Of course this is to beg the whole question. The more scientifically minded spiritualists might fairly enough answer that they are attempting to discover the laws of the occult and reduce an anarchical system to order, that our feeling of strangeness in these regions is only because of our little contact with them. There are, they claim, undeveloped aspects of personality which we have had as yet little occasion to use, but which would, once they were fully brought into action, give us the same sense of rapport with a super-sensible order that we now have in our contact with the sensible order. The crux of the whole contention is probably just here and in view of what has heretofore been accomplished in discovering and formulating the laws of the physical universe and in reducing an immense body of apparently unrelated facts to order, there is doubtless possible a very great systematization of psychical phenomena, even the most obscure. Nor may we readily set bounds to the measure of human development. But at any rate the statement with which this paragraph began is true. The region which the Society for Psychical Research set out to explore is obscure and is, as yet, so far from yielding to investigation that the investigators are not even agreed as to their facts, let alone the conclusions to be drawn from.
The proceedings of the Society literally fill volumes (thirty-two); it would require a specialist to follow them through and an analysis here impossible, rightly to evaluate them. When such careful investigators as Hill and Podmore, dealing with the same body of fact, differ constantly and diametrically in their conclusions, it is evident that the facts so far collected have not cumulative force enough to establish in the generality of disciplined minds a substantial unanimity of conviction. There are far too many alternatives in the interpretation of the facts and, in general, the personal equation of the investigator colours the conclusions reached. Of course this is, in a measure, true in every field of investigation, but it is outstandingly true in psychical research.
William James Enters the Field
For some years the Society was mainly occupied with hypnotism and thought transference, with occasional reports on "apparitions, haunted houses, premonitions, automatic writing, crystal vision and multiple personality." Professor William James' experiment with Mrs. Piper carried the Society over into the field of trance mediumship. James had a sound scientific interest in every aspect of the play of human consciousness and was earlier than any of his contemporaries awakened to the psychological value of abnormal mental states. He also loved fair play. He made his first report on Mrs. Piper in 1886. He was unable, he said, "to resist the conviction that knowledge appeared in her trances which she had never gained by the ordinary waking use of her eyes, ears and wits.... What the source of this knowledge may be, I know not, and have not a glimmer of explanatory suggestion to make, but from admitting the fact of such knowledge I can see no escape."
In a letter to Flourney dated August 9, 1908, James says of later investigations: "It seems to me that these reports open a new chapter in the history of automatism.... Evidently automatism is a word that covers an extraordinary variety of fact." The reports of Mrs. Piper's sittings fill a large place in the Society's records. Dr. Richard Hodgson and Professor Hyslop were finally led to accept her trance utterances and writings as spiritistic revelations. Podmore, after a most careful analysis, concludes that "Mrs. Piper's trance utterances indicate the possession of some supernormal power of apprehension, at least the capacity to read the unspoken and even unconscious thoughts and emotions of other minds."[73] He is willing to admit that if any case in the whole history of Spiritualism points at communication with the spirits of the dead, hers is that case, but he adds, "to other students of the records, including the present writer, the evidence nevertheless appears at present insufficient to justify the spiritualistic view even of a working hypothesis." "I cannot point to a single instance in which a precise and unambiguous piece of information has been furnished, of a kind which could not have proceeded from the medium's own mind, working upon the materials provided in the hints let drop by the sitter."[74]
[73] "Modern Spiritualism," Podmore, Vol. II, pp. 342-343.
[74] "Modern Spiritualism," Podmore, Vol. II, p. 345.
The Limitations of the Scientist in Psychical Investigation
It is impossible in this study to follow through the records of the Society. A representative group of its members, some of them men whose names carry weight in other regions, have been led by their investigations to adopt the spiritistic hypothesis. Significantly, however, it is generally the scientist and not the psychologist who commits himself most strongly to Spiritism. He is strongly impressed, as was Sir William Crookes, by phenomena of one sort or another which do not come under his laws, and he assigns to them causes which lie altogether out of his field. Indeed the temper and training of the scientist handicap him in all psychical investigations. He has only one of two alternatives: to explain what he sees in terms of what his laboratories have told him, or else in terms of forces with which he is not familiar. His training in careful experimentation may fit him to test and isolate physical phenomena, but if they cannot be explained in terms of the forces and laws with which he is familiar his conclusions are no more authoritative than the conclusions of any other reasonably intelligent man. He may, therefore, lend the weight of a great name to conclusions—or conjectures—entirely outside his own province. The element of trickery in the ordinary professional séance is notorious.[75] The ordinary physical phenomena of spiritism have almost without exception been duplicated by conjurers—many of whom have mystifying tricks of their own no medium can duplicate and even the most unusual phenomena, such as Home's apparent ability to handle fire unburnt and his levitation can be paralleled in savage rites or the performance of Indian fakirs, to which no professedly spiritistic explanation is attached. In many instances a trained conjurer would be far more apt to detect fraud than a trained scientist. He would at least know where to look for a probable explanation.
[75] Carrington, "The Psychical Phenomena of Spiritualism," pp. 6 and 7.