The Report consists of the reports of the séances of six experimental subcommittees, minutes of the examination before the General Committee of spiritualist witnesses, letters on spiritualism from a great number of literary and scientific persons, and communications in the shape of experiences and speculative essays on spiritualism by some of its principal adherents.
Subcommittee No. 1 (Rep., p. 9) declares itself to have "established conclusively" "the movements of heavy substances without contact or material connection of any kind between such substances and the body of any person present." This is confirmed by Subcommittee No. 2, and embodied in the general report. Amongst a great mass of well-attested phenomena, I select the following: "Thirteen witnesses state that they have seen heavy bodies, in some instances men, rise slowly in the air, and remain there without visible or tangible support." "Fourteen witnesses testify to having seen hands of figures not appertaining to any human being, but lifelike in appearance and mobility, which they have sometimes touched and even grasped." "Eight witnesses state that they have received precise information through rappings, writings, and in other ways, the accuracy of which was unknown at the time to themselves or to any persons present, and which, on subsequent inquiry, was found to be correct." Many of these experimental séances took place without the presence of any professional mediums. Subcommittees 1 and 2 declare that they have never used them, and these were particularly fertile in instances of independent movement, No. 1 having witnessed no less than fifty such motions.
There is absolutely no room for a suspicion of trickery, neither is it more rational to suppose that the phenomena had no objective existence, but were the mere phantasms of the excited imagination of the company; for the witnesses testify that they were in no such state of excitement, and their recorded conversation and behavior are incompatible with any such supposition. Again, such excitement acts spasmodically and irregularly; but, as a rule, the phenomena are seen by all equally. In the few cases in which individuals have manifested abnormal excitement, the séances have been frustrated. Subcommittee No. 2 sent for a neighbor to witness the phenomena when in full operation, and they presented precisely the same aspect to him as they did to the members of the séance.
There remains, then, a large number of objective phenomena of the kind mentioned which have to be accounted for. Three hypotheses have been advocated with more or less success, which I shall proceed to consider in order.
1st. Unconscious cerebration expressing itself in unconscious muscular action. 2d. Psychic force. 3d. Spirits. I would remark that the first and second agree, in so far as they make the source of the phenomena internal; they differ in that the first would make them the result of a known law, the action of which had been previously detected, whilst the second supposes a previously unknown law or force of which spiritualistic phenomena are the sole evidence.
I.
The doctrine of unconscious cerebration is thus expressed by Dr. Carpenter (Rep., p. 272): "Ideational changes take place in the cerebrum, of which we may be at the time unconscious for want of receptivity on the part of the sensorium, but of which the results may at a subsequent period present themselves to the consciousness, as ideas elaborated by an automatic process of which we have no cognizance." Dr. Carpenter's ground for "surmising" that "ideational changes" may be received unconsciously, and subsequently recognized, and that the consciousness or unconsciousness of the reception depends upon their being presented or not in the sensorium, is the following analogy: The cerebrum, "or rather its ganglionic matter in which its potentiality resides," stands in precisely the same anatomical relation to the sensorium that the retina does; but visual changes may be unconsciously received in the retina when the sensorium is inoperative, and may be subsequently recognized. The reality of this automatic reception and elaboration of ideas is confirmed by the phenomena of somnambulism, which show "that long trains of thought may, with a complete suspension of the directing and controlling power of the will, follow the lead either of some dominant idea or of suggestion from without." This doctrine, when applied to explain the intelligent manifestations of spiritualism, comes to this, that you cannot argue, from the fact that a man informs you truly of something which he could not possibly have learned elsewhere, and which you know you were never aware of in the ordinary sense of the word, that he is informed by a superior intelligence; for you may have received unconsciously into your cerebrum the information in question, or have unconsciously elaborated it from premises so received, and may have communicated it to your informant by unconscious muscular action.
I must do Dr. Carpenter the justice to admit that he nowhere, so far as I have seen, attempts to apply his doctrine in detail to the higher phenomena of spiritualism. He is contented with stating it as indicating the direction in which a solution of such phenomenal difficulties as do not seem to him wholly incredible is to be looked for.
