by Colin Wilson
Two close friends played a major part in convincing Myers that human beings survive the death of the body: the Rev. Stainton Moses, and William James. Oddly enough, both of them were originally even more sceptical than Myers.
William Stainton Moses was in many ways a typical ‘sick sensitive’; his health was always poor and he was to die at fifty-three. He had to resign a number of livings because of breakdowns in health. His original reaction to spiritualism was one of hostility, and he declared that Lord Adare’s book on Daniel Dunglas Home was ‘the dreariest twaddle he ever came across’. Robert Dale Owen’s second book on the paranormal, The Debateable Land, impressed him rather more. A doctor named Speers finally persuaded him to attend a seance in 1872, and he was impressed when he received an accurate description of a friend who had died in the north of England. He began attending seances by Daniel Dunglas Home, and was finally convinced by Home’s incredible phenomena. Soon after this, he realised that he himself was a medium. Odd things began to happen. Raps resounded from around the room. The toilet articles in his bedroom floated on to the bed and formed a cross. ‘Apports’ — like perfume and pin-cushions — fell from the air. Then, to his alarm, Moses was himself lifted up into the air. The third time this happened he was thrown on to a table, then on to the sofa. He began holding seances, at which the table floated up into the air, musical instruments played and all kinds of scents wafted through the room. His honestly and integrity were so obvious that he did more to convince Myers of the reality of mediumship than anyone else.
Since table rapping took so long, Moses decided to try automatic writing. He would write his question at the top of a page, then sit with a pencil in his hand until it began to write. The handwriting was small and neat, and quite unlike Moses’s own. Finally, Moses accumulated twenty-four volumes of these automatic scripts. After his death, they were passed on to Myers, who made selections from them for a volume called Spirit Teachings. Together with Allen Kardec’s Spirits’ Book, it forms the most interesting body of automatic writing in spiritualist literature.
Like Myers, Stainton Moses was inclined to believe that all this writing came from his own unconscious mind. On one occasion, he asked the ‘spirit’ — who seemed to be literate and intelligent — to quote the first line of Virgil’s Aeneid. The ‘spirit’ wrote the answer correctly. Moses was struck by the thought that, although he himself did not know the line consciously, he might well have recollected it from his schooldays. So he asked the ‘spirit’ if it would go to the bookcase, select the last book but one on the second shelf, and read out the last paragraph on page 94. The spirit apparently did this without removing the book from the shelf. Moses himself had no idea of what the book was, but the ‘spirit’ quoted the paragraph word for word.
This could, of course, be explained by the ‘cryptomnesia’ theory — that Moses had read the paragraph at some time, and that his ‘subliminal mind’ could recall it word for word. So by way of convincing him, the ‘spirit’ decided to select its own book. It dictated a paragraph about the poet Pope, and then told Moses that he would find it on the same shelf, in a book called Poetry, Romance and Rhetoric. When Moses took this off the shelf, it opened at the right page.
Spirit Teachings is a fascinating book because it contradicts Stainton Moses’s own creed in many respects. For a Christian clergyman, who had been brought up to believe that Christ is God, it must have been disconcerting to be told that Jesus was simply a great teacher, like many others, and that he himself would have disowned most of the absurd fictions that men have foisted on him. On the day after this startling communication, Moses argued long and bitterly, attacking the ‘spirit teachings’, and calling them ‘silly and frivolous, if not mischievous’. But the ‘teachers’ (there were apparently forty-nine of them) refused to budge an inch, and explained to Moses that all human history is a ‘progressive revelation of one and the same God’ — in other words, that the idea of Jesus as the unique son of God is a purely human notion.
Like Kardec’s Spirits’ Book, Moses’s Spirit Teachings also insists that there are a great many mischievous spirits around, most of them the ‘earth bound’ spirits of human beings who are either unaware they are dead or have no wish to move ‘elsewhere’. He makes the interesting observation that execution is a silly way to deal with criminals, since it lets loose a vengeful and murderous spirit that will do its best to exert a harmful influence on the living — like Kardec, the Spirit Teachings states that spirits can enter into our minds, and that we are often influenced by them without knowing it.
