often an illusion, as with the twig of the dowser, that the inanimate object is moved directly, and not by muscular intervention. So also we may assume that a table or other piece of furniture is tilted or moved by regular muscular force: certainly it can only move at the expense of the energy of the medium or of people present. And yet in all these cases the substance of the message may be foreign to the mind of anyone touching the instrument, and the guidance necessary for sense and relevance need not be exercised by their own consciousness.
When a table or similar rough instrument is employed, the ostensible communicators say that they feel more directly in touch with the sitters than when they operate through an intermediary or 'control' on their side,—as they appear to find it necessary to do for actual speech or writing,—and accordingly they find themselves able to give more private messages, and also to reproduce names and technicalities with greater facility and precision. The process of spelling out words in this way is a slow one, much slower than writing, and therefore the method labours under disadvantages, but it seems to possess advantages which to some extent counterbalance them.
Whether it sounds credible or not, and it is certainly surprising, I must testify that when a thing of any mobility is controlled in this more direct way, it is able to convey touches of emotion and phases of intonation, so to speak, in a most successful manner. A telegraph key could hardly do it, its range of movement is too restricted, it operates only in a discontinuous manner, by make and break; but a light table, under these conditions, seems no longer inert, it behaves as if animated. For the time it is animated—somewhat perhaps as a violin or piano is animated by a skilled musician and schooled to his will,—and the dramatic action thus attained is very remarkable. It can exhibit hesitation, it can exhibit certainty; it can seek for information, it can convey it; it can apparently ponder before giving a reply; it can welcome a new-comer; it can indicate joy or sorrow, fun or gravity; it can keep time with a song as if joining in the chorus; and, most notable of all, it can exhibit affection in an unmistakable manner.
The hand of a writing medium can do these things too; and that the whole body of a normal person can display these emotions is a commonplace. Yet they are all pieces of matter, though some are more permanently animated than others. But all are animated temporarily,—not one of them permanently,—and there appears to be no sharp line of demarcation. What we have to realise is that matter in any form is able to act as agent to the soul, and that by aid of matter various emotions as well as intelligence can be temporarily incarnated and displayed.
The extraction of elementary music from all manner of unlikely objects—kitchen utensils, for instance—is a known stage-performance. The utilisation of unlikely objects for purposes of communication, though it would not have been expected, may have to be included in the same general category.
With things made for the purpose, from a violin to the puppets of a marionette show, we know that simple human passions can be shown and can be roused. With things made for quiet other purposes it turns out that the same sort of possibility exists.
Table-tilting is an old and despised form of amusement, known to many families and often wisely discarded; but with care and sobriety and seriousness even this can be used as a means of communication; and the amount of mediumistic power necessary for this elementary form of psychic activity appears to be distinctly less than would be required for more elaborate methods.
One thing it is necessary clearly to realise and admit, namely that in all cases when an object is moved by direct contact of an operator's body, whether the instrument be a pencil or a piece of wood, unconscious muscular guidance must be allowed for; and anything that comes through of a kind known to or suspected by the operator must be discounted. Sometimes, however, the message comes in an unexpected and for the moment puzzling form, and sometimes it conveys information unknown to him. It is by the content of the communication that its supernormal value must be estimated.
There are many obvious disadvantages about a Table Sitting, especially in the slowness of the communications and in the fact that the sitter has to do most of the talking; whereas when some personality is controlling a medium, the sitters need say very little.
But, as said above, there are some communicators who object to a control's presence, especially if they have anything private to say; and these often prefer the table because it seems to bring them more directly into contact with the sitter, without an intermediary. They seem to ignore the presence of the medium on our side, notwithstanding the fact that, at a table sitting, she is present in her own consciousness and is aware of what goes on; they appear to be satisfied with having dispensed with the medium on their side. Moreover, it is in some cases found that information can be conveyed in a briefer and more direct manner, not having to be wrapped up in roundabout phrases, that names can be given more easily, and direct questions answered better, through the table than through a control.
It must be remembered that under control every medium has some peculiarities. Mrs. Leonard, for instance, is a very straightforward and honest medium, but not a particularly strong one. Accordingly anything like conversation and free interchange of ideas is hardly possible, and direct questions seldom receive direct answers, when put to the communicator through Feda.
I have known mediums much more powerful in this respect, so that free conversation with one or two specially skilled communicators was quite possible, and interchange of ideas almost as easy as when the communicator was in the flesh. But instances of that kind are hardly to be expected among hard-worked professional mediums.
I shall not in this volume touch upon still more puzzling and still more directly and peculiarly physical phenomena, such as are spoken of as 'direct voice,' 'direct writing,' and 'materialisation.' In these strange and, from one point of view, more advanced occurrences, though lower in another sense, inert matter appears to be operated on without the direct intervention of physiological mechanism. And yet such mechanism must be in the neighbourhood. I am inclined to think that these weird phenomena, when established, will be found to shade off into those other methods that I have been speaking of, and that no complete theory of either can be given until more is known about both. This is one of the facts which causes me to be undogmatic about the certainty that all movements, even under contact, are initiated in the muscles. I only here hold up a warning against premature decision. The whole subject of psycho-physical interaction and activity requires attention in due time and place; but the ground is now more treacherous, the pitfalls more numerous, and the territory to many minds comparatively unattractive. Let it wait until long-range artillery has beaten down some of the entanglements, before organised forces are summoned to advance.
