EXCEPT, PERHAPS, for a very few cases of "possession" that may be as clear-cut
as appeared to be that of the "Watseka Wonder" described in the preceding
chapter, the most impressive sort of empirical evidence of survival is that
provided by certain of the communications which are received through mediums or
automatists, and which purport to emanate from particular deceased persons. Such
communications, and the alternative interpretation or interpretations to which
they may be open, are what we shall consider in the present chapter.
1. Communications, purportedly from the deceased, through automatists
The
externally observable facts in the case of communications, purportedly from the
surviving spirits of the deceased, are that a person, either in a state of
trance or in the waking state, gives out various statements automatically, that
is, not consciously and intentionally as in ordinary expression. Such persons
are therefore perhaps best referred to as automatists, but actually more often
as mediums.
The statements may be spelled out letter by letter - a pointer, on which the
hand of the automatist rests, moving to the appropriate letters printed on a
board (the "ouija" board) without conscious guidance by the automatist, who may
the while be looking elsewhere and carrying on a conversation with the persons
present. Or the letters may be indicated in some other way, as by paranormal
raps or by movements of a table on which the hands rest, when the alphabet is
recited and the proper letter reached. Or again, the communications may be
written automatically by the hand of the automatist while his or her attention
is otherwise engaged; or the statements may be spoken either by the vocal organs
of the entranced medium, or at times, in some mysterious way by a voice that
seems not to employ the medium's vocal organs and is then termed the
"independent voice". But whichever one of these various means is used, the
appearances are that the automatist's own intelligence and will do not
participate in the framing of the statements made, and that a quite different
personality originates them. The handwriting or the voice, and the locutions,
the tricks of speech, and the stock of information manifested, are notably
different in the best cases from those of the automatist in her normal state.
Indeed, they are often typical of, and usually purport to emanate from, some
particular deceased friend or relative of the "sitter," i.e., of the person who
is sitting with the medium at the time.
The process of communication sometimes appears to be direct, and sometimes
indirect. In the latter case, the intelligence directly in command of the
automatist's organs of expression purports to be that of some discarnate person
more expert than others at the difficult task of using them. This intelligence,
which generally remains the same at many sittings, is known as the medium's
"control." Sometimes it utters through the medium's organs statements which it
purportedly hears being made by the sitter's deceased friend. On the other hand,
when the latter appears to be directly in command of the medium's organs, the
"control" appears to function as a helper and supervisor of the communicator's
attempt to express himself through those organs; for example, by preventing
other discarnate spirits that also desire to use the medium from interfering
with the communication going on.
That it is sometimes by no means easy to account for the content, the language,
and the mannerisms of the communications otherwise than by the supposition that
they really emanate from the surviving spirits of the deceased will now be made
evident by citation, even if only in summary form, of communications received by
the late Professor J. H. Hyslop, purportedly from his deceased father, through
the famous Boston medium, Mrs. Leonore Piper, who was studied by men of science
probably for more years, and more systematically and minutely, than any other
mental medium.
The first of them to study her was Professor William James. He published a first
report about her in 1886. In 1887, Dr. Richard Hodgson, who was secretary of the
American Society for Psychical Research and was an experienced and highly
critical investigator, undertook and carried on for eighteen years an intensive
study of her mediumship. In the course of time, Mrs. Piper made three trips to
England, where she was studied by Sir Oliver Lodge, F. W. H. Myers, Henry
Sidgwick, and other distinguished investigators.
Professor Hyslop was one of the many persons who had sittings with Mrs. Piper
during the years in which Dr. Hodgson was supervising the exercise of her
mediumship. In 1901, Hyslop published a long and lucid, circumspect, and
detailed report of his sittings with her(1). For lack of space here, reference
will be made only to the communications he received that purported to establish
the identity and survival of his father, who, it should be mentioned, had been
in no way a public character but had lived a very ordinary and retired life on
his farm.
(1) Proc. S. P. R, Vol. XVI:1-649,1901.
