Chapter IX: ); he read obituary notices, studied out-of-the-way stories of

men and women, and from the stores of his unconscious he produced this information as news from the spirit world. But, knowing nothing of the ways of the unconscious and becoming a prey to his own dissociated stream, he fed this stream and drifted with it into something a little removed from sanity.

I know not how the manifestations began, and whether he belonged to my second or third group I do not attempt to discuss; I am satisfied if I have made it clear that the work of this wonderful medium can be explained otherwise than by one of the two alternatives of spiritualism or conscious deceit.

We meet with the same rush to testify to the honesty of Mrs. Piper. Sir Oliver Lodge of course guarantees her, and the late Professor William James, the Harvard psychologist, wrote of her: 'Practically I should be willing now to stake as much money on Mrs. Piper's honesty as on that of any one I know, and am quite satisfied to leave my reputation for wisdom or folly so far as human nature is concerned to stand or fall by this declaration.'[30]

[Footnote 30: Re-quoted from _Spiritualism_, p. 75.]

This honesty of the main personality of the Dissociate leads astray professors of physics or of the old psychology.[31] It is the honest but mistaken man who misleads his fellows. We are on our guard against the rogue, and the conscious deceiver must needs be a good actor if he would succeed. The best actor knows he is acting, but the Reverend Moses needed no effort to preserve for years the appearance of straightforwardness and honesty. As far as he knew, he _was_ straightforward and honest, though beneath his consciousness lay fathomless possibilities of deceit, ever ready to take advantage of the externals of an honest man.

[Footnote 31: I may owe an apology here to the memory of Professor James, for the original quotation is given without its context.]

As I said in Chapter VI, an authoritative and confident manner makes easy the acceptance of suggestion. What can be more authoritative and confident than the manner of a man who believes what he says and knows that his hearers are willing to believe? If what he says are lies and delusions, that makes no difference in his manner, and his unsuspicious hearers are still ready to stake their reputations upon his honesty. That readiness only makes them the more suggestible and renders valueless their opinion as to the truth of what he says.

Spiritualist writers are glib concerning 'subliminal consciousness', and, knowing not what they mean, attribute to it powers of communication with the spirit world. The only one worthy of study is the late F. H. Myers, and though his stories of the marvellous are largely repetitions of old material yet his treatment of the psychology of double personality is illuminating. His work on _Human Personality_, if free from the spiritualist complex, would probably rank well in advance of its period. He has a good grasp of the subject of hysterical double personality, giving some excellent examples, but postulates a transition from the imaginings of the hysteric to the revelations of the spirit world. That the mind should pass through disease on its way to divine revelation, the boundary between the two being only a matter of judgement, is a necessary part of his explanation of mediumism. Just as spiritualists will maintain their belief in a medium after fraud has been detected, placing upon unbelievers the onus of proving fraud in every case, so Myers, knowing the workings of hysterical double personality, claims the right to exclude hysteria whenever he pleases and to attribute a divine origin to the material then produced. This demand appeals neither to the religious man nor to the sceptic.

I take the liberty of borrowing a story from Mr. Hereward Carrington, a spiritualist of some critical power.[32]

[Footnote 32: _Personal Experiences in Spiritualism_, pp. 59-61. T. Werner Laurie, Ltd.]

'One of the most interesting cases that I have ever encountered is
the following, which I consider of remarkable psychological
interest from various points of view.

During the early summer of 1911, a gentleman called upon me,
stating that he knew a wonderful physical medium, of the same type
as Palladino. He himself was a lawyer; his friend, the medium, was
also a lawyer, and had "a scientific interest in these things," and
in "having the remarkable manifestations which occurred in his
presence solved," etc. For three years and a half, I was told, this
case had been under private observation, and the manifestations had
grown more and more numerous and bewildering as time went on. This,
and much more of like nature, I heard by way of preliminary to the
investigation of what appeared to be a very promising case.

An evening having been arranged, the two gentlemen called at my
house, and, after a chat, the demonstrations were undertaken.

