Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University of Pennsylvania Part 21

3. That what he saw might have been produced by juggling.

4. That the sittings at which he was present were held at night, and that he could not remember what sort of a light they had.

5. That Zoellner's mental derangement came on very gradually, so that it would be difficult to say when it began; but that from the time of his experiments with Slade it was more p.r.o.nounced. He (Fechner) did not think, however, that it incapacitated Zoellner as an observer, the derangement being emotional; but, such as it was, it was clearly shown in his family and in his intercourse with friends.

6. Professor Fechner referred me to Professors Scheibner and Weber for information, saying that these two were present at most of the sittings.

I failed at this time to meet Professor Scheibner, who, though resident in Leipsic, happened to be away from home on a visit; but, having made an appointment with him by letter, I returned to Leipsic on July 3d, and called upon him at his home; upon this occasion he gave me more full and satisfactory details concerning Professor Zoellner's investigation than I succeeded in obtaining from any of the others. The notes which I made during my conversation with him I translated to him, and corrected in accordance with his suggestions before leaving his house. After my return to Halle I copied my notes out in full, and sent them by mail to Professor Scheibner, with the request that he correct them and return them to me at Berlin, signing his name to them if they correctly represented his opinions. In answer he enclosed me the copy which I had sent him, corrected where he thought the notes inexact, and an accompanying letter, stating that he did not forbid me to use the material which he had given me, but that he did not wish to set his name to any publication, if only for the reason that he was not sufficiently familiar with the English to judge accurately as to the shades of meaning, and thus could not say whether he accurately agreed with the notes as they stand, or not.

The copy which he corrected and returned to me I place at length in this Report, merely translating his corrections (very literally), and inserting them at the points indicated by himself. They are enclosed in quotation marks. In some instances, my desire for exact.i.tude in the translations has resulted in very bad English; the shape of my own paragraphs is due to the time and manner of their framing, and to a reluctance to making any changes in their form afterwards.

The copy reads as follows:

On July 3d, 1886, I visited Professor W. Scheibner, at his rooms, in Leipsic, and obtained from him the following information concerning Professor Zoellner's Spiritistic experiments with Dr. Henry Slade, the American Medium:

1. Professor Scheibner thinks that he was present at three or four of the regular seances with Slade. Slade came to Professor Zoellner's rooms; they sat around a table for perhaps half an hour, and then, after the seance was over, they spent an hour or two sitting informally in the same room, or in the next room, and talking. During these informal conversations surprising things would occur. Raps would now and then be heard, and objects would unexpectedly be thrown about the room. In these conversations Professor Scheibner was present perhaps five or six times.

Some of these took place during the day, and some in the evening.

2. Professor Scheibner said that each single thing that he saw might possibly have been jugglery, "although he perceived nothing that raised a direct suspicion."

The whole number of incidents taken together, however, surprised him, and seemed scarcely explicable as jugglery, for there did not seem to be the necessary time or means for preparing so many tricks, "which often connected themselves surprisingly with desires casually expressed in momentary conversations."

Professor Scheibner said, however, that he did not regard himself as competent to form an opinion which should have scientific weight, because:

(_a_) He knows nothing about jugglery;

(_b_) He was merely a pa.s.sive spectator, and could not, properly speaking, make observations--could not suggest conditions, "or gain the control which seemed necessary;" and

(_c_) He is short-sighted, "and might easily have left unnoticed something essential."

He says merely, that to him, _subjectively_, jugglery did not seem a good "or sufficient" explanation of the phenomena.

3. Professor Scheibner said that he had never seen anything of the kind before. He had never even, since his childhood, seen any exhibitions of jugglery; he does not go to see such things, because he is so short-sighted that if he went he would see nothing. In this connection he repeated his statement that from this, among other causes, he did not regard himself as competent to give an opinion. He said that many persons in Germany had demanded his opinion, but that he had refused it because he regarded his subjective impression, without objective proofs, as scientifically valueless.

4. Professor Scheibner said that he did not believe in these things before. He came to the seances because Professor Zoellner was a personal friend. He has seen very little of the sort since.

That little has been in the presence of a lady in Leipsic through whom raps occurred, and psychography. This last phenomenon consisted in communication through a little contrivance, furnished with an index or pointer, which answered questions by pointing to letters laid out before it. This it did when the lady placed her hand on the machine. The questions were "usually" not asked mentally, but spoken out. There were no tests applied to these phenomena, no conditions of exact investigation. Professor Scheibner "holds suspicion of conscious deception to be out of the question."

