book itself, the title of which is _Who Are These Spiritualists?_

I have the book before me, and any reader who cares to glance at the
printed Debate and see what Sir A. C. Doyle said about it will be
astonished when I describe it. The printed text gives 126 names, and 32
further names (many illegible) are written on the margins in Sir A. C.
Doyle's hand. Only in 53 cases out of the 158 is any quotation given
from the person named, and in not _one_ of these cases are we told where
the quotation may be verified. There are 27 (not 49, as Sir Arthur said)
men described as "professors"; and of these several never were
professors, and very few ever were Spiritualists. Sir A. C. Doyle has
himself included Professor Morselli, who calls Spiritualism "childish
and immoral." There are men included who died before Spiritualism was
born, and there are twenty or thirty Agnostics included. Men like "Lord
Dunraven, Lord Adare, and Alexander Wilder" are described, with the most
amazing effrontery, as "some of the world's greatest authors." Padre
Secchi, the pious Roman Catholic, is included. Thackeray, Sir E. Arnold,
Professor de Morgan, Thiers, Lord Brougham, Forbes Winslow, Longfellow,
Ruskin, Abraham Lincoln, and other distinguished sceptics are dragged
in. For sloppy, slovenly, loose, and worthless work--and I have in
twenty years of controversy had to handle a good deal--this little book
would be hard to beat.

A list of distinguished Spiritualists could be accommodated on a single
page of this book. A list of distinguished Rationalists in the same
period (1848-1920) would take twenty pages. The truth is that in the
earlier days of Spiritualism, when less was known than we now know about
mediumistic fraud, a number of distinguished men were "converted." They
were in every case converted by the impostors I have exposed in the
course of this work--by Home, Florrie Cook, Mrs. Guppy, Eglinton, Slade,
Morse, Holmes, etc. What is the value of such conversions? Who are the
"distinguished" Spiritualists _to-day_? Sir A. C. Doyle, Sir O. Lodge,
Sir W. Barrett, Mr. Gerald Balfour.... The reader will be astonished to
know that those are the only names of living men of any distinction that
Sir A. C. Doyle dares to give, either in the text or on the margins of
his book. What their opinion is worth the reader may judge for himself.

Let us pass on. I wrote recently in the _Literary Guide_ that "there are
hundreds of honest mediums." Some of my readers resented this as
over-generous. Possibly they have only a vague idea of Spiritualism, and
it is advisable for us to reflect clearly on the point. In the eyes of
Spiritualists every man or woman, paid or unpaid, who is supposed to be
in any way in communication with spirits is a "medium." The word does
not simply apply to men and women who, for payment, sit in cabinets or
in a circle, and lift tables, play guitars, write on slates, produce
ghosts, pull furniture about, tug the beards of sitters, and so on. I
should agree with the reader that these people, paid or unpaid, and all
mediums who operate in the dark or in red light, are probably frauds.
That is a fair conclusion from the preceding chapters, in which I have
exposed every variety of their manifestations, and from the history of
Spiritualism.

This rules out all professional mediums and a large proportion of the
amateurs. Perhaps the reader does not know, and would like to know, what
a séance is like. As far as the "more powerful" (and more certainly
fraudulent) mediums are concerned, I have already given a sufficient
description. A cloth-covered frame or "cabinet" is raised at one end of
the room, or a curtain is drawn across an alcove or corner. In this the
medium generally (not always) sits, and the curtains are closed until
the medium thinks fit to have them opened. The medium is sometimes
hypnotized, and sometimes falls into a natural trance; it matters
little, for the trance is invariably a sham, and the medium is wide
awake all the time, though he simulates the appearance of a trance. The
lights are lowered or extinguished. Generally a red-glass lantern or
bulb (sometimes several) is lit. Then, after a time, which is occupied
by singing or music (to drown the noise of the medium's movements), the
ghost appears, or the tambourine is played, or the table is lifted, and
so on.

