Adventurings in the Psychical Part 10

That she had lived near the Kennebec River, in the State of Maine.

That when writing letters it had been her custom to sign herself by the initials N. N., meaning Nellie Norton.

That she had died in middle life.

That when quite young she had had a love affair with a Mr. L. C. Brown, who was still living and engaged in business in Boston, at an address which the "spirit" gave.

As goes without saying, Mr. Cleaveland at once wrote to Mr. Brown, and in a few days received a reply from him, in which he said:

"I was out in the town of Sharon very recently, and called on an elderly gentleman who was a manufacturer there when I resided there as a boy in my teens. To my surprise, as we were reviving old recollections of fifty years ago, he spoke of a Miss Norton that he said I was sweet on at that time.

"The facts of the case are that Mary B. Norton, who always signed herself Nellie B. Norton, came there, a young miss about my age. We were, I guess, ardent lovers, but in the course of two years I left the town and she did, and I knew very little of her for a few years after that. I think it was about five years later that on my way home from the White Mountains I stopped off at her home in Maine, which was beside a large river. I feel sure this was the Kennebec River. Her father was an orthodox minister, but I do not understand the meaning of the 'water type.' I think some two years later she was residing in Fairhaven and sent me some papers that contained letters written by Mary B. Norton, but from that time--some over forty years--I have not seen her. I heard that she died some years ago, and think she must have been about fifty years of age."

Later Mr. Brown wrote again, saying that on second thought he was not certain that her name might not have been Amelia instead of Mary, as he had always known her "only as Nellie B."[23]

[23] This case is reported in detail in the _Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research_, vol. ii, pp.

119-138.

It is to the constant occurrence of incidents like these that the vitality of spiritism is mainly due. To many people it seems impossible to account for such detailed and abundantly corroborated proofs of personal ident.i.ty on any hypothesis short of actual spirit control. Yet in the last a.n.a.lysis, when viewed in the sober light of latter-day scientific knowledge of the workings of the human mind, it will be found that they do not afford the conclusive demonstration of the validity of the spiritistic doctrine which on the surface they appear to yield. For there is always the possibility--amounting, I feel warranted in saying, to certainty--that what they really indicate is not communication with the dead, but thought transference between living minds.

In fact the telepathic connection between the mind of the medium and the mind of the sitter is often most obvious. Take the three cases just cited, and which are typical of mediumistic communications. The statements made by the medium Corliss to the friend of Henry Ward Beecher were statements relating to an incident fresh in the latter's memory, and therefore easily obtainable by the telepathic process, which, there is reason to believe, is exceptionally at the command of genuine psychics. Likewise, my artist friend was much occupied mentally with the problems involved in the California offer, and was doubtless thinking of it, consciously or subconsciously, at the time the medium invoked the "spirit" of the army officer whose advice my friend would have sought had that officer still been in the flesh. All the medium had to do was to tap telepathically my friend's subconsciousness and extract from it every detail of the "revelation" so sensationally made to him in the seance room.

Slightly different, however, is the case of Miss Edith Wright. Here the facts thought to emanate from the dead Amelia B. Norton were facts concerning which Miss Wright's sitter, the Reverend Mr. Cleaveland, was ignorant. But it is most significant that, continuing his researches, Mr. Cleaveland made the discovery that Miss Norton's old sweetheart, Mr.

Brown, had had at least one sitting with Miss Wright. Mr. Brown denied that he had ever said anything about Miss Norton in Miss Wright's presence; but his memory may have played him false, and, in any event, she could have got from him by telepathy the data with which she afterward astonished both him and Mr. Cleaveland. Let me remind the reader that among the few definitely ascertained laws of telepathy is the fact that it is possible for telepathic messages to lie long latent in the recipient's mind before emerging above the threshold of consciousness.

This is of even greater significance in connection with the rarer, but still quite numerous, instances in which the mediumistic communications offered as evidence of spirit ident.i.ty refer to incidents not known by the medium or by the sitter or by any previous sitter. These, spiritists insist, are absolutely inexplicable on the telepathic basis. I can make their position clearer by citing an ill.u.s.trative case taken from the experience of that greatest of automatists, the New England medium, Mrs.

Leonora E. Piper, whose remarkable mediumistic faculty was first made known to the scientific world by Professor James thirty years ago, and who has since been repeatedly investigated by leading members of the Society for Psychical Research. Detectives have been employed to dog her footsteps, open her mail, watch her every move. But not once have they detected her in fraudulent practices; and, on the other hand, she has given such convincing proof of the genuineness of her power that some of the most skeptical among her investigators have ended by accepting at face value her "messages from the dead."

