Delphi Complete Works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Illustrated)

by SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

  In studying these phenomena Dr. Hodgson, who had been among the most severe critics of all transcendental explanations, was gradually forced to accept the spiritual hypothesis as the only one which covered the facts. He found that telepathy from sitter to medium would not do so. He was much impressed by the fact that where the communicating intelligence had been deranged in mind before death, the after messages were obscure and wild. This would be inexplicable if the messages were mere reflections from the memory of the sitter. On the other hand, there were cases, such as that of Hannah Wild, where a message sealed up in lifetime could not be given after death. While admitting the validity of such objections, one can but repeat that we should cling to the positive results and hope that fuller knowledge may give us the key which will explain those which seem negative. How can we realise what the laws are, and what the special difficulties, in such an experiment?

  In March, 1892, the Phinuit control was largely superseded by the George Pelham control, and the whole tone of the communications was raised by the change. George Pelham was a young literary man who was killed at the age of thirty-two by a fall from his horse. He had taken an interest in psychic study, and had actually promised Dr. Hodgson that if he should pass away he would endeavour to furnish evidence. It was a promise which he very amply fulfilled, and the present author would wish to express his gratitude, for it was the study of the George Pelham records * which made his mind receptive and sympathetic until final proofs came to him at the time of the Great War.

  * Dr. Hodgson’s Report. PROCEEDINGS of S.P.R., Vol. XIII, pp. 284-582. M. Sage. “Mrs. Piper and the S.P.R.” p. 98.

  Pelham preferred to write through Mrs. Piper’s hand, and it was no unusual thing for Phinuit to be talking and Pelham to be writing at the same moment. Pelham established his identity by meeting thirty old friends who were unknown to the medium, recognising them all, and addressing each in the tone which he had used in life. Never once did he mistake a stranger for a friend. It is difficult to imagine how continuity of individuality and power of communication-the two essentials of Spiritualism-could be more clearly established than by such a record. It is instructive that the act of communication was very pleasant to Pelham. “I am happy here, and more so since I find I can communicate with you. I pity those people who cannot speak.” Sometimes he showed ignorance of the past. M. Sage, commenting upon this, wisely says: “If there is another world, spirits do not go there to ruminate on what has happened in our incomplete life: they go there to be carried away in the vortex of a higher and greater activity. If, therefore, they sometimes forget, it is not astonishing. Nevertheless, they seem to forget less than we do.”

  It is clear that if Pelham has established his identity, then all that he can tell us of his actual experience of the next world is of the utmost importance. This is where the phenomenal side of Spiritualism gives way to the religious side, for what assurance from the most venerable of teachers, or of writings, can give us the same absolute conviction as a first-hand account from one whom we have known and who is actually leading the life which he describes? This subject is treated more fully elsewhere, and so it must suffice here to say that Pelham’s account is, in the main, the same as that which we have so often received, and that it depicts a life of gradual evolution which is a continuation of earth life and presents much the same features, though under a generally more agreeable form. It is not a life of mere pleasure or selfish idleness, but one where all our personal faculties are given a very wide field of action.

  In 1898 James Hervey Hyslop, Professor of Logic and Ethics at Columbia University, took the place of Dr. Hodgson as chief experimenter. Starting in the same position of scepticism, he in turn was forced by the same experiences to the same conclusions. It is impossible to read his records, which are given in his various books and also in Vol. XVI of the S.P.R. Proceedings,” without feeling that he could not possibly withstand the evidence. His father and many of his relatives returned and held conversations which were far beyond every alternative explanation of secondary personality or of telepathy. He does not beat about the bush in his conversation, but he says: “I have been talking with my father, my brother, my uncles,” and everyone who reads his account will be forced to agree with him. How this society can have such evidence in its own “Proceedings,” and yet, so far as the majority of its Council is concerned, remain unconverted to the spiritual view, is indeed a mystery. It can only be explained by the fact that there is a certain self-centred and limited-though possibly acute type of mind which receives no impression at all from that which happens to another, and yet is so constituted that it is the very last sort of mind likely to get evidence for itself on account of its effect upon the material on which such evidence depends. In this lies the reason for that which would otherwise be inexplicable.

