But while the evidence for the things already recounted here was pouring in, there came evidence too strong to be thrown aside without examination, of things harder to attribute to any incarnate power.
Home's accordeon, we are told by no less an authority than Sir William Crookes, and by several others (Pr. Vol. VI), was often played intelligently and beautifully without the apparent agency of human hands; and the inspirational writing which in earlier times had come from overwrought religious mystics, began to appear from people who were by no means overwrought or mystical, or even religious, though the most noted of them was. This was the Rev. W. Stainton Moses, the first remarkable medium who associated freely with the members of the Society. It is alleged that he manifested movement of objects without contact, lights, sounds in both the air and material objects, levitation and materialization—all the modes of zoömagnetism except resistance to heat—assuming that to be one of them. His molecular telekineses indicated intelligence.
Myers says (Pr. IX, 250f.):
"In 1882 he aided in the foundation of the Society for Psychical Research; but he left that body in 1886, on account of its attitude towards Spiritualism, which he regarded as unduly critical.... Many members of the Society held an intellectual position widely differing from that of Mr. Moses, and although his own published records were of a kind not easily credible, no suspicion as to his personal probity and veracity was ever, so far as I know, either expressed or entertained.
"... [Moses] was very reticent about exhibiting his powers, and consequently almost the only records are his own and those of his physician, Dr. Stanhope Speer, Mrs. Speer, and their son, Mr. Charlton T. Speer, Associate of the Royal Academy of Music—all persons of undoubted capacity and probity.... Dr. Speer's cast of mind was thoroughly materialistic, and it is remarkable that his interest in Mr. Moses' phenomena was from first to last of a purely scientific, as contrasted with an emotional or religious nature."
There are half a dozen other good witnesses, however.
Despite Moses' telepsychic telekineses, his principal alleged communications with the spirit world were by automatic (we prefer to call it heteromatic) writing. Of this he left twenty-four note books. The writings in these were in several different hands and bore the marks of as many different characters, that were never mixed up. They signed the names, Imperator, Rector, Doctor, etc., and declared their earthly selves to have been various eminent persons in the remote past.
We shall find later that after Moses' death, his alleged spirit gave an entirely different set of names for the earthly originals of these alleged personalities. Myers, having seen all the heteromatic writing, tacitly endorses Moses' statements regarding its visible qualities. Moses continues:
"By degrees I found that many spirits who were unable to influence my hand themselves sought the aid of a spirit 'Rector'