On one occasion, while she was being investigated in England by a committee of experts, that famous English psychical researcher, Sir Oliver Lodge, placed in her hands, while she was entranced, a gold watch once the property of an uncle of his who had died some twenty years before. It was now owned by another uncle, a twin brother of the dead man.

"I was told almost immediately," says Sir Oliver, "that it had belonged to one of my uncles--one that had been very fond of Uncle Robert, the name of the survivor--that the watch was now in the possession of this same Uncle Robert, with whom its late owner was anxious to communicate.

After some difficulty and many wrong attempts, Doctor Phinuit--a 'spirit' alleged to be controlling Mrs. Piper--caught the name Jerry, short for Jeremiah, and said emphatically, as if impersonating him: 'This is my watch, and Robert is my brother, and I am here. Uncle Jerry, my watch.'

"All this at the first sitting on the very morning the watch had arrived by post, no one but myself and a shorthand clerk, who happened to have been introduced for the first time at this sitting by me, and whose antecedents were well known to me, being present.

"Having thus ostensibly got into communication through some means or other with what purported to be Uncle Jerry, whom I had indeed known slightly in his later years of blindness, but of whose early life I knew nothing, I pointed out to him that to make Uncle Robert aware of his presence it would be well to recall trivial details of their boyhood, all of which I would faithfully report.

"He quite caught the idea, and proceeded during several successive sittings ostensibly to instruct Doctor Phinuit to mention a number of little things such as would enable his brother to recognize him.

References to his blindness, illness, and main facts of his life were comparatively useless from my point of view; but these details of boyhood, two-thirds of a century ago, were utterly and entirely out of my ken.

"'Uncle Jerry' recalled episodes such as swimming the creek when they were boys together, and running some risk of getting drowned; killing a cat in Smith's field; the possession of a small rifle, and of a long, peculiar skin, like a snakeskin, which he thought was now in the possession of Uncle Robert.

"All these facts have been more or less completely verified. But the interesting thing is that his twin brother, from whom I got the watch and with whom I was thus in correspondence, could not remember them all.

He recollected something about swimming the creek, though he himself had merely looked on. He had a distinct recollection of having had the snakeskin, and of the box in which it was kept, though he did not know where it was then. But he altogether denied killing the cat, and could not recall Smith's field.

"His memory, however, was decidedly failing him, and he was good enough to write to another brother, Frank, living in Cornwall, an old sea captain, and ask if he had any better remembrance of certain facts--of course not giving any inexplicable reason for asking. The result of this inquiry was triumphantly to vindicate the existence of Smith's field as a place near their home, where they used to play in Barking, Ess.e.x; and the killing of a cat by another brother was also recollected; while of the swimming of the creek, near a mill-race, full details were given, Frank and Jerry being the heroes of that foolhardy episode."

Sir Oliver Lodge himself appears to believe that he was actually in communication, through Mrs. Piper, with his dead Uncle Jerry; and by spiritists generally this is alluded to as a characteristic instance impossible of explanation on the theory of telepathy between living minds. But it is pertinent to point out that possibly, in his childhood, Sir Oliver may have heard his uncles, in some moment of reminiscence, discussing these very incidents. He would naturally have forgotten the episode, so far as conscious recollection of it was concerned; but he would none the less have retained some memory of their conversation in his subconsciousness, whence Mrs. Piper could have gained knowledge of it telepathically. And, even had he never heard of the incidents, they might indeed have been transmitted to him telepathically from the surviving uncles, and been by him retransmitted to Mrs. Piper.

This last possibility, involving as it does telepathy between more than two persons, may seem to be far-fetched. But there is plenty of evidence that telepathy of this sort--known technically as _telepathie a trois_--is an actuality. I have in mind one particularly interesting case studied by Mr. Andrew Lang, the brilliant essayist and psychical researcher. It concerns a crystal-gazer named Miss Angus.

"Again and again," to give Mr. Lang's own words, "Miss Angus, sitting with man or woman, described acquaintances of theirs but not of hers, in situations not known to the sitters but proved to be true to fact.

In one instance, Miss Angus described doings, from three weeks to a fortnight old, of people in India, people whom she had never seen or heard of, but who were known to her sitter. Her account, given on a Sat.u.r.day, was corroborated by a letter from India, which arrived next day, Sunday. In another case she described--about ten P. M.--what a lady, not known to her, but the daughter of a matron present, who was not the sitter, had been doing about four P. M. on the same day. Again, sitting with a lady, Miss Angus described a singular set of scenes much in the mind, not of her sitter, but of a very unsympathetic stranger, who was reading a book at the other end of the room.

"I have tried every hypothesis, normal and not so normal, to account for these and a.n.a.logous performances of Miss Angus. There was, in the Indian and other cases, no physical possibility of collusion; chance coincidence did not seem adequate; ghosts were out of the question, so was direct clairvoyance. Nothing remained for the speculative theorizer but the idea of cross currents of telepathy between Miss Angus, a casual stranger, the sitters, and people far away, known to the sitters or the stranger, but unknown to Miss Angus.