  No memory was too small or too definite for the father Hyslop to bring back to his son. Many of the facts had been forgotten and some never known by the latter. Two bottles upon his writing-desk, his brown penknife, his quill pen, the name of his pony, his black cap-people may describe such things as trivial, but they are essential in establishing personality. He had been a strict member of some small sect. Only in this did he seem to have changed. “Orthodoxy does not matter over here. I should have changed my mind in many things if I had known.”

  It is interesting to note that when on his sixteenth interview Professor Hyslop adopted the methods of the Spiritualists, chatting freely and without tests, he obtained more actual corroboration than in all the fifteen sittings in which he had adopted every precaution. The incident confirms the opinion that the less restraint there is at such interviews the more successful are the results, and that the meticulous researcher often ruins his own sitting. Hyslop has left it on record that out of 205 incidents mentioned in these conversations he has been able to verify no fewer than 152.

  Perhaps the most interesting and dramatic conversation ever held through Mrs. Piper is that between her two researchers after the death of Richard Hodgson in 1905. Here we have two men of first-class brain-Hodgson and Hyslop — the one “dead,” the other with his full faculties, keeping up a conversation at their accustomed level through the mouth and hand of this semi-educated and entranced woman. It is a wonderful, almost an inconceivable situation, that he who had so long been examining the spirit who used the woman should now actually be the spirit who used the woman, and be examined in turn by his old colleague. The whole episode is worthy of careful study.*

  * “The Psychic Riddle.” Funk, p. 58 and onwards.

  So, too, is the succeeding message, alleged to be from Stainton Moses. The following passage in it should give thought to many of our more material psychic researchers. The reader can decide for himself whether it is likely to have had its origin in the mind of Mrs. Piper:

  This thought we all wish to impress upon you and upon the friends on earth, that there is a difference between the entrance into the Spirit World of those who seek for spiritual unfolding and those who simply seek for scientific knowledge. Dr. Hodgson says that I shall tell you that it was a great error that he kept himself so largely attuned to material life and material things. You will understand he means that he did not move in the realm of the higher or spiritual. He did not view these psychic matters from the standpoint that I did. He sought to base everything mainly on material facts, and did not seek to interpret anything wholly as spiritual. One that comes over as he came over is transplanted from one sphere of life into another like a babe just born. He has been besieged since he is here with messages started from your side. All manner of questions are being carried to him by messengers. This is all in vain: he cannot answer. He repeats that I shall tell you he realises now that he saw only one side of this great question, and that the lesser important.

  Some description of this remarkable medium may interest the reader. Mr. A. J. Philpott says of her:

  I found her a comely, well-built and healthy-looking woman of middle age, above the medium height, with br
ownish hair and a rather good-natured and matronly cast of countenance. She looked like a well-to-do woman without any particularly marked characteristics, either intellectual or otherwise. I had rather expected to find a different type of woman, somebody that would show more evidence of nerves; this woman looked as calm and phlegmatic as a German HAUSFRAU. She evidently never had bothered herself with metaphysical or any other kind of questions of a vague or abstract character. Somehow, she reminded me of a nurse I had seen in a hospital at one time-a calm, self-possessed woman.

  Like many other great mediums, such as Margaret Fox-Kane, she was very agnostic as to the source of her own powers, which is the more natural in her case since she was always in deep trance, and had only second-hand accounts from which to judge what occurred. She was inclined herself to some crude and superficial telepathic explanation. As in the case of Eusapia Palladino, her mediumship came on after an injury to the head. Her powers seem to have left her as suddenly as they carne. The author met her in New York in 1922, at which time she seemed to have completely lost all her personal gifts, though she still retained her interest in the subject.

