IV. Lucidity
All the facts of lucidity (clairvoyance, second-sight, etc.) which are attributed to Mlle. Smith may be explained by telepathic impressions proceeding from living persons. This means that I not only admit from the start the possibility of such phenomena by virtue of the “Principle of Hamlet,” but, since telepathy is not, in my opinion, anything very strange, I shall feel no subjective difficulty in accepting the reality of Hélène’s supernormal intuitions, provided that they present some serious guarantee of authenticity, and do not explain themselves still more simply by normal and ordinary processes.
Leopold, who appears in almost all of these veridical messages—whether he recognizes himself as the author or whether he accompanies simply by his presence their manifestation through Hélène—has never deigned to grant me one under entirely satisfactory conditions, and he censures my insistence as vain and puerile curiosity. As to the innumerable phenomena with which others more fortunate than myself have been gratified, they have always offered this singularity: when they appeared to be really of a nature calculated to furnish a decisive and convincing proof as to their supernormal origin, I never succeeded in obtaining a written, precise, and circumstantial account, but only uncertain and incomplete tales, too intimate and too personal to be divulged by those interested in them; and, again, when my friends were quite willing to write out a detailed account and to answer to my demand for exact information, the fact reduced itself to such a small matter that it was beyond my power to see anything of the supernormal in it.
Taking everything into consideration, I am inclined to believe that Mlle. Smith, in truth, possesses real phenomena of clairvoyance, not, however, passing beyond the possible limits of telepathy; only, in order that they may be produced, it is necessary that Leopold—that is to say, the special psychic state of Hélène which is necessary for the reception and externalization of these telepathic impressions—be aided from the outside by the influence of certain favorable temperaments, more frequently met with among convinced spiritists than among persons who are normal, and that he be not impeded, on the other hand, by the paralyzing presence of hostile temperaments, such as that of a critical observer. It is greatly to be regretted that the naïve believers who inspire and succeed in obtaining magnificent phenomena of lucidity usually care so little for the desiderata of science, and, above all, refuse to submit themselves to an examination which might explain the phenomena in a natural manner; while the investigators in search of “convincing” proofs are not inspiring and obtain almost nothing.
However it may be, I shall give a few examples of Mlle. Smith’s proofs of lucidity, which are not very varied, and can be divided into the three categories of the medical prescriptions and diagnoses, of lost objects found again, and of retrocognitions of events more or less remote.
1. Medical Consultations.—In promising specimens of extraordinary facts of this kind I have gone too far. Many such have been told me—as, for instance, Leopold dictating an unknown and complicated recipe of a hair tonic for a gentleman living abroad, a single bottle of which was sufficient to bring forth a full growth of hair on a head which had become bald before middle age; or, again, Leopold, being consulted about the health of a lady living at a great distance from Geneva, revealing both the veridical nature of her illness, which was unknown till then to her physicians, and its origin, which was due to certain unsuspected but perfectly true incidents connected with her childhood, and, finally, the treatment, which was crowned with success. But the absence of written testimony and precise information as to the concomitant circumstances of these marvellous cures reduce them to the rank of amusing stories, the value of which cannot positively be estimated. As to better-attested episodes, it is true I have been able to obtain authentic stories, but they are those in which the probability of a supernormal element has been reduced to a minimum—imperceptible to me. I will cite but one case.
M. and Mme. G. having invited Mlle. Smith during the month of August to pass a day with them in the country, a few leagues distant from Geneva, took advantage of the visit to hold a seance in order to consult Leopold on the health of one of their children. I will tell the incident from a written account sent me by Mme. G. soon afterwards:
“Our little girl was suffering from anæmia, and fell frequently into a state of weakness, in spite of intervals of improvement. Dr. d’Espine had been recommended to us for the time of our return to Geneva. The medium [Mlle. Smith] knew nothing of this; we had taken the precaution to keep it from her.” The seance begins with a few kind words from Leopold, whom M. G. then asks whether he would do well in consulting Dr. d’Espine. “And I,” replied Leopold, “can I do nothing for you? Ungrateful people!” But when he was asked to indicate some treatment, he replied: “Wait till your return to Geneva.” Then, upon being asked whether an egg mixed with brandy would be good for the child, he replied that the egg would be good, but the brandy was not necessary in her case. Then he recommended that the child be taken for an hour’s walk in the open air every day. As to the prescription relating to her food, he repeated: “I told you to wait till your return to Geneva.”