"Now," adds Mr. Lang, in a paragraph that every attendant at spiritistic seances would do well to learn by heart, "suppose that Miss Angus, instead of dealing with living people by way of crystal-visions, had dealt by way of voice or automatic handwriting, and had introduced a dead 'communicator.' Then she would have been on a par with Mrs. Piper, yet with no aid from the dead."

That automatists "read the mind" of their sitters, or draw upon the contents of their own subconsciousness in obtaining the facts which they give out as coming from the spirit world, is further evident from experiments in automatic writing conducted by several American and English psychical researchers.[24]

[24] The extent to which automatists sometimes draw on the contents of their own subconsciousness is strikingly ill.u.s.trated by a case investigated by Mr. Lowes d.i.c.kinson, wherein the medium, an estimable young lady of his acquaintance, was seemingly "controlled" by the "spirit" of a n.o.blewoman of the Middle Ages, who described the customs, manners, and personages of the country in which she claimed to have lived, in such minute detail and with such accuracy that it seemed certain this was one case at all events in which survival had been proved. Ultimately it was discovered that every fact given by the alleged spirit was contained in a little known historical novel which the medium had read, but read only once, when a very small girl. So far as conscious recollection went she had forgotten all about this book, but subconsciously she had evidently retained a marvelously exact memory of it.

But when they are genuine automatists, it would be unjust to accuse them of conscious deception in attributing their communications to discarnate spirits. The trance state into which they usually fall is an abnormal condition, and is not unlike, if not identical with, the hypnotic state. As will be shown in detail later, one of the distinctive characteristics of hypnosis is the preternaturally increased suggestibility of the person hypnotized. He will accept and act upon the slightest suggestion of the hypnotist, no matter how ridiculous and absurd the suggestion may be, so long as it is not repugnant to his moral sense. Moreover, he can be induced to think that he is some one other than his real self, and will often a.s.sume the traits of the suggested personality with a fidelity that is astounding.

So, likewise, we must believe, with the automatist, who will impersonate anybody suggested--albeit suggested quite unconsciously--by the sitters, whether it be the "spirit" of a Greek philosopher, an Indian chief, or the deceased friend of some one present. Usually he is so deeply entranced as to have no knowledge of what he is doing, just as the hypnotized subject remains in ignorance of the actions he carries out in response to the operator's suggestions. But there is a record of at least one instance in which the automatist, an amateur psychical researcher named Charles H. Tout, of Vancouver, clearly recognized that his various impersonations were suggested to him by the spectators.

Mr. Tout relates that after attending a few seances with some friends he felt an impulse to play medium himself and a.s.sume an alien personality.

Yielding to this impulse, he discovered that, without losing complete control of his consciousness, he could develop a secondary self that would impose on the beholders as a discarnate spirit. On one occasion he thus impersonated the "spirit" of a dead woman, the mother of a friend present, and his impersonation was accepted as a genuine case of spirit control. On another, after having given several successful impersonations, he suddenly felt weak and ill. At this point, he states:

"One of the sitters made the remark, which I remember to have overheard, 'It is father controlling him,' and I then seemed to realize who I was and whom I was seeking. I began to be distressed in my lungs, and should have fallen if they had not held me by the hands and let me back gently upon the floor. I was in a measure still conscious of my actions, though not of my surroundings, and I have a clear memory of seeing myself in the character of my dying father lying in the bed and in the room in which he died. It was a most curious sensation. I saw his shrunken hands and face, and lived again through his dying moments; only now I was both myself--in some indistinct sort of way--and my father, with his feelings and appearance."

All of which Mr. Tout rightly attributes to "the dramatic working out, by some half-conscious stratum of his personality, of suggestions made at the time by other members of the circle, or received in prior experiences of the kind."

Add to this the known facts of telepathic action, and there is no need of looking further for a comprehensive explanation of the otherwise perplexing and supernatural-seeming phenomena of psychic automatism.

This applies even to the phenomenon of so-called "cross-correspondence,"

which has been especially stressed the past few years by certain members of the Society for Psychical Research as affording proof positive of survival.

With reference to this particular problem, it should in the first place be said that, in addition to Mrs. Piper, there are a number of other automatic writers who have been similarly investigated by the Society for Psychical Research for a long term of years, and whose trustworthiness has likewise been definitely established. They include a Mrs. Holland, a Mrs. Forbes, a Mrs. Thompson, Mrs. Verrall, of Newnham College, Cambridge, England, and Mrs. Verrall's daughter, Miss Helen Verrall. Through these ladies thousands of alleged "spirit messages"

have been received, including many purporting to come from Edmund Gurney, Henry Sidgwick, Frederic Myers, and Richard Hodgson, who in their lifetime were the most active and prominent members of the Society for Psychical Research. And among the automatic writings supposed to emanate from them there have been not a few so peculiarly conditioned as to suggest not only that the "spirits" of the four great psychical researchers are in touch with their living friends, but that they are working hard to devise special tests to prove their ident.i.ty.