Perhaps the most impressive thing about Spirit Teachings is that Moses himself felt so ambivalent about them. He published extracts in Light, the journal of the College of Psychic Science, but deliberately left out some of the harsher exchanges — in fact, there is evidence that he destroyed one of the notebooks because the ‘spirits’ were so uncomplimentary about him. Moreover, he went to considerable trouble to conceal the identities of the ‘forty-nine’ communicators, obviously feeling that to reveal them — they included half a dozen Old Testament prophets, not to mention Plato and Aristotle — would simply lead most people to assume he was mad or that the spirits were leg-pullers. The names of the ‘communicators’ were finally revealed more than half a century after Moses’s death by a researcher called A. W. Trethewy.
William James, the other major influence on Frederick Myers, was the son of a follower of Swedenborg. In spite of this — or perhaps because of it — his attitude towards Spiritualism was originally one of bored indifference. Like Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin, James began his career as a naturalist, and went on an expedition to explore the upper Amazon. Ill health drove him back to Boston; he studied medicine in Germany, and became a doctor. As a thinker he had little patience with involved metaphysics, and he developed the doctrine called ‘pragmatism’, a kind of predecessor of modern Logical Positivism. Stated very crudely, this says: ‘It doesn’t matter what you believe so long as it works.’ (James expressed it: ‘We have the right to believe at our own risk any hypothesis that is live enough to tempt our will’ — a doctrine that victims of Nazism might feel to be a little simplistic.) As a psychologist — his Principles of Psychology brought him fame — he believed that our emotions are basically merely physical sensations (a doctrine known as the James-Lange theory of emotions).
It can well be imagined that a pragmatist like James — he invented the expression ‘tough-minded’ — would have little patience with the doctrines of Spiritualism. Reviewing a book called Planchette when he was a medical student, James complained that ‘we fail to discover among all the facts [about psychical phenomena] a single one possessing either aesthetic beauty, intellectual originality or material usefulness’.
When he came to England in 1882, James met Myers, Gurney and Podmore, and was impressed by their integrity and sincerity. But where the paranormal was concerned, he remained a sceptic. Then, in 1885, his mother-in-law, Eliza Gibbens, heard about a remarkable young medium called Leonore Piper, and went to see her. Mrs Piper went into a trance, and then proceeded to tell Mrs Gibbens all kinds of facts about members of the family, identifying most of them by their Christian names. When Mrs Gibbens recounted all this to her daughter and son-in-law, James was naturally intrigued. His innate scepticism suggested that Mrs Piper had managed to make vague general statements that sounded true. The alternative was that she had somehow read Mrs Gibben’s mind. The next day, James’s sister-in-law went to see Mrs Piper, taking with her a letter in Italian. Mrs Piper held the letter to her forehead, and described the writer in detail. James was now sufficiently interested to go to see Mrs Piper himself.
Mrs Piper had discovered her own psychic powers when she went to consult a Boston healer named J. R. Cocke, and fell into a trance. On the next occasion she went to see Cocke, other people were present, including a certain Judge Frost. As soon as Cocke put his hand on her forehead, Mrs Piper went into a trance, then went to the table and wrote a message on a
sheet of paper, which she handed to the judge. It was, apparently, a message from his dead son, and he declared it ‘the most remarkable he had ever received’. Mrs Piper suddenly became a local celebrity.
James went to see her in a highly critical frame of mind, together with his pretty and intelligent wife Alice. The Jameses took care that Mrs Piper should not know their identity, or that they were connected with the previous ‘sitters’. Mrs Piper went into her trance, and was then taken over by her ‘control’, a Frenchman called Phinuit. And to James’s surprise, ‘Phinuit’ mentioned several of the members of the family he had already described to Mrs Gibbens, spoke of Alice’s father as ‘Giblin’, and spoke of a child the Jameses had lost in the previous year. The child had been called Herman; ‘Phinuit’ called him ‘Herrin’ — a fairly accurate approximation.