These are the heavier and more expensive performances, and are
constantly being exposed. The medium has apparatus in the false seat of
his chair or concealed about his person. But the common, daily séance is
quite different. You sit round a table or in a circle, or (if you will
rise to the price) sit alone with the lady. The light may be good. The
medium "sees" and describes spirit forms hovering about you. If you are
one of the people whom the medium has, through an intermediary,
attracted to the circle, you get some accurate details. If not, the
medium begins with generalities and, studying your expression, feels her
way to details. It is generally a waste of time. Friends of mine have
gone from one to another medium in London, and they tell me that it is
simply a tedious and most irritating way of convincing oneself that
these people are all frauds.

But beyond these are hundreds, or thousands, of private individuals who
discover that they are mediums. They take a pencil in their hands, fall
into a passive, dreamy state, and presently the pencil "automatically"
writes messages from the spirit world. Others use the planchette (a
pencil fixed in a heart-shaped board which, when the medium's fingers
are on it, writes on a sheet of paper) or the ouija board (in which the
apex of the heart spells out messages by pointing rapidly to the letters
of the alphabet painted on a larger board over which it travels). I have
studied all three forms, and may take them together as "automatic
writing."

The first question is whether this _can_ be done unconsciously. If such
messages are consciously spelt or written by the medium, it is, of
course, fraud, because the messages purport to come from the dead. My
own experience convinces me that even here there is a vast amount of
fraud. The social status and general character of the medium do not
seem to matter at all, as we have repeatedly seen. People get into the
attitude of the child. "I can do what you can't do," you constantly hear
the child say to its fellows. There is a good deal of the child in all
of us. Prestige, distinction, credit for a rare or original power, is as
much sought as money; and this motive grows stronger when the medium
already has money. Everybody knows, or ought to know, the perfectly
authentic story of Mozart's _Requiem_. A wealthy amateur, Count Walsegg,
secretly paid Mozart to compose that famous Mass, and it was to be
passed off by Walsegg as his own.

But while there is much fraud even in automatic writing, there are
certainly hundreds of mediums of this description who quite honestly
believe that they are spirit-controlled. Mr. G. B. Shaw's mother was an
automatic artist of that class. I have seen some of her spirit drawings.
A high-minded medical man of my acquaintance was a medium of the same
type. The class is very numerous. Psychologically, it is not very
difficult to understand. A pianist can play quite complicated pieces
unconsciously or subconsciously. A writer, who cannot normally write
decent fiction, may have wonderful flights of imagination in a dream. An
expert worker can do quite complicated things without attention.
Something of the same faculty seems to come in time to the automatic
writer or artist. Consciousness is more or less--never entirely,
perhaps--switched off from its usual connection with the hand, and the
part of the brain-machine which is not lit by consciousness takes over
the connection.

That this can be done in perfect honesty will be clear to every reader
of Flammarion's book, _Les forces naturelles inconnues_. Flammarion
never became a Spiritualist, but he was quite a fluent automatic writer
in his youth. Victorien Sardou, the great dramatist, belonged to the
same circle, and was an automatic draughtsman. Flammarion gives
specimens of the work of both. Quite without a deliberate intention, he
signed his automatic writing (on science) "Galileo."

I have no doubt that at the time both these distinguished men were
strongly tempted to embrace the Spiritualist theory. These experiences,
and the experiences of the séance, can be exceedingly impressive and
dramatic. The man who has never been there is too apt to think that all
Spiritualists are fools. I have been to séances, and I do not admit
that. I am quarrelling with Spiritualists because they will not realize
the possibilities and the actual abundance of fraud. But the séance is
undoubtedly very impressive at times. I have held a serious
conversation, in German and Latin, through an amateur medium of my own
acquaintance, with the supposed spirit of a certain German theologian of
the last century whose name (as given) was well known to me. I do not at
all wonder that many succumb in sittings of this sort. But I found
invariably that, if one resolutely kept one's head and devised crucial
tests, the claim broke down. So it is with Flammarion and Sardou. What
"Galileo" wrote in 1870 was just the astronomy of that time; and much of
it is totally wrong to-day. Sardou, on the other hand, drew remarkable
sketches of life on Jupiter; and we know to-day that Jupiter is red-hot!

