“Call Myers! Bring Myers!”
He ought to be given time to collect himself, to reflect. He also complained of the difficulty of conveying his ideas through the mediums: “they were translating like a schoolboy does his first lines of Virgil.”[[8]] As for his present condition, “he groped his way as if through passages, before he knew he was dead. He thought he had lost his way in a strange town ... and, even when he saw people that he knew were dead, he thought they were only visions.”
This, together with more chatter of a no less trivial nature, is about all that we obtained from Myers’ “control” or “impersonation,” of which better things had been expected. The “communication” and many others which, it appears, recall in a striking fashion Myers’ habits, character and ways of thinking and speaking, would possess some value if none of those by whom or to whom they were made had been acquainted with him at the time when he was still numbered among the living. As they stand, they are most probably but reminiscences of a secondary personality of the medium or unconscious suggestions of the questioner or the sitters.
5
A more important communication and a more perplexing, because of the names connected with it, is that which is known as “Mrs. Piper’s Hodgson-Control.” Professor William James devotes an account of over a hundred and twenty pages to it in Vol. XXIII. of the Proceedings. Dr. Hodgson, in his lifetime, was secretary of the American branch of the S.P.R., of which William James was vice-president. For many years, he devoted himself to the medium Mrs. Piper, working with her twice a week and thus accumulating an enormous mass of documents on the subject of posthumous manifestations, a mass whose wealth has not yet been exhausted. Like Myers, he had promised to come back after his death; and, in his jovial way, he had more than once declared to Mrs. Piper that, when he came to visit her in his turn, as he had more experience than the other spirits, the sittings would take a more decisive shape and that “he would make it hot for them.” He did come back, a week after his death, and manifested himself by automatic writing (which, with Mrs. Piper as medium, was the most usual method of communication) during several sittings at which William James was present. I should like to give an idea of these manifestations. But, as the celebrated Harvard professor very truly observes, the shorthand report of a sitting of this kind at once alters its aspect from start to finish. We seek in vain for the emotion experienced on thus finding one’s self in the presence of an invisible but living being, who not only answers your questions, but anticipates your thoughts, understands before you have finished speaking, grasps an allusion and caps it with another allusion, grave or smiling. The life of the dead man, which, during a strange hour, had, so to speak, surrounded and penetrated you, seems to be extinguished for the second time. Stenography, which is devoid of all emotion, no doubt supplies the best elements for arriving at a logical conclusion; but it is not certain that here, as in many other cases where the unknown predominates, logic is the only road that leads to the truth.
“When I first undertook,” says William James, “to collate this series of sittings and make the present report, I supposed that my verdict would be determined by pure logic. Certain minute incidents, I thought, ought to make for spirit-return or against it in a ‘crucial’ way. But watching my mind work as it goes over the data, convinces me that exact logic plays only a preparatory part in shaping our conclusions here; and that the decisive vote, if there be one, has to be cast by what I may call one’s general sense of dramatic probability, which sense ebbs and flows from one hypothesis to another—it does so in the present writer at least—in a rather illogical manner. If one sticks to the detail, one may draw an anti-spiritist conclusion; if one thinks more of what the whole mass may signify, one may well incline to spiritist interpretations.”[[9]]
And, at the end of his article, he sums up in the following words:
“I myself feel as if an external will to communicate were probably there, that is, I find myself doubting, in consequence of my whole acquaintance with that sphere of phenomena, that Mrs. Piper’s dream-life, even equipped with ‘telepathic’ powers, accounts for all the results found. But if asked whether the will to communicate be Hodgson’s, or be some mere spirit-counterfeit of Hodgson, I remain uncertain and await more facts, facts which may not point clearly to a conclusion for fifty or a hundred years.”[[10]]
As we see, William James is inclined to waver; and at certain points in his account he appears to waver still more and indeed to say deliberately that the spirits “have a finger in the pie.” These hesitations on the part of a man who has revolutionized our psychological ideas and who possessed a brain as wonderfully organized and well-balanced as that of our own Taine, for instance, are very significant. As a doctor of medicine and a professor of philosophy, sceptical by nature and scrupulously faithful to experimental methods, he was thrice qualified to conduct investigations of this kind to a successful conclusion. It is not a question of allowing ourselves, in our turn, to be unduly influenced by those hesitations; but, in any case, they show that the problem is a serious one, the gravest, perhaps, if the facts were beyond dispute, which we have had to solve since the coming of Christ; and that we must not expect to dismiss it with a shrug or a laugh.