Very briefly, the story was as follows: Mr. Davey was an amateur conjurer of some skill who set himself to imitate by trickery the performances of Slade, Eglington, and other exponents of “slate-writing” phenomena. In this he succeeded to admiration—so much so that certain spiritualists characteristically insisted that he must be a very powerful “medium”! He scrupulously denied himself the advantage of claiming his results as supernormal, but in spite of this found no difficulty in imposing on his sitters. The latter were encouraged to take every possible precaution against trickery and were instructed to write the most careful reports of what occurred.
A number of reports were thus obtained from men and women of unquestionable intelligence and acumen which, if they had been even approximately accurate, would have established the supernormality of Mr. Davey’s phenomena beyond any peradventure. But comparison of their reports with the known and recorded procedure which actually took place showed the most astonishing discrepancies. Omissions and distortions of the first importance were abundant and the experiments proved to the hilt that, for phenomena of this kind, the reports of untrained witnesses are, in general, not worth the paper they are written on.
I wish that space permitted me to quote, in parallel columns, some of these Davey reports and some of those given by witnesses of photographic séances so that my readers could see how very similar the circumstances are.
But I must content myself with pointing out that whereas in the one case everything turned on whether the “medium” had any chance of substituting or tampering with slates, so in the other it is a matter of whether there has been any chance of substituting or tampering with plates. The reports of intelligent witnesses proved worthless in the one case, and it seems reasonable to suppose that they are no more valuable in the other.
So, to anyone who thinks that in the mouth of two or three witnesses the genuineness of spirit photographs shall be established, I would say, “Go home and invest a few shillings in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vols. iv. and viii.—it will be more profitable than the same amount laid out in photographic séances—and when you have carefully read their account of the Davey experiments in conjunction with Mr. Patrick’s paper, see whether your confidence in spirit photographs is as strong as ever!”
I have drawn attention to these experiments of Mr. Davey elsewhere and I am sorry to be obliged to insist on their importance again. But until people learn that the reports of uninstructed observers—however acute in other respects—are utterly unreliable, the fraudulent medium will flourish and the unsuspecting public will be robbed and deceived.
VII.—The Value of Recognition
(W. Whately Smith)
Believers in spirit photographs generally consider that they are playing their trump card when they point out that thousands of “extras” have been definitely recognised by sitters as portraits of their deceased friends or relatives. But this card, impressive as it looks, will not really take the trick. If it could be shown (i.) that a given “extra” was unmistakably recognisable as a portrait of a deceased—or even of a living—person, and (ii.) that the medium concerned could not possibly have obtained a likeness of that person to work from, then we should be obliged to attach great weight to this factor, even if the conditions were not otherwise such as to exclude fraud. For such a result could not be fraudulently produced. But in spite of the perfectly honest assertions of many investigators, it seems very doubtful whether this state of affairs has ever been realised.