“Where is the report of the Dialectical Society? This is the question which many people are asking, but to which no one seems prepared to give a satisfactory reply. Has this Report, which was to settle the question of Spiritualism, only unsettled the Dialectical Society—causing, as we learn, some of its principal officers and members to secede from it on finding that the investigations of the Committee pointed in a different way to what they anticipated, and to which they had committed themselves? People ask—Have the Committee come to an opinion on the subject or have they too many opinions?”
The only information I have come in contact with referring to the Dialectical Committee and its work has been from Spiritualistic publications, most of them under authorship of Mr. James Burns, and I copy the following from “The Medium and Daybreak” of November 16, 1877:
“Objection has been taken in some quarters to the fact that the Society itself did not publish the Report, but left the matter of the publication as an open question to its Committee.” Again: on the 20th of July, 1870, the council passed a resolution—“that the request of the Committee, that the Report be printed under the authority of the Society, be not acceded to.”
The exact nature of the work done by the Dialectical Society’s Committee can be summed up by another extract from the same issue of “The Medium and Daybreak”:
“In due time the Committee presented to the Council the General and Sub-Reports, supplementing the same by a voluminous mass of evidence taken directly from the lips of Spiritualists practically acquainted with the subject—persons of the highest respectability and representing nearly every grade of society.” (The italics are mine.)
Another element of discord in the Dialectical investigation is shown by the following:
“Attempt has been made, of course, to undervalue these telling researches. The non-successful Committees have been brought gleefully into prominence, in hope that positive results obtained by the successful Committees might thereby be discredited.”
It seems to be a published fact that this movement on the part of the Dialectical Society resulted in much discord amounting to a split in the Society. Mr. Burns in his editorial column of the “Medium and Daybreak” says:
“Our present issue affords an important and valuable addition to the cheap literature of Spiritualism. It is filled with useful matter for investigators, judiciously extracted from the Report of the London Dialectical Society.” (My italics.)
The supporters of Spiritualism lay great stress and importance on the fact that a few of their co-workers are men prominent in scientific and literary circles, but these are in such a minority, when compared with men of the same time who do not co-operate, that the Spiritualists in order to give force and dignity to their argument “ring the changes” on these few names and keep them prominently to the front, notwithstanding that it has been proven beyond question, time and again, that these sages themselves have frequently been the victims of fraudulent mediums, sometimes knowingly.