“What real spirit,” he wrote, “at last able to revisit his wife on this earth, but would find something better to say than that she had changed the place of his photograph? And yet that is the sort of remark to which the spirits introduced by the mysterious Phinuit are apt to confine themselves.”
A woman writer passed away not long ago in early middle life. Her mother tried to get in touch through a medium with the departed spirit, and received a message to the effect that some valuable old lace had been forgotten in the top drawer of a tallboy, and that it ought to be taken out and washed! In a recent newspaper article by an eminent Spiritualist, reference was made to a supposed authentic communication lately received from the other side. It concerned a pair of grey suède shoes and a fountain pen.
Spiritualists tell us that such “trivial fond records” as we find, for instance, in “Raymond,” are of more value as evidence than graver talk of a general kind. Sir Oliver Lodge says, for instance, “The idea that a departed friend ought to be occupied wholly and entirely with grave matters, and ought not to remember jokes and fun, is a gratuitous claim which has to be abandoned. Humour does not cease with earth life. Why should it?”[41]
With the utmost respect, we reply that Sir Oliver misses the point. The solemn platitudes of “Imperator” are, if possible, even less convincing than the descriptions of life in the unseen world given in “Raymond,” over which Mr. Wells makes merry in “The Undying Fire.” Why is it that the outpourings of Spiritualism almost invariably, as Dr. Barnes points out, “reflect the commonplace thoughts of commonplace minds”?
If spirits were indeed communicating with men from within the veil, would not their language bear some trace of the mighty change they have undergone? Mr. Birrell, in one of his Bristol speeches, raised a question which must occur to every thoughtful inquirer. “The records of Spiritualism,” he said, “leave me unconvinced. They lack the things of morality, of grandeur, of emotion; in a word, of religion. They deal with petty things, mere prolonged egoism, as if the one thing we want to be assured of is continued existence, and an endless capacity to exchange platitudes. A revelation of the life beyond the grave ought surely, if it is to do any good in the world, to be more stupendous than that—something of really first-class importance. Otherwise we are just as well without it.”
(2) Among Spiritualists themselves we hear constant discussion as to the singular failure of the “spirits” to give names. Dr. L. P. Jacks examines this problem in the Journal of the S.P.R. for May, 1919.[42]
He had been “struck by the fact that a spirit who manifested his former personal appearance with great accuracy, even to minute details, was yet apparently unable to manifest his name, except in an imperfect and doubtful manner.” Why was his old coat manifested and his name not?
“Our names, while unessential to our self-consciousness, do play a prominent part in our sensible experience, especially with those of us who are cursed with an interminable correspondence, and one would think that a mind returning to its old tracks, as Sir Oliver Lodge suggests the spirits do, would find his name one of the easiest things to pick out.”
Professor Jacks is disposed to find a solution of the puzzle in telepathy. “It is easier,” he says, “to understand how a telepathist, having succeeded in reading one part of my mind, should fail or omit to read another, than it is to understand how an educated man in the other life should be able to reproduce his coat, but unable to trace the letters of his own name.”
The failure of the “spirits” to give names is a highly suspicious fact. How is it, asks Dr. Jacks, that the “control” which reproduces through the medium long messages as given by the communicating spirit, should fail to “catch” the name, in spite of the effort of all parties to get it through?[43]