With this dissociation well established and having for its object the production of occult phenomena, we can understand the rest of the manifestations that he produced for his circle of friends. He received numerous communications from the dead, produced spirit lights, transferred objects from one room to another through closed doors, floated about, and, in short, went through all the spiritualist repertory.
The ball is kept rolling by all sorts of people. The late Archdeacon Wilberforce, who believed in 'objective entities that seem able to manipulate or influence nerve currents, or magnetic ether, or whatever it is, of persons in the flesh',[27] wrote approvingly of him: 'The most remarkable medium I ever knew was the Reverend Stainton Moses, a clergyman in my father's diocese of Oxford'.[28]
Of the same medium Mr. Podmore says: 'Apart from the moral difficulties involved, there is little or nothing to forbid the supposition that the whole of these messages were deliberately concocted by Mr. Moses himself and palmed off upon his unsuspecting friends.'[29]
The moral difficulties disappear when we consider the case as one of dissociation. His spirit communications were psychologically identical with the automatic writings of the Glastonbury archæologists (see Chapter IX); he read obituary notices, studied out-of-the-way stories of men and women, and from the stores of his unconscious he produced this information as news from the spirit world. But, knowing nothing of the ways of the unconscious and becoming a prey to his own dissociated stream, he fed this stream and drifted with it into something a little removed from sanity.
I know not how the manifestations began, and whether he belonged to my second or third group I do not attempt to discuss; I am satisfied if I have made it clear that the work of this wonderful medium can be explained otherwise than by one of the two alternatives of spiritualism or conscious deceit.
We meet with the same rush to testify to the honesty of Mrs. Piper. Sir Oliver Lodge of course guarantees her, and the late Professor William James, the Harvard psychologist, wrote of her: 'Practically I should be willing now to stake as much money on Mrs. Piper's honesty as on that of any one I know, and am quite satisfied to leave my reputation for wisdom or folly so far as human nature is concerned to stand or fall by this declaration.'[30]
This honesty of the main personality of the Dissociate leads astray professors of physics or of the old psychology.[31] It is the honest but mistaken man who misleads his fellows. We are on our guard against the rogue, and the conscious deceiver must needs be a good actor if he would succeed. The best actor knows he is acting, but the Reverend Moses needed no effort to preserve for years the appearance of straightforwardness and honesty. As far as he knew, he was straightforward and honest, though beneath his consciousness lay fathomless possibilities of deceit, ever ready to take advantage of the externals of an honest man.
As I said in Chapter VI, an authoritative and confident manner makes easy the acceptance of suggestion. What can be more authoritative and confident than the manner of a man who believes what he says and knows that his hearers are willing to believe? If what he says are lies and delusions, that makes no difference in his manner, and his unsuspicious hearers are still ready to stake their reputations upon his honesty. That readiness only makes them the more suggestible and renders valueless their opinion as to the truth of what he says.
Spiritualist writers are glib concerning 'subliminal consciousness', and, knowing not what they mean, attribute to it powers of communication with the spirit world. The only one worthy of study is the late F. H. Myers, and though his stories of the marvellous are largely repetitions of old material yet his treatment of the psychology of double personality is illuminating. His work on Human Personality, if free from the spiritualist complex, would probably rank well in advance of its period. He has a good grasp of the subject of hysterical double personality, giving some excellent examples, but postulates a transition from the imaginings of the hysteric to the revelations of the spirit world. That the mind should pass through disease on its way to divine revelation, the boundary between the two being only a matter of judgement, is a necessary part of his explanation of mediumism. Just as spiritualists will maintain their belief in a medium after fraud has been detected, placing upon unbelievers the onus of proving fraud in every case, so Myers, knowing the workings of hysterical double personality, claims the right to exclude hysteria whenever he pleases and to attribute a divine origin to the material then produced. This demand appeals neither to the religious man nor to the sceptic.
I take the liberty of borrowing a story from Mr. Hereward Carrington, a spiritualist of some critical power.[32]