On their return to Geneva in the middle of September, M. and Mme. G. held a second seance. This time Leopold was more exact; he advised: “Not too much milk, but rather a few glasses of good pure wine at each meal.” Then he added: “Treat the anæmia first and you will triumph over the throat trouble, which would finally weaken her too much. Her blood is so weak that the least cold, the slightest emotion, I will go so far as to say that the expectation of a pleasure even, would be sufficient to bring the angina to a crisis. You ought to have foreseen that.” “Leopold,” M. G. notes here, “has enabled us to put our finger upon such of the details as we did not know how to explain. At each sentence my wife and I looked at each other with stupefaction.” Leopold ordered also many green vegetables, warm salt-water douches of three minutes’ duration in the evening, and: “The principal thing now is five drops of iron in half a glass of water twice a day before the meal. Do this and you will see the result in a month.” In two weeks’ time the little girl was hardly recognizable.
I have cited this case because it is among those that have most struck M. and Mme. G., and upon which they build their conviction of the independent existence and supernormal knowledge of Leopold, and because it shows how little is needed to kindle the faith among spiritists. I forgot to say that the G. family was well known by Mlle. Smith, and that during the whole winter and the preceding spring she had held weekly seances at their home. There is but one thing that astonishes me, and that is, that Leopold, at the time of the first improvised consultation, should have been taken unawares up to the point of postponing his orders until later, and adhering to such commonplace things as a walk in the open air and the suppression of brandy. In the second seance one sees the effect of a month’s incubation. Leopold has had time to recover in Hélène’s memory the remembrance concerning the little girl who was anæmic and subject to sore throat; also the prescription which, in the given case, surely proved most efficacious, but which hardly denotes a supernormal knowledge. One does not even need here telepathy to explain messages which are amply accounted for by the subconscious functions of Mlle. Smith’s ordinary faculties.
Examples of this kind, drawn from Mlle. Smith’s mediumship, might be almost indefinitely multiplied; but cui bono? Once more, I do not claim that Leopold has never given any medical consultation surpassing Hélène’s latent knowledge and implying supernormal powers of clairvoyance. I only say that I have not yet succeeded in finding a single case where the proofs reached the height of that conclusion.
2. Objects Recovered.—I do not know any case in which Mlle. Smith has indicated the situation of an object which had been hidden, and as to the location of which she could have had no information through natural channels. All her discoveries consist, so far as I have been able to judge, in the return, under a spiritistic and with a dramatic aspect, of memories either simply forgotten or properly subliminal, which depended upon the incidents concerned having first belonged to the ordinary consciousness, or their having always escaped it and having been from their origin registered in the subconsciousness.
These are facts of cryptomnesia pure and simple—i. e., explicable by a normal psychological process very common in its essence, while the picturesque embellishments added by the mediumistic imagination give to these teleological automatisms a certain mysterious and supernormal appearance which in other surroundings would certainly create for Hélène—or rather for Leopold—a place alongside St. Anthony of Padua. I confine myself to two examples. Mlle. Smith being charged with the duty of making ready the merchandise sent out from her department, was handed a telegram one day from a customer who asked that four yards of No. 13,459 be despatched to him immediately. “This brief order,” said Hélène, “was not calculated to hasten the forwarding of the goods. How could I readily find this No. 13,459, in the midst of six or seven thousand others in the store? Pondering, telegram in hand, I was wondering how I could find it, when a voice outside of but very near me said to me: ‘Not there, but here,’ and involuntarily I turned round, without knowing why, and my hand laid itself mechanically on a piece of goods which I drew towards me, and which actually bore the No. 13,459.”
