Dr. Carpenter frequently invoked for the explanation of marvels, a cause which is vera causa, expectancy. ‘The expectation of a certain result is often enough to produce it’ (p. 12). This he proves by cases of hypnotised patients who did, or suffered, what they expected to be ordered to suffer or do, though no such order was really given to them. Again (p. 40) he urges that imaginative people, who sit for a couple of hours, ‘especially if in the dark,’ believing or hoping to see a human body, or a table, rise in the air, probably ‘pass into a state which is neither sleeping nor waking, but between the two, in which they see, hear, or feel by touch, anything they have been led to expect will present itself.’
This is, indeed, highly probable. But we must suppose that all present fall into this ambiguous state, described of old by Porphyry. One waking spectator who sees nothing would make the statements of the others even more worthless than usual. And it is certain that it is not even pretended that all, always, see the same phenomena.
‘One saw an arm, and one a hand, and one the waving of a gown,’ in that séance at Branxholme, where only William of Deloraine beheld all,
And knew, but how it mattered not,
It was the wizard, Michael Scott. [{329}]
Granting the ambiguous state, granting darkness, and expectancy, anything may seem to happen. But Dr. Carpenter wholly omits such cases as that of Mr. Hamilton Aïdé, and of M. Alphonse Karr. Both were absolutely sceptical. Both disliked Home very much, and thought him an underbred Yankee quack and charlatan. Both were in the ‘expectancy’ of seeing no marvels, were under ‘the dominant idea’ that nothing unusual would occur. Both, in a brilliantly lighted room of a villa near Nice, saw a chair make a rush from the wall into the middle of the room, and saw a very large and heavy table, untouched, rise majestically in the air. M. Karr at once got under the table, and hunted, vainly, for mechanical appliances. Then he and Mr. Aide went home, disconcerted, and in very bad humour. How do ‘expectancy’ and the ‘dominant idea’ explain this experience, which Mr. Aïdé has published in the Nineteenth Century? The expectancy and dominant ideas of these gentlemen should have made them see the table and chair sit tight, while believers observed them in active motion. Again, how could Mr. Crookes’s lack of ‘a special training in the bodily and mental constitution, abnormal as well as normal,’ of ‘mediums,’ affect his power of observing whether a plank of wood did, or did not, move to a certain extent untouched, or slightly touched, and whether the difference of position was, or was not, registered mechanically? (p. 70). It was a pure matter of skilled and trained observation in mechanics. Dr. Huggins was also present at this experiment in a mode of motion. Him Dr. Carpenter gracefully discredited as an ‘amateur,’ without ‘a broad basis of general scientific culture’. He had devoted himself ‘to a branch of research which tasks the keenest powers of observation’. Now it was precisely powers of observation that were required. ‘There are moral sources of error,’ of which a mere observer like Dr. Huggins would be unaware. And ‘one of the most potent of these is a proclivity to believe in the reality of spiritual communications,’ particularly dangerous in a case where ‘spiritual communications,’ were not in question! The question was, did an indicator move, or not, under a certain amount of pressure? Indiscreetly enough, to be sure, the pressure was attributed to ‘psychic force,’ and perhaps that was what Dr. Carpenter had in his mind, when he warned Dr. Huggins against ‘the proclivity to believe in the reality of spiritual communications’.
About a wilderness of other phenomena, attested by scores of sane people, from Lord Crawford to Mr. S. C. Hall, Dr. Carpenter ‘left himself no time to speak’ (p. 105). This was convenient, but the lack of time prevented Dr. Carpenter from removing our stumbling-block, the one obstacle which keeps us from adopting, with no shadow of doubt, the theory that explains all the marvels by the survival and revival of savage delusions. Dr. Carpenter’s hypothesis of expectancy, of a dominant idea, acting on believers, in an ambiguous state, and in the dark, can do much, but it cannot account for the experience of wide-awake sceptics, under the opposite dominant idea, in a brilliant light.
Dr. Carpenter exposed and exploded a quantity of mesmeric spiritualistic myths narrated by Dr. Gregory, by Miss Martineau, and by less respectable if equally gullible authorities. But, speaking merely as perplexed and unconvinced students of argument and evidence, we cannot say that he removed the difficulties which have been illustrated and described.
Table-turning, after what is called a ‘boom’ in 1853-60, is now an abandoned amusement. It is deserted, like croquet, and it is even less to be regretted. But its existence enabled disputants to illustrate the ordinary processes of reasoning; each making assertions up to the limit of his personal experience; each attacking, as ‘superstitious,’ all who had seen, or fancied they had seen, more than himself, and each fighting gallantly for his own explanatory hypothesis, which never did explain any phenomena beyond those attested by his own senses. The others were declared not to exist, or to be the result of imposture and mal-observation,—and perhaps they were.
The truly diverting thing is that Home did not believe in the other ‘mediums,’ nor in anything in the way of a marvel (such as matter passing through matter) which he had not seen with his own eyes. Whether Home’s incredulity should be reckoned as a proof of his belief in his own powers, might be argued either way.