As a test of unintentional garbling I asked a professional man, who had read Raymond sympathetically, to give me a short account of what the medium said about the photograph. Here is his version, and it must be understood that he knew I should criticise it:—
'Sir Oliver Lodge was told by a medium that Raymond wished to tell him about a photograph taken in France. The medium said the photograph was of a group of officers including Raymond—a photo Sir Oliver had not seen. There were lines running vertically in the background. Raymond is seated. Some one's knee was preventing him from sitting comfortably and annoyed him. He was holding a stick. The photo was out of doors, but in a sheltered position.'
The only points in which this tallies with the book description of what the medium (not Sir Oliver) said are those shown by the words in italic. The rest is garbled, and for the garbling my friend and Sir Oliver are about equally responsible.
I have since asked other intelligent people to read the chapter and then write out the story; the result is generally similar to that just given. The affair is such a to-do about nothing that the sympathetic and uncritical reader, deceived by the fuss, thinks there must be something in it and makes additions of his own to account for his belief. Had he read it critically he would have recognised the emptiness of the story, but once he is impressed by it he must improve it or become aware of its flimsiness.
Once again I must emphasise the way in which a guess, wide of the truth, is wrenched into an application to something entirely irrelevant. The first medium says that before Raymond went away his family had a photograph which showed him in a group of other men; because this is not true, it is twisted into a reference to a photograph taken in France and not yet received. The revelations of this medium must be cut out of the story, and the whole incident is reduced to Sir Oliver Lodge being told in an ordinary letter that a group photograph is on its way to him; then he tells another medium about a group photograph, and in answer to leading questions she makes the halting guesses reproduced above.
This is the famous photograph story, stripped of exaggeration and garbling. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would lead us to believe that the medium told Sir Oliver about the existence of the photograph, but the true account shows that, so far from this being the case, Sir Oliver told the medium.
It is a commonplace of spiritualism that a medium may be guilty of trickery at one time and genuinely gifted at another. We may freely admit that mediums are peculiar people, but when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle writes on a subject that needs careful observation and description and gives this distorted account of the photograph story, he can expect little credence when he writes in the same book equally convincing stories of the supernatural and puts them before the public as a contribution to religious thought. He gives a list of eminent men who vouch for the genuineness of supernatural phenomena, and says that the days are past when their opinions can be dismissed with the empty 'All rot' or 'Nauseating drivel' formula. I agree, and regard their opinions as interesting objects of psychological study. A little research could produce a longer list of men, equally eminent in their day, who believed in witchcraft and were willing to execute people in accordance with that belief. The belief may yet return with all its horrors if The New Revelation is taken seriously. On page 168 we read concerning the Cheriton poltergeist[19]:—
'It is very probable that Mr. Rolfe is, unknown to himself, a physical medium, and that when he was in the confined space of the cellar he turned it into a cabinet in which his magnetic powers could accumulate and be available for use.' (It is hard to believe that he who speaks like this about 'magnetic powers' once had at least an elementary knowledge of physics.) On page 170 we read, concerning another poltergeist, that '... a clergyman, with some knowledge of occult matters, has succeeded by sympathetic reasoning and prayer in obtaining a promise from the entity that it will plague the household no more.'
Poor Mr. Rolfe has had a narrow escape of being mixed up with an 'entity' who, or which, might have led him to the stake in a thorough-going spiritualist age.
This relation between spiritualism and witchcraft is not a fantasy of my unconscious; listen to this from another believer:—