A word must be said first as to the physical manner in which the communications
were being delivered by Mrs. Piper at that period of her mediumship. She sat in
a chair before a table on which were two pillows. After a few minutes, she would
go into a trance and lean forward. Her left hand, palm upward, was then placed
on the pillow, her right cheek resting on the palm, so that she was facing left.
Her right arm was then placed on another table to the right, on which there was
a writing pad. A pencil was then put in her hand, which then began to write.
The communications so received purported to come from several of Professor
Hyslop's dead relatives, and in particular from his father. Their content
included a statement of Professor Hyslop's name, James; of his father's name,
and of the names of three others of his father's children. Also, references to a
number of particular conversations the father had had with Professor Hyslop, to
many special incidents and facts, and to family matters. Examples would be that
the father had trouble with his left eye, that he had a mark near his left ear,
that he used to wear a thin coat or dressing gown mornings and that at one time
he wore a black skull cap at night; that he used to have one round and one
square bottle on his desk and carried a brown-handled penknife with which he
used to pare his nails; that he had a horse called Tom; that he used to write
with quill pens which he trimmed himself; and so on. A number of these facts
were unknown to Professor Hyslop, but were found to be true after inquiry. The
communications also contained favorite pieces of advice, which the father had
been in the habit of uttering, and these worded in ways characteristic of his
modes of speech.
The communications that purported to come from other dead relatives, and indeed
those given by Mrs. Piper to scores and scores of other sitters over the years,
were similarly of facts or incidents too trivial to have become matters of
public knowledge, or indeed to have been ascertainable by a stranger without
elaborate inquiries, if at all. Facts of this kind are therefore all the more
significant as prima facie evidences of identity. It is interesting to note in
this connection that if one had a brother in another city, with whom one was
able to communicate only through a third party - and this a person in a rather
dopy state and if the brother doubted the identity of the sender of the
messages, then trivial and intimate facts such as those cited - some of them
preferably known only to one's brother and oneself would be the very kind one
would naturally mention to establish one's identity.
The question now arises, however, whether the imparting of such facts by a
medium is explicable on some other hypothesis than that of communication with
the deceased. Two other explanations - one normal and the other
paranormal - suggest themselves. The first is, of course, that the medium obtained antecedently in some perfectly normal manner the information communicated. One
of the reasons why I chose Mrs. Piper's mediumship as example is that in her
case this explanation is completely ruled out by the rigorous and elaborate
precautions which were taken to exclude that possibility. For one thing, Dr.
Hodgson had both Mrs. Piper and her husband watched for weeks by detectives, to
find out whether they went about making inquiries concerning the relatives and
family history of persons they might have expected to come for sittings. Nothing
in the slightest degree suspicious was ever found. Moreover, sitters were always
introduced by Dr. Hodgson under assumed names. Sometimes, they did not come into
the room until after Mrs. Piper was in trance, and then remained behind her
where she could not have seen them even if her eyes had been open. On her trips
to England, Mrs. Piper stayed in Myer's house or in that of Sir Oliver Lodge,
and the few letters she received were examined and most of them read, with her
permission, by Myers, Lodge, or Sidgwick. Many of the facts she gave out could
not have been learned even by a skilled detective; and to learn such others as
could have been so learned would have required a vast expenditure of time and
money, which Mrs. Piper did not have. William James summed up the case against
the fraud explanation in the statement that "not only has there not been one
single suspicious circumstance remarked" during the many years in which she and
her mode of life were under close observation, "but not one suggestion has ever
been made from any quarter which might tend to explain how the medium, living
the apparent life she leads could possibly collect information about so many
sitters by natural means(2). Thus, because we do not merely believe but
positively know that the information she gave was not obtained by her in any of
the normal manners, there is in her case no escape from the fact that it had
some paranormal source.
(2) Cf. the conclusions of Frank Podmore to the same effect on pp. 71-78 of his
"Discussion of the Trance-phenomena of Mrs. Piper," Proc. Soc. for Psychical
Research, Vol. XIV:50-78, 1898-9, in which he contrasts the rigor of the
precautions against possibility of fraud taken in Mrs. Piper's case with the
possibilities of it that existed in certain famous cases of purported
clairvoyance.