This is a broad characteristic of automatic writing since it began in
the fifties of the nineteenth century. At its best it merely reflected
the culture of the time, which was often wrong. Stainton Moses, for
instance, wrote reams of edifying revelation. But I find among his
wonderful utterances about ancient history certain statements concerning
the early Hindus and Persians which recent discoveries have completely
falsified. He had been reading certain books which were just passable
(though already a little out of date) fifty years ago. Among other
things the spirits told him that Manu lived 3,000 B.C., and that there
was a high "Brahminical lore" long before that date! So with Andrew
Jackson Davis, the first of these marvellous bringers of wisdom from the
spirit world. He had probably read R. Chambers's _Vestiges of Creation_,
and he gave out weird and wonderful revelations about evolution. In the
beginning was a clam, which begot a tadpole, which begot a quadruped,
and so on. Davis certainly lied hard when he used to deny that he had
read the books to which his "revelations" were traced, but no one can
deny his originality.

Then there was Fowler, an American medical student and pious amateur
medium, who was regarded with reverence by the American Spiritualists. I
invite the reader's particular attention to this man, as he is one of
those unpaid individuals who are supposed (by Spiritualists) to have no
conceivable motive for cheating. Yet he lied and cheated in the most
original fashion. He told his friends that ghostly men entered his
bedroom at nights, produced ghostly pens and ink, and left messages in
Hebrew on his table. An expert in Hebrew found that the message was a
very bad copy of a passage from the Hebrew text of _Daniel_. This did
not affect the faith of Spiritualists, who put a piece of parchment in
Fowler's room for a further message. They had a rich reward. They found
next day a spiritual manifesto signed by no less than fifty-six spirits,
including some of the statesmen who had signed the Declaration of
Independence.

The frauds were very gross in those early decades. Franklin, Washington,
even Thomas Paine, sent hundreds of messages from the "Summerland." As
time went on, Socrates, Plato, Sir I. Newton, Milton, Galileo,
Aristotle, and nearly everybody whose name was in an encyclopædia,
guided the automatic writers. When one reads the inane twaddle signed
with their names, one wonders that even simple people could be deceived.
Dante dictated a poem of three thousand lines in the richest provincial
American. One automatic writer wrote, under inspiration, a book of a
hundred thousand words. It is estimated that there were two thousand
writing mediums in the United States alone four years after the
foundation of the movement.

Mrs. Piper was chiefly an automatic writer in the latter part of her
famous career as a medium, but we need scarcely discuss further her
accomplishments. In her later years she said that she did not claim to
be controlled by spirits, and this is sometimes wrongly described as a
confession of fraud. What she directly meant was that she did not
profess any opinion as to the source of the knowledge she gave to
sitters. She seemed to favour the theory of telepathy. When, however, we
remember that she spoke constantly in the name of spirits (Longfellow,
Phinuit, Pelham, Myers, etc.), the plea seems curious. Those who believe
that she was really in a sort of trance-state, and knew not what she
was doing, may be disposed to accept Podmore's theory, that her
subconscious personality dramatized these various spirits or supposed
spirits. Some of us do not like this idea of trance. In the hundreds of
exact records of proceedings with mediums that I have read, I have not
seen a page that suggested a genuine "trance," but I have noted scores
and scores of passages which showed that the medium feigned to be in a
trance, but was very wide awake.

Mrs. Thompson is another clairvoyant and automatic writer who has been
much appreciated by modern Spiritualists. It is well to recall that
before 1898 she was a medium for "physical phenomena." She even brought
about materializations. Then she met Mr. Myers, and her powers assumed a
more refined form. Dr. Hodgson, that quaint mixture of blunt criticism
and occasional credulity, had six sittings with her, and roundly stated
that she was a fraud. The correct information which she gave him was, he
said, taken from letters to which she had access, or from works of
reference like _Who's Who_. In one case, which made a great impression,
she gave some remarkably abstruse and correct information. It was
afterwards found that the facts were stated in an old diary which had
belonged to her husband. She herself produced the diary, and said that
she had never read it; so, of course, everybody believed her. When
Professor Sidgwick died, in 1900, his "spirit" used to communicate
through her. She reproduced his manner, and even his writing (which she
said she had never seen), very fairly; but she could give no
communication from him of "evidential" value.