It is not necessary to be a medium to know by experience these happy reminiscences or inspirations which sometimes come to free us from embarrassment by shining forth like a light at an opportune moment; but that which in the case of ordinary persons remains in the feeble condition of an idea or internal image, among mediumistic temperaments assumes readily the fixed and vivid form of an hallucination. Instead of simply “suddenly recollecting” in the case of the No. 13,459, as would have happened to any one else, Hélène hears an exterior voice, and perceives her hand moving involuntarily in a given direction. It is noted that this automatism assumed an auditive and motor form which is the pendant of the vocal and visual automatism which I have referred to on pp. [58]-59. It is to this same class of facts, well known and almost common to-day, that the following example likewise belongs, although the subliminal imagination had surrounded it with the form of an intervention on the part of Leopold.
One Sunday evening, on returning home, Mlle. Smith noticed that she had lost a small breastpin which had been fastened to her corsage, and which she greatly valued as a souvenir. The following day she returned to look for it where she had been the evening before, but in vain, and a notice which she caused to be inserted in the “lost” columns of a daily newspaper gave no result. Here I leave the narration of the story to her: “Persuaded that my pin was really lost, I did my best to think no more about it, but this was a difficult matter, since one night I was awakened suddenly by three raps struck against my bed. Somewhat frightened, I looked around, but saw nothing. I tried to go to sleep, but again many raps were struck, this time near my head. I seated myself on my bed (I was agitated), trying to discover what was happening, and hardly had I seated myself when I saw a hand shaking my lost breastpin before my eyes. This vision lasted only a minute, but that was long enough for it to make a deep impression upon me.”
The following Tuesday evening (ten days after the loss of the trinket) Hélène held a seance at the house of M. Cuendet, at which two other persons were also present. She told of the loss of her pin and the curious vision above described; then all seated themselves at the table. After a typtological dictation upon an altogether different subject, the following incident occurred, the account of which I have borrowed from notes taken by M. Cuendet (it was in 1894, and I only knew Mlle. Smith by reputation at the time):
“We notice that from the beginning of the seance Mlle. Smith describes to us our familiar spirit [Leopold] as holding a lantern in his hand. Why? The table is shaken anew, about to tell us something. The following is then dictated to us by it: ‘Arise. Take a lantern. Extend your walk to the Municipal Building. Take the path which crosses the meadow, and which ends at the Street of the Baths. In the middle of the path, to the left, a few yards distant, a block of white stone will be found. Starting from the block of stone, only one yard away from it, towards the setting sun, the pin so much sought for will be found. Go, I accompany you.’
“I copy verbatim this communication, which was obtained letter by letter. I add nothing, take nothing from it. General stupefaction! We hesitate! Finally, we all four rise, we light a lantern and set out. It was twenty minutes to ten o’clock.
“We walk slowly; we arrive at the Municipal Building, and take the path which leads from it to the Street of the Baths. In the middle, to the left, some yards distant, we, in fact, find the block of stone indicated. We search for a moment without result, and begin to fear we shall find nothing. Finally, towards the setting sun, a yard from the block of stone, I find buried in the grass, covered with sand, and consequently badly soiled, the pin indicated.
“Some one had evidently stepped on it, as it was slightly bent. Mlle. Smith uttered an exclamation of surprise, and we all four returned to the house, to recover from our very natural emotion.”
This case has remained in the eyes of Mlle. Smith and her spiritistic friends as one of the most striking and irrefragible proofs of the objective and independent reality of Leopold. For the psychologist it constitutes a very beautiful and interesting example of cryptomnesia, well worthy to figure among the very instructive cases collected by Mr. Myers, in which the memory of a subliminal perception (i. e., registered immediately without striking the normal personality) appears as a revelation in a dream of ordinary sleep, or under some other equivalent form of automatism. Here is “Leopold”—the subconsciousness of Hélène—who, having felt the pin fall and noticed where it rolled, first manifested himself in a passing nocturnal vision, and then took advantage of the next spiritistic gathering to restore completely her latent memories. It is not necessary to see anything intentional in this restitution, the simple play of association of ideas sufficing to explain that the memory of the situation of the pin stored up in a subliminal stratum and stimulated by a desire to recover the lost object might have mechanically reappeared at the moment of the seance, thanks to mediumistic autohypnotization, and gushed forth under the dramatic form, naturally appropriate to the environment, of an apparently supernormal piece of information furnished by Leopold.
