by Bart Schultz
Hodgson was convinced, explained all her so-called spiritualist phenomena, and
as far as the Sidgwicks and Podmore were concerned, Hodgson’s was the last
word on Eusapia Palladino. Their worst suspeicions had been confirmed; there
was nothing further to add.
It was this uncompromising rejection of all the evidence for a medium
upon any demonstration of fraud in a particular instance that struck fellow
researchers like William James as unduly ungenerous. But in this case,
Sidgwick was clearly right to be more suspicious of the will to believe.
The case of Eusapia Palladino was only part of the excitement attending
psychical research in the nineties, and her reception may in fact have been
colored by the excitement over other cases. Most importantly, there was
also the trance mediumship of one Leonora Piper, whose automatic writ-
ing supposedly reflected communications, via an other-worldly control,
from various deceased persons. The evidence from such sources utterly
convinced (the always credulous) Myers of the reality of personal sur-
vival, and appears even to have brought Sidgwick nearer the conclusion
that there was evidence for survival after all, sufficient to merit further
investigation. In fact, this form of inquiry would continue well into the
twentieth century, to such a degree that C. D. Broad could write, in the
s, that
Controls and ostensible communicators often display a knowledge of facts about
the past lives of dead persons and about the present actions and thoughts and
emotions of living ones, which is too extensive and detailed to be reasonably
ascribed to chance-coincidence, and it is quite inexplicable by reference to any
normal sources of information open to the medium. I do not think that this would
be seriously questioned by anyone, with a reasonably open mind, who had made a
careful study of the recorded facts and had had a certain amount of experience of
his own in these matters: though it is often dogmatically denied by persons who
lack those qualifications.
Ironically, the case of Piper, an American, had come to the SPR as a kind
of godsend at the moment of Sidgwick’s despair. She had been investigated
by William James as early as and later by none other than the skeptical
Hodgson, who found that this was a case he could not crack. The intensive
investigations of her that began in and extended over the next decade,
according to Morton Prince, “wrecked Dick Hodgson who had one of
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the most beautiful minds I ever knew.” At any rate, it was Piper, with
Hodgson as her champion, who converted the eminent physicist Lodge,
who after this point came to be a believer in human survival of physical
death.
What was the nature of the evidence? It was much along the lines
described by Broad. As Oppenheim records:
Piper’s first visit to England in – added Lodge, recently elected a Fellow
of the Royal Society, to the list of her admirers. Together with Myers and Leaf,
he formed a committee to study her mediumship, an inquiry that they pursued
in Cambridge, London, and Liverpool. Usually they invited other guests to meet
Piper and these, introduced under assumed names, frequently marveled at her
ability to recount personal information about themselves and their families that,
they were convinced, she could not have acquired through normal means. Some-
times it seemed that her knowledge could only have come to her from the deceased.
Trickery or purposeful deception on her part appeared out of the question. In
Boston, Hodgson had hired detectives to follow her and ascertain whether she
had confederates who supplied her with information, or whether she herself did
research on potential sitters. Piper successfully passed that test and while in Eng-
land was most cooperative in allowing SPR investigators to search her luggage and
to scrutinize her mail. There was nothing to suggest that she turned to outside
sources, human or literary, for the contents of her trance conversations.
As usual, the psychical researchers sought to explain Piper’s perfor-
mance as involving “nothing more” than telepathic communication be-
tween living persons, rather than communications from the “other world.”
But this could not, it seemed, fully account for her occasional ability to
produce material that had been unknown to any living person. Myers
visited Piper in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in , and came away abso-
lutely persuaded, as he told Lodge, “that spirits are talking & writing to us
thro her.” Similar evidence was obtained from a medium named Rosina
Thompson. In both cases, the psychical researchers argued, a “spirit pres-
ence” was controlling the automatist productions in the trance state. In-
deed, Myers was certain that he had been in touch with his beloved Annie
Marshall.
