There are here twelve miracles! Home and Iamblichus add to Mr. Moses’s répertoire the alteration of the medium’s height or bulk. This feat still leaves Mr. Moses ‘one up,’ as regards Home, in whose presence objects did not disappear, nor did they pass through stone walls. The questions are, to account for the continuity of collective hallucinations, if we accept that hypothesis, and to explain the procedure of Mr. Moses, if he were an impostor. He did not exhibit before more than seven or eight private friends, and he gained neither money nor dazzling social success by his performances.
This page in the chapter of ‘demoniac affections’ is thus still in the state of ébauche. Mr. Moses believed his experiences to be ‘demoniac affections,’ in the Neoplatonic sense. Could his phenomena have been investigated by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Parker, Messrs. Maskelyne and Cook, and Professor Huxley, the public mind might have arrived at some conclusion on the subject. But Mr. Moses’s chief spirit, known in society as ‘Imperator,’ declined to let strangers look on. He testified his indignation in a manner so bruyant, he so banged on tables, that Mr. Moses and his friends thought it wiser to avoid an altercation.
This exclusiveness of ‘Imperator’ certainly donne furieusement à penser. If spirits are spirits they may just as well take it for understood that performances ‘done in a corner’ are of no scientific value. But we are still at a loss for a ‘round’ and satisfactory hypothesis which will colligate all the alleged facts, and explain their historical continuity. We merely state that continuity as a historical fact. Marvels of savages, Neoplatonists, saints of Church or Covenant, ‘spontaneous’ phenomena, Mediumistic phenomena, all hang together in some ways. Of this the Church has her own explanation.
COMPARATIVE PSYCHICAL RESEARCH
A Party at Ragley Castle. The Miraculous Conformist. The Restoration and Scepticism. Experimental Proof of Spiritual Existence. Glanvill. Boyle. More. The Gentleman’s Butler. ‘Levitation.’ Witchcraft. Movements of Objects. The Drummer of Tedworth. Haunted Houses. Rerrick. Glenluce. Ghosts. ‘Spectral Evidence.’ Continuity and Uniformity of Stories. St. Joseph of Cupertino, his Flights. Modern Instances. Theory of Induced Hallucination. Ibn Batuta. Animated Furniture. From China to Peru. Rapping Spirit at Lyons. The Imposture at Orleans. The Stockwell Mystery. The Demon of Spraiton. Modern Instances. The Wesleys. Theory of Imposture. Conclusion.
In the month of February, 1665, there was assembled at Ragley Castle as curious a party as ever met in an English country-house. The hostess was the Lady Conway, a woman of remarkable talent and character, but wholly devoted to mystical speculations. In the end, unrestrained by the arguments of her clerical allies, she joined the Society of Friends, by the world called Quakers. Lady Conway at the time when her guests gathered at Ragley, as through all her later life, was suffering from violent chronic headache. The party at Ragley was invited to meet her latest medical attendant, an unlicensed practitioner, Mr. Valentine Greatrakes, or Greatorex; his name is spelled in a variety of ways. Mr. Greatrakes was called ‘The Irish Stroker’ and ‘The Miraculous Conformist’ by his admirers, for, while it was admitted that Dissenters might frequently possess, or might claim, powers of miracle, the gift, or the pretension, was rare among members of the Established Church. The person of Mr. Greatrakes, if we may believe Dr. Henry Stubbe, physician at Stratford-on-Avon, diffused a pleasing fragrance as of violets. Lord Herbert of Cherbury, it will be remembered, tells the same story about himself in his memoirs. Mr. Greatrakes ‘is a man of graceful personage and presence, and if my phantasy betrayed not my judgement,’ says Dr. Stubbe, ‘I observed in his eyes and meene a vivacitie and spritelinesse that is nothing common’.
