A score of such tests could be devised. Three of the best writing mediums the Society for Psychical Research cares to indicate could be accommodated, under proper observation, in different rooms of the same building, and these tests carried out. We could invite the spirit to pass from medium to medium and repeat the message to all three, or give a part to each. Until some such rigorous inquiry is carried out, we may decline to be interested. I have before me several volumes of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. Candidly, they are full of trash and padding. There is very little that merits serious consideration, and nothing that is not weakened by uncertainties, suppressions, and over-zealous eagerness.
In fine, what impresses any man who reads much of all the volumes of "revelation" which have been vouchsafed to us is the entirely earthly character of it all. The Spiritualist theory is that men grow rapidly wiser after death. Plato is two thousand years wiser than he was when he lived. Ptah-hotep is six thousand years older and wiser. Neither these, nor Buddha nor Christ nor any other moralist, has a word of wisdom for us. In fact, a theory has had to be invented which supposes that they move away from the earth to distant regions of the spirit-world as they grow older, and so cannot communicate. It is a pity they are not "permitted" to do so for propaganda purposes. But even those who remain in communication have learned nothing since they left the earth. No discovery has ever yet been communicated to us. In Spiritualist literature, it is true, there is a claim that certain unknown facts about the satellites of Uranus were revealed; but Flammarion makes short work of the claim. The communications never rise above the level of the thought and knowledge of living humanity: never even above the level of the knowledge available to the mediums. It is scarcely an "insanity of incredulity" to suppose that they originated there.
Chapter IX GHOST-LAND AND ITS CITIZENS
About twenty years ago a writing medium, a sober professional man whose character would not be questioned, showed me a pile of his automatic "script." He sincerely believed that he had for several years been in communication with the dead. I glanced over many sheets of platitude and familiar moralizing, and then asked him to tell me how they described the new world in which the dead lived. He hesitated, and tried to convince me that this point, which seemed to me the most interesting of all, was unimportant. When I pressed, he said that it was a world so different from ours that the spirits could hardly convey a coherent description of it in our language. They had to be content with such vague phrases as that they "lived in houses of flowers."
That was the state of the "new revelation" twenty years ago. Long before that whole volumes of quite precise description of ghost-land had been written, but it was discredited. Andrew Jackson Davis had invented the name "Summerland," which Sir A. C. Doyle adopts to-day; but Davis's wonderful gospel had turned out to be a farrago of wild speculation, founded on an imperfect grasp of a crude, early stage of science. Then Stainton Moses and hundreds of other automatic writers had given us knowledge about the next world. A common feature of these early descriptions was that the dead lived in a quasi-material universe round about the earth and could visit the various planets and the sun at any time. In that case, of course, they could give most valuable assistance to our astronomers, and they were quite willing. Some said that there were living beings on the sun. As a matter of fact, one of our early astronomers had conjectured that there might be a cool, dark surface below the shining clouds which give out the light of the sun, and this "spirit" was following his lead. We know to-day that no part of the sun falls below a temperature of 7,000° C. Others described life on Jupiter and Saturn, and we now know that they are red-hot. Another medium, Helen Smith, attracted to herself a most romantic interest for years because she was controlled by the spirit of a late inhabitant of the planet Mars, and we learned a marvellous amount of weird detail about life on Mars.
The thing was so obviously overdone, and Spiritualism was so generally discredited in the eighties on account of the very numerous exposures of mediums, that for a time revelations were less frequent. People fell back very largely on the older belief, that the dead are "pure spirits," living in an environment that cannot be described in our language, which is material. This, in point of fact, is a hollow and insincere pretext. Philosophers have been accustomed for two thousand years to describe the life of the spirit, and have provided a vocabulary for any who are interested in it. The truth is that ideas were changing, and mediums were not at all sure what it was safe to say.
Towards the close of the century there was some revival of Spiritualism, and there were fresh attempts to describe the beautiful world beyond the grave. Mediums were then in the "houses of flowers" stage. It sounded very pretty, but you must not take it literally. With the advance of the new century, mediums recovered all their confidence. It was at the beginning of the present century that physicists began to discover that matter was composed of electrons, and "ether" was the most discussed subject in the whole scientific press. Here was a grand opportunity. A world of ether would not be so crudely Materialistic as the earlier post-mortem world of the mediums. Yet it might be moulded by the imagination into a more or less material shape. It must be frankly admitted that the "pure spirit" idea is not attractive. Those who yearn to meet again the people they had known and loved are a little chilled at the prospect of finding only what seems to be an abstraction, a mere mathematical point, a thing paler and less tangible than a streak of mist. Ether was therefore gladly seized as a good compromise. Ghost-land was in the ether of space.
There had been, it is true, earlier references in Spiritualist revelations to "ether bodies," but it is chiefly since the series of discoveries in science to which radium led that the modern Spiritualist idea has been evolved. As usual, the spiritual revelations follow in the rear of advancing science. But in this case the automatic writers had a great advantage. They need only follow the lead of Sir Oliver Lodge, who, however curious his ideas of physiology may be, is certainly an authority on ether. He began by hinting mysteriously that he saw "a spiritual significance" in ether. Following up that clue, the automatic writers have worked so industriously that we now know the "Summerland" more thoroughly than we know Central Africa or Thibet.
Buoyed up by the growing sentiment of agreement, as proved by the very profitable sales of his works, Sir Oliver Lodge, in Raymond, gave the world a vast amount of detail about the land beyond the grave. He did not guarantee it, it is true. That is not his way. But he assured the public that his mediums were undoubtedly "in touch" with his dead son, and the Spiritualist public must be pardoned if they understood that all the marvellous matter put out in the name of Raymond was to be taken seriously. The message was really ingenious. Raymond was, unhappily, not merely unable to give "direct voice" communications, as Sir A. C. Doyle's son is believed to have done, but he could not even directly communicate through Mrs. Leonard, the medium. He used as an intermediary the spirit of a child named "Feda"; and, of course, when one has to use a child—and such an irresponsible, lisping, foolish little child as "Feda"—as intermediary, you must not press the message literally in every part. The method had the advantage of pleasing Spiritualists, who found a complete confirmation of all their speculations about ghost-land, and at the same time disarming critics, because Raymond was not really responsible.