The paranormal explanation alternative to the hypothesis is that, in the trance
condition, Mrs. Piper, or her dissociated, secondary personalities, possess
telepathic powers so extensive as to enable her to obtain the information she
gives out from the minds of living persons who happen to have it; and this even
if at the time it is buried in their subconsciousness, and no matter whether
such persons be at the time with Mrs. Piper or anywhere else on earth. Or else
that, in trance, Mrs. Piper has powers of retrocognitive clairvoyance so
extensive as to enable her to observe the past life on earth of a deceased
person.
But even this supposition is not enough, for besides the recondite true items
with which the communications abound, there remains to be explained the dramatic
form - the spontaneous give-and-take - of the communications. For this, it is
necessary to ascribe to Mrs. Piper's trance personality the extraordinary
histrionic ability which would be needed to translate instantly the suitable
items of telepathically or clairvoyantly acquired information into the form
which expression of a memory, or of an association of ideas, or of response to
an allusion, etc., would take in animated conversation between two persons who
had shared various experiences - many of them trivial in themselves, but because
of this all the more evidential of identity. How staggering a task this would be
can be appreciated only in extensive perusal of the verbatim records of the
conversations between sitter and communicator, and often between two
communicators.
Professor Hyslop takes cognizance of the capacity which a hypnotized subject
does have for dramatic imitation of a person he is made to imagine himself to be
and about whom he knows something; and Hyslop stresses the great difference,
evident in the concrete, between this and the dramatic interplay between
different personalities, of which numerous instances occur in the Piper
sittings. And he points out also that nothing really parallel to the latter is
to be found in the relations to one another of the several dissociated
personalities in cases such as that of Morton Prince's Miss Beauchamp(3). Hyslop
had stressed earlier (p. 90) that if normal explanations fail to account for the
phenomena he has recorded, then the only alternative to the supposition that he
has actually been communicating with the independent intelligence of his father
is "that we have a most extraordinary impersonation of him, involving a
combination of telepathic powers and secondary personality with its dramatic
play that should as much try our scepticism as the belief in spirits."
(3) Proc. S.P.R, Vol. XVI:269 ff. 1901.
He concludes: "When I look over the whole field of the phenomena and consider
the suppositions that must be made to escape spiritism, which not only one
aspect of the case but every incidental feature of it strengthens, such as the
dramatic interplay of different personalities, the personal traits of the
communicator, the emotional tone that was natural to the same, the proper
appreciation of a situation or a question, and the unity of consciousness
displayed throughout, I see no reason except the suspicions of my neighbours for
withholding assent" (p. 293).
Another of Mrs. Piper's communicators, who during a period of her mediumship was
also her chief "control," was "George Pelham." Early in 1892, a young lawyer,
George Pelham, [pseudonym for Pellew] died in New York as a result of an
accident. He was an associate of the American Society for Psychical Research and
a friend of Dr. Hodgson's, to whom he had said that, if he died first "and found
himself 'still existing,' he would 'make things lively' in the effort to reveal
the fact of his continued existence."(4)
(4) Proc. S. P. R. Vol. XIII:295, 1897-8.
Some four or five weeks after his death, a communicator purporting to be George
Pelham manifested himself at a sitting Mrs. Piper was giving to an old friend of
his, John Hart. In the subsequent sittings in which G. P. figured, he was
specially requested to identify such friends of his as might be among the
sitters; and, out of at least one hundred and fifty persons who then had
sittings with Mrs. Piper, G. P. truly recognized thirty former friends; there
was no case of false recognition; and he failed in only one case to recognize a
person he had known. (This was a young woman whom he had known only when she was
a child eight or nine years before.) In each case, "the recognition was clear
and full, and accompanied by an appreciation of the relations which subsisted
between G. P. living and the sitters." Dr. Hodgson adds: "The continual
manifestation of this personality, - so different from Phinuit or other
communicators, - with its own reservoir of memories, with its swift appreciation
of any reference to friends of G. P., with its 'give-and-take' in little
incidental conversations with myself, has helped largely in producing a
conviction of the actual presence of the G. P. personality which it would be
quite impossible to impart by any mere enumeration of verifiable statements."(5)
(5) Op. cit. p. 328.