3. Retrocognitions.—The apparently supernormal revelations in regard to the past, furnished at the seances of Mlle. Smith, can be divided into two groups—namely, whether they concern universal history, or deal with private interests relative to the families of the sitters.
First: The messages of the first group abound, under the form of visions accompanied by typtological explanations, in Hélène’s seances of 1894, but have almost wholly come to an end since I made her acquaintance, and I have never been witness of any. According to the reports which I have seen, all these retrocognitions have reference to the history of Protestantism, or that of the French Revolution—i. e., to two classes of facts which are among the best known in France to-day.
It goes without saying that the firmly convinced spiritistic group in which these messages were received have never had a doubt that the apparitions which Hélène perceived were the veritable personages they asserted themselves to be, habited as they were in the costume of the period to which they belonged, communicating by means of the table, and speaking in the first person (except when Leopold acted as showman and dictated in his own name the explanations asked for).
But as the content of these messages is always the verbatim reproduction or almost exact equivalent of information which is to be found in historical and biographical dictionaries, I cannot avoid being inclined to the impression that we here are concerned with common facts of cryptomnesia.
If the intervention of the supernormal be absolutely insisted upon in this case, it can only be manifested under the form of a telepathic transmission from the sitters to the medium. In favor of that supposition two facts may be urged: first, that Mlle. Smith passed in that group as devoid of all historical knowledge, and was very much surprised at these revelations of facts totally unknown to her; secondly, that there were regularly in attendance at these seances one or more members of the teaching body, who by their general education possessed, without any doubt whatever, either consciously or in a latent manner, all the historical knowledge, which, after all, was not very great, displayed by Leopold.
But these arguments are not of much weight in my opinion. To begin with the second: as the sitters had their hands on the table at the same time with the medium, according to the spiritistic custom, they could themselves, without any telepathy, properly speaking, and simply by their slight, unconscious muscular contractions, have directed, unknown to themselves, the movements of that piece of furniture, Mlle. Smith only augmenting these shocks proceeding from her neighbors.
As to the supposed ignorance of Mlle. Smith, it is not at all so great as has been imagined, and the historical revelations obtained at her seances do not in any degree surpass the level of that which she could have absorbed, consciously or unconsciously, at school and in her surroundings.
Moreover, the hypothesis which appears to me the most probable, and on which I rest, is that the messages come essentially from Hélène herself—I ought rather to say from her subliminal memory; that, however, does not exclude a certain amount of co-operation on the part of the sitters, whose conversation, on the one hand, and their unconscious muscular action upon the table, on the other, have often maintained and directed the course of the subconscious ideas of the medium and the automatic unfolding of her latent memories.
Secondly: Retrocognition of family events, which are exhibited in Mlle. Smith’s seances, have generally the savor of the unknown for the sitters, from the fact that they concern incidents of the past which have never been printed save in the memories of certain aged persons or of a few lovers of local anecdotes.
I do not hesitate to see in these stories of other days, gushing forth in visions and in dictations by the table in the course of Hélène’s hemisomnambulisms, narratives heard in her childhood and long since forgotten by her ordinary personality, but which reappear by the aid of mediumistic autohypnotization, bringing the deepest strata to the surface; the simple play of association, in an entirely natural manner, then causes the memories relative to the families of the persons present at the seance to be poured forth. There is nothing whatever of the supernormal in all this, in spite of the dramatic form, the piquant and unexpected art, the amusing embellishments, of which the subliminal imagination bethinks itself—or I should rather say Leopold, in his rôle of historiographer and scene-shifter of the past.
The judgment which I have pronounced is the result of a course of inductive reasoning based on the retrocognitions of Mlle. Smith concerning my own family. I trust it may be allowable for me to enter upon some details designed to justify my opinion.
I note first that all these retrocognitions with which Leopold honored me took place in the first six seances which I had with Hélène, after which there has not been a single one in the whole five years which have since elapsed. This argues in favor of a limited group of latent memories, which my introduction to the seances set free, a sort of subliminal sac or pocket which was emptied once for all on the first occasions of my presence.
