Hamlin Garland

“ Miller put in a last word of warning: "Because a phenomenon has not been explained, and no one knows how to explain it, is no reason for supposing there is anything extraphysical about it. No one has explained the first cause of the development of an embryo. No one knows what goes on in an active nerve, or why atoms are selective in their associates. Ignorance is not a proper basis for speculation, and if one must have a theory, let it be one having some obvious continuity with our best physical knowledge." ”

“ I believe in the methods of the chemist and the electrician. I prefer the experimenter to the theorist. I like the calm, clear, concise statements of these European savans, who approach the subject, not as bereaved persons, but as biologists. I am ready to go wherever science leads, and I should be very glad to know that our life here is but a link in the chain of existence. Others may have more convincing knowledge than I, but at this present moment the weight of evidence seems to me to be on the side of the theory that mediumship is, after all, a question of unexplored human biology. ”

“ So intense was the silence each time that we could hear the slightest breath, the minutest movement of the tin as it scraped along the rug.
"It is useless to talk of a confederate," I remarked; "it is of no value to refer this action to the hands of the psychic. We must look to subtler causes for this phenomenon. Perhaps Maxwell's theory that some magnetic power is liberated by the contraction of the larger muscles will account for it, but in no other way."
At last the megaphone soared into the air, passed over our heads, and dropped gently upon the table. ”

“ A man will stand out against Zöllner, Crookes, Lodge, and Myers, discounting all the rest of the great investigators, and then crumple up like a caterpillar at the first touch of The Invisible Hand when it comes to him directly. ”

“ Her hands were here, the table there. Does it not seem to you a case of the 'psychic force,' such as Crookes and Richet describe?"
Miller was confounded, but concealed it. "She may have shoved the table with her feet."
"How? Your newspaper is unbroken. Not a tack is disturbed. But suppose she did! How about the books? Did she get the books with her feet? How about the broad hand which I saw? How about the candy-box which was moved from a point seven feet away? How could she slip from her bonds? See these threads, actually sunk into her wrists!" ”

“ He had the air of an anxious man undergoing a dangerous ordeal. His right hand was stretched stiffly toward the phantom, his left was held near his heart; his knees seemed to tremble, and his body appeared to be irresistibly drawn toward the cabinet. Slowly, watchfully, fearfully, he approached the [Pg 271] phantom. The figure turned toward him, and a moment later they met—they clung together, they appeared to coalesce, and the psychic fell through the curtain to the floor of the cabinet, like a man smitten with death."
"What do you wish to imply?" asked Miller. ”

“ Harris.
The sleeper nodded.
"Can't you write?" I asked. "Can't you speak?"
A low gurgle in the throat was the only answer at the moment, but after a few trials a husky whisper began to be heard. "I will try," she said, and suddenly began to chuckle, rolling upon one hip and throwing one foot over the other like a man taking an easy attitude. She now held the pencil as if it were a cigarette, laughing again with such generous tone that the other women recoiled. ”

“ It's harder to understand than the spirit hypothesis. He himself admits this, and goes on to say that while he is certain that we are in the presence of an unknown force, he is convinced that the phenomena will ultimately be found orderly, like all other facts of nature. 'Therefore, in the critical state of research, the scientific problem, it seems to me, is not whether spiritism be true or false, but whether metapsychical phenomena are real or imaginary. Some future Newton will discover a more complete formula than ours,' he prophesies. ”

“ They are helpless in the face of a challenge to produce the phenomena, and yet the hidden forces are themselves helpless without them—"
"Is the table throbbing?" asked Brierly.
"I don't feel it."
"Have you ever had any convincing evidence of this psychic force—such as movement of objects without contact?" asked Harris.
"Yes. I have had a table rise at least twenty inches from the floor in the full light, with no one present but the medium and myself, and while our finger-tips alone touched the top. ”

“ The egotism of you professional physicists is a kind of insanity. The moment a man like Richet or Lombroso admits a knowledge of one of these occult facts, you who have no experience in the same phenomena jump on him like so many wolves. Such bigotry is unworthy a scientist. ”

“ Suppose your biologists prove that the psychic can put forth a supernumerary arm, or maintain, for a short time, a complete double of herself. Would that necessarily make the spiritist theory untenable? Is it not fair to conclude that if the soul or 'astral' or 'etheric double' can act outside the living body, it can live and think and manifest after the dissolution of its material shell? Does not the experimental work of Bottazzi, Morselli, and De Rochas all make for a spiritual interpretation of life rather than for the position of the materialist? ”