A broom was placed on the floor, and then, the medium kneeling over
the object (or, rather, squatting on the ground), he placed his
fingers on either side of the broom-handle, and then gradually
took them away. As he did so the broom was seen to rise into the
air. It remained suspended in space for a few seconds, then fell to
the floor. The effect was most striking, while the phenomenon was
of that simple order which one would naturally expect to discover
in a simple undeveloped medium.

The first two or three experiments interested me immensely, I must
confess. But I noted one particular thing about the movements of
the medium, which was that every time he placed an object on the
floor, he placed it very close to his knees; this caused me to look
between his knees intently instead of at the object during the next
few trials. The result was that I distinctly saw _a fine black
thread_ stretched from leg to leg, forming a loop, into which the
various objects were slipped in the act of placing them on the
floor. The rest was only a matter of balance.

In spite of the fact that I had discovered the _modus operandi_, I
did not wish to act hastily, having been accused so often in the
past of condemning too hastily upon discovering the fraud.
Accordingly I asked the medium to meet me a few evenings later at
the office of my friend, Dr. Gustave Sayer, and here we witnessed a
second demonstration. It would be useless to repeat the details of
this performance, which was simply a repetition of the first.
Suffice it to say that not only was the medium seen using the loop
of thread throughout, but this loop broke twice during the
evening--once in the middle of the experiment--the thread being
heard to break, and the object at once falling to the ground.

On the first occasion the medium made an excuse, retired upstairs,
and evidently arranged the thread, for he came down again in a few
minutes and proceeded to give us a further test. Upon the thread
(audibly) breaking a second time, however, he said that he "did not
think he could do any more for us that evening," and sat down,
apparently exhausted.

It was the most flagrant and bare-faced swindle I ever came across,
and in this Dr. Sayer agrees with me.

And yet here was a young lawyer practising these tricks,
apparently for no motive, and constantly lying about them in a most
astonishing manner; and this was a case from which much was to be
hoped, apparently.'

This story hardly needs comment; but the writer's attitude towards another and more famous medium, Eusapia Palladino, is very different.

Until I read the book from which these passages are quoted I thought no one regarded this lady as anything but an exposed fraud; even Sir Oliver Lodge has written concerning her, 'my only regret is that I allowed myself to make a report, although only a private report, to the Society for Psychical Research, on the strength of a few exceptionally good sittings, instead of waiting until I had likewise experienced some of the bad or tricky sittings to which all the Continental observers had borne frequent witness.'[33]

[Footnote 33: Quoted from _The Question_, p. 118.]

Mr. Carrington says of this lady[34]:--

'In any event, it appears to me obvious that, even assuming that
fraud was intended on this occasion, it proves nothing more than
the fact that Eusapia will resort to clever trickery whenever the
occasion is given her to do so--a fact which all students of her
phenomena know full well already; and it does not in the least
prove that the whole seance was fraudulent--which is what is
implied in Professor Munsterberg's article. Every one knows well
enough that scores of phenomena have been observed in the past
which could not possibly have been accounted for, even assuming
that the medium had both her feet free--a fact I have previously
pointed out. The difference between Eusapia and the other mediums
spoken of in this volume is this, that in their case they
invariably fail whenever "test conditions" are imposed, whereas
Eusapia generally succeeds; further, the whole tenor and setting of
the seance, so to speak, is entirely different. Lastly, we have the
unanimity of opinion amongst scientific men as to Eusapia's powers,
whereas we have nothing of the sort in the case of any other
medium. On the contrary, whenever they are investigated along these
lines, they either fail altogether or are detected in fraud.'

[Footnote 34: _Personal Experiences_, p. 174.]