  The society has devoted an enormous amount of patient work to the consideration of what are known as “cross correspondences.” Many hundreds of pages in the society’s “Proceedings” are given to this subject, which has aroused acute controversy.

  It has been suggested that the scheme was originated on the Other Side by F. W. H. Myers as a method of communication that would eliminate that bugbear of so many psychic researchers-telepathy from the living. It is at least a certainty that while he was on earth Myers had considered the project in a simpler form, namely, to get the same word or message through two mediums.

  But the cross correspondence of the S.P.R. is in the main of a much more complicated character. In this, one script is not a mere reproduction of statements made in another; the scripts seem rather designed to represent different aspects of the same idea, and often the information in one is explanatory and complementary of that in another.

  Miss Alice Johnson, the Research Officer of the S.P.R., was the first to notice this link between the scripts. She cites this simple instance:

  In one case, Mrs. Forbes’s script, purporting to come from her son Talbot, stated that he must now leave her, since he was looking for a sensitive who wrote automatically, in order that he might obtain corroboration of her own writing.

  Mrs. Verrall, on the same day, wrote of a fir tree planted in a garden, and the script was signed with a sword and suspended bugle. The latter was part of the badge of the regiment to which Talbot Forbes had belonged, and Mrs. Forbes had in her garden some fir trees, grown from seed sent to her by her son. These facts were unknown to Mrs. Verrall.

  Miss Johnson, who made a close study of the scripts coming through Mrs. Thompson, Mrs. Forbes, Mrs. Verrall, Mrs. Willett) Mrs. Piper, and others, thus describes the conclusion to which she came:

  The characteristic of these cases-or, at least, some of them-is that we do not get in the writing of one automatist anything like a mechanical verbatim reproduction of phrases in the other. We do not even get the same idea expressed in different ways-as might well result from direct telepathy between them. What we get is a fragmentary utterance in one script, which seems to have no particular point or meaning, and another fragmentary utterance in the other, of an equally pointless character; but when we put the two together, we see that they supplement one another, and that there is apparently one coherent idea underlying both, but only partially expressed in each.

  She says* — what is by no means the fact, because hundreds of cases to the contrary can be cited — that:

  * S.P.R. Proceedings, Vol. XXI, p. 375.

  The weakness of all well-authenticated cases of apparent telepathy from the dead is, of course, that they can generally be explained by telepathy from the living.

  And she adds:

  In these cross correspondences, however, we find apparently telepathy relating to the present-that is, the corresponding statements are approximately contemporaneous, and to events in the present which, to all intents and purposes, are unknown to any living person, since the meaning and point of her script is often uncomprehended by each automatist until the solution is found through putting the two scripts together. At the same time we have proof of what has occurred in the scripts themselves. Thus it appears that this method is directed towards satisfying our evidential requirements.

  The student who will undertake the immense labour of carefully examining these documents-they run into hundreds of printed pages-may perhaps be satisfied by the evidence presented.

  But, as a matter of fact, we find that many able and experienced psychic researchers consider it unsatisfactory. Here are a few opinions on the subject.

  Richet says:

  These are certainly well-marked cases of cryptesthesia, but whether there is cryptesthesia, or lucidity, or telepathy, these do not in any way imply survival of a conscious personality.*

  * “Thirty Years of Psychical Research.”

  It has to be remembered, however, that Richet is not an impartial controversialist, since an admission of Spirit would contradict all the teachings of his lifetime.

  Dr. Joseph Maxwell is of the same school of thought as Richet. He says:

  It is impossible to admit the intervention of a spirit. We want proof of facts, and the system of cross correspondences is founded on negative facts and is an unstable foundation. Only positive facts have an intrinsic value, which cross correspondences cannot show, not at present, at any rate.

  It may be remarked that Maxwell, like Richet, has now come a long way towards the Spiritualistic position.