The impersonation of dead people by the "entranced" medium makes a
great impression on Spiritualists. It is difficult to understand why.
One medium quite convinced a friend of mine by such a performance. She
sat, in the circle, in a trance one day, when she suddenly rose from her
chair, stroked an imaginary moustache, and began to speak in a gruff
voice. "He"--the young lady had become a cavalry man--explained in a
dazed way that he had died at Knightsbridge Barracks on the previous
day, and gave his name. Great was the joy of the elect on finding
afterwards that a soldier of the name had died at Knightsbridge on the
previous day.

It was quite childish. It is just by learning such out-of-the-way facts,
as they easily can, and making use of them, that the mediums keep up
their reputations. There was no reason whatever why the medium should
not have learned of the death and made so profitable a use of it.
Stainton Moses often did such things. One day he was possessed by the
spirit of a cabman who said that he had been killed on the streets of
London that very afternoon. By an unusual oversight the spirit did not
give his name. It was afterwards found that the accident was reported in
an evening paper which Stainton Moses _might_ have seen just before the
séance; and, by a curious coincidence, the reporter had not given the
cabman's name. In other cases, where mediums had been invited to
districts with which they were not familiar, yet they gave quite
accurate details about local dead, it was found on inquiry that the
information _might_ have been gathered from the stones in the local
cemetery.

A common retort of the Spiritualist, when you point out the possibility
of the medium impersonating the dead, is that, "if she did so, she must
be one of the cleverest actresses in England." You are asked,
triumphantly, why the lady should be content with a few pounds a week as
a despised medium, when she might be making five thousand a year on a
stage. Any person who has seen these "trances" will know the value of
their "dramatic" art. Almost anybody could do it. The medium makes from
three to five pounds a week by such things, but if she tried the stage
she would have, at the most, a minor part with fifty or sixty pounds a
year. Spiritualists get their judgments weirdly distorted by their bias.
I need only quote the extravagant language in which Sir A. C. Doyle
refers to Mr. Vale Owen's trash or Mrs. Spencer's picture of Christ. He
makes the miracle in which he wishes to believe.

Two particular cases of spirit messages by automatic writing have lately
been pressed upon us, and we must briefly examine them. One is given in
a book by Mr. F. Bligh Bond, called _The Gate of Remembrance_, which is
recommended to us by Sir A. C. Doyle as one of the five particularly
convincing works which he would have us read. He again fails to tell his
readers that Mr. Bligh Bond draws a very different conclusion than his
own from the facts. He has a mystical theory of a universal memory or
consciousness, a sort of ocean into which the memories of the dead have
flowed. He does not believe that the individual spirits of the dead
monks of pre-Reformation days came along and dictated their views
through his automatic-writing friend.

Any person, however, who reads the book impartially will see no need for
either the Spiritualist view or Mr. Bond's. The main point is that,
through Mr. Bond's friend, Mr. John Alleyne, what purported to be the
ghosts of the old monks of Glastonbury Abbey wrote quite vivid sketches
of their medieval life in the Abbey and, particularly, suggested the
position and general features of a chapel that was at the time unknown.
As to the character or impersonation of the monks, which seems to
Spiritualists so impressive, we are told by experts on medieval language
that it will not sustain criticism. The language is quaint and pleasant
to read, but it is not consistent either in old English or Latin. It is
the language of a man who is familiar with medieval English and Latin,
but does not speak it as his _own_ language, and so often trips. It is,
in other words, Mr. John Alleyne writing old English and medieval Latin,
and stumbling occasionally.

As to the indication of a buried chapel, both this and the general
impersonation of the old monks are intelligible to any man who has read
the book itself, not Spiritualist accounts of it. Mr. Bond, an architect
and archæologist, expected to be appointed to the charge of the ruins,
and he and his friend Mr. Alleyne steeped themselves, all through the
year 1907, in the literature of the subject. They read all that was
known about Glastonbury, and lived for months in the medieval
atmosphere. Then Mr. Alleyne took his pencil and began to write
automatically. The general result is not strange; nor is it at all
supernatural that he should have formed a theory about the lost chapel
and conveyed this to paper in the guise of a message from one of the old
monks.

