INVALUABLE THOUGH it is, were no evidence forthcoming other than such mosaics of
messages [i.e., the cross-correspondences], with their cryptic language and allusions studiously veiled, until the
disclosure of some missing word or phrase shall piece them together into an
intelligible whole, we might indeed receive a discouraging and utterly erroneous
impression that the manufacture of puzzles and enigmas is the sole faculty and
employment of discarnate spirits. But we have, of course, much other evidence,
which, though attaining less completely to the rigorous standard demanded by
Psychical Research, is quite strong enough to be considered by many
unimpeachable, except on the hypothesis of terrene telepathy pushed to its very
farthest limits.
This evidence forms a most useful, in fact an indispensable supplement to that
which aims primarily at elaborating conclusive proofs. It is given in
communications of various kinds, professing to come from some discarnate spirit,
and by their characteristic matter and manner creating an impression that they
really do so. The well-authenticated cases of such communications that have
occurred during the last few years are far too numerous for recital here, even
in the form of the barest catalogue. If we consider only the one particular
little group of friends and colleagues who have so swiftly reassembled on the
other side, we find instances many and impressive. Those who, like the present
writer, were intimate with them have recognized repeatedly the familiar traits,
material and trivial, habits of thought, and tricks of speech, that betoken a
personality, or its vraisemblance still existing, though contending with
obstacles which forbid more than an incomplete expression. Such changes as are
noted might spring naturally from the changed conditions of the communicators.
Thus we learn that Frederic Myers has lost nothing of his intense concern about
his comrades on their homeward way, but that what he now most eagerly desires is
to assure them how "immortality, instead of being a beautiful dream, is the one,
the only reality, the strong golden thread on which all the illusions of all the
lives are strung." And, again, that
Henry Sidgwick retains his propensity for
awaiting results with scrupulous patience, though he has now, as well he may,
added to patience a confident hope. A short account may be given here of an
incident from which this appears, the rather as it involves two
cross-correspondences of a not unmanageably complicated type.
In Cambridge on February 9, 1906, Mrs.
Verrall's automatic writing informed her
that in Professor Henry Sidgwick's Memoir, which was shortly to be
published, she would find two clues to the meaning of certain passages in her
earlier script. The Memoir was published on February 27, and on the
following day she found one of these clues, but noticed some inconsistencies
whence she inferred a mistake in the passage concerned, the writer of which had
purported to be Professor Sidgwick. She at once mentioned this to Mrs.
Eleanor Sidgwick,
and at the same time Mrs. Holland, away in the country, and unaware of what had
happened, wrote automatically: "Henry (i.e. Professor Sidgwick) was
not mistaken."
Soon afterwards Mrs. Verrall found the second clue in a letter from Henry
Sidgwick on the subject of immortality, in which he says: "On moral grounds,
hope rather than certainty is fit for us in this earthly existence."
The letter was addressed to his friend, Roden Noel, with whom neither Mrs.
Verrall nor Mrs. Holland had been acquainted. Yet in her next automatic script,
a few days afterwards, Mrs. Holland wrote, under the "control" of Henry
Sidgwick, the date of Roden Noel's death, twelve years before, and added the
following passage, in which the sentiments strongly resemble, with some
appropriate modifications, those of the letter to him wherein Mrs. Verrall had
just found her clue: "We no more solve the riddle of death by dying than we
solve the problem of life by being born. Take my own case - I was always a
seeker, until it seemed to me at times as if the quest was more to me than the
prize. Only the attainments of my search were generally like rainbow gold,
always beyond and afar. It is not all clear; I seek still, only with a
confirmed optimism more perfect and beautiful than any we imagined before. I
am not oppressed with the desire that animates some of us to share our knowledge
or optimism with you all before the time. You know who feels like that; but I am
content that you should wait. The solution of the Great Problem I could not
give you - I am still very far away from it. And the abiding knowledge of the
inherent truth and beauty into which all the inevitable uglinesses of existence
finally resolve themselves will be yours in due time."
Moreover, at this time Mrs. Verrall's as well as Mrs. Holland's script produced
appropriate references to Roden Noel and his poems, while each almost
simultaneously wrote a description of the, to them, unknown poet which intimate
friends of his pronounced to be very characteristic.