James went away badly puzzled; either Mrs Piper knew his wife’s family by sight, and had learned ‘by some lucky coincidence’ all kinds of intimate details about them, or she possessed some kind of supernormal powers. He continued to visit Mrs Piper, and after observing her for a long time, decided that she was undoubtedly genuine. But were the ‘spirits’ genuine? James felt that ‘it is hard to reconcile’ the theory of spirit control with ‘the extreme triviality of most of the communications’. Besides, ‘Phinuit’ — who claimed to be a Frenchman — had only the most rudimentary knowledge of French. The likeliest theory, James decided, was that ‘Phinuit’ was some aspect of Mrs Piper’s own personality — in other words, that Mrs Piper was a ‘split personality’, like Louis Vivé. But even that failed to explain how ‘Phinuit’ could get hold of so much accurate information. James kept sending his friends to her — all under pseudonyms — and Mrs Piper continued to produce accurate information about dead relatives.
James allowed himself to be convinced. He said later: ‘If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you must not seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you can prove one single crow to be white.’ It was one of the most sensible remarks ever made about spiritualism; the ‘crow’ James had in mind was Leonore Piper.
In 1885, an American branch of the Society for Psychical Research had been founded in Philadelphia by Professor William Barrett. The London Society sent over one of its most promising young investigators, Richard Hodgson, a thoroughly ‘tough-minded’ individual, who had been to India to investigate Madame Blavatsky and decided she was a fraud. Hodgson immediately called on Mrs Piper, and was staggered when she spoke to him about a girl called Jessie, to whom he had been engaged in Australia. Jessie had died while Hodgson was abroad. What convinced Hodgson even more than ‘Phinuit’ ’s accurate description of Jessie, was his report of a conversation that no one but Hodgson knew about. Hodgson, who had so far been a sceptic about psychical phenomena, had no doubt that Mrs Piper was genuine. He signed her up to devote her services to the Society for Psychical Research — for £200 a year — and in 1889 she came to England. Hodgson even went to the length of having her shadowed by private detectives to see whether she had some private information network. Myers, Lodge and the Sidgwicks tested her extensively, and decided that, whatever the nature of her powers, they were undoubtedly genuine. But then, they could have been based on telepathy.
What finally convinced Hodgson was a case involving a young man named George Pellew, who had been killed in a fall in 1892. Hodgson — who had known Pellew — took another old friend of Pellew’s along to a sitting with Mrs Piper. ‘Phinuit’ immediately recognised Pellew’s friend — or, rather, ‘Pellew’s spirit’ recognised him, and called him by his correct name. The friend removed a stud he was wearing and handed it to ‘Phinuit’. George Pellew immediately said (through ‘Phinuit’) ‘That’s mine. Mother gave you that.’ The friend denied this, but he later turned out to be wrong. Pellew’s stepmother had removed the studs from the body, and when the friend asked for some memento, it was she who suggested sending them to him. Here was a fact that Mrs Piper could not have learned by telepathy.
‘Phinuit’ went on to talk about a couple named James and Mary Howard, with whom Pellew had lived for a time in New York. The friend only knew the Howards slightly, and Hodgson did not know them at all; but ‘Pellew’ went on to speak of their daughter Katherine, and sent her a message: ‘Tell her, she’ll know. I will solve the problems, Katherine.’ This meant nothing to Hodgson or the friend. But when James Howard was told about it the next day, he had no doubt that the message came from Pellew, who used to have long discussions about Time, Space and Eternity with Katherine Howard, and had used the phrase ‘I will solve the problems, Katherine’ while he was alive.
