Believers in Eusapia would point to some dozens of things in her record that these professors, and even conjurers like Carrington, could not explain. I am quite content to leave them unexplained. We are under no obligation to explain them or else accept Spiritualism. There is, as Schiaparelli said, a third alternative: agnosticism. If the majority of Eusapia's tricks were at one time or other seen to be done by fraud, the presumption is that the rest were fraud. There are scientific men who seem to lose their common sense in these inquiries. You might put a conjurer before them in broad daylight, and they will not see how he does a single one of his tricks. But when, in a bad light, a lady conjurer or medium does something which they cannot explain they appeal to abnormal powers or ghosts. It is neither science nor common sense.
Towards the close of Eusapia's career another powerful Italian peasant-woman, Lucia Sordi, began to interest the professors. She outdid Eusapia in some matters. While she sat bound with cords in the cabinet, a decanter of wine was lifted from the table, and a glass put to the lips of each sitter. She was eventually exposed, and I will not linger on her. She could get out of any bonds; and she had two confederates always, in the shape of her young daughters.
Most recent of all are the phenomena of the "Goligher circle" of Belfast. A teacher of mechanics, Mr. Crawford, has greatly strengthened the faith by recording their wonderful exploits in his Reality of Psychic Phenomena (1916) and Experiments in Psychical Science (1919). Sir A. C. Doyle is enthusiastic about them, as is his wont. Even Sir W. Barrett tells us that "it is difficult to believe how the cleverest conjurer, with elaborate apparatus, could have performed" what he witnessed. Decidedly, here is something serious. Yet I intend to dismiss it very briefly. The "circle" consists of seven members of the Goligher family, and they are all mediums. In other words, there were fourteen hands and fourteen feet to be watched, in a red light (the worst in the world for the eye), and this young teacher of science flatters himself that he controlled them all, and meantime attended to a lot of scales and other apparatus. We are asked to believe this after four or five professors repeatedly failed to control the hands and feet of one woman (Eusapia). Moreover, they were permitted to hold Eusapia's hands and feet, but Crawford was not permitted to touch the feet of his medium. He gives no photographs, except of his superfluous scales and tables. The Goligher family, he says, were most anxious to have photographs taken, but the "spirits" said it would injure the medium.
When Sir W. Barrett tells the public that "the cleverest conjurer, with elaborate apparatus," could not do these things, he talks nonsense of which he ought to be ashamed. There is nothing in the two books that requires any apparatus at all, or anything more than practice. Raps were common. They have been since 1848. Mr. Crawford talks of "sledgehammer blows" and "thunderous noises." As the mediums were never searched, the raps may have been exceptionally loud, but Mr. Crawford naïvely gives one detail which puts us on our guard. He one night brought a particularly sensitive phonograph. The noises that night were "terrific," he says. He took the record to the offices of Light, and the editor of that journal can do no more than say that the noises were "clearly audible" (p. 32). So, when Mr. Crawford tells us of strong men being unable to press down the levitated table, we will take a pinch of salt.
The "table" (really a light stool) usually lifted weighed two pounds. Sir A. C. Doyle assured his audience that this was lifted as high as the ceiling. On the contrary, Mr. Crawford expressly says that it never rose more than four feet; which is, I find by "scientific" experiment, the height to which a young lady, sitting on a chair, could raise such a stool on her foot. A most remarkable coincidence. It is a further remarkable coincidence that the young lady's weight increased, when an object was levitated, by just the weight of that object, less about two ounces which some other person took over (a steadying finger, for instance). It is an even more remarkable coincidence that, when Mr. Crawford asked for an impression of the ghostly machinery which made the raps, the mark he got on paper was "something of an oval shape, about two square inches in area" (p. 192); which is singularly like a young lady's heel. Similarly, when he asked for an impression in a saucer of putty, the mark he describes—and carefully omits to photograph for us—is precisely the mark of a young lady's big toe with a threaded material on it. It is further curious that this remarkable psychic power, which can lift a ten-pound table, could not lift a white handkerchief a fraction of an inch; which prompts the painful reflection that a dark foot might be visible if it touched a white handkerchief.
Mr. Crawford's books are really too naive. He asked Kathleen, by way of control experiment, to show him if she could raise the stool on her foot; and he asks us to believe that her very obvious wriggles and straining prove that this was not the usual lifting force. He puts her on a scale, and asks the "ghosts" to take a large amount of matter out of her body. He is profoundly impressed when her weight decreases by 54½ pounds; and he asks us to believe that ghosts have taken 54½ pounds of flesh and fat out of the fair Kathleen and "laid it on the floor." A simpler hypothesis is that she got her toe to the floor, as Eusapia did. Mr. Crawford ought to leave ghosts for a while, and take a course of human anatomy and physiology. His mechanical knowledge enables him to sketch a diagram of a "cantilever," constructed out of the medium's body, and reaching from it to the centre of the table, a distance of eighteen inches, or the length of Kathleen's leg from knee to foot. But how in the name of all that is reasonable this cantilever is worked from the body end, without wrenching the young lady's "innards" out of joint, passes the subtlest imagination. The "spirits" were consulted as to the way they did it. By a final peculiar coincidence it transpired that they knew just as much about science as Kathleen Goligher; and that was nothing.
This is a very long chapter, but the phenomena it had to discuss are the most serious in Spiritualist literature, and I was eager to omit nothing which is deemed important. Let me close it with a short account of an historical occurrence, which is at the same time a parable. We are often told that the medium was "physically incapable" of doing this or the other. Here is an interesting illustration of human possibilities.
In 1846 all Paris was busy discussing "the electric girl." Little Angélique Cottin, a village child of thirteen summers, a very quiet and guileless-looking maid, exuded the "electric fluid" (ghosts were not yet in fashion) in such abundance that the furniture almost danced about the room. When she rose from her chair it flew back, even if a man held it, and was often smashed. A heavy dining-table went over at a touch from her dress. A chair held by "several strong men" was pushed back when she sat on it. The Paris Academy of Sciences examined her, and could make nothing of her. The chairs she rose from were sent crashing against the wall, and broken. But one night, when the crowd gathered about her to see the marvels, a wicked old sceptic watched her closely from a distance. Only that afternoon a heavy dining-table, with its load of dishes, had gone over. The child saw the sceptic's eye, yet wanted to entertain the crowd. There was a struggle of patience between sceptic and child for two hours, and at last age won. He saw her move, and demanded an examination; and they found the bruise on her leg caused by knocking over the heavy table. It was all over. She had developed a marvellous way of using the muscles of her legs and buttocks instantaneously and imperceptibly. This was, says Flammarion, "the end of this sad story in which so many people had been duped by a poor idiot." He is wrong on two points. The child was by no means an idiot; and this was only the beginning, not the end. We do well to remember what this child of thirteen could do.[10]
FOOTNOTES:
[7] The account which he gives in the Dispatch (March 21, 1920) is precisely the same as his account (which I quoted verbatim in the Debate) in his Experience of Spiritualism with D. D. Home, pp. 82-3.