Is Spiritualism Based on Fraud? / The Evidence Given by Sir A.C. Doyle and Others Drastically Examined

by Joseph McCabe

And, with the courage of honest inquirers, let us attack the strongest manifestations of this power first. Such are the instances in which the medium himself—spirits respect the proprieties and do not treat lady-mediums in this way—is lifted from the ground and raised even as high as the ceiling. When I say that ladies are not treated in this frivolous way, the informed reader will gather at once that I decline to take serious notice of the once famous levitation of Mrs. Guppy. Dr. Russel Wallace was quite convinced that this lady was "levitated" on to the table, in the dark, and she was no light weight. But we shall be excused from examining his statement if we recall what the lady claimed in 1871. Herne and Williams, both impostors, were giving a séance in Lamb's Conduit Street, and their "spirit-controls" said they would "apport" the weighty Mrs. Guppy. Three minutes later, although the doors were locked, and her home was three miles away, she was standing on the table. She had a wet pen in her hand, and she explained tearfully to the innocent sitters that she had been snatched by invisible powers from her books and taken through the solid walls. People like Russel Wallace still believed in Mrs. Guppy, but I assume that there is no one to-day who does not see in this case a blatant collusion of three rogues to cheat the public. I assume that the same contempt will be meted out to the claim of the Rev. Dr. Monck, who, not to be outdone, stated shortly afterwards that he had been similarly transported from Bristol to Swindon.

Probably the modern reader will be disposed to dismiss with equal contempt the claim that Daniel Dunglas Home was, in the year 1869, wafted by spirit-hands from one window to another, seventy feet above the ground, at a house in Victoria Street. But here I must ask him to pause. This is one of the classical manifestations, one of the foundations of Spiritualism. Sir A. C. Doyle says that the evidence here is excellent. Sir William Barrett maintains that the story is indisputably true. Sir William Crookes says that "to reject the recorded evidence on this subject is to reject all human testimony whatever." It is a Spiritualist dogma.

I have shown in the debate with Sir A. C. Doyle that this dogma is based on evidence that will not stand five minutes' examination. Not one of these leading Spiritualists can possibly have examined the evidence. No witness even claims to have seen Home wafted from window to window. Lord Adare is the only survivor of the three supposed witnesses, and, when he saw some Press report of my destructive criticism in the Debate, he sent to the Weekly Dispatch a letter that he had written at the time. He seemed to think that this letter afforded new evidence. The interested reader will be amused to find that this letter is precisely the evidence I had quoted in the Debate, for it was published forty years ago.

No one professes to have seen Home carried from window to window. Home told the three men who were present that he was going to be wafted, and he thus set up a state of very nervous expectation. Sir W. Barrett, who tells us that "nothing was said beforehand of what they might expect to see," says precisely the opposite of the truth. Both Lord Crawford and Lord Adare say that they were warned. Then Lord Crawford says that he saw the shadow on the wall of Home entering the room horizontally; and as the moon, by whose light he professes to have seen the shadow, was at the most only three days old, his testimony is absolutely worthless. Lord Adare claims only that he saw Home, in the dark, "standing upright outside our window."[7] In the dark—it was an almost moonless December night—one could not, as a matter of fact, say very positively whether Home was outside or inside; but, in any case, he acknowledges that there was a nineteen-inch window-sill outside the window, and Home could stand on that.

So there is not only not a shred of evidence that Home went from one window to another, but the whole story suggests trickery. Home told them what to expect, and he pretended, in the dark, that he was a "spirit" whispering this to them. He noisily opened the window in the next room. He came into their room, from the window-sill, laughing and saying (in spite of the historic solemnity of the occasion!) that it would be funny if a policeman had seen him in the air. When Lord Adare went into the next room, and politely doubted if Home could have gone out by so small an aperture, Home told him to stand some distance back, and then swung himself out in a jaunty fashion, as a gymnast would. In fine, it is well to remember that this was the same D. D. Home who had defrauded a widow of £33,000, and had been, in the previous year (1868), branded in a London court as a fraud and an adventurer.

After this we need not linger long over the other "levitations" of Home, or allow ourselves to be intimidated by the bluster of Sir A. C. Doyle and Sir W. Barrett. Sir Arthur tells us that "there are altogether on record some fifty or sixty cases of levitation on the part of Home"; that "Professor Crookes saw Home levitated twice"; and that "as he floated round the room he wrote his name above the pictures." It is a pity that Sir A. C. Doyle does not tell people that Home did all these wonderful things in the dark, and that in most cases the people present merely had Home's word for it that he was "floating round the room." The whole evidence for these things has been demolished so effectually by Mr. Podmore in his Newer Spiritualism (chs. i and ii) that I need say little here.

No reliable witness, giving us a precise account of the circumstances, has ever claimed that he saw Home off the ground and clear of all furniture. Sir W. Crookes says that he saw Home, in poor light, rise six inches for a space of ten seconds. It is a poor instalment of miracle; but I am obliged to add that Crookes was at the other side of the room, and he confesses that he did not see Home's feet leave the ground! Crookes says that on one occasion he was allowed to pass his hands under Home's feet; but he tells this wonderful exploit twenty-three years after the event (in 1894), and he does not give precise indications where the hands were when he examined the feet. Mr. John Jones saw Home rise in 1861; but he does not say that he saw Home's hands, and he admits that his muscles were so taut that he calls them "cataleptic." It is equally true that Home wrote his name above the pictures; but no one had examined the spots before the séance, and no one could see if he stood on anything to reach them during the séance, as it was pitch dark. The only apparently good case is an occasion when a sitter says that, in the dark, he saw Home's figure completely cross the rather lighter space of the window, feet first, and then cross it again head first. But it happens that on this occasion there are two witnesses, and the less rhetorical of the two expressly says that the shadow on the blind was at first only "the feet and part of the legs," and then (after Home had announced that the spirits were turning him round) only "the head and face." Any gymnast could do that. The whole of these recorded miracles reek with evidence of charlatanry. The lights were always put out, and Home in nearly all cases said that he was rising, and then told them that he was floating about various parts of the room.

Still worse is the evidence for Home's occasional "elongation." The picture of Sir W. Crookes gravely measuring the height of this brazen impostor, as he alternately draws himself in and stretches out, is as pathetic as the picture of him standing with a bottle of phosphorus in a bedroom at Hackney while two girls make a fool of him. It is just as pathetic that men like Sir A. C. Doyle and Sir W. Barrett assure the public that they believe these things, when they have, apparently, not examined the evidence. To believe that in the course of a few seconds certain spiritual powers, who cannot unravel for us the smallest scientific problem, can so alter that marvellous world of cells and tissues which make up a man's body as to make him even six inches taller, is to believe in a miracle beside which the dividing of the waters of the Red Sea is child's play. Yet distinguished men of science and medical men assure the public that they believe this, and believe it on evidence that has been riddled over and over again.

It was a still earlier fraud, Gordon, who began this trick of mounting furniture in the dark and saying that the spirits bore him up; but the "evidence" is not worth glancing at. One might as well ask us to examine seriously the evidence for the "elongation" of Herne, Peters, Morse, and all the other impostors of the time, or for the spiritual transit of Mrs. Guppy and Dr. Monck. Let us rather see what sort of evidence is furnished in recent times.

It appears that the spirits no longer levitate the mediums themselves. Although the power is said to be developing as time goes on, the age of these impressive floatings round pitch-dark rooms is over. The only instance I have read in the last twenty years is that of Ofelia Corralès, of Costa Rica, who unfortunately fell off the stool she was standing on. We have now to be content with the levitation of tables and the dragging of furniture towards the medium.