The reader will not fail to see why I have minutely pointed out the features of this recent case. It is, in the first place, an example of "psychic," not "physical," phenomena; and it was conjuring pure and simple. It was, further, "most successful and convincing," as Sir A. C. Doyle pronounced; yet there was not a particle of abnormal power about it. Finally, it was done in the presence of three keen critics, as well as of leading Spiritualists; yet the fraud was not discovered. To invoke the "supernormal," after this, the moment some ordinary individual fails to detect fraud, is surely ludicrous.
Now let me put another warning before the reader. It is notorious that Spiritualists are particularly, even if innocently, apt to mislead in their accounts of their experiences. Unless the experience is recorded on paper at once, it is almost worthless; and even then it is often quite wrong. There is such a thing as "selection" in the human mind. When two people, a Spiritualist and a sceptic, see or read the same thing, their minds may get quite a different impression of it. The mind of the Spiritualist leaps to the features of it which seem to be supernormal, and slurs or ignores or soon forgets the others. The mind of the sceptic does the opposite. You thus get quite inaccurate accounts from Spiritualists, though they are often quite innocent. One once asked me to explain how a medium, two hundred miles from his home, in a place where no one knew him, could tell his name and a good deal about him. By two minutes' cross-examination I got him to admit that he had been working for some weeks in this district and was known to a few fellow-workers. No doubt one of these had given a medium information about him, and then induced him to visit her. These indirect methods are very effective.
A very good example is Sir A. C. Doyle himself. In the debate with me he made statement after statement of the most inaccurate description. He said that Eusapia Palladino was quite honest in the first fifteen years of her mediumship; that he had given me the names of forty Spiritualist professors; that the Fox sisters were at first honest; that I did not give the evidence from his books correctly; that Mr. Lethem got certain detailed information the first time he consulted a medium; that in Mme. Bisson's book you can see ectoplasm pouring from the medium's "nose, eyes, ears, and skin"; that Florrie Cook "never took one penny of money"; that in the Belfast experiment the table rose to the ceiling; and so on. His frame of mind was extraordinary. But I will give a far more extraordinary case which will make the reader very cautious about Spiritualist testimony.
About forty years ago, when the old type of ghost story was not yet quite dead, Myers and Gurney, who were collecting anecdotes of this sort, received a particularly authentic specimen. It was a personal experience of Sir Edmund Hornby, a retired Judge from Shanghai. A few years earlier, he said, he had one night written out his judgment for the following day, but the reporter failed to call for a copy. He went to bed, and some time after one o'clock he was awakened by the reporter, who very solemnly asked him for the copy. With much grumbling Sir Edmund got up and gave him the copy. He remembered that in returning to bed he had awakened Lady Hornby. And the next morning, on going to court, he learned that the reporter had died just at that hour, of heart disease (as the inquest afterwards found), and had never left the house. He had been visited by the reporter's spirit.
Here was an experience of most exceptional weight. Who could doubt either the word or the competence of the Chief Judge of the Supreme Consular Court of China and Japan? The story was promptly written up in the Nineteenth Century ("Visible Apparitions," July, 1884), and sceptics were confounded. But a copy of the Nineteenth Century reached Shanghai, where the incident was said to have taken place, and in the same monthly for November there appeared a letter from Mr. Balfour, editor of the North China Herald and the Supreme Court and Consular Gazette. It proved, and Sir E. Hornby was compelled to admit, that the story was entirely untrue. It was a jumble of inaccuracies. The reporter had died between eight and nine in the morning, not at one, and had slept peacefully all night. There had been no inquest. There was no judgment whatever delivered by Sir E. Hornby that morning. There was not even a Lady Hornby in existence at the time! Sir Edmund Hornby sullenly acknowledged the truth of all this, and could mutter only that he could not understand his own mistake.