I have every wish to speak on matters of physiological experiment with the modesty befitting my comparative unfamiliarity with the subject. I have no difficulty in admitting all that Dr. Carpenter says, in his article on "Electro-biology and Mesmerism" (Quart., Oct., 1853), on the action of dominant ideas, whether original or suggested, in the production of the phenomena of somnambulism and mesmerism; but I hesitate as to the possibility of receiving in the form of an unconscious ideational change such a piece of information as this: "I have another sister besides those I am used to reckon"; and of its recovery, not as an image or sensation such as a dream might leave, but as an unequivocal assertion of a fact clothed in all its native confidence. The nerve modification, which I suppose the "ideational change" comes to, is here understood to play the part, not merely of a bell whose prolonged vibrations, when taken cognizance of, may more or less suggest the individual visitor, but of a photographic negative, set aside, indeed, and overlaid, but from which at any moment exact representations may be taken. This theory appears to me to belong to the category of those which, to borrow Dr. Carpenter's expression (art., p. 535), "cannot be accepted without a great amount of evidence in their favor, but which, not being in absolute opposition to recognized laws, may be received upon strong testimony, without doing violence to our common sense." I must add that I have met with no such evidence either in the Quarterly Review or elsewhere. When we ask for instances, in which modern science is ordinarily so fertile, it is at least suspicious that the only at all adequate examples produced in the brilliant article, "Spiritualism and its Recent Converts" (Quart., vol. 131, 1871), are taken from the very spiritualistic phenomena under discussion. Let us, however, for the moment grant all that is expressly demanded on the score of unconscious cerebration, and then see how far it affords an adequate explanation of the phenomena of spiritualism. Of course, independent physical manifestations, such as the subcommittees report, fall entirely without the sphere of this explanation; and Faraday's ingenious machine for testing muscular action has no place where there is no contact of muscles. But what are we to say to communications such as the following (Rep., p. 195), made to Signor Damiani, at Clifton? He asked of the rapping table, "Who is there?" "Sister," was rapped out in reply. "What sister?" "Marietta." "Don't know you; that is not a family name. Are you not mistaken?" "No; I am your sister." He left the table in disgust, but afterwards joined in another séance at the same house. "Who are you?" he asks. "Marietta." "Again! Why does not a sister whom I can remember come?" "I will bring one." "And the raps were heard to recede, becoming faint and fainter, until lost in the distance. In a few seconds, a double knock, like the trot of a horse, was heard approaching, striking the ceiling, the floor, and, lastly, the table. 'Who is there?' 'Your sister Antonietta.' That is a good guess, thought I. 'Where did she pass away?' 'Chieti.' 'When?' Thirty-four loud, distinct raps succeeded. Strange! My sister so named had certainly died at Chieti just thirty-four years before." "How many brothers and sisters had you then? Can you give me their names?" "Five names (the real ones), all correctly spelt in Italian, were given. Numerous other tests produced equally remarkable results." He is much perplexed, naturally, about this sister "Marietta," and writes to his mother about her. He is answered that, "on such a date, forty-four years before, a sister had been born and had lived six hours, during which time she had been baptized by the midwife by the name of Mary." Now, this is not a case of an isolated bit of information that may have been given and forthwith wholly disconnected from the current of life, as an Indian child might have been told, on the eve of its voyage to England, that a certain tropical berry was poisonous, which it never saw again. In Signor Damiani's case, the sleep of unconscious cerebration must have been very deep that so interesting a fact should not have been waked up by all the friction it must have sustained every time of the thousand of times that he asserted himself and his five brothers and sisters to the exclusion of any others.
But these difficulties sink into the shade when we try to carry out the explanation a step further. We have to explain not merely how Signor Damiani knew, but how the medium knew, the astonishing fact. I can understand how emotions of various kinds may be read in muscular motions; how the almost inevitable slight hesitation at certain critical letters may suggest them to the keen and practised observer; but how, amongst all the threads of thought which cross the human mind, the very one which must needs be the slenderest and most remote should get itself expressed by unconscious muscular action, and how another should read the hieroglyph, I simply cannot conceive. Nothing I have met with in the wildest spiritualism is half so difficult to believe.