“ If I had known, for instance, the folly of allowing everybody to quiz the psychic, I might have been spared many hours of tiresome sitting. Maxwell is, indeed, an ideal investigator—he has made a great advance in methods, and his conclusions, though tentative, are most suggestive. No unprejudiced reader can finish his book, Metapsychical Phenomena, without feeling that its author is a brave and fearless writer, as well as a cautious and sane reasoner. ”

“ Let us have the truth, no matter how unpalatable it may be. If these phenomena exist, they are in the domain of natural law and can be weighed and measured. If they are imaginary, they should be swept away, like other dreams of superstition and ignorance."
Fowler was not to be silenced. "I predict that you and your like will yet be forced, like Lombroso, to take your place with Aksakof, Lodge, Wallace, Du Prel, and Crookes, who have come to admit the intervention of discarnate intelligences. ”

“ Matter is all we have to cling to when it comes to physical tests. A nail driven down through the sleeve of the medium's dress seems to increase our control of her, and a metronome or a Morse telegraphic sounder does add value to our testimony, and yet Zöllner seems nearer right than Miller: matter seems only a condition of force, and subject to change at the will of the psychic. ”

“ There are men psychics," replied Fowler, "but they're scarce. One of the most wonderful I have ever known is a big, burly fellow of most aggressive manner. The reason why there are so few men in the business I take to be this: men are less subjective, less passive, than women, and the psychic's rôle seems to be a negative one. Men are aggressive and impatient, engaged in some kind of struggle with material things, or they are intolerant of the process of developing their psychic gifts. If Garland has found a male psychic, he is in luck." ”

“ I consider that they have strengthened rather than weakened the mystic side of the universe. They are bringing the wonder of the world back to the positivist. Let them go on. They will yet demonstrate, in spite of themselves, the immortality of the soul. ”

“ An astronomer with his eye to a telescope is a highly specialized and competent being. An astronomer listening to whispers in the dark may be as simple and credulous as a child."
"I grant all that. But I see in it the greater reason why men like yourself should take up the investigation of these illusive and disturbing problems. These phenomena, as Flammarion says, introduce us into uncharted seas, and we need the most cautious and clearest-sighted scientists in this world as pilots. ”

“ I said, excitedly, "I see hands!"
"I do not," he answered; "but I hear a rustling."
Swift on the trail, I called out: "Now, show me your empty hand, 'Wilbur.' I want to see how big it is." A moment later I exclaimed, in profound excitement: "I can see a large hand against the window, and, strangest part of all, the spread fingers are pointing toward Mrs. Smiley, the wrist is nearest you and at least six feet from the psychic. It is a man's hand. You are not doing this, Miller?" ”

“ It is as easy to produce a phantom with hair plaited as it is to produce one with hair in curls. If it is a case of the modelling of the etheric vapor by the mind of the psychic, these differences would be produced naturally enough. The forcible handling of the medium by the invisible ones is a much more difficult thing for me to explain, for to imagine the psychic emitting a form of force which afterward proceeds to raise the psychic herself against her will—as Mrs. Smiley testifies happened again and again in her youth—is to do violence to all that we know of natural law. ”

“ Precisely so; and every advance along the line of these experiments goes to prove the power of mind to transform matter. It almost seems to me at times as though these psychic minds were able to reduce matter to its primal atom and reshape it. In Bottazzi's seventh sitting, under the same rigorous restraint of Eusapia, a vase of flowers was transported, a rose was set in a lady's hair, a small drum was seized and beaten rhythmically, an enormous black fist came out from behind the curtain, and an open hand seized Bottazzi gently by the neck. ”

“ Spirits have taught us nothing. They have not led science forward a single step.... I must say that if there are spirits, or beings independent of us, in action, they know no more than we do about the other world's.' And yet as regards the physical facts of mediumship, he sustains all the investigators. 'These phenomena exist,' he says."
"Candidly, Garland, what is your own belief?" asked Miller, a few moment's later. ”

“ Who knows whether my friends and I who laugh at spiritualism are not in error, just like hypnotized persons, or like lunatics; being in the dark as regards the truth, we laugh at those who are not in the same condition.'"
"True enough," said Fowler. "The man who has made no study of these phenomena is like one color-blind: he has never seen a landscape."
"It was this candid statement by Lombroso that moved Professor Chiaia, a friend of Eusapia's, to write the great alienist a letter which was in effect a challenge. ”