Much has been said by these controls about the difficulties which beset them in
their endeavours to communicate; and we may ourselves reasonably infer and
conjecture much more, without supposing that we have by any means fully realized
the magnitude of the obstacles which they encounter, or even, in many respects,
the nature of them. Amongst those which lie to some extent within the ken of our
imagination, the most formidable may perhaps be; (1) the impossibility of
securing the complete passivity of the mind of the medium whom the communicator
is using as an instrument, and therefore of excluding its influence on the
working of his own; (2) the all but total impossibility of transcending the
limits imposed by the medium's mental apparatus and intellectual equipment.
The effects of this first difficulty are obvious to anybody who studies the
phenomena occurring in different automatists under what is, or purports to be,
the same control, and an exceptionally favourable opportunity for making such
observations is afforded by the above-mentioned allied group of automatists and
controls. If the variations noticeable, from medium to medium, in each
controlling spirit were eliminated, leaving only the features common to all its
manifestation we should no doubt discover that the characteristics which it had
really possessed in earth-life formed this residuum. But the emerging personality
would often seem a thing of shreds and patches, so closely had it been
interwoven with that of the medium through which it made its way. For, as Sir
Oliver Lodge remarks: "The process of communication is sophisticated by many
influences, so that it is very difficult, perhaps at present, impossible, to
disentangle and exhibit clearly the part that each plays."
This difficulty is a difficulty indeed. In the case of an entranced medium,
whose spirit is supposed to withdraw temporarily from the organism, of which
another spirit takes possession, the situation has some resemblance to that of a
stream, with its main current deflected, and another stream turned into its
channel. The new stream will of course be bounded by the old channel, and its
waters tinged by the pools which lie in its bed, and the deposits over which it
flows. But when the medium is not entranced, the analogy points rather to those
fresh-water springs which sometimes rise in the sea. Here the separateness of
the waters is generally sure to be far more transient and less complete. Only
when the spring wells up with unwonted force and copiousness does it reach the
surface free from briny admixture. And, in fact, something about the manner in
which the more characteristic of the communications often come, does suggest a
sudden uprush of this kind through an always resisting and encroaching element.
Then, as for the second great difficulty which confronts the communicator,
entailed upon him by the limitations of the automatist, we may imagine some
faint resemblance between his plight and that of a writer constrained to compose
an abstruse treatise in words of three letters, or in those occurring on some
chance scrap of print. The smaller and sillier the scrap, the more fatal will he
find his, restrictions, just as the control's power of expressing himself is
diminished by the illiteracy and unintelligence of the medium. We must allow
likewise for the possibility, if not probability, of other still more baffling
impediments, unimaginable by us in our ignorance of what the conditions are in
the spirit-world. Thus, there is reason to believe that an intelligent
communicator is sometimes, when communicating, in a more or less dazed and
drowsy condition, which gives his message the character merely of a fantastic
dream.
Curious glimpses, by the way, may sometimes be gained from the confused and
incoherent, but often very interesting utterances of
Mrs. Piper, as she begins
to waken half-dazed from her trance. She always represents herself as returning
most reluctantly from surroundings compared with which her earthly abode appears
dark and dismal, and shared by inhabitants who are decidedly unprepossessing.
They seem to her, she says, like black people. On one occasion, indeed, she
addressed her sitters with a quaint and uncompromising frankness: "I don't want
you - I want the other place - you look funny... You are ugly, to say the
least. I never! I wouldn't look like you... Are you alive?" she added; "there
are others more alive than you are up there." More significantly, she often
speaks of being surrounded on her departure by those who are endeavouring to
communicate with this world, and who seize the opportunity of impressing upon
her some brief message, which she has at times been able to deliver, as a
valuable bit of evidence, before the fleeting recollection of her
trance-experiences has faded.
Dr. Richard Hodgson began his investigation of Mrs. Piper's trance-utterances as a
thorough sceptic, but after many years of unremitting and critical
investigation, testing one hypothesis after another, he was finally driven to
the conclusion "that the chief 'communicators' are veritably the personalities
that they claim to be, and that they have survived the change we call death."
