Controls
The usual machinery of a séance creates suspicion. Most mediums have controls. Nothing is more capricious than these controls. They may be people who really never existed at all. The genesis of Mrs. Piper's control, Dr. Phinuit, is suggestive. "It would appear that Mrs. Piper in 1884 had visited for advice a professional clairvoyant whose leading control claimed to be a Frenchman named Finné, or Finnett."[79] When Mrs. Piper was later seen by William James, a French doctor had succeeded in obtaining almost exclusive control and his name was reported to be Phinuit. Beyond debate, as far as name goes, here is a kind of transmuted suggestion. The Finnett of the French clairvoyant, who may or may not have really lived, becomes the Phinuit of Mrs. Piper, for whose existence there is apparently no testimony at all.
[79] Podmore's "Modern Spiritualism," Vol. II, p. 333.
The controls have sometimes been Indians and indeed almost any one may appear as a control—Longfellow, for example, or Mrs. Siddons, or Bach or Vanderbilt. In a region where disproof and proof are equally impossible this element of capricious control is suspicious. It is much more likely to be some obscure casting up of the medium's mind, through lines of association of which the medium is utterly unconscious, than to represent the personalities so named. In Raymond the control is one Moonstone, or a little Indian girl called Freda or Feda, who speaks of herself in the third person and who reports a great many silly things in a very silly way.
It is possible, of course, to say that these thus named are spirit mediums as necessary for the transfer of suggestion from the discarnate order as mediums seem to be in the incarnate order, and that abnormal personalities are as much needed on one side as the other through the abnormality of the whole process. But this is patently to beg the question. There is room in the whole process for the trivial, even the inconsequential. As the advocates of spiritism have urged, identification very often turns on apparently trivial things but it is difficult to justify the very great element of the capricious and actually foolish which enters so largely into the records of all sittings. It would seem as if death robbed grave personalities of their gravity, the strong of their force and the wise of their wisdom, and this is so hard to believe as to make us wonder whether we are not really dealing with something which belongs to an entirely different region and is open to an entirely different line of explanation.
But beyond such considerations as these, which may or may not have force, there remains the graver question still—the question of the identification of the sources from which the intelligible residue of communications is received. If we fall back upon suggestion there are always two general sources of suggestion—the incarnate and the discarnate, and among the incarnate themselves there are manifold sources of suggestion. The sitter may be unconsciously supplying the material which the medium is receiving, recasting and giving back again, or the medium may be reporting what is received from other incarnate sources than the sitter. (This, of course, when we have eliminated all that might possibly be contributed by the medium.)
The Dilemma of Spiritism
Anything, therefore, which is known to the living may be the source of the medium's information. Only those things, therefore, which are utterly unknown to the living anywhere, which cannot possibly have been known by the medium himself or herself, can be finally and conclusively a testimony to communications from the dead. But unless the information thus received is known to the living, its truth or falsity can never be proved or disproved. This is the dilemma which spiritism is finally brought to face and from this dilemma there is absolutely no escape. It does not forbid the conclusions which may be drawn from a seeming preponderance of evidence, but it does forbid absolute certainty, for, to repeat, if the information is to be verified it must be verified by the living, which proves that some one does possess it and may have communicated it—if we assume such communication to be possible—to the medium. On the other hand, if no one at all possesses the information, then we may never be sure that it is real information, or anything else than a creation of an excited imagination.
There is one test here which, if it were really made under absolutely dependable conditions, conditions, that is, in no wise open to suspicion or misunderstanding, might be final. If a message written before death and so sealed as to be unknown to any one save the one who wrote it, could be correctly reported, it would have, everything else being right, an immense force. (Though even here clairvoyance—for which, on the whole, there is a pretty dependable evidence—might afford the true explanation.) F.W.H. Myers left such a message as this. In January, 1891, he sent Sir Oliver Lodge a "sealed envelope, in the hope that after his death the communication contained in the envelope would be able to be given by means of a medium. Many different messages obtained by a well-known medium, Madame Verrall, and coming supposedly from Frederick Myers, led them to believe that they represented this communication. The envelope was opened in December, 1904, and 'it was found that there was no resemblance between its actual contents and what was alleged by the script to be contained in it.'"[80] If there is any authentic case of this final test being successfully maintained, the writer does not know it. There are instances of hidden articles discovered, but these tests by no means possess the same force of testimony.
[80] Boirac, "The Psychology of the Future," p. 278.