The more skeptical psychical researchers struggled hard with the
strangeness of the Piper case. She claimed that she was under the guid-
ance of the spirit of a deceased French physician, the “Phinuit control,”
but when William James addressed the control in French, it seemed not
to comprehend. James speculated that this “spirit” was some form of
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unconscious construction, quite fictitious. But he grew more receptive
to other interpretations when Piper was supposedly taken over by a new
control, during the period from to . As Robert Almeder has
summed up the evidence that baffled James and converted Hodgson:
George Pellew had been a young man of philosophical and literary talent who had
been killed in New York two weeks before he became Mrs. Piper’s control. Five
years earlier, Pellew had – under a pseudonym – attended one and only one sitting
with Mrs. Piper. According to A. Gauld, out of sitters who were introduced
to G.P. during the sittings, G.P. recognized of the who had been known
to the living Pellew. (The thirtieth, whom G.P. recognized after an initial failure,
was a young person who had “grown up” in the interval.) G.P. conversed with
each of them in an appropriate manner and showed an intimate knowledge of
their careers and of his own supposed past relationships with them. According to
Gauld, rarely did G.P. slip up badly in these matters, as he sometimes did when
discussing certain philosophical questions that had interested him during life.
It was during this time that Hodgson came to believe that Mrs. Piper’s
controls were sometimes what they claimed to be – namely, surviving dis-
embodied persons. Pre
sumably, the reason was that G. P. – in identifying
the thirty people known to him when alive, and in describing his own
personal (and sometimes intimate) relationships with them – manifested
a very systematic, coherent, and personal set of memories that one would
have expected of Pellew. Also, it seemed unlikely that Mrs. Piper was suc-
cessfully dramatizing the personality of Pellew, because she had met him
only once, briefly, five years earlier, when he sat with her anonymously.
James still resisted, believing that Hodgson had too quickly discounted
forms of telepathy as the basic explanation. But on the whole, he was
softened:
If we suppose Mrs. Piper’s dream-life once and for all to have had the notion
suggested to it that it must personate spirits to sitters, the fair degree of virtuosity need not, I think, surprise us. Nor need the exceptional memory shown surprise
us, for memory seems extraordinarily strong in the subconscious life. But I find
that when I ascend from the details of the Piper Case to the whole meaning of the phenomenon, and especially when I connect the Piper case with all the other cases I know of automatic writing and mediumship, and with the whole record of spirit-possession in human history, the notion that such an immense current of human experience, complex in so many ways, should spell out absolutely nothing but the word “humbug” acquires a character of unlikeness. The notion that so many men and women, in all other respects honest enough, should have this preposterous monkeying self annexed
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to their personality seems to me so weird that the spirit theory immediately takes
on a more probable appearance. The spirits, if spirits there be, must indeed work
under incredible complications and falsifications, but at least if they are present,
some honesty is left in the whole department of the universe which otherwise is
run by pure deception.
James, it would appear, was capable of mustering a Sidgwickian abhorrence
for the perversity of a universe in which all spiritual experience turned
out to be the diddlings of the “monkeying self.”
The Sidgwicks, naturally, were more resistent still, but they too were
deeply impressed, and one suspects that it was precisely this bit of
Jamesian coherentism that was informing Sidgwick’s thoughts on theism.
As the Memoir notes, in addition to Sidgwick’s further – and seemingly
successful – experiments in telepathy and hypnosis, there came in
“Mrs. Piper – a medium who in a trance state seemed to have a power of
getting information telepathically from the minds of those who sat with
her, and sometimes something beyond this.” Furthermore, “Sidgwick
took an active part in the investigation, and though he did not himself
have any success with her, the experiences of his friends impressed him
very strongly.” As Sidgwick would write to Roden Noel, with respect to
Lodge’s SPR report on Piper, “I think we are on the verge of something
important.” (M , ) Eleanor Sidgwick would later sum up matters
as follows: after Hodgson’s second report on Piper, when she was under
the G. P. control, “though all did not agree that the evidence for survival
was yet conclusive, all who studied the subject felt, I think, that at any rate
there was evidence that had to be taken account of.”
Set in this context, Sidgwick’s enthusiasm for Eusapia Palladino makes
more sense; his most skeptical and stalwart companions in psychical
research (Hodgson, Lodge, Podmore, Eleanor) were all going over to
optimism – some more slowly than others, but the drift was clear. It
was a prime triumph for Myers when Sidgwick in would respond to
Hodgson’s report on Piper that, as for the spirit interpretation, “he could
not say more than that a prima facie case had been established for further
investigation, keeping this hypothesis in view.” The time was indeed ripe
for the Synthetic Society.