This Miraculous Conformist was the younger son of an Irish squire, and a person of some property. After the Restoration—and not before—Greatrakes felt ‘a strong and powerful impulse in him to essay’ the art of healing by touching, or stroking. He resisted the impulse, till one of his hands having become ‘dead’ or numb, he healed it by the strokes of the other hand. From that moment Greatrakes practised, and became celebrated; he cured some diseased persons, failed wholly with others, and had partial and temporary success with a third class. The descriptions given by Stubbe, in his letter to the celebrated Robert Boyle, and by Foxcroft, Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, leave little doubt that ‘The Irish Stroker’ was most successful with hypochondriacal and hysterical patients. He used to chase the disease up and down their bodies, if it did not ‘fly out through the interstices of his fingers,’ and if he could drive it into an outlying part, and then forth into the wide world, the patient recovered. So Dr. Stubbe reports the method of Greatrakes. [{86}] He was brought over from Ireland, at a charge of about £155, to cure Lady Conway’s headaches. In this it is confessed that he entirely failed; though he wrought a few miracles of healing among rural invalids. To meet this fragrant and miraculous Conformist, Lady Conway invited men worthy of the privilege, such as the Rev. Joseph Glanvill, F.R.S., the author of Sadducismus Triumphatus, his friend Dr. Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist, and other persons interested in mystical studies. Thus at Ragley there was convened the nucleus of an unofficial but active Society for Psychical Research, as that study existed in the seventeenth century.
The object of this chapter is to compare the motives, methods, and results of Lady Conway’s circle, with those of the modern Society for Psychical Research. Both have investigated the reports of abnormal phenomena. Both have collected and published narratives of eye-witnesses. The moderns, however, are much more strict on points of evidence than their predecessors. They are not content to watch, but they introduce ‘tests,’ generally with the most disenchanting results. The old researchers were animated by the desire to establish the tottering faith of the Restoration, which was endangered by the reaction against Puritanism. Among the fruits of Puritanism, and of that frenzied state of mind which accompanied the Civil War, was a furious persecution of ‘witches’. In a rare little book, Select Cases of Conscience, touching Witches and Witchcraft, by John Gaule, ‘preacher of the Word at Great Staughton in the county of Huntington’ (London, 1646), we find the author not denying the existence of witchcraft, but pleading for calm, learned and judicial investigation. To do this was to take his life in his hand, for Matthew Hopkins, a fanatical miscreant, was ruling in a Reign of Terror through the country. The clergy of the Church of England, as Hutchinson proves in his Treatise of Witchcraft (second edition, London, 1720), had been comparatively cautious in their treatment of the subject. Their record is far from clean, but they had exposed some impostures, chiefly, it is fair to say, where Nonconformists, or Catholics, had detected the witch. With the Restoration the general laxity went so far as to scoff at witchcraft, to deny its existence, and even, in the works of Wagstaff and Webster, to minimise the leading case of the Witch of Endor. Against the ‘drollery of Sadducism,’ the Psychical Researchers within the English Church, like Glanvill and Henry More, or beyond its pale, like Richard Baxter and many Scotch divines, defended witchcraft and apparitions as outworks of faith in general. The modern Psychical Society, whatever the predisposition of some of its members may be, explores abnormal phenomena, not in the interests of faith, but of knowledge. Again, the old inquirers were dominated by a belief in the devil. They saw witchcraft and demoniacal possession, where the moderns see hysterics and hypnotic conditions.
For us the topic is rather akin to mythology, and ‘folk-psychology,’ as the Germans call it. We are interested, as will be shown, in a most curious question of evidence, and the value of evidence. It will again appear that the phenomena reported by Glanvill, More, Sinclair, Kirk, Telfair, Bovet, are identical with those examined by Messrs. Gurney, Myers, Kellar (the American professional conjurer), and many others. The differences, though interesting, are rather temporary and accidental than essential.
A few moments of attention to the table talk of the party assembled at Ragley will enable us to understand the aims, the methods, and the ideas of the old informal society. By a lucky accident, fragments of the conversation may be collected from Glanvill’s Sadducismus Triumphatus, [{88a}] and from the correspondence of Glanvill, Henry More, and Robert Boyle. Mr. Boyle, among more tangible researches, devoted himself to collecting anecdotes, about the second sight. These manuscripts are not published in the six huge quarto volumes of Boyle’s works; on the other hand, we possess Lord Tarbet’s answer to his questions. [{88b}] Boyle, as his letters show, was a rather chary believer in witchcraft and possession. He referred Glanvill to his kinsman, Lord Orrery, who had enjoyed an experience not very familiar; he had seen a gentleman’s butler float in the air!