In bringing to a close Section 6 of his report, Hodgson states that, although
further experiment may lead him to change his view, yet "at the present time I
cannot profess to have any doubt but that the chief 'communicators,' to whom I
have referred in the foregoing pages, are veritably the personalities that they
claim to be, that they have survived the change we call death, and that they
have directly communicated with us whom we call living, through Mrs. Piper's
entranced organism."(6)
(6) Op. cit. p. 406.
The dramatic spontaneity of some of the communications, and their impressive
faithfulness to the manner, thought, and character of the deceased persons from
whom they purport to emanate, is testified to similarly in the comments of the
Rev. M. A. Bayfield on a communication which purported to come from Dr. A. W.
Verrall after his death in 1912. Referring to Verrall's intellectual impatience,
Mr. Bayfield writes: "The thing I mean does not readily lend itself to
definition, but it was eminently characteristic;" and, after quoting certain
passages typical of it in the scripts, he goes on.. "All this is Verrall's
manner to the life in animated conversation... When I first read the words
quoted above I received a series of little shocks, for the turns of speech are
Verrall's, the high-pitched emphasis is his, and I could hear the very tones in
which he would have spoken each sentence." In commenting on the question whether
"these life-like touches of character" are inserted perhaps "by an ingenious
forger (the unprincipled subliminal of some living person) with a purpose, in
order to lend convincing vraisemblance to a fictitious impersonation," Mr.
Bayfield writes that "nowhere is there any slip which would justify the
suspicion that in reality we have to do with a cunningly masquerading 'sub.'
Neither the impatience, nor the emphatic utterance, nor the playfulness has
anywhere the appearance of being 'put on,' - of being separable from the matter
of the scripts ... to me at least it is incredible that even the cleverest could
achieve such an unexampled triumph in deceptive impersonation as this would be
if the actor is not Verrall himself."(7)
(7) Proc. S.P.R. Vol. XXVII:246-49,1914-15.
2. Communications through automatists from fictitious and from still living
persons
Whatever may be the correct explanation of such correct and
dramatically verisimilar mediumistic communications as those we have just
described, the explanation must in one way or another leave room for the fact
that in some instances "communications" have been received from characters out
of fiction, such as Adam Bede; that, on one occasion, Prof. G. Stanley Hall had,
through Mrs. Piper, communications from a girl, Bessie Beals, who was a purely
fictitious niece of his invented by him for the purpose of the experiment; that,
in 1853, Victor Hugo in exile in jersey received "communications" from "The Lion
of Androcles" and "The Ass of Balaam;" that Dr. S. G. Soal received, through
Mrs. Blanche Cooper, communications from, on the one hand, a John Ferguson, who
turned out to be a wholly fictitious person, and on the other from a Gordon
Davis, whom he had known slightly when both were boys at the same school. Soal
had since then talked with him only once, for about half an hour about service
matters when both were cadets in the army and met by chance on a railroad
platform. Soal later believed him to have been killed in the war; but he was in
fact living at the time communications of a number of facts about his life
history, past and future, were received by Soal through Mrs. Cooper. "Some of
these facts," Soal writes, "were given in the form of verbal statements
describing incidents which had happened or which were to happen; other facts
such as his vocal characteristics were expressed in a purely physical way," for
in this case the personality of the (still living) Gordon Davis appeared to
"control" or "possess" the medium; was dramatized and spoke in the first person
with the fastidious accent and clear articulation peculiar to Gordon Davis; and
apparently believed itself to be a deceased person.(8)
(8) Proc. S.P.R. Vol. XXXV:471-594, 1926. A Report of Some Communications
Received through Mrs. Blanche Cooper.
Some five earlier cases of communications purporting to emanate from persons who
asserted they had died or who were believed to have died, but who were actually
living, are cited by Prof. Th. Flournoy in the third chapter of his Spiritism
and Psychology(9). The words 'Deceiving Spirits,' which, in quotation marks, he
uses as title of that chapter, refer to the fact that Spiritualists are wont to
ascribe such spurious communications to mischievous, deceitful spirits. But
obviously this explanation would be legitimate only if it had first been
independently established that any discarnate spirits at all exist.