The next work recommended to us is a short paper by Mr. Gerald Balfour
called "The Ear of Dionysius" (published in the _Proceedings of the
Society for Psychical Research_, vol. xxix, March, 1917). The writing
medium, Mrs. Verrall, a Cambridge lady of a highly cultivated and
refined type and an excellent classical scholar, found in her automatic
"script" on August 26, 1910, a reference to "the Ear of Dionysius."
Three years and a-half later another writing medium, Mrs. Willett, got
one of those rambling and incoherent messages, which are customary, in
reference to "the Ear of Dionysius." This seemed to be more than a
coincidence, as Mrs. Willett is no classical scholar. But Mr. Balfour
candidly warns us that Mrs. Willett said that she had heard nothing
about the earlier reference to the Ear of Dionysius in Mrs. Verrall's
case. It would be remarkable if the fact had been kept entirely secret
for three and a-half years, as some importance was attached to it in
psychic circles, and we may prefer to trust Mr. Balfour's memory rather
than Mrs. Willett's. He says that he feels sure that one day, in the
long interval, Mrs. Willett asked him what the Ear of Dionysius was.

Mr. Balfour, however, believes that in the sequel we have fair evidence
of spirit communication. The reader who is not familiar with these
matters should know that a new test had been devised for controlling the
origin of these messages. It was felt that if the "spirit" of one of the
dead psychical researchers (who could no longer read or remember the
sealed messages they had left) were to give an unintelligible message to
one medium, a second unintelligible message to a second medium, and then
the key to both to either or to a third medium, and if the contents of
these messages were strictly withheld from the mediums (each knowing
only her own part), a very definite proof of spirit origin would be
afforded. Thus the ghost of Mr. Verrall or Mr. Myers might take a line
of an obscure Greek poet, give one word of it to Mrs. Thompson, another
to Mrs. Willett, and then point out the connection through Mrs. Verrall.
Mr. Balfour claims that this was done in connection with the Ear of
Dionysius. Mrs. Willett, who does not know Latin or Greek, got messages
containing a number of classical allusions. Among them was one which no
one could understand, and the key to this was some time afterwards given
in the automatic writing of Mrs. Verrall.

The reader will now begin to understand the serious and respectable part
of modern Spiritualism. I presume that these cultivated Spiritualists
regard the "physical phenomena" of the movement and the ordinary mediums
with the same contempt that I do. They know that fraud is being
perpetrated daily, and that the history of the movement, since its
beginning in 1848, has reeked with fraud. It is on these refined
messages and cross-references that they would stake their faith.

But, while we readily grant that these things offer an arguable case and
must not be dismissed with the disdain which we have shown in the
previous chapters, we feel that the new basis is altogether insecure and
inadequate. Two mediums get a reference to so remote and unlikely a
thing as "the Ear of Dionysius." When you put it in this simple form it
sounds impressive; but we saw that there was an interval of three and
a-half years, and we do not feel at all sure that people so profoundly
interested, so religiously eager, in these matters would succeed in
keeping the first communication entirely from the ears of medium No. 2.
In point of fact, Mr. Balfour tells us that he has a distinct
recollection of being asked by Mrs. Willett, during the interval, what
the Ear of Dionysius was. Mrs. Willett denies it. We shall probably
prefer the disinterested memory of Mr. Balfour. Now, the very same
weakness is found even in the second part of the story. For any
evidential value it rests on two very large suppositions:--

1. That one medium knew absolutely nothing about the most interesting
and promising development which was for months agitating the minds of
her own friends.

2. That another medium heroically refrained from reading up any
classical dictionaries or works on the subject, and reserved her mind
strictly for whatever information the spirits might give her.

One can scarcely be called hypercritical if one has doubts about these
suppositions. There does not seem to be any room for the theory either
of telepathy or of spirit communication.