This gentleman has reason for pride in his powers of observation, but his spiritualist complexes are so firmly enclosed in their logic-tight compartment that his own critical powers beat in vain against the door. It was unfortunate for the young lawyer, but at the same time inexplicable, that Mr. Carrington pitted his observations, made at two sittings only, against those of the people who had had the case under private observation for three and a half years. Surely this respectable young man deserved the laurels of mediumism as much as did Eusapia. What are two failures against three and a half years' manifestations that 'had grown more and more numerous and bewildering as time went on'? I am sure that, if Mr. Hereward Carrington had given his blessing, this young man might have become a famous medium instead of being blighted after his years of successful effort.

But Mr. Carrington cannot conceive an alternative between a bare-faced swindle and a spirit manifestation, and in this he is harsher than I. It is plain that this young lawyer had the respect of his friends and was believed to be honest, just like Mrs. Piper and Stainton Moses, and Mr. Carrington missed a chance of useful psychological investigation when he dismissed the case so curtly. The chance cannot be recalled, but a talk with this medium might have helped in the understanding of his distinctly disordered mind. I once had the chance of a frank talk with the accomplice of a professional medium, but, though he had some belief in the occult, he was so fully conscious of his roguery that I learned no more psychology than I have picked up from a three-card trickster. Anyhow, Mr. Carrington gives us an example of a medium in the making who we can only guess was a man whose disappointed ambitions and neurotic 'Will to Power' had led him astray.

I wonder how Mr. Carrington explains the failure of previous observers to detect the trickery? The man's apparent honesty of course helped, but the Herd Instinct was also at work and converts would be unlikely to criticise when a few reputable people had expressed their belief. Certain card-tricks are safer from detection by a large audience than by a small one. If three people are present and one thinks he detects the trick he may speak, for he is only in a minority of one to two; but if five out of fifteen detect it, each one, feeling he is in a minority of one to fourteen, is over-ruled by his sense of insignificance and remains silent accordingly. It is easier to sway a crowd than to persuade an individual.

Let me make it clear that I do not merely compare the medium with the hysteric, I regard them as identical except in those cases where the medium is a conscious deceiver. The attitude of the believers in the honesty of the medium is the same as that of the sympathising friends of the hysteric patient, and it is often as difficult and thankless a task to explain the patient's condition to his or her friends as it is to save the credulous from falling a prey to the fortune-teller. But such difference as there may be is in favour of the unfortunate hysteric, who is the victim of forces that are too powerful to be resisted without help and who often anxiously desires recovery.

I have seen in a man suffering from war-strain the spontaneous development of what would be accepted as clairvoyance; the identity of his performance with that of the medium is of great importance. The patient was in that condition of dissociation or partial hypnosis into which these men easily pass, and was apparently 'seeing' some of the horrors he had experienced. As a rule such revivals of war episodes can be relied upon as a true reproduction of actual events, but in this case there were inconsistencies in the story. For example, describing how Uhlans drove their lances into Belgian babies, he said: 'If I had my revolver I'd let them have it,' but gave no indication of what he, a British soldier, was doing unarmed and under such circumstances. Moreover, though the account was given with due emphasis, there was a lack of the emotion characteristic of the revival of actual horrors.

Then a break came in the story, and he went on to describe a tragedy which had recently roused public interest. He saw the murderer walking with his victim, described how she handed over certain articles to him, and then how the man shot her and hurried off.

All this was graphically related as if he were actually witnessing the tragedy, and as I listened I realised how any one ignorant of the workings of a disordered mind would feel compelled to believe in the reality of clairvoyance and might be impelled to act upon the belief, for the description of the murder, if true, could only have been derived from something like second-sight.

The cause at work in producing these fantasies was fairly clear. The man had seen three years of fighting, and had resolutely tried to forget all that he had passed through; he had the usual symptoms of 'shell-shock', and in addition complained bitterly of being haunted by dreams of murder. I know not what particular happening had so impressed him, but in his unconscious were the memories of many horrors which, refused admission to his consciousness, insisted on manifesting themselves by dreams and waking fears.

Every horrible thing he read or heard was joined on to his dissociated stream of memories and emotions, to be reproduced in dreams and fantasies.