(9) Transl. by H. Carrington, pub. Harper & Bros. New York, 1911, pp. 72-90.
3. Mrs. Sidgwick's interpretation of the Piper communications
In an article
entitled "Discussion of the Trance Phenomena of Mrs. Piper,"(10) Mrs. Sidgwick,
who was one of the keenest minded women of her time in England, takes into
consideration what is known both of the pathological dissociations of
personality, and of the capacity of subjects in deep hypnotic trance to
impersonate anyone whom they have been induced to believe themselves to be. In
the light of all this she argues, not specifically against the contention that
Mrs. Piper's communications provide some evidence of survival after death, but
against the "possession" interpretation of her trance communications; that is,
against the supposition that on those occasions the discarnate spirits of George
Pelham, of Prof. Hyslop's father, etc., "turn out Mrs. Piper's spirit and
themselves take its place in her organism," (p. 35) i.e., possess it for the
time being and employ her organs of expression in the same direct manner as that
in which each of us normally employs his own vocal organs in oral expression or
his own hand in writing.
(10) Proc. Soc. for Psych. Res'ch. Vol. XV:16-38,1900-01.
Mrs. Sidgwick contends that the interpretation most plausible in the light of
all the peculiarities of the communications is that the communicating mind is in
all cases Mrs. Piper's own (entranced) mind; that in the trance condition, her
mind has ,can unusually developed telepathic faculty" (p. 34); that the
recondite information her trance mind gives out is obtained by it telepathically
from the minds of living persons having it, or possibly from the dead; and that
the dramatic form which the presentation of it takes in conversations with the
sitter is accounted for most economically, but adequately, if one supposes that
the entranced, dreaming Mrs. Piper believes herself at the time to be the
deceased person whose memories and personality traits then occupy her mind.
As tending to support this hypothesis against that of direct possession of Mrs.
Piper's organism by the discarnate spirit of G. P. or of some other deceased
person, Mrs. Sidgwick points out that some sitters are uniformly more successful
than others in getting communications whose content is attributable only to some
paranormal source - whether this be telepathy from the sitter, or from other
living persons, or from the deceased.
This, Mrs. Sidgwick argues, would indicate that the sitter's state of mind, or
his particular type of mind, is somehow a factor in the "communication" process;
for if the process depended only on the medium and on temporary possession of
her entranced organism by a discarnate spirit, there would be no reason why the
communications from a given spirit - say, G. P.'s - should, as in fact is the
case, be steadily less evidential of some paranormal origin when made to one
particular sitter than when made to a particular other.
This conclusion, however, hardly seems to follow; for the supposition that the
sitter contributes something - congeniality, readiness to believe, interest in
paranormal phenomena, perhaps; or the opposites - is quite compatible with the
communicator's being really who he claims to be. It is a matter of common
experience that different persons with whom one converses affect one differently
and bring out of him different things-one, trivialities; another, exercise
perhaps of such unusual powers, or manifestation of such special interests, as
he may have.
Anyway, the question we are at present centrally concerned with is whether proof
of survival, or at least evidence definitely establishing it as probable, is
provided by the paranormal occurrences cited, and more particularly at this
point by mediumistic communications, such as Mrs. Piper's, that contain remote
details of some particular person's past life and reproduce with high
verisimilitude his tone, mannerisms, and distinctive associations of ideas.
Hence, if these do prove or establish a positive probability of survival, then
the question whether a surviving deceased person communicates with us directly,
by taking possession of the entranced Mrs. Piper's organism, or only indirectly
by telepathy in the manner suggested by Mrs. Sidgwick, is of but secondary
interest, as having to do merely with the technique of the process of
communication.