Of course, the theorizing that came of such developments was itself
wild beyond belief. Myers, as one would expect, was the wildest of all.
Here was a companion of Socrates who took it that Socrates was psychic.
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The flights of psychological fancy that would become Human Personality
had been released from Sidgwickian skepticism, though the results were
proving paradoxical. Between the subliminal and the supraliminal, and
the emphasis on the former not as a sink of base instinct, but as a source
of artistic inspiration and creativity, the psychology of the individual was
not looking very individualistic. As Oppenheim has rightly observed:
Aiming above all else to prove that the human personality survived bodily death, he
had virtually destroyed the human personality. In Myers’s theory of the subliminal
self, man emerged as a not particularly well integrated bundle of many parts; strata
and streams of consciousness did not form one seamless web, but remained distinct
entities. Myers vastly confused the question of what distinguished one single
personality from another. Was personality composed of all the layers of subliminal
consciousness taken together, or of one in particular? Was it, perhaps, the sum total of subliminal and supraliminal selves combined? Whatever its constitution, it was
liable to abandon its own home, leaving that vulnerable to invasion and possession
by an alien personality. Leaf was expressing an understandable opinion when he
remarked that Myers’s work weakened his own sense of personality. Myers had
definitely not, Leaf explained, proved “the survival of what we call the living
spirit, the personality – a unit of consciousness, limited and self-contained, a
centre of will and vital force, carrying on into another world the aspirations and
the affections of this.”
Myers knew how this deconstruction of the unitary agent was beginning
to frighten people – Father Tyrrell probably found it strange – but he
had to content himself with a faith “that there is an incandescent solid,”
albeit one that “is beneath our line of sight.” Symonds in fact loved this
development, though he would give it a less personalist twist. As he wrote
to Sidgwick, in a letter strongly suggestive of the limits of his scientific
attitude:
I am fascinated by Myers’ treatise on the Subliminal Consciousness. I doubt
whether he himself suspects how far the hypothesis involved in his argument
carries. Rightly, he confines himself to proof or plausible inference from more or
less accredited phenomena.
I could talk more than it seems convenient to write, upon the deductions and
corollaries which must ensue from this doctrine, if it is established. It will prove
a great prop to Pan
theism, the religion of the Cosmic mind.
The reference is presumably to Myers’s seminal articles on “The
Subliminal Self” that appeared in the SPR’s Proceedings in . And
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in fact, Myers was leading the way, setting the terms of the debate.
Complex competing accounts of the phenomena – was it telapathic or
direct control by departed spirits, or perhaps telapathic communication
from departed spirits? – were all speaking Myers’s depth psychological lan-
guage. As Gauld demonstrates, the differences between the various mem-
bers of the Sidgwick Group “seem on the surface to be quite considerable;
and no doubt from a practical point of view they are considerable. But they
did not involve the members of the Sidgwick Group in quite the theoretical
differences one might expect, for believers and non-believers alike came
in greater or in less measure to accept much the same sort of theoretical
framework or at any rate theoretical terminology.” And “this framework
was principally developed by Myers.” Thus,
That Myers believed in survival whilst Sidgwick doubted it was not to any great
extent due to the former accepting phenomena which the latter dismissed as fraud-
ulent. The evidence had reached such a state . . . that rejecting the survivalist point of view involved about as much credulity (in the way of supposing sensitives and
mediums to possess fantastic powers of telepathy and clairvoyance) as upholding
it did, so that the side one took might well be decided by one’s constitutional
optimism or pessimism, or by one’s suspicions as to one’s prospects in another
existence.
Admittedly, it may seem quite fantastic to think of the ever-skeptical
Sidgwick taking this type of psychological speculation so seriously. But he
manifestly did, and it is worth reiterating that from an early age he had an
abiding belief in quirky unconscious thought processes. Myers’s Human
Personality actually contains a report that Sidgwick belatedly wrote in
, recounting his experiments with his friend Cowell in the s: