We next come to a very good ghost of the old and now rather unfashionable sort. The authority is Mr. William Brown, who had it from the Rev. Mr. Mercer of Aberdalgie, ‘as what was generally belived as to Dr. Rule, Principal at Edinburgh’. Such is Wodrow’s way, his ideas of evidence are quite rudimentary. Give him a ghost, and he does not care for ‘contemporary record,’ or ‘corroborative testimony’. To come to the story. Dr. Rule, finding no room at an inn near Carnie Mount, had a fire lit in a chamber of a large deserted house hard by. He went to bed, leaving a bright fire burning, when ‘the room dore is opened, and an apparition, in shape of a country tradsman, came in, and opened the courtains without speaking a word’. The doctor determined not to begin a conversation, so the apparition lighted the candles, brought them to the bedside, and backed to the door. Dr. Rule, like old Brer Rabbit, ‘kept on a-saying nothing’. ‘Then the apparition took an effectuall way to raise the doctor. He caryed back the candles to the table, and, with the tongs, took doun the kindled coals, and laid them on the deal chamber floor.’ Dr. Rule now ‘thought it was time to rise,’ and followed the appearance, who carried the candles downstairs, set them on the lowest step, and vanished. Dr. Rule then lifted the candles, and went back to bed. Next morning he went to the sheriff, and told him there ‘was murder in it’. The sheriff said, ‘it might be so,’ but, even if so, the crime was not recent, as the house for thirty years had stood empty. The step was taken up, and a dead body was found, ‘and bones, to the conviction of all’. The doctor then preached on these unusual events, and an old man of eighty fell a-weeping, confessing that, as a mason lad, he had killed a companion, and buried him in that spot, while the house was being built. Consequently the house, though a new one, was haunted from the first, and was soon deserted. The narrator, Mr. Mercer, had himself seen two ghosts of murdered boys frequently in Dundee. He did not speak, nor did they, and as the rooms were comfortable he did not leave them. To have talked about the incident would only have been injurious to his landlady. ‘The longer I live, the more unexpected things I meet with, and even among my own relations,’ says Mr. Wodrow with much simplicity. But he never met with a ghost, nor even with any one who had met with a ghost, except Mr. Mercer.
In the same age, or earlier, Increase Mather represents apparitions as uncommonly scarce in New England, though diabolical possession and witchcraft were as familiar as influenza. It has been shown that, in nearly forty years of earnest collecting, Mr. Wodrow did not find a single supernatural occurrence which was worth investigating by the curious. Every tale was old, or some simple natural cause was at the bottom of the mystery, or the narrative rested on vague gossip, or was a myth. Today, at any dinner party, you may hear of bogles and wraiths at first or at second hand, in an abundance which would have rejoiced Wodrow. Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe vainly brags, in Law’s Memorialls, that ‘good sense and widely diffused information have driven our ghosts to a few remote castles in the North of Scotland’ (1819). But, however we are to explain it, the ghosts have come forth again, and, like golf, have crossed the Tweed. Now this is a queer result of science, common-sense, cheap newspapers, popular education, and progress in general. We may all confess to a belief in ghosts, because we call them ‘phantasmogenetic agencies,’ and in as much of witchcraft as we style ‘hypnotic suggestion’. So great, it seems, is the force of language! [{303}]
THE LOGIC OF TABLE-TURNING
Bias in belief. Difficulty of examining problems in which unknown personal conditions are dominant. Comte Agénor de Gasparin on table-turning. The rise of modern table-turning. Rapping. French examples. A lady bitten by a spirit. Flying objects. The ‘via media’ of M. de Gasparin. Tables are turned by recondite physical causes: not by muscular or spiritual actions. The author’s own experiments. Motion without contact. Dr. Carpenter’s views. Incredulity of M. de Gasparin as to phenomena beyond his own experience. Ancient Greek phenomena. M. de Gasparin rejects ‘spirits’. Dr. Carpenter neglects M. de Gasparin’s evidence. Survival and revival. Delacourt’s case. Home’s case. Simon Magus. Early scientific training. Its results. Conclusion.
While reason is fondly supposed to govern our conduct, and direct our conclusions, there is no doubt that our opinions are really regulated by custom, temperament, hope, and fear. We believe or disbelieve because other people do so, because our character is attracted to, or repelled by the unusual, the mysterious; because, from one motive or another, we wish things to be thus, or fear that they may be thus, or hope that they may be so, and cannot but dread that they are otherwise. Again, the laws of Nature which have been ascertained are enough for the conduct of life, and science constantly, and with excellent reason, resists to the last gasp every attempt to recognise the existence of a new law, which, after all, can apparently do little for the benefit of mankind, and may conceivably do something by no means beneficial. Again, science is accustomed to deal with constant phenomena, which, given the conditions, will always result. The phenomena of the marvellous are not constant, or, rather, the conditions cannot be definitely ascertained. When Mr. Crookes made certain experiments on Home’s power of causing a balance to move without contact he succeeded; in the presence of some Russian savants a similar experiment failed. Granting that Mr. Crookes’s tests were accurate (and the lay mind, at least, can see no flaw in them), we must suppose that the personal conditions, in the Russian case, were not the same.
