Why should the souls of the dead amuse themselves in this way? The supposition seems almost absurd.
We know that an ordinary man does not change his intellectual or moral value from day to day, and, if his spirit continues to exist after the death of his body, we may expect to find it such as it was before. But why so many oddities and incoherences?
However these things may be, it behooves us not to have any preconceived idea, and our bounden duty is to seek to prove the facts as they present themselves to us.
The unknown natural force brought into play for the lifting of a table is not the exclusive property of mediums. In different degrees it forms a part of all organisms, with different coefficients, 100 for organisms such as those of Home, or Eusapia, 80 for others, 50 or 25 for less favored individuals. But I should hold it as certain that it never drops in any case to 0. The best proof of this is that, with patience, perseverance, and the exercise of the will, almost all the groups of experimenters who have seriously occupied themselves with these researches have succeeded in obtaining, not merely movements, but also complete levitations, raps, and other phenomena.
The word "medium" scarcely has any longer a reason for being, since the existence of an intermediary between the spirits and us is not yet proved. But still the word may be preserved, logic being the rarest of things in grammar and in everything else that is human. The word "electricity" has had no connection for a long time with amber (ἠλεκτρον), nor the word "veneration" with the genitive case of Venus (Veneris), nor the (at first astrological) term "disaster" with aster (star), nor the word "tragedy" with goat-song (τράγος, ᾠδή). But this does not hinder these words from being understood in their habitual sense.[95]
As respects explanatory hypotheses, I repeat, the field is open to all. It is to be noted that communications dictated are closely related to the condition of mind, the ideas, the opinions, the beliefs, the knowledge, and even the literary culture, of the experimenters. They are like a reflection, or counterpart, of this ensemble of ideas and faculties. Compare the communications noted down in the house of Victor Hugo in Jersey, those of the Phalansterian Society of Eugéne Nus, those of astronomical meetings, those of religious believers,—Catholics, Protestants, etc.
If the hypothesis were not so bold as to seem unacceptable to us, I should dare to think that the concentration of the thoughts of psychic experimenters creates a momentary intellectual being who replies to the questions asked and then vanishes.
Reflection, reflex action? That is perhaps the true expression. Everybody has seen his image reflected in a mirror, and nobody is astonished by it. However, analyse the thing. The more you look at this optical being moving there behind the mirror, the more remarkable the image appears to you. Now suppose looking-glasses had not been invented. If we had not knowledge of those immense mirrors which reflect whole apartments and the visitors in them, if we had never seen anything of the kind, and if someone should tell us that images and reflections of living persons could thus manifest themselves and thus move, we should not comprehend, and should not believe it.
Yes, the ephemeral personification created in Spiritualistic séances sometimes recalls the image that we see in a mirror, which has nothing real in itself, but which yet exists and reproduces the original. The image fixed by the photograph is of the same kind, only durable. The potential image formed at the focus of the mirror of a telescope, invisible in itself, but which we can receive on a level mirror and study, at the same time enlarging it by the microscope of the eye-piece, perhaps approaches nearer to that which seems to be produced by the concentration of the psychical energy of a group of persons. We create an imaginary being, we speak to it, and in its replies it almost always reflects the mentality of the experimenters. And just as with the aid of mirrors we can concentrate light, heat, ether-waves, electric waves, in a focus, so, in the same way, it seems sometimes as if the sitters added their psychic forces to those of the medium, of the dynamogen, condensing the waves, and helping to produce a sort of fugitive being more or less material.
The sub-conscious nature, the brain of the medium, or his astral body, the fluidic mind, the unknown powers latent in sensitive organisms, might we not consider these as the mirror which we have just imagined? And might this mirror also not receive and reproduce impressions, or influence, from a soul at a distance?