Their semi-scientific terminology also chokes off the ordinary reader, and one might say sometimes after reading their articles what an American trapper in the Rocky Mountains said to me about some University man whom he had been escorting for the season."He was that clever," he said, "that you Page 32could not understand what he said." But in spite of these little peculiarities all of us who have wanted light in the darkness have found it by the methodical, never-tiring work of the Society.Its influence was one of the powers which now helped me to shape my thoughts.There was another, however, which made a deep impression upon me.Up to now I had read all the wonderful experiences of great experimenters, but I had never come across any effort upon their part to build up some system which would cover and contain them all.Now I read that monumental book, Myers' Human Personality , a great root book from which a whole tree of knowledge will grow.In this book Myers was unable to get any formula which covered all the phenomena called "spiritual,"but in discussing that action of mind upon mind which he has himself called telepathy he completely proved his point, and he worked it out so thoroughly with so many examples, that, save for those who were wilfully blind to the evidence, it took its place henceforth as a scientific fact.But this was Page 33an enormous advance.If mind could act upon mind at a distance, then there were some human powers which were quite different to matter as we had always understood it.The ground was cut from under the feet of the materialist, and my old position had been destroyed.I had said that the flame could not exist when the candle was gone.But here was the flame a long way off the candle, acting upon its own.The analogy was clearly a false analogy.If the mind, the spirit, the intelligence of man could operate at a distance from the body, then it was a thing to that extent separate from the body.Why then should it not exist on its own when the body was destroyed? Not only did impressions come from a distance in the case of those who were just dead, but the same evidence proved that actual appearances of the dead person came with them, showing that the impressions were carried by something which was exactly like the body, and yet acted independently and survived the death of the body.The chain of evidence between the simplest Page 34cases of thought-reading at one end, and the actual manifestation of the spirit independently of the body at the other, was one unbroken chain, each phase leading to the other, and this fact seemed to me to bring the first signs of systematic science and order into what had been a mere collection of bewildering and more or less unrelated facts.
About this time I had an interesting experience, for Iwas one of three delegates sent by the Psychical Society to sit up in a haunted house.It was one of these poltergeist cases, where noises and foolish tricks had gone on for some years, very much like the classical case of John Wesley's family at Epworth in 1726, or the case of the Fox family at Hydesville near Rochester in 1848, which was the starting-point of modern spiritualism.Nothing sensational came of our journey, and yet it was not entirely barren.On the first night nothing occurred.On the second, there were tremendous noises, sounds like someone beating a table with a stick.We had, of course, taken every precaution, and we could not explain the noises; but at the same time we could not swear that Page 35some ingenious practical joke had not been played upon us.There the matter ended for the time.Some years afterwards, however, I met a member of the family who occupied the house, and he told me that after our visit the bones of a child, evidently long buried, had been dug up in the garden.
You must admit that this was very remarkable.Haunted houses are rare, and houses with buried human beings in their gardens are also, we will hope, rare.That they should have both united in one house is surely some argument for the truth of the phenomena.It is interesting to remember that in the case of the Fox family there was also some word of human bones and evidence of murder being found in the cellar, though an actual crime was never established.I have little doubt that if the Wesley family could have got upon speaking terms with their persecutor, they would also have come upon some motive for the persecution.It almost seems as if a life cut suddenly and violently short had some store of unspent vitality which could still manifest itself in a strange, mischievous fashion.Later Ihad another singular Page 36 personal experience of this sort which I may describe at the end of this argument.
Note: Vide Appendix III.
From this period until the time of the War I continued in the leisure hours of a very busy life to devote attention to this subject.
I had experience of one series of seances with very amazing results, including several materializations seen in dim light.As the medium was detected in trickery shortly afterwards I wiped these off entirely as evidence.
At the same time I think that the presumption is very clear, that in the case of some mediums like Eusapia Palladino they may be guilty of trickery when their powers fail them, and yet at other times have very genuine gifts.
