Fact and Fable in Psychology

by Joseph Jastrow

In the reports of the investigations of mediums, published by the Society for Psychical Research (vol. iv.), we find accounts of the performances of one Englinton, also with slate-writing, and whose success, as described by enthusiastic sitters, does not fall short of the miraculous. Yet the description of this wonder-worker's doings by a competent observer, Professor Carvill Lewis, renders the manifestations absolutely transparent. He sat intently watching Englinton for an hour, and nothing happened; fearing a blank séance, he purposely diverted his attention. The moment he looked away the manifestations began, and he could see "the medium look down intently toward his knees and in the direction of the slate. I now quickly turned back my head, when the slate was brought up against the table with a sharp rap." The manœuvre was repeated with the same result; and while the writing was going on, Professor Lewis distinctly saw "the movement of the central tendon in his wrist corresponding to that made by his middle finger in the act of writing. Each movement of the tendon was simultaneously accompanied by the sound of a scratch on the slate." Again, for the answer to the request to define "Idocrase," Englinton required the use of a dictionary, and left the room for a minute; the answer was then written just as it is given in Webster's dictionary; but, unfortunately, albumina was read for alumina. When the slate, which acts with a spring, was to be closed, Englinton suddenly sneezed; when the writing was small and faint, he shifted his position until he came within a few inches of it; a postage stamp secretly glued across the two leaves of the double slate prevented all manifestations; a double fee immediately caused further manifestations, when, owing to the exhaustion of power, such had just been declared to be impossible; and the writing on the slates was identified by an expert as that of Englinton. It was the same Englinton who was convicted of connivance with Mme. Blavatsky in the production of a spurious theosophic marvel; and it is to him that the following story, supplied by Mr. Padshah and indorsed by Mr. Hodgson (the exposer of Mme. Blavatsky), relates: Mr. Padshah and a friend had asked for Gujerati writing at a séance, but without success. Mr. Padshah (without informing his friend) sent anonymously to Englinton a poem in Gujerati; and the friend received from the medium a minutely faithful copy of the same on a slate, as the direct revelation of the spirits!

II

But all this accounts for only part of the problem. To convict every medium of fraud is not a complete explanation of the appearance which this belief presented in its most characteristic form some decades ago, and still presents. It remains to account for the great success of the movement; for the fact that so many have been deceived and so few have really understood; to show why we are to believe the Seybert Commission, and not credit the countless miracle-mongers. This is psychologically the most interesting portion of the problem, and has been very successfully treated by Mrs. Sidgwick, Mr. Hodgson, and Mr. Davey, of the Society for Psychical Research.

There is a very broadspread notion that anybody can go to a spiritualistic séance and give a reliable opinion as to whether what he or she may chance to see is explicable as conjuring or not. Especially where the right to one's opinion is regarded as a corollary to the right of liberty, does this notion prevail. It is probably not an exaggeration to maintain that most such claimants are about as competent to form a trustworthy opinion on such a subject as they are to pronounce upon the genuineness of a Syriac manuscript. The matter is in some aspects as much a technical acquisition as is the diagnosticating of a disease. It is not at all to the discredit of any one's powers of observation or intellectual acumen to be deceived by the performances of a conjurer; and the same holds true of the professional part of mediumistic phenomena. Until this homely but salutary truth is impressed with all its importance upon all intending investigators, there is little hope of bringing about a proper attitude towards these and kindred phenomena. We believe that there will be an eclipse of the moon when the astronomer so predicts, not because we can calculate the time or even understand how the astronomer does it, but because that is a technical acquisition which he has learned and we have not; and so with a thousand other and more humble facts of daily life. Spiritualism, to a large extent, comes under the same category; and observers who have acquainted themselves with the possibilities of conjuring and the natural history of deception, who by their training and endowment have fitted themselves to be competent judges of such alleged ultra-physical facts—these persons have the same right to our confidence and respect as a body of chemists or physicians on a question within their province. It by no means follows that all scientists are fitted for an investigation of this kind, nor that all laymen are not; it does follow that a body of trained and able observers, who are aware of the possibilities of faulty observation and of the tendency to substitute hasty inference for fact, who know something about deception as a psychological characteristic, who have acquired or call to their aid the technical requisites for such an investigation, are better fitted to carry it to a logical outcome than are others, equally distinguished in other directions and equally able, if you will, but who have not these special qualifications. It follows that it is not fair for you to set up what you think you have seen as overthrowing their authority; even if you happen to be an unprejudiced and accurate observer and have weighed the probability of your observations being vitiated by one or other of the many sources of error in such observation, it is only a small fact, though of course one worthy of notice. There is no good reason why the average man should set so much store by his own impressions of sense, when the fallibility of other witnesses is so readily demonstrable.