But the facts cited in Section 2 would by themselves be enough to show that the
content and form of mediumistic communications, even when as impressive as some
of those of Mrs. Piper or of Mrs. Blanche Cooper, do not necessarily proceed
from discarnate spirits. The question thus forces itself upon us whether some
other explanation is available, that would account at once for the
communications from fictitious persons; for the correct and dramatically
verisimilar communications purportedly from deceased persons who, however, are
in fact still living; and also for the similarly impressive communications that
likewise purport to emanate from deceased persons, but where those persons had
in fact died.
About the only hypothesis in sight that might do all this and that would be
other than that of communications from excarnate spirits deceitful or truthful,
is the hypothesis of telepathy from the subconscious minds of living persons who
have or have had the information manifested in the communications; or/and the
hypothesis of clairvoyance by the medium, giving her access to existing facts or
records containing the information. For of course the correctness, or not, of
the information communicated can be testified to, if at all, only by some still
living person's memory or by some still existing facts or documents.
Before inquiring into the adequacy of this hypothesis, however, we shall have to
consider the cases of so-called "Cross-correspondences;" for they are the ones
most difficult to account for in terms of only that hypothesis. At the same
time, they are the ones that provide the strongest evidence of "true" survival.
4. Cross-correspondences
It is unfortunately not possible to give an
intelligible concrete presentation of any of the cases of cross-correspondence
in the space available here, nor without presupposing special knowledge of Greek
and Latin classics by the reader; for the scripts of the automatists involved in
the cross-correspondences, and the analyses of them, run to hundreds of pages;
their significance turns on references or allusions to recondite points in those
classics; and their evidential force can be fully appreciated only after long
and careful study of the scripts and of the circumstances under which each
individually was produced.
The best that can be done here is therefore only to state in general terms what
is meant by the term "cross-correspondences," how the experiment they constitute
originated, and who were respectively the automatists, the investigators, and
the purported communicators concerned in it.
Cross-correspondences are correspondences between the scripts of different
automatists isolated from one another at least to the extent of being kept in
ignorance of the contents of one another's scripts. Sometimes, one of the
automatists is ignorant of the other's existence. For example, Mrs. Verrall, on
Oct. 25, 1901, was asked by Mr. Piddington to try to obtain in her scripts a
word to be reproduced in the script of another automatist, Mrs. Archdale, of
whom Mrs. Verrall had never heard before. She was told that the supposed
"control" of Mrs. Archdale was the latter's deceased son, Stewart. Then Mrs.
Verrall remembered that, in a script of hers of Sept. 18, 1901, i.e., over a
month before she had come to know of Mrs. Archdale's existence, the name
Stewart, had occurred together with two other names. These turned out to be ones
closely connected with the deceased boy. Similarly definite correspondences were
found between some of Mrs. Verrall's scripts in England in the summer of 1905
and those of another automatist, at the time in India, Mrs. Holland, of whose
name Mrs. Verrall was then ignorant, and whose acquaintance she did not make
until November 1905(11). Other automatists besides Mrs. Verrall (lecturer in
Classics at Newnham College and wife of Dr. A. W. Verall, Cambridge University
classicist) and Mrs. Holland (pseudonym of a sister of Rudyard Kipling,) were
Miss Helen Verrall, Mrs. Thompson, Mrs. Forbes (pseudonym), Mrs. Willett
(pseudonym), and Mrs. Piper.
(11) Proc. S.P.R. Vol. XX:205-6,1906.
The investigators in the series of cross-correspondences were Mr. J. G.
Piddington, the Hon. Gerald Wm. Balfour (who later became Lord Balfour), Sir
Oliver Lodge, Mr. Frank Podmore, Mrs. Sidgwick, and Miss Alice Johnson,
Secretary of the Society for Psychical Research. Dr. Richard Hodgson, in charge
of Mrs. Piper's sittings in Boston up to the time of his death in 1905, also
participated. And, to some extent, Mrs. Verrall functioned not only as
automatist but also as investigator.
The deceased persons from whom purported to come the communications
characterized by cross-correspondences were chiefly F. W. H. Myers, author of
the classic Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, who had died in
1901; Edmund Gurney (d. 1888), author, with Myers and Podmore's collaboration,
of Phantasms of the Living; Henry Sidgwick (d. 1900), the distinguished
Cambridge philosopher and first president of the S.P.R.; and Dr. Richard
Hodgson (d. 1905), Secretary of the A. S. P. R. After Dr. Verrall's death in
1912, communications typical of him and of Prof. Butcher were also received.
