THE BORDER-LAND OF LIFE AND DEATH
WELL, in examining these facts, however strange and really unparalleled some of them may be, I never find one which proceeds frankly from this world or which comes indisputably from the other. They are, if you wish, phenomenal border incidents; but it cannot be said that the border has been violated. It is simply a matter of distant perception, subliminal clairvoyance, and telepathy raised to the highest power; and these three manifestations of the unexplored depths of man are to-day recognized and classified by science, which is not saying that they are explained. That is another question. When, in connection with electricity, we use such terms as positive, negative, induction, potential, and resistance, we are also applying conventional words to facts and phenomena of the inward essence of which we are utterly ignorant; and we must needs be content with these, pending better. Between these extraordinary manifestations and those given to us by a medium who is not speaking in the name of the dead, there is, I insist, only a difference of the greater and the lesser, a difference of extent or degree, and in no wise a difference in kind.
For the proof to be more decisive, it would be necessary that neither the medium nor the witnesses should ever have known of the existence of him whose past is revealed by the dead man; in other words, that every living link should be eliminated. I do not believe that this has ever actually occurred, nor even that it is possible; in any case, it would be a very difficult experiment to control. Be this as it may, Dr. Hodgson, who devoted part of his life to the quest of specific phenomena wherein the boundaries of mediumistic power should be plainly overstepped, believes that he found them in certain cases, of which, as the others were of very much the same nature, I will merely mention one of the most striking. In a course of excellent sittings with Mrs. Piper, the medium, he communicated with various dead friends who reminded him of a large number of common memories. The medium, the spirits, and he himself seemed in a wonderfully accommodating mood; and the revelations were plentiful, exact, and easy. In this extremely favorable atmosphere, he was placed in communication with the soul of one of his best friends, who had died a year before, and whom he simply called “A.” This A, whom he had known more intimately than most of the spirits with whom he had communicated previously, behaved quite differently and, while establishing his identity beyond dispute, vouchsafed only incoherent replies. Now, A “had been troubled much, for years before his death, by headaches and occasionally mental exhaustion, though not amounting to positive mental disturbance.”
The same phenomenon appears to recur whenever similar troubles have come before death, as in cases of suicide.
“If the telepathic explanation is held to be the only one,” says Dr. Hodgson (I give the gist of his observations), “if it is claimed that all the communications of these discarnate minds are only suggestions from my subconscious self, it is unintelligible that, after having obtained satisfactory results from others whom I had known far less intimately than A and with whom I had consequently far fewer recollections in common, I should get from him, in the same sittings, nothing but incoherencies. I am thus driven to believe that my subliminal self is not the only thing in evidence, that it is in the presence of a real, living personality, whose mental state is the same as it was at the hour of death, a personality which remains independent of my subliminal consciousness and absolutely unaffected by it, which is deaf to its suggestions, and draws from its own resources the revelations which it makes.”
The argument is not without value, but its full force would be obtained only if it were certain that none of those present knew of A’s madness; otherwise it can be contended that, the notion of madness having penetrated the subconscious intelligence of one of them, it worked upon it and gave to the replies induced a form in keeping with the state of mind presupposed in the dead man.