Whatever of seeming dogmatism there is in this view is removed by the experimental demonstration furnished by Messrs. Hodgson and Davey, that the kind and amount of mal-observation and faulty description which an average observer will introduce into the account of a performance such as the medium gives, is amply sufficient to account for the divergence between his report of the performance and what really occurred. The success of a large class of tricks depends upon diverting the observer's attention from the points of real importance, and in leading him to draw inferences perfectly valid under ordinary circumstances but entirely wrong in the particular case. It must be constantly remembered that the judging powers are at a great disadvantage in observing such performances, and that it is a kind of judgment in which they have little practice. In the intercourse of daily life a certain amount of good faith and of confidence in the straightforwardness of the doings of others prevents us from exercising that close scrutiny and suspicion here necessary. We know that most of our neighbors have neither the intention nor the sharpness to deceive us, and do not live on the principle of the detective, who regards every one as dishonest until proven to be otherwise. This attitude of extreme suspicion is indispensable in dealing with the phenomena now under discussion. It follows, therefore, that the layman cannot serve as a pilot for himself or for others in such troubled waters. This, however, if duly recognized, need not be a matter of concern. "This unpreparedness and inobservancy of mind in the presence of a conjurer," says Mr. Hodgson, is not "a thing of which any one who is not familiar with the tricks already need be ashamed." Even a professional may be nonplussed by a medium's performance, if he have no experience in the special kind of sleight-of-hand required for the trick. This is the experience of Mr. Harry Kellar; he at first declared himself unable to explain slate-writing as a trick, but now can repeat the process in a variety of ways, and with far greater skill than is shown by the mediums. We may therefore approach Mr. Davey's investigation with the assurance that, in all probability, we too should have failed to detect what was really done, and should have rendered quite as erroneous account of what we saw as did his actual sitters; and according to our training and temperament we should have drawn our several conclusions, and all of them variously wide of the mark.

Mr. Davey (who, by the way, was at one time deceived almost into conversion by spiritualistic phenomena, and who, before he took up the matter seriously, recorded his conviction that "the idea of trickery or jugglery in slate-writing communications is quite out of the question") was an expert amateur conjurer, and repeated the slate-writing performances of such as Englinton with at least equal skill. He arranged with Mr. Hodgson to give sittings to several ladies and gentlemen, on the condition that they send him detailed written accounts of what they had seen. He did not pose as a medium nor accept a fee, but simply said that he had something to show which his sitters were to explain as best they could, and with due consideration of trickery as a possible mode of explanation. The "medium" has here a decided advantage over Mr. Davey, because his sitters come to him with a mental attitude that entertains, however remotely, the possibility of witnessing something supernatural; and this difference is sufficient to create an adjustment of the powers of observation less fitted to detect trickery than if the performer refrains from announcing himself as the go-between of the supernatural. This is well illustrated in the reports of Mr. Davey's sitters; for a few friends who were told beforehand that they were to witness a sleight-of-hand performance, or were strongly led to believe it such, made much less of a marvel of the performance than those who had not been thus enlightened. "Nevertheless" (I am citing from Mr. Podmore's résumé), "the effect produced was such that a well-known professional conjurer expressed his complete inability to explain the results by trickery; that no one of his sitters ever detected his modus operandi; that most were completely baffled, or took refuge in the supposition of a new form of electricity, or 'a powerful magnetic force used in double manner: (1) a force of attraction, and (2) that of repulsion'; and that more than one spiritualist ascribed the phenomena to occult agency, and regarded—perhaps still regard—Mr. Davey as a renegade medium."

