CHAPTER VII

MESSAGES FROM THE SPIRIT-WORLD


Clairvoyance, strictly speaking, is supposed to be an abnormal power of
the medium: a range of vision, a fineness of sense, that we less gifted
beings do not possess. But the performance is very apt to resolve itself
into a claim that the medium sees invisible spirits and is communicating
with them. Of real clairvoyance--of a power to read a closed book or a
folded paper or see a distant spot--no instance has ever yet been
recorded that will pass scrutiny. Many scientific men, as I said, who do
not believe in spirits do believe in the abnormal powers of mediums.
They would like to get a proof of clairvoyance, but they are unable to
offer us one. The wonderful stories told of the gift in Spiritualist
circles vanish, like the stories about Home and Moses, the moment the
critical lamp is turned upon them.

We are therefore reduced to the Spiritualist claim that a medium really
receives information from spirits, and we have to see on what sort of
evidence this is based. Now there is an aspect of this question which
even the leading Spiritualists do not face very candidly. More than
twenty years ago it was felt, and rightly felt, by Spiritualists that at
least a long step forward would be made if they left sealed or
cipher-messages at death, and communicated the contents or the key of
these from "beyond." It is well known how Myers left with Sir Oliver
Lodge a sealed message of this description. A month after his death he
"got into touch" with Lodge through the medium Mrs. Thompson. Unhappily
he had forgotten all about the message, and even about the Society for
Psychical Research! Next the supremely gifted Mrs. Verrall got into
touch with Myers. By this time--it was the end of 1904--Myers had had
time to get adjusted, and was talking more or less rationally through
Mrs. Verrall. If there had not been a very material test in reserve, Sir
O. Lodge and his friends would have sworn that the messages were from
the spirit of Myers. As it was, they were so confident that on December
13, 1904, they solemnly opened the precious envelope. They were struck
dumb when there was not the least correspondence between Mrs. Verrall's
message from Myers and the message he had left in the envelope.

Miss Dallas tries, in her _Mors Janua Vitæ_, to soften the blow, but her
pleas are useless. The final failure utterly stultifies all the days and
months of supposed messages. And this is not the only case. Hodgson had
adopted a similar test, and it was a ghastly failure. Other
Spiritualists left sealed messages when they died, and not a syllable of
one of them has been read. Our Spiritualists _do not_ get into
communication with the dead. This is negative evidence, but it is far
more impressive than any of the rhetorical and inaccurate accounts of
experiences which they give us. It is precise and unmistakable. Every
Spiritualist who dies now knows that this is the supremely desired test,
yet we have twenty years of complete, unmitigated failure. Men like Sir
O. Lodge tell us that they recognize the personality of Hodgson beyond
mistake in the messages they get through mediums; but the one sure
test, the getting of the key to the cipher-messages which Hodgson left
behind, is an absolute failure. It would become our Spiritualists to
strike a more modest note, and not assure the ignorant public, as Sir A.