Now what are we to think of all this? Must we, with Myers, Newbold, Hyslop, Hodgson and many others, who studied this problem at length, conclude in favour of the incontestable agency of forces and intelligences returning from the farther bank of the great river which it was deemed that none might cross. Must we acknowledge with them that there are cases ever more numerous which make it impossible for us to hesitate any longer between the telepathic theory and the spiritualistic theory? I do not think so. I have no prejudices—what were the use of having any, in these mysteries?—no reluctance to admit the survival and the intervention of the dead; but it is wise and necessary, before leaving the terrestrial plane, to exhaust all the suppositions, all the explanations there to be discovered. We have to make our choice between two manifestations of the unknown, two miracles, if you prefer, whereof one is situated in the world which we inhabit and the other in a region which, rightly or wrongly, we believe to be separated from us by nameless spaces which no human being, alive or dead, has crossed to this day. It is natural, therefore, that we should stay in our own world, as long as it gives us a foothold, as long as we are not pitilessly expelled from it by a series of irresistible and irrefutable facts issuing from the adjoining abyss. The survival of a spirit is no more improbable than the prodigious faculties which we are obliged to attribute to the mediums if we deny them to the dead; but the existence of the medium, contrary to that of the spirit, is unquestionable; and therefore it is for the spirit, or for those who make use of its name, first to prove that it exists.
Do the extraordinary phenomena of which we know—transmission of thought from one subconscious mind to another, perception of events at a distance, subliminal clairvoyance—occur when the dead are not in evidence, when the experiments are being made exclusively between living persons? This cannot be honestly contested. Certainly no one has ever obtained among living people any series of communications or revelations similar to those of the great spiritualistic mediums, Mrs. Piper, Mrs. Thompson and Stainton Moses, nor anything that can compare with them for continuity or lucidity. But, though the quality of the phenomena will not bear comparison, it cannot be denied that their inner nature is identical. Our logical inference is that the real cause lies not in the source of inspiration, but in the personal value, the sensitiveness, the power of the medium. For the rest, Mr. J. G. Piddington, who devoted an exceedingly detailed study to Mrs. Thompson, plainly perceived in her, when she was not “entranced” and when there were no spirits whatever in question, manifestations inferior, it is true, but absolutely analogous to those involving the dead.[7] These mediums are pleased, in all good faith and probably unconsciously, to give to their subliminal faculties, to their secondary personalities, or to accept, on their behalf, names which were borne by beings who have crossed to the farther side of the mystery: this is a matter of vocabulary or nomenclature which neither lessens nor increases the intrinsic significance of the facts. Well, in examining these facts, however strange and really unparalleled some of them may be, I never find one which proceeds frankly from this world or which comes indisputably from the other. They are, if you wish, phenomenal border incidents; but it cannot be said that the border has been violated. In the story of Sir Oliver Lodge’s watch, for instance, which is one of the most characteristic and one which carries us farther than most, we must attribute to the medium faculties that have ceased to be human. She must have put herself in touch, whether by perception of events at a distance, or by transmission of thought from one subconscious mind to another, or again by subliminal clairvoyance, with the two surviving brothers of the deceased owner of the watch; and, in the past subconsciousness of those two brothers, distant from each other, she had to rediscover a host of circumstances which they themselves had forgotten and which lay hidden beneath the heaped-up dust and darkness of six-and-sixty years. It is certain that a phenomenon of this kind passes the bounds of the imagination and that we should refuse to credit it if, first of all, the experiment had not been controlled and certified by a man of the standing of Sir Oliver Lodge, and if, moreover, it did not form one of a group of equally significant facts which clearly show that we are not here concerned with an absolutely unique miracle or with an unhoped-for and unprecedented concourse of coincidences. It is simply a matter of distant perception, subliminal clairvoyance and telepathy raised to the highest power; and these three manifestations of the unexplored depths of man are to-day recognized and classified by science, which is not saying that they are explained: that is another question. When, in connection with electricity, we use such terms as positive, negative, induction, potential and resistance, we are also applying conventional words to facts and phenomena of whose inward essence we are utterly ignorant; and we must needs be content with these, pending any better. There is, I insist, between these extraordinary manifestations and those given to us by a medium who is not speaking in the name of the dead, but a difference of the greater and the lesser, a difference of extent or degree and in no wise a difference in kind.
8
For the proof to be more decisive, it would be necessary that no one, neither the medium nor the witnesses, should ever have known of the existence of him whose past is revealed by the dead man, in other words, that every living link should be eliminated. I do not believe that this has actually occurred up to the present, nor even that it is possible; in any case, it would be very difficult to control such an experiment. Be this as it may, Dr. Hodgson, who devoted part of his life to the quest of specific phenomena wherein the boundaries of mediumistic power should be plainly overstepped, believes that he found them in certain cases, of which—as the others were of very much the same nature—I will merely mention one of the most striking.[8] In a course of excellent sittings with Mrs. Piper the medium, he communicated with various dead friends who reminded him of a large number of common memories. The medium, the spirits and he himself seemed in a wonderfully accommodating mood; and the revelations were plentiful, exact and easy. In this extremely favourable atmosphere, he was placed in communication with the soul of one of his best friends, who had died a year before and whom he simply calls “A.” This A, whom he had known more intimately than most of the spirits with whom he had communicated previously, behaved quite differently and, while establishing his identity beyond dispute, vouchsafed only incoherent replies. Now A “had been troubled much, for years before his death, by headaches and occasionally mental exhaustion, though not amounting to positive mental disturbance.”
The same phenomenon appears to recur whenever similar troubles have come before death, as in cases of suicide.
“If the telepathic explanation is held to be the only one,” says Dr. Hodgson (I give the gist of his observations), “if it is claimed that all the communications of these discarnate minds are only suggestions from my subconscious self, it is unintelligible that, after having obtained satisfactory results from others whom I had known far less intimately than A and with whom I had consequently far fewer recollections in common, I should get from him, in the same sittings, nothing but incoherencies. I am thus driven to believe that my subliminal self is not the only thing in evidence, that it is in the presence of a real, living personality, whose mental state is the same as it was at the hour of death, a personality which remains independent of my subliminal consciousness and absolutely unaffected by it, which is deaf to its suggestions and draws from its own resources the revelations which it makes.”
The argument is not without value, but its full force would be obtained only if it were certain that none of those present knew of A’s madness; otherwise it can be contended that, the notion of madness having penetrated the subconscious intelligence of one of them, it worked upon it and gave to the replies induced a form in keeping with the state of mind presupposed in the dead man.