Scientific students of to-day seem divided between two theories as they examine the table phenomena. These are ascribed (1) to supernormal and little understood powers of the human personality, or (2) to the intervention of irresponsible and, it may be, sub-human intelligences.
Readers of “Raymond” will remember Sir Oliver Lodge’s reference to the difficulties of “table-sittings.” Various passages show that he himself has been greatly puzzled. Accounts of sittings at “Mariemont,” Sir Oliver Lodge’s home, tell of obstreperous doings on the part of the tables. Two got broken, and “a stronger and heavier round table with four legs was obtained, and employed only for this purpose.” In one of the séances with “Feda,” the alleged spirit of Raymond referred through the “control” to table-doings at Mariemont.
“Other spirits get in, not bad spirits, but ones that like to feel they are helping. The peculiar manifestations are not him, and it only confuses him terribly. Part of it was him, but when the table was careering about it was not him at all. He started it, but something comes along stronger than himself, and he loses the control.”[21]
In a later sitting with the same medium and control we find the sentence (supposed to come from Raymond), “The Indians have got through their hanky-panky.” The reference was understood by his brother to mean “playing with the table in a way beyond his control.”[22]
Mr. J. Arthur Hill has some sensible remarks on the general subject of table phenomena. “There seems no particular point,” he says, “in physical phenomena alone, except as providing a problem for the physicist and psychical researcher. A table or other object may move in some inexplicable way, but that is no proof of ‘spirits’; the energy is supplied from physical matter—mainly the medium’s and sitters’ bodies, apparently—and it is only through evidential messages conveyed by the phenomena that spirit agency can reasonably be inferred.” Mr. Hill disapproves of “private circles,” except when held for investigation by qualified persons.
Table phenomena, of whatever kind, afford no proof that discarnate human spirits are seeking to communicate with friends on earth.
We close this chapter with the words of Camille Flammarion, the French astronomer, whose name is so highly honoured in Spiritualistic circles:—
“The physical phenomena … do not prove the existence of spirits, and may possibly be explained without them … that is, by unknown forces, emanating from the experimenters, and especially from the mediums.”
FOOTNOTES:
[19] Fully reported in the Journal of the S.P.R. for December, 1908.