At the point at which we have now arrived in this chapter of explanations we are precisely in the position of Alexander Aksakof when he wrote his great work, Animism and Spiritualism, in reply to the book of Dr. von Hartmann on Spiritualism. Hartman claimed to explain all of these psychical phenomena by the following hypothesis.
A nervous force producing, outside of the limits of the human body, mechanical and plastic effects.
Duplicate hallucinations of this same nervous force, and producing also physical and plastic effects.
A latent somnambulistic consciousness, capable (the subject being in his normal state) of reading in the intellectual background of another man, his present and his past, and being able to divine the future.
Akaskof tried to see if these hypotheses (the last of which is a pretty bold one) are sufficient to explain everything, and he concludes that they are not. That is also my opinion. There is something else. This something else, this residue at the bottom of the crucible of experiment, is a psychic element, the nature of which remains still wholly hidden from us. I think that all the readers of this book will share my conviction.
Anthropomorphic hypotheses are far from explaining everything. Besides, they are only hypotheses. We must not hide from ourselves that these phenomena introduce us into another world, into an unknown world, one that is still to be explored in its whole extent.
As to beings different from ourselves,—what may their nature be? Of this we cannot form any idea. Souls of the dead? This is very far from being demonstrated. The innumerable observations which I have collected during more than forty years all prove to me the contrary. No satisfactory identification has been made.[92]
The communications obtained have always seemed to proceed from the mentality of the group, or, when they are heterogeneous, from spirits of an incomprehensible nature. The being evoked soon vanishes when one insists on pushing him to the wall and having the heart out of his mystery. And then my greatest hope has been deceived, that hope of my twentieth year, when I would so gladly have received celestial light upon the doctrine of the plurality of worlds. The spirits have taught us nothing.
Nevertheless, the agents seem sometimes to be independent. Crookes mentions having seen Miss Fox write automatically a communication for one of her sitters while another communication upon another subject was given to her for a second person by means of the alphabet and by raps, and all the while she was chatting with a third person upon another subject totally different from the other two. Does this remarkable fact prove with certainty the action of a spirit other than that of the medium?
The same scientist mentions that, during one of his séances, a little rod crossed the table, in full light, and came and rapped his hand, giving him a communication by following the letters of the alphabet spelled out by him. The other end of the rod rested on the table at a certain distance from the hand of the medium Home.