  We find the matter discussed with fitting gravity in the London Spectator:

  Even if such things (i.e. cross correspondences of a complex type) were common, might it not be argued that they would only prove that some conscious being was producing them; that they would scarcely prove that the conscious being was “in the spirit”; that they would certainly not prove that he was the particular dead person that he claimed to be? A cross correspondence is a possible proof of organization, not of identity.

  It is true that many able men like Sir Oliver Lodge and Mr. Gerald Balfour accept the evidence from cross correspondences. But if these satisfy only a comparative few, then their object has not been achieved.

  Here are a few examples of the simpler kind taken from the S.P.R. “Proceedings.” As anything from fifty to a hundred printed pages are devoted to a single one of the more complicated cases, it is difficult adequately to summarize them in a brief space, and it is impossible to exaggerate how wearisome they are to the reader in their entirety.

  On March 11, 1907, at one o’clock, Mrs. Piper said in the waking stage:

  “Violets.”

  On the same day at 11 a.m. Mrs. Verrall wrote automatically:

  “With violet buds their heads were crowned.”

  “Violacea? odores.” (Violet-coloured scents.) “Violet and olive leaf, purple and hoary.” The city of the violet”

  On April 8, 1907, the alleged spirit of Myers, through Mrs. Piper, said to Mrs. Sidgwick:

  “Do you remember Euripides?Do you remember Spirit and Angel? I gave bothNearly all the words I have written to-day are with reference to messages I am trying to give through Mrs. V.”

  Mrs. Verrall had, on March 7, in the course of an automatic script, the words “Hercules Furens” and “Euripides.” And on March 25 Mrs. Verrall had written:

  The Hercules play comes in there and the clue is in the Euripides play, if you could only see it.

  This certainly seems beyond coincidence. Again, on April 16, 1907, Mrs. Holland in India produced a script in which came the words “Mors” and “The shadow of death.”

  On the following day Mrs. Piper uttered the word Tanatos (obviously a mispronunciation of THANATOS-being the Greek word for “death,” as Mors is the Latin).

  On April 29 Mrs. Verrall wrote a script wholly oc
cupied with the idea of Death, with quotations from Landor, Shakespeare, Virgil, and Horace, all involving the idea of Death.

  On April 30 Mrs. Piper, in the waking stage, repeated the word THANATOS three times in close succession.

  Here again the theory of coincidence would seem to be far-fetched.

  Another cross correspondence concerned with the phrase AVE ROMA IMMORTALIS is a very lengthy one. Mr. Gerald Balfour discussing it * says that the completed idea was a well-known picture in the Vatican.

  * S.P.R. PROCEEDINGS, Vol. XXV., p. 54.

  Mrs. Verrall’s script gave details of the picture unmeaning to herself, but made clear by the phrase five Roma immortalis, which came a few days later in Mrs. Holland’s script.

  An interesting feature was the apparent understanding by the control of what was being done.

  On March 2, when the cross correspondence began, Mrs. Verrall wrote that she would have word sent “through another lady” that would elucidate matters. On March 7, when the cross correspondence ended, Mrs. Holland’s contribution was followed by the words: “How could I make it any clearer without giving her the clue?”

  Mr. Gerald Balfour considers, with reason, that these two comments show that this cross correspondence was being deliberately brought about.

  Sir Oliver Lodge, in commenting on the way the meaning is ingeniously wrapped up in these cross correspondences, says of one of them:

  The ingenuity and subtlety and literary allusiveness made the record difficult to read, even when disentangled and presented by the skill of Mr. Piddington.

  This criticism, from one who has been convinced of their veridical character, is sufficient indication that cross correspondences are not likely to make anything more than a limited appeal. To the ordinary Spiritualist they seem an exceedingly roundabout method of demonstrating that which can be proved by easier and more convincing methods. If a man were to endeavour to prove the existence of America by picking up driftwood upon the European shores, as Columbus once did, instead of getting into touch with the land or its inhabitants, it would present a rough analogy to such circuitous methods of investigation.