Mr. Davey's performances, as described by many of his sitters, like the descriptions of the performances of many a medium, are marvelous enough to demand the hypothesis of occult agency: "Writing between a conjurer's own slates in a way quite inexplicable to the conjurer; writing upon slates locked and carefully guarded by witnesses; writing upon slates held by the witnesses firmly against the under-surface of the table; writing upon slates held by the witnesses above the table; answers to questions written secretly in locked slates; correct quotations appearing on guarded slates from books chosen by the witnesses at random, and sometimes mentally, the books not touched by the 'medium'; writing in different colors mentally chosen by the witnesses, covering the whole side of one of their own slates; messages in languages unknown to the medium, including a message in German, for which only a mental request had been made, and a letter in Japanese in a double slate locked and sealed by the witness; the date of a coin placed by the witness in a sealed envelope correctly written in a locked slate upon the table, the envelope remaining intact; a word written between slates screwed together and also corded and sealed together, the word being chosen by the witness after the slates were fastened by himself, etc., etc. And yet, though 'autographic' fragments of pencil were 'heard' weaving mysterious messages between and under and over slates, and fragments of chalk were seen moving about under a tumbler placed above the table in full view, none of the sitters witnessed that best phenomenon, Mr. Davey writing."

It must not be supposed that the errors of mal-description and lapse of memory thus committed are at all serious in themselves; on the contrary, they are mostly such as would be entirely pardonable in ordinary matters. Mr. Hodgson places them in four classes. In the first, the observer interpolates a fact which really did not happen, but which he was led to believe had occurred; he records that he examined the slate, when he really did not. Secondly, for similar causes, he substitutes one statement for another closely like it; he says he examined the slate minutely, when he really only did so hastily. Thirdly, he transposes the order in which the events happened, making the examination of the slate occur at a later period than when it really took place. Lastly, he omits certain details which he was carefully led to consider trivial, but which really were most important. Such slight lapses as these are sufficient to make a marvel of a clever piece of conjuring; add to this the increased temptations for mal-observation afforded by the dim light and mysterious surroundings of the medium, as well as by the sympathetic attitude of the sitters, and the wide divergence between the miraculous narratives of spiritualists and the homely deceptions which they are intended to describe, is no longer a mystery.

It cannot be too strongly insisted upon how slight may be the clue that holds the key to the explanation, how easy it is to overlook it, how mysterious the performance becomes without it. It may be the difference between placing the slate in a given position and starting to do so when the hand of the medium naturally comes forward to receive it; it may depend upon whether the slates were examined just before or just after a certain detail in the performance which was carefully not made prominent; it may depend upon the difficulty of really seeing a quick and unexpected sleight-of-hand movement on the part of a skilled performer; it may depend upon whether the question asked was really of your own choosing, or was deftly led up to; it may depend upon a score of other equally insignificant details upon which the assurance of the average person, that such mal-observation or misdescription did not occur, is almost worthless. These are some of the slighter factors in the case; there may be much more serious ones which lead not merely to exaggeration but to elaborate falsification and distortion of truth, and to the emphatic assertion of the most extravagant miracles, coupled usually with the assurance that there was no possibility or room for deception. Mr. Davey's performance was relatively a matter-of-fact test with critical and intelligent sitters; hence we should expect the divergence between report and reality to be far less serious than when the question at issue is the demonstration of the supernatural by an appeal to the religious fervor and to the emotional susceptibilities of would-be believers and sympathetic propagandists. I shall return to this difference of attitude in discussing the prepossession in favor of the belief in Spiritualism; for the present, it is sufficient to notice that under the most favorable combination of circumstances—that is, an able, educated, and experienced observer witnessing a definite performance in a calm, critical mood, and carefully preparing a written account of his observations—the difference between actual fact and the testimony of the witness is still considerable, and the divergence often upon essential points. We are accordingly justified in making allowance for double or treble or a hundredfold more serious divergence between fact and report, when we pass to decidedly less favorable conditions, such as those of the ordinary spiritualistic test or séance; for these surely present conditions least conducive to accuracy of observation or of record.

It is seldom that so direct and forcible an application of experimental results to actual mental experiences occurring under familiar circumstances can be made, as is the case in regard to this noteworthy investigation of Messrs. Hodgson and Davey. This investigation, almost at one stroke, throws a blinding light upon the entire field of the phenomena; accounting in large part for the vast aggregate of testimony in favor of miracles by actual witnesses, demonstrating the readiness with which we may unwittingly deceive ourselves by false observation and others by lapses of memory, as to what we actually witnessed; and again presenting the nature of these fallible characteristics of sense-perception and memory, of inference and judgment, so strikingly and tangibly as to serve as a classic illustration for the psychologist. The practical import of these considerations has been quite generally disregarded by upholders of the spiritualistic hypothesis, and has by no means been fully appreciated by those who lay claim to an opinion upon the significance of spiritualistic manifestations, and who discuss the psychological questions which they involve.