CHAPTER XV
ATTITUDE OF THE WISE AND PRUDENT
"The vagueness and confusion inevitable at the beginning of a novel line of research, [are] naturally distasteful to the savant accustomed to proceed by measurable increments of knowledge from experimental bases already assured. Such an one, if he reads this book, may feel as though he had been called away from an ordnance survey, conducted with a competent staff and familiar instruments, to plough slowly with inexperienced mariners through some strange ocean where beds of entangling seaweed cumber the trackless way. We accept the analogy; but we would remind him that even floating weeds of novel genera may foreshow a land unknown; and that it was not without ultimate gain to men that the straining keels of Columbus first pressed through the Sargasso Sea."—F. W. H. M., Introduction to Phantasms of the Living
IT is rather remarkable that the majority of learned men have closed their minds to what have seemed bare and simple facts to many people. Those who call themselves spiritualists have an easy and simple faith; they interpret their experiences in the most straightforward and unsophisticated manner, and some of them have shown unfortunately that they can be led into credulity and error, without much difficulty, by unscrupulous people. Nevertheless, that simple-hearted folk are most accessible to new facts seems to be rather accordant with history. Whenever, not by reasoning but by direct experience, knowledge has been enlarged, or when a revelation has come to the human race through the agency of higher powers, it is not the wise but the simple who are first to receive it. This cannot be used as an argument either way; the simple may be mistaken, and may too blithely interpret their sense-impressions in the most obvious manner; just as on the other hand the eyes of the learned may be closed to anything which appears disconnected from their previous knowledge. For after all it is inevitable that any really new order of things must be so disconnected; some little time must elapse before the weight of facts impel the learned in a new direction, and meanwhile the unlearned may be absorbing direct experience, and in their own fashion may be forging ahead. It is an example of the ancient paradox propounded in and about 1 Cor. i. 26; and no fault need be found with what is natural.
It behoves me to mention in particular the attitude of men of science, of whom I may say quorum pars parva fui; for in no way do I wish to dissociate myself from either such stricture or such praise as may be appropriate to men who have made a study of science their vocation,—not indeed the peaks of the race, but the general body. For it is safe to assume that we must have some qualities in common, and that these must be among the causes which have switched us on to a laborious and materially unremunerative road.
Michael Foster said in his Presidential Address to the British Association at Dover:—
"Men of science have no peculiar virtues, no special powers. They are ordinary men, their characters are common, even commonplace. Science, as Huxley said, is organised common sense, and men of science are common men, drilled in the ways of common sense."
This of course, like any aphorism, does not bear pressing unduly: and Dr. Arthur Schuster in a similar Address at Manchester hedged it round with qualifying clauses:—
"This saying of Huxley's has been repeated so often that one almost wishes it were true; but unfortunately I cannot find a definition of common sense that fits the phrase. Sometimes the word is used as if it were identical with uncommon sense, sometimes as if it were the same thing as common nonsense. Often it means untrained intelligence, and in its best aspect it is, I think, that faculty which recognises that the obvious solution of a problem is frequently the right one. When, for instance, I see during a total solar eclipse red flames shooting out from the edge of the sun, the obvious explanation is that these are real phenomena, caused by masses of glowing vapours ejected from the sun. And when a learned friend tells me that all this is an optical illusion due to anomalous refraction, I object on the ground that the explanation violates my common sense. He replies by giving me the reasons which have led him to his conclusions; and though I still believe that I am right, I have to meet him with a more substantial reply than an appeal to my own convictions. Against a solid argument common sense has no power, and must remain a useful but fallible guide which both leads and misleads all classes of the community alike."
The sound moral of this is, not that a common-sense explanation is likely to be the right one, or that it necessarily has any merits if there are sound reasons to oppose to it, but that the common sense or most obvious and superficial explanation may turn out to be after all truer as well as simpler than more recondite hypotheses which have been substituted for it. In other words—the straightforward explanation need not be false.
Now the phenomena encountered in psychical research have long ago suggested an explanation, in terms of other than living human intelligences, which may be properly called spiritistic. Every kind of alternative explanation, including the almost equally unorthodox one of telepathy from living people, has been tried: and these attempts have been necessary and perfectly legitimate. If they had succeeded, well and good; but inasmuch as in my judgment there are phenomena which they cannot explain, and inasmuch as some form of spiritistic hypothesis, given certain postulates, explains practically all, I have found myself driven back on what I may call the common-sense explanation; or, to adopt Dr. Schuster's parable, I consider that the red flames round the sun are what they appear to be.
To attribute capricious mechanical performance to the action of live things, is sufficient as a proximate explanation; as we saw in the case of the jumping bean, Chapter I. If the existence of the live thing is otherwise unknown, the explanation may seem forced and unsatisfactory. But if after trying other hypotheses we find that this only will fit the case, we may return to it after all with a clear conscience. That represents the history of my own progress in Psychical Research.