After this awful example we think twice before we take the testimony of Spiritualists at its face value. Sir A. C. Doyle, in particular, is especially guilty of such confusions, to the great advantage of his stories. During the Debate, as I said, he told of a wonderful Glasgow clairvoyante, who was consulted by a Mr. Lethem (a Glasgow J.P.), who had lost a son in the War. She at once told Mr. Lethem, Sir Arthur says, his son's name, the name of the London station at which he had said farewell, and the name of the London hotel at which they had stayed. This sounded very impressive indeed. But I happened to have read Mr. Lethem's articles (Weekly Record, February 21 and 28, 1920), and I have them before me. Mr. Lethem was a well-known man in Glasgow, and was known to be "inquiring." Now it was eight months after his son's death that he met this clairvoyante, yet all she could tell him was his son's name and appearance. It was, he confesses, "not much" and "not strictly evidential." It was at a later sitting that she gave the other details. Sir A. C. Doyle has fused the two sittings together and made the experience more impressive. The medium had time to make inquiries. There is a further detail which Sir A. C. Doyle does not tell. The brother of the dead officer asked, as a test question, the name of the town where they had last dined together. It took "more than a year" to get an answer to this!
Thus a quite commonplace and easily explained feat of a medium is dressed up by Sir A. C. Doyle as supernormal. He does this repeatedly in his books. In the New Revelation he says, quoting Sir Oliver Lodge's Raymond, that a medium described to Sir Oliver a photograph of his son, "no copy of which had reached England, and which proved to be exactly as he described it." Here he has done the same as in the case of Mr. Lethem—fused together several successive sittings. The first medium consulted by Sir Oliver Lodge made only a very brief statement. It was wrong in three out of four particulars; and the fourth was a very safe guess (that Raymond had once been photographed in a group). The particulars which so much impressed Sir O. Lodge were given much later, and by a lady medium; and by that time there were plenty of copies of the photograph in England! Sir O. Lodge gives the various dates.
Sir William Barrett and Sir O. Lodge are just as slipshod. I have amply shown this in the case of Lodge in my Religion of Sir O. Lodge (and Raymond is even worse than the books I analysed), and Sir W. F. Barrett's On the Threshold of the Unseen is just as bad. I have previously said how he tells his readers that it would take "the cleverest conjurer with elaborate apparatus" to do what the Golighers do at Belfast; and I showed that one limb of one member of the circle of seven mediums would, with the help of a finger or two perhaps, explain everything. Sir William also says (p. 53) that the London Dialectical Society "published the report of a special committee" strongly in favour of Spiritualism. On the contrary, the London Dialectical Society expressly refused to publish that egregious document. He says (p. 72), in describing the Home levitation case, that "nothing was said beforehand of what they might expect to see," and "the accounts given by each [witness] are alike." These statements are the reverse of the truth. The book contains many such instances.
Here is another, which is expressly concerned with the greatest of all "clairvoyantes," Mrs. Piper, and the most critical Spiritualist of modern times, Dr. Hodgson. In the Debate Sir A. C. Doyle introduces him (p. 21) as "Professor Hodgson, the greatest detective who ever put his mind to this subject." He is fond of turning the people he quotes into "professors." It makes them more weighty. Hodgson was never a professor, but he was an able man, and he exposed more than one fraud like Eusapia Palladino. But I have been permitted to see a letter which puts Dr. Hodgson himself in the category of over-zealous and unreliable witnesses; and as this letter is to be published in the form of a preface to the second edition of Dr. C. Mercier's book on Spiritualism, I am not quoting an anonymous document.
Mrs. Piper, the great American clairvoyante, the medium whose performances are endorsed as genuine even by men who regard Spiritualism as ninety-eight per cent. fraud, began her career as a "psychic" in 1874. At first she was controlled, in the common Spiritualist way, by "an Indian girl." Then the great spirits of Bach and Longfellow and other illustrious dead began to control her. Next a deceased French doctor, "Phinuit," took her in hand, and she did wonderful things. But when people who were really critical began to test Phinuit's knowledge of medicine, and inquire (for the purpose of verification) about Phinuit's former address on earth, he hedged and shuffled, and then retired into obscurity, like the Indian girl and Longfellow. Her next spirit was "Pelham," a young man who modestly desired to remain anonymous. For four years "George Pelham," a highly cultivated spirit, gave "marvellously accurate" messages through Mrs. Piper, and the world was assured that there was not the slightest doubt about his identity. He was a very cultivated young American who had "passed over" in 1892.