To put the matter more concretely, let me cite the case of Mrs. Holland.

This lady is a resident of India. In 1893, having seen in the _Review of Reviews_ a reference to automatic writing, she experimented in it herself, and found that she possessed the faculty of penning coherent sentences without being conscious of what she was writing. She continued these experiments for ten years, or until 1903, when, after reading Myers's "Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death," she one day discovered that her automatic writing was seemingly no longer spontaneous, but controlled by two outside intelligences that called themselves "Myers" and "Gurney." Each "control," alternating with the other, caused her to write long communications, in which there was mingled with much that seemed unintelligible and nonsensical long descriptions of unnamed persons and places. Her interest aroused, Mrs.

Holland collected a number of these communications and mailed them to Miss Alice Johnson, Research Officer of the English Society for Psychical Research.

Examining them carefully, Miss Johnson discovered, much to her surprise, that they contained unmistakable references to people and the homes of people whom Myers and Gurney had known intimately, but of whom, as Miss Johnson satisfied herself by searching inquiry, Mrs. Holland had no knowledge. Thus there was an excellent description of Mrs. Verrall, her husband, Dr. A. W. Verrall, and the Verrall dining-room, in which Myers had often been entertained. Even the street address of the Verralls was correctly given. Miss Johnson, as may be imagined, at once wrote, urging Mrs. Holland to continue her automatic writing, and to forward all her script to the offices of the Society. This was done, with the result that much else of a seemingly evidential value was soon obtained. It was especially noted that, although Mrs. Holland knew nothing of Latin and Greek, her communications from the Myers control occasionally contained pa.s.sages written in both these languages, with which Myers had been well acquainted.

November 25, 1903, the Gurney control wrote in the automatic script: "Now there is an experiment I want you to make--Suggest to the P. R.--to Miss J.--that some one with a trained will--she will have no difficulty in finding some one of the sort--is to try--for a few minutes--every morning for at least a month--to convey a thought--a phrase--a name--anything they like--to your mind." In due course this suggestion was sent by Mrs. Holland to Miss Johnson, who arranged for a series of such experiments, with Mrs. Verrall acting as the second medium.

The experiments began in March, 1905, were continued until towards the end of May, and were resumed for a few weeks in the spring of the following year. The scheme adopted, however, was not exactly that suggested by the Gurney control. Instead of simply attempting to convey some thought to Mrs. Holland's mind, Mrs. Verrall, at Miss Johnson's suggestion, wrote automatically herself on each day that Mrs. Holland was to write. Neither medium was to hold the slightest communication with the other, but both were to forward their automatic scripts to Miss Johnson as soon as written. In fact, in order to prevent any loophole for fraud, Miss Johnson throughout the 1905 experiments kept Mrs.

Holland in ignorance of the ident.i.ty of her fellow-experimenter, who, on her side, was ignorant of Mrs. Holland's real name--the "Holland" being a pseudonym. Some exceedingly interesting results were secured.

March 1, 1905, Mrs. Holland's script contained these sentences, "There are cut flowers in the blue jar--jonquils I think and tulips--growing tulips near the window. A dull day, but the sky hints at spring, and one chirping bird is heard above the roar of the traffic." In reply to a questioning letter from Miss Johnson, Mrs. Verrall wrote:

"On March 1 the only cut flowers in my drawing-room were in two blue china jars on the mantelpiece; the flowers were large single daffodils.

On the ledge of the window ... were three pots of growing yellow tulips--the only flowers near any window. The day was dull in the morning, but about twelve the sun came out and it was warm; it rained heavily in the afternoon."

There was no "cross-correspondence" in the writings of the two scripts for this or the next two weeks--the experimenters wrote only once a week--but in the scripts of the week following Miss Johnson found a curious coincidence--the presence of notes of music. Only once before or since, she testifies, have notes of music appeared in the script of either Mrs. Verrall or Mrs. Holland. In Mrs. Holland's script of that same date, March 22, there was also a reference to "the ivory gate through which all good dreams come." Mrs. Verrall, it was learned, on March 19 or 20, had been reading Virgil's pa.s.sage in the "aeneid" about the gates of horn and ivory. She had been reading Dante, too, in the original Italian, the first time she had read anything in Italian for months; and, oddly enough, Mrs. Holland's script for March 22 contained a sentence in Italian.