The two experiences I have just analysed are selected by Sir A. C. Doyle
as the most convincing in the whole of the work of the more modern and
more refined Spiritualists. I need not linger over other experiences of
these automatic writers. For the most part, automatic writing provides
only vapid or inaccurate stuff which is its own refutation. In the early
years, when Franklin, Shakespeare, Plato, and all the most illustrious
dead wrote nonsense of the most vapoury description, the situation was
quite grotesque. Nor is this kind of thing yet extinct. There are
mediums practising in London to-day who put the sitter in communication
with the sages and poets of ancient times. In the very best of these
cases there is a certain silliness about the communications which makes
them difficult to read. Even the spirits of Myers and Verrall seem to be
in a perpetual Bank-Holiday mood, making naive little puns and jokes,
and talking in the rambling, incoherent way that scholars do only in
hours of domestic dissipation. There is a world thirsting (it is said)
for proof that the dead still live. Here are (it is said) men like W. T.
Stead, Myers, Hodgson, Verrall, Sidgwick, Vice-Admiral Moore, Robert
Owen, etc., at the "other end of the wire," as William James used to
say. Yet, apparently, nothing can be said or done that quite clearly
goes beyond the power of the mediums. The arrogance of the Spiritualists
in the circumstances is amazing.

There are a dozen ways in which the theory could be rigorously tested.
One has been tried and completely failed: the communication of messages
which were left in proper custody before death. We shall, of course,
presently have an announcement that such a message has been read. Some
zealous Spiritualist will leave a sealed message, and will take care
that some medium or other is able to read it. We may be prepared for
such things. The fact is that half-a-dozen serious and reliable
Spiritualists have tried this test, and it has hopelessly miscarried.
Another test was that devised by Dr. Hodgson--to leave messages in
cipher, though not sealed. This also has completely failed. A third test
would be for one of these ghosts of learned Cambridge men, who are so
fluent on things that do not matter, to dictate a passage from an
obscure Greek poet through a medium who does not know Greek _at the
request of a sitter_. It is a familiar and ancient trick for a medium
to recite or write a passage in a foreign language. It has been learned
beforehand. But let a scholar ask the spirit of a dead scholar to spell
out through the ignorant medium _there and then_ a specified line or
passage within his knowledge. I have tried the experiment. It never
succeeds. Another test would be for one of these ghostly scholars to
dictate a word of a line of some obscure Greek poet (chosen by the
sitter) to one medium (ignorant of Greek), and another word of the same
line to another medium immediately afterwards, before there was the
remotest possibility of communication.

A score of such tests could be devised. Three of the best writing
mediums the Society for Psychical Research cares to indicate could be
accommodated, under proper observation, in different rooms of the same
building, and these tests carried out. We could invite the spirit to
pass from medium to medium and repeat the message to all three, or give
a part to each. Until some such rigorous inquiry is carried out, we may
decline to be interested. I have before me several volumes of the
_Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research_. Candidly, they are
full of trash and padding. There is very little that merits serious
consideration, and nothing that is not weakened by uncertainties,
suppressions, and over-zealous eagerness.

In fine, what impresses any man who reads much of all the volumes of
"revelation" which have been vouchsafed to us is the entirely _earthly_
character of it all. The Spiritualist theory is that men grow rapidly
wiser after death. Plato is two thousand years wiser than he was when he
lived. Ptah-hotep is six thousand years older and wiser. Neither these,
nor Buddha nor Christ nor any other moralist, has a word of wisdom for
us. In fact, a theory has had to be invented which supposes that they
move away from the earth to distant regions of the spirit-world as they
grow older, and so cannot communicate. It is a pity they are not
"permitted" to do so for propaganda purposes. But even those who remain
in communication have learned nothing since they left the earth. No
discovery has ever yet been communicated to us. In Spiritualist
literature, it is true, there is a claim that certain unknown facts
about the satellites of Uranus were revealed; but Flammarion makes short
work of the claim. The communications _never_ rise above the level of
the thought and knowledge of living humanity: never even above the level
of the knowledge available to the mediums. It is scarcely an "insanity
of incredulity" to suppose that they originated there.