“ Which do you prefer, passive admiration, of which you must have had more than enough already, or the calm affirmation of physicists who are accustomed to extort from Nature secrets which she hides from physical eyes? 'In this way,' adds the master, 'Eusapia's irritation was softened; she rebelled no further, but yielded with docility to the sharp, attentive scrutiny of the observer, who finally declared himself beaten, not having been able to discover at any point a shadow of fraud.'"
"Hurrah for Eusapia!" shouted Howard. "She must be a wonder!" ”

“ Richet speaks of this curious recession of belief, and admits his own inability to retain the conviction that, at the moment of the phenomenon, was complete. 'No sooner is the sitting over than my doubts come swarming back upon me,' he says. 'The real world which surrounds us, with its prejudices, its schemes of habitual opinions, holds us in so strong a grasp that we can scarcely free ourselves completely. ”

“ Up to the beginning of last year Bottazzi confesses that he had read little or nothing on the subject, and, like our friend Miller here, considered it beneath the dignity of a scientist to be present at spiritualist circles. It is highly instructive to note that Paladino, the most renowned medium of her time, was in Naples at his very door; but that doesn't matter—a scientist is blind to what he does not wish to see. ”

“ I resumed, "for Bottazzi apparently proved that the invisible hand of Eusapia's invisible arm could not penetrate a cage of wire mesh that covered the telegraphic key in the cabinet. 'How, then, can we consider it to be a spirit hand—an immaterial hand—when a wire-netting can stop it?' he very pertinently inquires."
"That's what troubles me," said Miller. "If a phantom hand can bring a real book and thumb its leaves, or drum with a real pencil or write, why isn't it, for all practicable purposes, a real hand?"
"What is a real hand?" retorted Fowler. ”

“ I retorted. "Maxwell plainly says, 'Where the "control" is insisting upon something which I do not like, I politely resist, and end by getting my own way.' Note the 'politely.' In short, he recognizes that a genuine medium is a very precious instrument, and he does not begin by clubbing him—or her—into submission. For all their wondrous powers, the people who possess these powers are very weak. They are not allowed to make anything more than a living out of the practise of the magic, and they live under the threat of having the power withdrawn. ”

“ I said to them all, "that I am trying to follow Crookes's advice, which is to strip away all romance and all superstitious religious ideas from this subject. I am insisting on the normal character of these phenomena. Whatever happens to-night, Mrs. Miller, please do not be alarmed. There is nothing inherently uncanny or unwholesome in these [Pg 84] phenomena. No one knows better than your husband the essential mystery of the simplest fact. Materialization, for example, is unusual; but if it happens it cannot be supernatural. Nothing is supernatural. Am I right, Miller?" ”

“ It moved in impulses, an inch or two at a time, until it was certainly six or eight inches farther from the psychic.
It is impossible to conceive how this movement without contact takes place; but, then, what do we know about the action of the magnet on a pile of iron filings? How can a thought in the brain of man contract a set of muscles and lift a cannon-ball? At bottom we do not know how the will, as we call it, crosses the chasm between mind and matter—we don't even know there is a chasm. ”

“ If the medium is paid for her work she is too eager to serve, and everything tempts her to deceive. Furthermore, it has been proved that the psychic is in the very nature of the case extremely liable to suggestion, and the combined wills of the sitters focussed on one desired phenomena becomes an [Pg 54] almost irresistible force to certain psychics. On the other hand, the best observers say that the most striking proofs of spiritualism lies in the fact that the most amazing phenomena come in opposition to the will of both the psychic and the sitters. ”

“ Why not stop now and save ourselves the trouble of investigation?"
"Because there is joy in the pursuit—because it is in the nature of man to pursue this quest. Who knows but the conclusions of Venzano and Morselli, of Bottazzi and Foà, have opened new vistas in human nature? These 'supernormal powers' may chance to be of immense value to the race, quite aside from their bearing upon the problem of death. Furthermore, these reports come at a time when a hard-and-fast literalism of interpretation is the fashion among scientists like Miller. ”

“ Bottazzi declares in italics that Paladino neither put her hand into the cabinet nor knew the contents of it. 'Rarely has she been surrounded by such an assembly of unprejudiced minds, by such strict and attentive intellects,' he declares. And when you consider the absence of women, the mystery of the machinery, together with the stern character of the sitters, the medium's courage becomes marvellous. Perfect honesty alone can sustain a medium in such an ordeal. I am ready to agree that a new era began for spiritism when Eusapia entered that room, April 17, 1907. ”