Spiritualism : Part 7

Modern Religious Cults and Movements
by Gaius Glenn Atkins

(Page 17 of 21)

Telepathy between the living is fairly well enough established to make this a not impossible hypothesis, and even materialization might be accounted for in the same way. Sir Oliver Lodge is inclined to discover in the luminiferous ether an environment in which discarnate personality could function. But this is pure supposition, though others have adopted it. Walker, for example, in his extremely suggestive work on Monism and Christian Theism. But he suggests the ether only as a help to the imagination in meeting the difficulties of an immortal existence - the old Heaven and Hell having been made astronomically and geologically impossible. But if Einstein should upset the hypothesis of the ether all this would go the way of the Heaven and Hell of Dante.

We cannot eliminate, however, in a supposition so vague as this the contributive elements supplied by the friends themselves to whom the communication is supposed to be addressed and by whom it is certainly interpreted, for if the trance medium is open to suggestion from the discarnate side, the medium must be equally open to suggestion from the living, a suggestion likely to be very much stronger, more distinct, more compelling.

The real crux of the whole problem is the disentanglement of these possible lines of suggestion and the assignment of them to their true sources. We may, the writer believes, eliminate as far as their evidential value is concerned, all physical phenomena. In doing this we need not necessarily deny the reality of some of the physical phenomena but the larger part of the residue which might possibly be left after the elimination of fraud on the part of the medium and unintentional misrepresentation on the part of the witnesses is so utterly meaningless as to have no value at all.

The only physical phenomena which can have any direct bearing on spirit communication are the tapping and table tipping which can by a deal of ingenuity be made to spell out a message or answer questions yes or no. The same question as to the source of the suggestion enters here. Even if we admit the taps to spell out a message, we have still to decide from whom the message comes and the messages alleged to be contributed through the voice are so much more full and intelligible as to leave the whole question standing or falling with the credibility of voice trance mediumship.

Controls

The usual machinery of a séance creates suspicion. Most mediums have controls. Nothing is more capricious than these controls. They may be people who really never existed at all. The genesis of Mrs. Piper's control, Dr. Phinuit, is suggestive. "It would appear that Mrs. Piper in 1884 had visited for advice a professional clairvoyant whose leading control claimed to be a Frenchman named Finné, or Finnett." When Mrs. Piper was later seen by William James, a French doctor had succeeded in obtaining almost exclusive control and his name was reported to be Phinuit. Beyond debate, as far as name goes, here is a kind of transmuted suggestion. The Finnett of the French clairvoyant, who may or may not have really lived, becomes the Phinuit of Mrs. Piper, for whose existence there is apparently no testimony at all.

The controls have sometimes been Indians and indeed almost any one may appear as a control - Longfellow, for example, or Mrs. Siddons, or Bach or Vanderbilt. In a region where disproof and proof are equally impossible this element of capricious control is suspicious. It is much more likely to be some obscure casting up of the medium's mind, through lines of association of which the medium is utterly unconscious, than to represent the personalities so named. In Raymond the control is one Moonstone, or a little Indian girl called Freda or Feda, who spokes of herself in the third person and who reports a great many silly things in a very silly way.

It is possible, of course, to say that these therefore named are spirit mediums as necessary for the transfer of suggestion from the discarnate order as mediums seem to be in the incarnate order, and that abnormal personalities are as much needed on one side as the other through the abnormality of the whole process. But this is patently to beg the question. There is room in the whole process for the trivial, even the inconsequential. As the advocates of spiritualism have urged, identification very often turns on apparently trivial things but it is difficult to justify the very great element of the capricious and actually foolish which enters so largely into the records of all sittings. It would seem as if death robbed grave personalities of their gravity, the strong of their force and the wise of their wisdom, and this is so hard to believe as to make us wonder whether we are not really dealing with something which belongs to an entirely different region and is open to an entirely different line of explanation.

But beyond such considerations as these, which may or may not have force, there remains the graver question still - the question of the identification of the sources from which the intelligible residue of communications is received. If we fall back upon suggestion there are always two general sources of suggestion - the incarnate and the discarnate, and among the incarnate themselves there are manifold sources of suggestion. The sitter may be unconsciously supplying the material which the medium is receiving, recasting and giving back again, or the medium may be reporting what is received from other incarnate sources than the sitter. (This, of course, when we have eliminated all that might possibly be contributed by the medium.)

The Dilemma of Spiritualism

Anything, therefore, which is known to the living may be the source of the medium's information. Only those things, therefore, which are utterly unknown to the living anywhere, which cannot possibly have been known by the medium himself or herself, can be finally and conclusively a testimony to communications from the dead. But unless the information therefore received is known to the living, its truth or falsity can never be proved or disproved.

This is the dilemma which spiritualism is finally brought to face and from this dilemma there is absolutely no escape. It does not forbid the conclusions which may be drawn from a seeming preponderance of evidence, but it does forbid absolute certainty, for, to repeat, if the information is to be verified it must be verified by the living, which proves that some one does possess it and may have communicated it - if we assume such communication to be possible - to the medium. On the other hand, if no one at all possesses the information, then we may never be sure that it is real information, or anything else than a creation of an excited imagination.

Copyright 1923 by Fleming H. Revell Company