5. Professor Zoellner was, said Professor Scheibner, a man of keen mind, but in his investigations apt to see "by preference" what lay in the path of his theory. He could "less easily" see what was against his theory. He was childlike and trustful in character, and might easily have been deceived by an impostor. He expected everyone to be honest and frank as he was. He started with the a.s.sumption that Slade meant to be honest with him. He would have thought it wrong to doubt Slade's honesty. Professor Zoellner, said Professor Scheibner, set out to find proof for four-dimentional s.p.a.ce, in which he was already inclined to believe. His whole thought was directed to that point.

6. Professor Scheibner thinks that the mental disturbance under which Zoellner suffered later, might be regarded as, at this time, incipient.

He became more and more given to fixing his attention on a few ideas, and incapable of seeing what was against them. Towards the last he was pa.s.sionate when criticized. Professor Scheibner would not say that Professor Zoellner's mental disturbance was p.r.o.nounced and full-formed, so to speak, but that it was incipient, and, if Zoellner had lived longer, would have fully developed. Zoellner himself, "whose brothers and sisters frequently[A] suffered from mental disease, often feared lest a similar fate should come upon him."

[Footnote A: "Dessen Geschwister mehrfach" etc.--the words may be taken in two senses.]

7. Professor Scheibner gives no opinion on Spiritism. He can only say that he cannot explain the phenomena that he saw.

8. Professor Weber, said Professor Scheibner, "attended the Zoellner-Slade experiments under the same circ.u.mstances as he (Scheibner) himself."

9. Professor Zoellner's book, said Professor Scheibner, would create the impression that Weber and Fechner and he agreed with Zoellner throughout in his opinion of the phenomena "and their interpretation;" but this, he said, is not the case.

HALLE a.S., _July 5th_, 1886.

So much for the information given by Professor Scheibner. It now remained to see Professor Wilhelm Weber, and on the evening of July 12th I called upon him at his house in Goettingen. Of his statements I took notes during my conversation with him, as in the former instances, and copied and arranged them the same evening at my hotel. Professor Weber is now eighty-three years old, and does not lecture. He is extremely excitable and somewhat incoherent when excited. I found it difficult to induce him to talk slowly enough, and systematically enough, for me to make my notes. Professor Weber said:

1. That he thought the things he saw in the seances with Slade were different from jugglery.

2. That he did not think there was time or opportunity for Slade to prepare deceptions.

3. That he himself knew nothing of jugglery, nor did Professor Zoellner.

4. That he can testify to the _facts_ as described by Zoellner, and that he could not himself have described the occurrences better than they are described in Zoellner's book:--to the _facts_ he is willing to testify, the _means_ he declares unknown to him, but does not regard jugglery as a sufficient explanation. If another can understand, he said, how jugglery can explain the facts, well and good--he can not.

5. That he had never seen anything of the kind before, and has not since; it being his only experience of Spiritualism.

6. That he had the greatest freedom to experiment and set conditions, and that the conditions were favorable to observation.

7. That he regarded Professor Fechner as one of the best observers in the world, and Professor Scheibner as an excellent observer.

8. That Professor Zoellner _was not_ at that time, in any sense, in an abnormal mental condition.

Professor Weber seemed unwilling to speak decidedly on the subject, but showed that he leaned to the Spiritistic interpretation of the facts. He said that the things done indicated intelligence on the part of the doer.

Having now before us the testimony given by these survivors of the famous investigation, I will collect briefly the facts relating to each of those concerned--adding in one or two cases from other sources--and point out the nature and value of their testimony to the occurrences recorded by Professor Zoellner.

1. As to Professor Wundt, who is by profession an experimental psychologist, and an observer. Professor Wundt did not regard the investigation, so far as he partic.i.p.ated, as in any respect thorough or satisfactory. The conditions of observation were not present. When called upon by Professor Ulrici to describe the occurrences as he saw them, he said he would not willingly describe what he had not had opportunity to observe.

2. As to Professor Zoellner, the chief witness and author of the book published, a number of points are worthy of note.

(1.) The question of his mental condition at the time of the investigation. It is a.s.serted by Baron h.e.l.lenbach (see _Geburt und Tod_ etc., Wien, 1885, S. 96) that Zoellner was of sound mind up to his death. The statement should have due weight, but the author's general att.i.tude towards Spiritism should not be overlooked. I do not consider his testimony for Zoellner's sanity as good as that of Fechner or Scheibner against. Of the four men mentioned as connected with him, Wundt, Weber, Fechner and Scheibner, three (all except Weber) are decidedly of the opinion that his mental condition was not normal. The opinion of Wundt, as of a man whose profession would not permit him to speak hastily upon this topic, I would regard as of special value; but if we rule that out upon the ground that Wundt was not impressed by the investigation, and might naturally be inclined to underrate Zoellner, who was, we have left the opinions of Fechner and Scheibner, both Zoellner's colleagues at Leipsic, both particular friends of Zoellner, and both inclined to agree with him as to the reality of the facts he describes. Both of them regarded Zoellner at the time as of more or less unsound mind. His disease, as described by them, seems to have been chiefly emotional, showing itself in a pa.s.sionate dislike of contradiction, and a tendency to overlook any evidence contrary to a cherished theory.