Now an electric current will inevitably do its work, if known and ascertained conditions are present; a personal current, so to speak, depends on personal conditions which are unascertainable. It is inevitable that science, accustomed to the invariable, should turn away from phenomena which, if they do occur, seem, so far, to have a will of their own. That they have a will of their own is precisely their attraction for another class of minds, which recognises in them the action of unknown intelligences. There are also people who so dislike our detention in the prison house of old unvarying laws, that their bias is in favour of anything which may tend to prove that science, in her contemporary mood, is not infallible. As the Frenchman did not care what sort of scheme he invested money in, ‘provided that it annoys the English,’ so many persons do not care what they invest belief in, provided that it irritates men of science. Just as rationally, some men of science denounce all investigation of the abnormal phenomena of which history and rumour are so full, because the research may bring back distasteful beliefs, and revive the ‘ancestral tendency’ to superstition. Yet the question is not whether the results of research may be dangerous, but whether the phenomena occur. The speculations of Copernicus, of Galileo, of the geologists, of Mr. Darwin, were ‘dangerous,’ and it does not appear that they have added to the sum of human delight. But men of science are still happiest when denouncing the ‘obscurantism’ of those who opposed Copernicus, Mr. Darwin, and the rest, in dread of the moral results. We owe the strugforlifeur of M. Daudet to Mr. Darwin and Mr. Alfred Wallace, and the strugforlifeur is as dangerous and disagreeable as the half-crazy spiritualist. Science is only concerned with truth, not with the mischievous inferences which people may draw from truth. And yet certain friends of science, quite naturally and normally, fall back on the attitude of the opponents of Copernicus: ‘These things,’ they say, ‘should not even be examined’.
Such are the hostile and distracting influences, the contending currents, in the midst of which Reason has to operate as well as she can. Meanwhile every one of us probably supposes himself to be a model of pure reason, and if people would only listen to him, the measure of the universe. This happy and universal frame of mind is agreeably illustrated in a work by the late Comte Agénor de Gasparin, Les Tables Tournantes (Deuxième edition: Levy, Paris, 1888). The first edition is of 1854, and was published at a time of general excitement about ‘table-turning’ and ‘spirit-rapping,’ an excitement which only old people remember, and which it is amazing to read about.
Modern spirit-rapping, of which table-turning is a branch, began, as we know, in 1847-48. A family of Methodists named Fox, entered, in 1847, on the tenancy of a house in Hydesville, in the State of New York. The previous occupants had been disturbed by ‘knocking,’ this continued in the Fox régime, one of the little girls found that the raps would answer (a discovery often made before) a system of alphabetic communication was opened, and spiritualism was launched. [{307}] In March, 1853, a packet of American newspapers reached Bremen, and, as Dr. Andrée wrote to the Gazette d’Augsbourg (March 30, 1853), all Bremen took to experiments in turning tables. The practice spread like a new disease, even men of science and academicians were puzzled, it is a fact that, at a breakfast party in Macaulay’s rooms in the Albany, a long and heavy table became vivacious, to Macaulay’s disgust, when the usual experiment was tried. Men of science were, in some cases, puzzled, in others believed that a new force must be recognised, in others talked of unconscious pushing or of imposture. M. Babinet, a member of the Institute, writing in the Revue des Deux Mondes (May, 1854), explained the ‘raps’ or percussive noises, as the result of ventriloquism! A similar explanation was urged, and withdrawn, in the case of the Cock Lane ghost, and it does not appear that M. Babinet produced a ventriloquist who could do the trick. Raps may be counterfeited in many ways, but hardly by ventriloquism. The raps were, in Europe, a later phenomenon than the table-turning, and aroused far more interest. The higher clergy investigated the matter, and the Bishop of Mans in a charge, set down the phenomena to the agency of some kind of spirits, with whom Christian men should have no commerce. Granting the facts, the bishop was undeniably right.
There was published at that time a journal called La Table Parlante, which contained recitals of phenomena, correspondence, and so forth. Among the narratives, that of a M. Benezet was typical, and is curious. In recent years, about 1872-80, the Rev. Mr. Stainton Moses, a clergyman and scholar of the best moral reputation, believed himself to be the centre of extraordinary, and practically incredible, occurrences, a belief shared by observers among his friends. M. Benezet’s narrative is full of precisely parallel details. M. Benezet lived at Toulouse, in 1853; and his experiences had for their scene his own house, and that of his relations, M. and Mme. L. The affair began in table-turning and table-tilting: the tilts indicated the presence of ‘spirits,’ which answered questions, right or wrong: under the hands of the L.’s the table became vivacious, and chased a butterfly. Then the spirit said it could appear as an old lady, who was viewed by one of the children. The L.’s being alarmed, gave up making experiments, but one day, at dinner, thumps were struck on the table. M. Benezet was called in, and heard the noises with awe. He went away, but the knocks sounded under the chair of Mme. L., she threw some holy water under the chair, when her thumb was bitten, and marks of teeth were left on it. Presently her shoulder was bitten, whether on a place which she could reach with her teeth or not, we are not informed. Raps went on, the L.’s fled to M. Benezet’s house, which was instantly disturbed in the same fashion. Objects were spirited away, and reappeared as oddly as they had vanished. Packets of bonbons turned up unbeknown, sailed about the room, and suddenly fell on the table at dinner. The L.’s went back to their own house, where their hats and boots contracted a habit of floating dreamily about in the air. Things were hurled at them, practical jokes were played, and in September these monstrous annoyances gradually ceased. The most obvious explanation is that Mme. L. demoralised by turning tables, took, consciously or unconsciously, to imitating the tricks of which history and legend are full. Her modus, operandi, in some phenomena, is difficult to conjecture.
While opinion was agitated by these violent events, and contending hypotheses, while La Table Parlante took a Catholic view, and Science a negative view, M. Agénor de Gasparin, a Protestant, chose a via media.