In his imaginings there was a mixture of truth and fancy; the figure of the murderer, for example, proved to be associated in his mind with the figure of an officer who was present at a time of great emotional strain, and the articles handed over by the victim were identical with articles familiar to the patient and of emotional importance to him. The other reproductions proved to be of incidents which had been related to him and to which he had given an intimate personal interest whilst elaborating them; his own experiences were more deeply repressed.

His condition was identical with that of the honest medium--whether Stainton Moses or more recently advertised seers--but fortunately his friends recognised the true nature of his disorder and, instead of cultivating it as a 'gift', took steps to have it treated as a disease.

In the description of mediums we often find hints of hysterical symptoms. Sir Oliver Lodge tells of the sighings and writhings of one of his performers, but it is not often that a definite diagnosis is made as in the following extract[35]:--

'I do not think that any one who has seen the effects of a _good_
seance upon Eusapia could doubt its reality. She has been known to
suffer from partial paralysis, from hysteria, nausea, amnesia, loss
of vision, as well as great weakness, prostration, etc., after the
seance. I have seen her actively nauseated--excessively ill--after
a good seance of this character, a symptom which is unlikely to be
simulated, even if it could be. It is only after a _good_ seance
that such things occur, however. After a poor seance at which,
perhaps, much fraud has occurred ... I think that Eusapia often
simulates exhaustion when, as a matter of fact, there is little or
none, but this would not deceive one who has carefully watched her
for weeks and months together, and has observed the effects of a
genuine seance upon her.'

[Footnote 35: _Personal Experiences_, p. 242.]

The behaviour described by Mr. Carrington is precisely that of the hysteric, but it is not clear what he means when he says that her being actively nauseated is a symptom unlikely to be simulated, even if it could be. Hysterical vomiting--resulting from mental processes, and not from any physical cause--is very common, and is a simulation of bodily disease, though I do not imply that the patient is aware of the simulation. Perhaps being nauseated was, in this case, a symbol of the disgust which one personality felt towards the frauds and lies of the other. Eusapia, having reached a condition of hysterical dissociation, presents the material symptoms of such a condition, for the nausea, paralysis, amnesia, loss of vision, prostration, etc., are classical symptoms of hysteria. The spiritualist actually holds them forth as proofs of the reality of spirit communication! Let the reader bear in mind that they show Eusapia to have been not merely a cheat, but mentally diseased.

There is a sad list of books purporting to instruct beginners how to communicate with the dead, and the instructions are such as to induce dissociation--a mental condition with possibilities of self-deception and hysterical manifestations like those shown by Eusapia Palladino.

Bad enough it is to believe the fantasies of a diseased mind to be revelations from beyond the grave, but how can one sufficiently condemn men of learning and position who would lead along the pathway of disease those who mourn their lost ones?

A few extracts from _How to Speak with the Dead_[36] will illustrate these pernicious attempts.

[Footnote 36: By Sciens: Kegan Paul, Trench, Truebner & Co.]

(Page 88) 'By sitting in some place quite alone and free from
interruption, and by adopting a mental attitude of passive
receptivity and expectancy, the soul becomes ready to perceive and
be affected by any spirits that may be in its vicinity and that may
attempt to open up communications.... The manifestations ... may
vary from thought-suggestion to positive physical phenomena ...
such as the hearing of a voice or even the visual appearance of
some supernormal object. All depends upon whether the sitter is or
is not susceptible to psychical influence, and also upon whether
the locality or the sitter personally is or is not haunted.'

Then (page 91) when the Dissociation has developed:--

'In cases where the sitter is markedly "psychic" it frequently happens that normal control over the body is lost. A condition of trance supervenes, and while this continues the spirit--which may be either a "second personality" or a soul from the outside--that has gained the upper hand makes use to a greater or less extent of the brain and other organs subject to its mastery. The hand may write: the mouth may speak: the whole body may be engaged in some impersonation; and all this may take place beyond the scope of the sitter's normal consciousness.'