To the general change in his nature due to his disease Professor Scheibner testifies; and Professor Fechner's belief as to his mental condition is specially worthy of note from the fact that, although recognizing it to be abnormal, he still holds his powers of observation to be sound, and upon this ground is inclined to a.s.sent to the facts described. If anyone could be tempted to make Zoellner as sane as possible, it would be one in the position of Professor Fechner.

Professor Weber's testimony I will examine later. Upon the question whether the peculiar form of Zoellner's disease would be likely to affect his powers of observation, the following points may throw some light.

(2.) It is evident, both from what Zoellner has himself printed and from what Professor Scheibner has said, that Zoellner's interest in the investigation centered in his attempt to prove experimentally what he already held to be speculatively true as to a fourth dimension of s.p.a.ce.

In a paper published in the _Quarterly Journal of Science_, for April, 1878, he says:

"At the end of my first treatise, already finished in ma.n.u.script in the course of August, 1877, I called attention to the circ.u.mstance that a certain number of physical phenomena, which, by 'synthetical conclusions _a priori_' might be explained through the generalized conception of s.p.a.ce and the platonic hypothesis of projection, coincided with so-called Spiritualistic phenomena. Cautiously, however, I said:--'To those of my readers who are inclined to see in Spiritualistic phenomena an _empirical_ confirmation of those phenomena above deduced in regard to their _theoretical_ possibility, I beg to observe that from the point of view of idealism there must first be given a precise definition and criticism of _objective reality_'" etc. Now this reference to Spiritualistic phenomena was made before Zoellner had seen anything of the kind, and his att.i.tude was evidently a receptive one. Moreover, we have Professor Scheibner's testimony to the fact that during the whole investigation his attention was entirely directed towards the subject of the fourth dimension, and an experimental demonstration of its existence. Bearing in mind, therefore, the mental att.i.tude in which, and the object with which, Zoellner approached this investigation, we cannot look upon any subjective, or emotional, mental disturbance, which results, as described, in making him narrow his attention more and more upon a few ideas, and disregard or find it difficult to observe what seems contrary to them, as without objective significance, particularly where we know the man to be a total stranger to investigations of such a nature as this one, and not only quite ignorant as to possible methods of deception, but unwilling to doubt the integrity of the Medium.

(3.) There are things in Zoellner's own accounts which indicate a certain lack of caution and accuracy on his part, and tend to lessen one's confidence in his statements. As an instance of inaccuracy, I may mention the statement he makes in his article in the _Quarterly Journal of Science_ as to the opinions of his colleagues. Professor Zoellner says:

"I reserve to later publication, in my own treatises, the description of further experiments obtained by me in twelve seances with Mr. Slade, and, as I am expressly authorized to mention, in the presence of my friends and colleagues, Professor Fechner, Professor Wilhelm Weber, the celebrated electrician from Goettingen, and Herr Scheibner, Professor of Mathematics in the University of Leipsic, who are _perfectly_ convinced of the reality of the observed facts, altogether excluding imposture or prestidigitation."

Here the att.i.tude of the four men is not correctly described, and Professor Zoellner's statement does them injustice, as Professor Scheibner remarked. At least two of the men were merely _inclined_ to accept the facts, and to these two the words "_perfectly_ convinced"

will not apply.

As one out of numerous instances of lack of caution, I may refer to Zoellner's statements, that at certain times writing was heard upon the slates, giving no proof whatever to show that the writing was really done at the time of hearing the sounds, and apparently quite ignorant of the fact that deception may readily be practiced on this point.

3. As to Professor Fechner. The fact is admitted that he was, at the time of the investigation, suffering from cataract, which made all observation extremely defective. Moreover, he was present at but two of the sittings, and has stated that he did not regard these as very decisive. His att.i.tude towards the phenomena described is based on his faith in Professor Zoellner's powers of observation, and not on what he saw himself. He does not, therefore, as an independent witness would, add anything to the force of Professor Zoellner's testimony.