Though some of us may be unable fully to share Dr. Hodgson's conviction, we must
remember that his experience and knowledge was larger than ours, and at any rate
we may dismiss the futile criticism of those who have not spent as many minutes
as he spent years in the study of this subject. Dr. Hodgson's opinion, it may be
added, is now shared by many other able inquirers, who have made a searching and
impartial investigation of the evidence which has accumulated since his death.
Moreover, when appraising the most recent testimony in favour of life after
death, we should remember that the evidence is being constantly strengthened,
not by accumulation merely, but by increased cogency and purposefulness. If we
review the past ten years, we cannot fail to be struck by the steadily growing
clearness of attempts on the part of those who have passed over to improve and
multiply methods of communication. These efforts are seconded on our side with
admirable industry, patience and tact, alike by automatists and students of
psychical phenomena, and the results come daily to light. At the present time,
the Society for Psychical Research has just published the details of some very
remarkable incidents which took place in the course of 1910. Writing of these,
Sir Oliver Lodge says: "He [the scientific explorer] feels secure and happy in
his advance only when one and the same hypothesis will amount for
everything - both old and new - which he encounters. The one hypothesis which seems
to me most nearly to satisfy that condition in this case, is that we are in
indirect touch with some part of the surviving personality of a scholar, and
that scholar F. W. H. Myers."
All things considered, it seems a not wholly extravagant conjecture that another
ten years may put us in possession of more knowledge about the means whereby
these supernormal messages are conveyed to us, and therefore in more favourable
circumstances for receiving them. Hitherto our experiences on the subject have
certainly tended to correct the popular notion of a ghost as a being whose
coming and going is very much a matter of its own casual caprice, barred by
nothing, except, perhaps, some form of exorcism. And they have heightened our
appreciation of the insight shown by Wordsworth in making his afflicted Margaret
say
"I look for ghosts, but none will force
Their way to me,"
little disposed as we may be to draw her despairing
conclusion -
"'Tis falsely said
That there was over intercourse
Between the living and the dead,"
Certainly, for our own part, we believe there is
some active intelligence at work behind, and apart from, the automatist, an
intelligence which is more like the deceased person it professes to be than that
of any other we can imagine. And though the intelligence is provokingly
irritating in the way it evades simple direct replies to questions, yet it is
difficult to find any other solution to the problem of these scripts and
cross-correspondences than that, there is an attempt at intelligent co-operation
between certain disembodied minds and our own.
But does the evidence afford us proof of immortality? Obviously it cannot; nor
can any investigations yield scientific proof of that larger, higher, and
enduring life which we desire and mean by immortality. Some of the evidence,
indeed, seems rather to indicate a more or less truncated personality, a
fragment of earthly memories, partly roused by, and mainly connected with, those
through and to whom the communications come; to picture, in fact, a dim,
wraith-like survival such as that imagined by Homer when he made Achilles in the
underworld declare that he would rather serve as a hireling among the living
than reign a king among the dead. The intelligent and characteristic messages,
however, suggest that the vague ones are due to the fading and dissolving of
earthly memories and ties, as the departed become more absorbed in their new
life, the very nature of which we are in our present state incapable of
conceiving. Our own limitations, in fact, make it impossible for the evidence to
convey the assurance that we are communicating with what is best and noblest in
those who have passed into the unseen.
In fine, psychical research, though it may strengthen the foundations, cannot
take the place of religion, using in its widest sense that much-abused word.
For, after all, it deals with the external, though it be in an unseen world; and
its chief value lies in the fulfilment of its work, whereby it reveals to us the
inadequacy of the external, either here or hereafter, to satisfy the life of the
soul. The psychical order is not the spiritual order, but a stepping-stone in
the ascent of the soul to its own self-apprehension, its conscious sharing in
the eternal divine life, of which Frederic Myers thus foretells:
"And from thee, o'er some lucid ocean-rim,
The phantom Past shall as a shadow flee;
And thou be in the Spirit, and everything
Born in the God that shall be born in thee."
Source:
The
article above was taken from William Barrett's "Psychical Research"
(London: Williams & Norgate, 1911).
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