Chapter V

THE NEOSPIRITUALISTIC
HYPOTHESIS: APPARITIONS

1

Outside theosophy, investigations of a purely scientific nature have been made in the baffling regions of survival and reincarnation. Neospiritualism, or psychicism or experimental spiritualism, had its origin in America in 1870. In the following year, the first strictly scientific experiments were organized by Sir William Crookes, the man of genius who opened up most of the roads at the end of which men were astounded to discover unknown properties and conditions of matter; and, as early as 1873 or 1874, he obtained, with the aid of the medium Florence Cook, phenomena of materialization that have hardly been surpassed. But the real inauguration of the new science dates from the foundation of the Society of Psychical Research, familiarly known as the S.P.R. This society was formed in London, twenty-eight years ago, under the auspices of the most distinguished men of science in England and has, as we know, made a methodical and strict study of every case of supernormal psychology and sensibility. This study or investigation, originally conducted by Edmund Gurney, F. W. H. Myers and Frank Podmore and continued by their successors, is a masterpiece of scientific patience and conscientiousness. Not an incident is admitted that is not supported by unimpeachable testimony, by definite written records and convincing corroboration; in a word, it is hardly possible to contest the essential veracity of the majority of them, unless we begin by making up our minds to deny any positive value to human evidence and by making any conviction, any certainty impossible that derives its source therefrom.[4] Among those supernormal manifestations, telepathy, telergy, previsions and so forth, we will take cognizance only of those which relate to life beyond the grave. They can be divided into two categories: (1) real, objective and spontaneous apparitions, or direct manifestations; (2) manifestations obtained by the agency of mediums, whether induced apparitions, which we will put aside for the moment because of their frequently questionable character,[5] or communications with the dead by word of mouth or automatic writing. We will stop for a moment to consider those extraordinary communications. They have been studied at length by such men as F. W. H. Myers, Richard Hodgson, Sir Oliver Lodge and the philosopher William James, the father of the new pragmatism; they profoundly impressed and almost convinced these men and they therefore deserve to arrest our attention.

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Footnote 4:

How strict these investigations are is shown by the perpetual attacks
on the S.P.R. in the spiritualistic press, which constantly refers to
it as the Society “for the suppression of facts,” “for the wholesale
imputation of imposture,” “for the discouragement of the sensitive and
for the repudiation of every revelation of the kind which was said to
be pressing itself upon humanity from the regions of light and
knowledge.”

Footnote 5:

It would, however, be unjust to assert that all these apparitions are
open to question. For instance, it is impossible to deny the reality
of the celebrated Katie King, the double of Florence Cook, whose
actions and movements were rigorously investigated and controlled by a
man like Sir William Crookes for a period of three years. But, looked
upon as a proof of survival—notwithstanding that Katie King professed
to be a dead person who had returned to earth to expiate certain
sins—her manifestations are not so valuable as the communications
obtained since her time. In any case, they bring us no revelation
concerning existence beyond the grave; and Katie, who was so young, so
much alive, whose pulsations could be counted, whose heart was heard
beating, who was photographed, who distributed locks of her hair to
those present, who replied to every question put to her, Katie herself
never uttered a word on the subject of the secrets of the next world.

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2

As concerns the manifestations of the first category, it is, of course, impossible to give even a summary account of the most striking of them in these pages; and I refer the reader to the volumes of the _Proceedings_. It is enough to remember that numerous apparitions of deceased persons have been investigated and studied by men of science like Sir William Crookes, Alfred Russel Wallace, Robert Dale Owen, Professor Aksakof, Paul Gibier and others. Gurney, who is one of the classics of this new science, gives two hundred and thirty instances of this sort; and, since then, the _Journal_ of the S.P.R. and the spiritualistic reviews have never ceased to record new ones. It appears therefore to be as well established as a fact can be that a spiritual or nervous shape, an image, a belated reflexion of life is capable of subsisting for some time, of releasing itself from the body, of surviving it, of traversing enormous distances in the twinkling of an eye, of manifesting itself to the living and, sometimes, of communicating with them.

For the rest, we have to recognize that these apparitions are very brief. They only take place at the precise moment of death or follow very shortly after. They do not seem to have the least consciousness of a new or superterrestrial life differing from that of the body whence they issue. On the contrary, their spiritual energy, at a time when it ought to be absolutely pure, because it is rid of matter, seems greatly inferior to what it was when matter surrounded it. These more or less uneasy phantasms, often tormented with trivial cares, have never, although they come from another world, brought us one single revelation of topical interest concerning that world whose prodigious threshold they have crossed. Soon, they fade away and disappear for ever. Are they the first glimmers of a new existence or the final glimmers of the old? Do the dead thus use, for want of a better, the last link that binds them and makes them perceptible to our senses? Do they afterwards go on living around us, without again succeeding, in spite of their endeavours, in making themselves known or giving us an idea of their presence, because we have not the organ that is necessary to perceive them, even as all our endeavours would not succeed in giving a man who was blind from birth the least notion of light and colour? We do not know at all; nor can we tell whether it be permissible to draw any conclusion from all these incontestable phenomena. They would really assume importance only if it were possible to verify or to induce apparitions of beings whose death dated back a certain number of years. We should then at last have the positive proof, which has always escaped us hitherto, that the spirit is independent of the body, that it is cause, not effect, that it can thrive, find sustenance and perform its functions without organs. The greatest question that humanity has ever set itself would thus be, if not solved, at least rid of some of its obscurity; and, forthwith, personal survival, while continuing to be wrapped in the mysteries of the beginning and the end, would become defensible. But we have not yet reached that stage. Meanwhile, it is interesting to observe that there really are ghosts, spectres and phantoms. Once again, science steps in to confirm a general belief of mankind and to teach us that a belief of this sort, however absurd it may at first seem, still deserves careful examination.