Another who visited Mrs Piper was the famous French author, M. Paul Bourget, who was astonished at what he heard. He happened to have on his watch-chain a small seal which had been given him by a painter, long since dead, under the saddest circumstances, of whom it was impossible the medium could ever have heard; yet no sooner had she touched the object than she related to him the circumstance. One could quote case after case in the Society's reports, but in all the time Mrs Piper has been under such rigid scrutiny not one suspicious instance or one pointing to normal acquisition of facts has been discovered.
Some have boldly hazarded the conjecture that Mrs Piper worked up the dossiers of her sitters beforehand; inasmuch as she could easily obtain her facts in many ways; by reading private letters, for instance, or information derived from other mediums, or by employing private inquiry agents. These things are said to be habitually done by professional clairvoyants, by either going themselves or sending an agent in the capacity of, say, a book canvasser, to some town or district, and get all the information they can, to return some months later and give clairvoyant sittings. There is a belief, and it is possibly correct, that there is an organisation which gives and exchanges information thus obtained by the members of the Society. Perhaps this may account for the extraordinary good fortune of some spiritualists in obtaining "tests." Some sitters who went to Mrs Piper had visited other mediums previously. But one may be sure that all precautions were taken to ensure against her knowing the names of the sitters, so that she could not use any information, even if she had obtained any, in this way. Those best qualified to judge are convinced that her knowledge was not gained in this way, partly because of the precautions used and partly by reason of the information itself.
As has been said, Mrs Piper was under the close scrutiny of Dr Hodgson for many years, and nothing of the kind has ever come to light. Also Dr Hodgson arranged beforehand her sittings for more than ten years, never telling her the names of the sitters, who in almost every instance were unknown to her by sight, and were without distinction introduced under the name of "Smith." She made so many correct statements at many individual sittings, and the proportion of successful sittings is so high, that it is very difficult to attribute fraud to her. About dates she appears to be very vague. She prefers to give Christian names to surnames, and of the former those in common use rather than those out of the way. As her descriptions of houses or places are generally failures, she seldom attempts them. Mrs Piper seems to be weakest, indeed, just where the so-called medium is most successful. Her strongest points are describing diseases, the character of the sitter, his idiosyncrasies, and the character of his friends, their sympathies, loves, hates, and relationships in general, unimportant incidents in their past histories, and so on. To retain such information in the memory is very difficult, and to obtain it by general means well-nigh impossible.
Many of the personalities or "controls" of Mrs Piper speak, write, and act in a way extraordinarily in consonance with those characters as they were on earth. In other words, her "controls" have well-differentiated identities. Each has a different manner, a different voice, different acts, different ways of looking at things; in fact, has a different character. For example, there is the spirit of G. P., a young journalist and author who died suddenly in February 1892. A few weeks later his spirit possessed Mrs Piper's organism, and although he was unknown to Mrs Piper in life, yet for years since then he has carried on numerous prolonged conversations with his friends, including Dr Hodgson, and supplied numerous proofs of his knowledge of the concerns of the deceased G. P. G. P.'s personal effects, MSS., etc., are referred to, as well as private conversations of the past, and, moreover, he suddenly recognises amongst those attending Mrs Piper's séances those whom he knew during life. Dr Hodgson was unable to find any instance when such recognition has been incorrectly given. But G. P. is only one of several trance personations speaking through Mrs Piper's organism and recognised by friends.
After a contemplation of Mrs Piper's trance utterances alone we are inevitably faced by a choice of three conclusions: either (1) fraud (and fraud I hold here to be absolutely inadmissible); or (2) the possession of some supernormal power of apprehension; or (3) communication with the spirits of deceased persons.
Dr Hodgson was driven by sheer force of logic to accept the third of these hypotheses. Others who have studied the phenomena have followed. Dr J. H. Hyslop has published a record of the sittings held with Mrs Piper in 1898 and 1899. His report contains the verbatim record of seventeen sittings, and no pains have been spared to make the record complete. It has exhaustive commentaries and accounts of experiments intended to elucidate the supposed difficulties of trance communication. Professor Hyslop finally arrives at the conclusion, after an extensive investigation, during which no item of the evidence has failed to be weighed and no possible source of error would seem to have escaped consideration, that spirit communication is the only explanation which fits all the facts, and he altogether rejects telepathy as being inadequate.
I hope that those who have so far followed me in this brief inquiry into the mysteries of occult phenomena will recognise the impartiality with which I have endeavoured to conduct it. I said in the beginning that I set out with a light heart as well as an open mind. I had no idea of the extent of the territory, I knew little of its voluminous literature, of the extraordinary ramifications of occultism, of the labours of the many learned men who have spent their whole lives in seeking to separate fact from superstition. My mind was light because, frankly, I believed—with a sort of inherent, temperamental belief—that, however much the testimony concerning coincident dreams, hallucinations, mediumistic manifestations, materialisation, and clairvoyance might mystify, it was all capable of normal explanation—there was nothing supernatural about it. And so throughout the inquiry I sought to show how, chiefly, telepathy was a working hypothesis in most of the manifestations, while for the physical ones, such as table rapping, levitations, and the rest, an unknown extension of human muscular power might possibly exist to solve the mystery. So far I strode forward with some confidence. But now the time has come when my confidence deserts me. Telepathy breaks down. It is a key which by no amount of wriggling will turn the lock. "It is not," as one leading inquirer has said, "that telepathy is insufficient: it is superfluous." If the existence of disembodied spirits is proved, then all the other phenomena are also proved.
If the case of Mrs Piper—under rigid surveillance for years—has convinced some of the profoundest intellects of the day—men who began by being sceptical—that disembodied spirits are responsible for her utterances, it would certainly tend to convince me. But I carefully guarded myself from conviction until I had read the evidence—even to a résumé of this medium's utterances last year in London under the auspices of the Society for Psychical Research—and I assert with confidence that no metaphysical theory has ever been formulated that will account for these manifestations save one—the survival of the human personality after death. Once Mrs Piper is admitted as genuine, then it follows that the spiritistic manifestations which have puzzled mankind, not merely for generations or during the modern cult of spiritism, but ever since primitive times, become, as it were, emancipated.
"It does seem to me," said Mr Balfour, in his famous Society for Psychical Research address, "that there is at least strong ground for supposing that outside the world, as we have, from the point of science, been in the habit of conceiving it, there does lie a region, not open indeed to experimental observation in the same way as the more familiar regions of the material world are open to it, but still with regard to which some experimental information may be laboriously gleaned; and even if we cannot entertain any confident hope of discovering what laws these half-seen phenomena obey, at all events it will be some gain to have shown, not as a matter of speculation or conjecture, but as a matter of ascertained fact, that there are things in heaven and earth not hitherto dreamed of in our scientific philosophy."