In the second place, this knowledge only concerns outside details, susceptible of striking the attention of the gallery and of being carried from mouth to mouth. Since family histories have no great interest for the ordinary reader, I will confine myself to citing, by way of example, the vision which so astonished me at my first meeting with Hélène (p. [2]), and which has already been published by M. Lemaître. I reproduce his narrative, giving real names:
“The medium [Mlle. Smith] perceives a long trail of smoke, which envelopes M. Flournoy. ‘A woman!’ cries the medium, and, a moment after, ‘Two women ... quite pretty, brunettes ... both are in bridal toilet!... This concerns you, M. Flournoy!’ [The table approves by a rap.] They remain motionless; they have white flowers in their hair and resemble each other a little; their eyes, like their hair, are black, or, at all events, very dark. The one in the corner appears under two different aspects; under both forms she is young—perhaps twenty-five years old; on the one hand she remains with the appearance already described (bridal toilet), and on the other she appears very luminous in a great space, a little more slender of visage, and surrounded by a number of pretty children, in the midst of whom she appears very happy; her happiness manifests itself by her expression, but still more in her surroundings. Both women seem ready to be married. The medium then hears a name, which at first escapes her, then returns little by little. ‘An!... An!... Dan ... Ran ... Dandi ... Dandiran!’
“‘To which of these two women does this name belong?’ demands M. Flournoy—‘to the one you see under two aspects, or to the other?’ Answer: ‘To the one who is presented under two forms.’ The medium does not see the other woman as distinctly as the first, but all at once distinguishes a tall man by her side, who only passes by, when the table dictates: ‘I am his sister; we will return!’ after which the scene changes and we pass to another subject.”
This vision revolves altogether around the facts that my mother and her sister were married on the same day; that they were brunettes, quite pretty, and looked alike; that my father was tall; that my aunt married M. Dandiran and died while still young, without children; all matters which should have been of public notoriety in a small city like Geneva. But the same is true of all the other retrocognitions of Mlle. Smith; their content is always veridical, but at the same time is also such as could not fail to be known to a host of people. This causes me to doubt whether there is at the base of these phenomena a really supernormal faculty of retrocognition.
A third striking feature is, that all Hélène’s retrocognitions concerning me are relative to the family of my mother, and are connected with two quite precise and brief periods, the first of which is many years previous to Mlle. Smith’s birth. This limitation as to times and persons seems to me significant.
To clear up the matter, if possible, I addressed myself to the last representative of the present generation of my family, Professor Dandiran, of Lausanne, and laid the case before him. He did not immediately remember whether my grandparents Claparède had any communication, nearly half a century before, with the Smith family, but on the following day he wrote me that he distinctly recalled a young woman of that name in whom his mother and aunt had been greatly interested, and who had been employed by them as a dressmaker previous to her marriage to a Hungarian.
One understands that I had a reason for not addressing myself first to Mme. Smith herself; but I must do her the justice to state that when I questioned her in turn, she very obligingly gave me all the information I desired, and which was in perfect accord with the statements of M. Dandiran.
Without entering into details wearisome to the reader, it will be sufficient for me to state that all the retrocognitions in which I was involved were connected with two periods in which Mme. Smith had relations with my mother’s family, periods separated by an interval during which these relations were suspended by the fact of M. and Mme. Smith making a sojourn of several years in a foreign country. It would have been possible for Hélène to know directly the facts of the second period, at which time she was about five or six years of age. As to the first period, which was many years prior to her birth (the time of the double marriage of my mother and her sister in 1853), it is evident that Mme. Smith has had many opportunities at a later date to narrate these facts to her daughter; and it would have been altogether natural for her to have done so.
Ab uno disce omnes. Although I am less familiar with the retrocognitions of Mlle. Smith concerning other families, everything contributes to prove to me that they are explicable in the same manner. In two cases, at least, proof has been obtained that the mother of Mlle. Smith was found to have been in direct and personal communication with the families concerned, exactly as was the case with my grandparents, and this circumstance is sufficient to account for the knowledge, very astonishing at first sight, contained in the revelations of Leopold.
To sum up—pure cryptomnesia seems to me to furnish a sufficient and adequate explanation for Hélène’s retrocognitions, both as to family events as well as historic facts.
And no more in this domain of knowledge of the past than in those of recovered objects and medical consultations have I thus far succeeded in discovering in her the least serious indication of supernormal faculties.