It goes without saying that, à priori, the hypothesis of spirits to explain the phenomena of mediums has in it nothing of the impossible or the absurd. It does not even necessarily contradict, as is sometimes imagined, the directing principle of physiological psychology—the psychological parallelism—which demands that every mental phenomenon shall have a physical correlative. For, in spite of our habit of considering the molecular or atomic phenomena of the brain, the katabolism of the nerves, as the true concomitant of conscious processes, it may well be—it is even very probable—that these molecular movements do not constitute the ultimate physical term immediately paralleling the mental world, but that the real physical correlatives (spatial) of the (non-spatial) psychological phenomena should be sought for in the vibrations of imponderable matter, the ether, in which the ponderable atoms and molecules are plunged somewhat like grains of dust in the atmosphere, in order to make a sensible though somewhat inaccurate comparison.
The ethereal body, perispiritistic, astral, fluid, etc., of the occultists, and of many thinkers who are not believers in occultism, is only a notion scientifically absurd when it is made to be an equivocal and cloudy intermediary between the soul and the body, an unassignable tertium quid, a plastic mediator of which nothing is known as to its being material or spiritual or something else. But conceived as a system of movements of the ether, it contains nothing absolutely anti-or extra-scientific in its nature; the connection between the subjective facts of consciousness and the objective, material facts, remains essentially the same whether one considers the material world under the imponderable form of ether or under the ponderable form of chemical atoms, of physical molecules, and of anatomical elements. Nothing, then, would be radically opposed, from the point of view of the natural sciences, to the existence of disincarnate spirits wandering through space.
The foregoing will doubtless please my spiritistic friends. Here are two facts which will please them less. First: I separate myself from them when they pass prematurely from mere abstract possibilities to the affirmation of actualities. Perhaps the outcome will prove them right some day; perhaps in the near future, but we have not yet reached that point. I freely admit that never have circumstances been so favorable for the spiritistic doctrines as at present. The authentic return of George Pelham and other deceased persons, through Mrs. Piper entranced, as intermediary, seems to be admitted by so many acute observers, the phenomena observed for fifteen years past in the case of this incomparable medium are at times so marvellous and surrounded with such solid scientific guarantees—the case is, in a word, so unheard of and astounding in all respects, that those who are only acquainted with it from a distance, by printed reports and oral narratives of immediate witnesses, feel themselves in a poor position for formulating their doubts and reservations upon this subject.
I fear, in the second place, for mediums and practical spiritists, that when their hypothesis shall have been scientifically demonstrated the result may be very different from that which they now imagine it will be.
It might well happen that the cult of the table, mechanical writing, seances, and all other mediumistic exercises, may receive their death-blow from the official recognition of spirits by science. Suppose, in fact, that contemporaneous researches should at last have proved clearly that messages actually come from the disincarnate; it has already followed from the same researches that in the most favorable cases the veritable messages are very difficult to distinguish from those which are not authentic. When people come to understand that this sorting of messages is almost always beyond their power, they will, perhaps, be put out of conceit with experiments in which they have ninety-nine chances against one of being dupes of themselves or others, and in which—a still more vexatious matter—if they should even be so fortunate as to light upon the hundredth chance, they would have no certain means of knowing it.
This subject, decidedly, is fatal to me. I lose myself in digressions when discussing it—very useless they are, too, since the verdict which the future will pronounce upon the theory of spirits, with or without an ethereal body, matters little as far as the actual examination of the messages furnished by Mlle. Smith is concerned. Even having become scientifically verified, spiritism will never absolve us from bringing to the analysis of the pretended communications less care and rigor than while it was only an undemonstrated hypothesis; each particular case will always demand to be scrutinized by itself, in order to make the distinction between that which in all probability only arises from many non-spiritistic causes, and the residue eventually proceeding from the disincarnate.
I ought to state at the outset that, as far as Hélène’s mediumistic phenomena are concerned, their careful analysis has not revealed to me in them any evident vestige of the other world, not even of traces of a telepathic transmission on the part of the living. I have only succeeded in perceiving in them very beautiful and instructive examples of the well-known tendency of the subliminal imagination to reconstruct the deceased and to feign their presence, especially when the favorable suggestions of the surrounding environment incites them to do so. Not being infallible, and bearing in mind Hamlet’s principle, I will guard myself well from affirming that these subliminal imitations and simulacra are absolutely free from any spirit collaboration; I content myself with repeating that I have not discovered any, and that it seems to me in the highest degree improbable, and with leaving it to others to demonstrate its reality, if they think they are able to do so. Some examples taken from the principal incarnations of Mlle. Smith will enable me to show after a more concrete fashion my manner of regarding them.
1. Case of Mlle. Vignier.—This case has no evidential value whatever, since (as has been seen, p. [411]), there were formerly relations between the Vignier family and Mme. Smith which suffice to explain the veridical knowledge manifested by Hélène in this incarnation.
I give an abridged recital of it, nevertheless, for the sake of certain points of psychological interest. None of the spectators had any suspicion of these relations at the time of this scene, which was absolutely enigmatical to all of them.
In a seance at my house (on March 3, 1895, after a Hindoo vision, described p. [280]), Mlle. Smith saw an unknown lady appear, of whom she gave the following description: “A nose bent and hooked like the beak of an eagle; small gray eyes, very close together; a mouth with three teeth only; a wicked smile, mocking expression; simple dress; a collar not of the fashion of to-day; she draws near to this portrait,[30] and gazes at it not ill-naturedly.”