Lest the hysterical dissociation is not yet enough developed, the victim receives, on page 98, another thrust along the road to disease:--

'If it be found on trial that psychic powers exist to an
appreciable extent it may be taken for granted that they are
capable of very great increase by persevering effort and systematic
employment.'

A warning is both given and stultified on page 107:--

'Self-deception and the imaginations bred of wishes and emotions
are to be guarded against;' ... 'in solitary Expectancy fraud and
trickery are completely absent, and all manifestations are matters
of the most simple personal observation, the accuracy of which can
be confirmed--as in an ordinary scientific laboratory--by the test
of repetition.'

These directions are sufficient to start victims along the path taken by Eusapia, and, though we do not know how this woman reached the condition described by Mr. Carrington, yet the men who fostered her deception certainly helped the unfortunate creature in her development of a second personality compounded of delusion and fraud. The description of the other case of Mr. Carrington's contains a significant phrase: 'the phenomenon was of that simple order which one would naturally expect to discover in a simple undeveloped medium.' Just so: the game was only beginning, but, if the medium had developed, the split-off personality would have taken charge and limitless cheating and fraud could have been carried on by a medium who was to all seeming an honest man.

But as I showed that the causes of hysteria are to be found in conflict and repression, only taking the 'Will to Power' and 'repression of the knowledge of deceit' as particular forms applying to a few cases, so I must allow that the medium may not always be influenced by the last two factors. The hysteric is the prey of emotions and experiences which cannot be faced unaided, and the strivings and desires that arise from the unconscious, which in one individual may find expression in social work, may find vent by a neurosis in another, or by mysticism in a third.

The desires may be of the noblest kind, and, failing to find legitimate expression, may show themselves in fantasies. I am not the first to draw attention to the psychology of Joan of Arc, and we can picture her urged by the noblest emotions to seek in a dissociated stream powers beyond the reach of consciousness; her visions were real to her, and tradition may be believed when it relates the story of her detection of King Charles disguised as one of his own courtiers. 'Be not amazed, nothing is hid from me', are the words attributed to her, and the incident well exemplifies the hypersensitivity of a dissociated stream.

I cannot picture a modern medium actuated by high motives, but am ready to admit that even in our days there may be mystics whose dissociations arose from commendable origins. Theosophy is bound up with the story of two women, Madame Blavatsky and Mrs. Besant; the former was a self-confessed deceiver, but the latter is a very different kind of woman. Brought up in strict religious surroundings, she found herself compelled to cast aside her religious beliefs and, at great personal sacrifice, take up a public attitude directly opposite to them; but her old beliefs still lay in the unconscious, and when the opportunity arose she found relief from her conflict in a fantastic creed of the supernatural. No one who has studied her life can deny her honesty, but honesty does not make her beliefs easier of acceptance.

Before leaving the subject of mediums I must allude again to witchcraft. To those who believe in spirits, good or evil, which can take possession of us and make us do their will, and can throw about bricks and sand and furniture in our material world, there is nothing remarkable in epidemics of bewitchery, especially as the witch-finders were more fortunate than our spiritualists in having the unanimous support of the most eminent authorities of their day.

To explain the psychology of witchcraft is beyond the scope of this book, but it is not hard to conceive that when the belief in witchcraft was strong certain unfortunate people who set out to play tricks, maybe for notoriety or temporary gain, became ensnared by credulity and finding escape difficult came to believe in their own powers. Thus dissociation would be set up and on the side of the witch-finders Herd Instinct (or suggestion) and logic-tight compartments did the rest.

The fact that confessions of witchcraft were apparently common makes this explanation more probable.

For a career ending at the stake to have such a trivial origin as a desire for notoriety is in agreement with the history of Sludge, whose downfall began with a desire to draw attention to himself. Call them ambitions and the desires seem less trivial, nor do I shrink from suggesting that the 'gifts' of the water-diviner and the most financially disinterested medium, even of Mr. Stainton Moses himself, have origin in a desire to shine before one's fellows--a neurotic 'Will to Power'.