The correspondences between the scripts had to do in most cases with rather
recondite details of the Greek and Latin classics. To identify them or to
understand the allusions to them made in the scripts therefore required
considerable knowledge of the classics by the investigators. One of these, Mr.
J. G. Piddington, who had the requisite scholarly equipment and ingenuity, and
who was much interested in the scripts, found that certain of them, besides
having a topic in common, complemented one another in a manner analogous to that
in which the individually insignificant pieces of a jigsaw puzzle - or to use his
own comparison, the cubes of a mosaic - make a meaningful whole when correctly
combined. This complementariness is the distinctive feature of the most
evidential of the cross-correspondences.
An additional point of the greatest interest is that the scripts contain
numerous statements more or less explicitly to the effect that the discarnate
Myers, Gurney, and Sidgwick were the devisers of the scheme of giving out,
through automatists isolated from one another, communications that would be
separately unintelligible but that made sense when put together or, in some of
the cases, when a clue to the sense was supplied in the script of yet another
automatist. In this way, the possibility of explaining simply as due to
telepathy or clairvoyance the similarities of topic between the scripts of two
automatists would be ruled out or greatly strained; and in addition proof would
automatically be supplied that the communicators, in their discarnate state,
were not mere automata and sets of memories, but retained intellectual
initiative and ingenuity; that is, that they were still fully living.
An excellent summary of some of the most evidential cases of
cross-correspondence, with some extracts from the scripts, is presented in a
fair and discerning manner by H. F. Saltmarsh in his little book, Evidence of
Personal Survival from Cross Correspondences(12). Briefer accounts of the
subject-though more ample than the present one-may be found in G. N. M. Tyrrell's
The Personality of Man, chs. 17 and 18, and in his Science and
Psychical Phenomena, ch. XVII.(13) It is worth mentioning that Lord Balfour, in
his fine "Study of the Psychological Aspects of Mrs. Willett's Mediumship and of
the Statements of the Communicators Concerning Process"(14) states that "the
bulk of Mrs. Willett's automatic output is too private for publication;" hence
that, in his paper, "there must still remain withheld from publicity a good many
passages which [he] would willingly have quoted by way of illustration;" and
that 'It would be impossible to do justice to the argument in favour of spirit
communication on the basis of the Willett phenomena without violating
confidences which [he is] bound to respect" (pp. 43, 45).
(12) G. Bell & Sons, London 1938, pp. viii and 159. At the end is a full list of
the discussions of the scripts in the Proceedings of the S. P. R.
(13) Respectively, Penguin Books, New York, 1946, No. A165; and Harper & Bros.,
New York and London, 1938.
(14) Proc. S.P.R. Vol. XLIII:41-318, 1935.
In 1932, Mrs. Sidgwick wrote an account of the history and work of the Society
for Psychical Research during its first fifty years of existence. She being at
the time President of Honor of the Society, her paper was presented by her
brother, Lord Balfour at the jubilee meeting of the Society, July 1, 1932. After
he had done so, he added that some of the persons present "may have felt that
the note of caution and reserve has possibly been over-emphasized in Mrs.
Sidgwick's paper!' Then he went on: "Conclusive proof of survival is notoriously
difficult to obtain. But the evidence may be such as to produce belief, even
though it fall short of conclusive proof." Lord Balfour then concluded with the
words: "I have Mrs. Sidgwick's assurance - an assurance which I am permitted to
convey to the meeting - that, upon the evidence before her, she herself is a firm
believer both in survival and in the reality of communication between the living
and the dead."(16) This belief, he had himself come to share.
(16) Proc. S.P.R. Vol. XLI:16,1932-3.
Certainly, few persons have been both as thoroughly acquainted with the evidence
from cross-correspondences for survival and for communication with the deceased,
and at the same time as objective and keenly critical, as were Mrs. Sidgwick and
Lord Balfour.
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