Myers and Hodgson were finally convinced by Mrs Piper that the messages really came from spirits. But James continued to feel that Myers’s ‘subliminal mind’ theory was as good as any. It was another fourteen years before he was willing to concede that the subliminal mind could not explain all the phenomena. In December 1905, Hodgson was playing handball at a club in Boston when he collapsed and died. That night, Mrs Piper dreamed she was trying to enter a dark tunnel, and that a bearded man like Hodgson was trying to prevent her; the next morning, she learned of his death. Eight days later, she was holding a pencil when her hand suddenly wrote the word ‘Hodgson’. And from then on, ‘Hodgson’ began to communicate through Mrs Piper. William James and his son attended a seance, and James had to admit that this was the authentic Hodgson personality. Yet although he was willing to admit that much, he was still not prepared to concede that Hodgson’s ‘spirit’ had somehow survived his death. He suggested that he was confronting some kind of ‘after-image’ of Hodgson, like a film or gramophone record. What James did not explain is how a film or gramophone record could answer questions about Hodgson’s life, and convince a number of people that it was Hodgson speaking. James himself would die in 1910, and — as we have seen in the last chapter — would convince Professor James Hyslop of his survival of death by sending the cryptic message about red pyjamas via a medium who had never heard of either James or Hyslop …
Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death concludes with the long account of Mrs Piper; she was, apparently, Myers’s ‘white crow’ as well as James’s. Myers never lived to see his masterpiece in print; his health had begun to fail soon after the embarrassing business of Ada Goodrich-Freer. (Miss Goodrich-Freer commented balefully that people who crossed her often came to a bad end.) William James wrote a long review of the book when it finally came out, two years after Myers’s death, and the tone of the review is far from total enthusiasm: ‘The work, whatever weaknesses it may have, strikes me as at least a masterpiece of coordination and unification. The voluminous arsenal of ‘cases’ … might make the most erudite naturalist or historian envy him …’ In retrospect, James seems less than generous. It is true that the book has certain weaknesses which Myers would have undoubtedly removed if he had known about them: for example, he cites Ada Goodrich-Freer’s experiments in crystal gazing, and we know enough about that lady to feel that most of her claims must be viewed with suspicion. Neither did Myers know that his secretary of many years, George Albert Smith — the hypnotist who demonstrated the nine different levels of trance memory — would one day be accused of cheating in some of his earliest experiments in Brighton with a young man named Douglas Blackburn. (It is true that there was no earthly reason why Smith should have continued to cheat when he began to work for Myers, and his severest critics concede that he was a genuine hypnotist. But again, the least breath of this kind of suspicion makes evidence valueless for scientific purposes.) Having said which, it is necessary to concede that Human Personality towers above all other books on psychical research like a mountain above foothills.
Where the ‘white crow’, Leonore Piper, is concerned, one intriguing question remains. If ‘Phinuit’ was not a genuine Frenchman, who was he? Eleanor Sidgwick studied the problem for twenty-three years before — in 1915 — she announced her own conclusion: that ‘Phinuit’ was a fragment of Mrs Piper’s persona
lity — a multiple personality, like Clara Fowler’s alter-ego ‘Sally’. And later studies conducted with other mediums — like Mrs Osborne Leonard and Eileen Garrett — make this practically a certainty. In 1935, the researcher Whately Carington gave Mrs Leonard a word-association test — saying a word, and waiting for Mrs Leonard to reply with a word she associated with it. He made the interesting discovery that Mrs Leonard and her ‘control’ ‘Feda’ were like mirror images as far as words were concerned. When Mrs Leonard reacted slowly to a word, ‘Feda’ reacted quickly, and vice versa. And the same was found of Mrs Garrett and her ‘control’ ‘Uvani’. This could not be coincidence. Ever since the earliest studies of multiple personality, researchers had noticed that the patient and his — or her — alter-ego had diametrically opposite qualities. In 1811, a girl called Mary Reynolds, who lived in Pennsylvania, fell into a deep sleep for twenty hours, and when she woke up, had become another person. The original Mary was a dull girl, hyper-cautious and subject to fits of depression; the new ‘Mary’ was merry, irresponsible and flighty. For twenty years or so the Marys alternated, then they slowly blended, creating an altogether more satisfactory personality. It was almost as if Mary’s personality was made out of a child’s construction kit, and Mary 1 used up one set of attributes, while Mary 2 used the rest. Janet’s patient Leonie — the one who could be summoned from half a mile away by the hypnotist — had the same kind of mirror-image alter-ego. This alter-ego flatly denied that she was ‘Leonie’, declaring that Leonie was a stupid idiot. Lady Una Troubridge, who published a study of Mrs Leonard in 1922, noticed that Teda’ seemed to feel contemptuous of the medium.