Henry Ridgely Evans

“ As Max Mueller, one of the greatest living Oriental scholars, has repeatedly stated, any attempt to read into Oriental thought our Western science and philosophy or to reconcile them, is futile to a degree; the two schools are as opposite to each other, as the negative and positive poles of a magnet, Orientalism representing the former, Occidentalism, the latter. Oriental philosophy with its Indeterminate Being (or pure nothing as the Absolute) ends in the utter negation of everything and affords no clue to the secret of the Universe. ”

“ Gentlemen are summoned from the audience to tie the mediums. Now, tell me, is it an easy task for an amateur to tie a man up off-hand with a rope three yards long, in a very secure way? The amateur is flurried, self-conscious, anxious to acquit himself well of the business, but he is a gentleman, not a brute, and if one of the Brothers sees the ropes getting into a dangerous tangle, he gives a slight groan, as if he were being injured, and the instantaneous impulse of the other man is to loosen the cord a trifle. ”

“ The three men place their hands on the table and wait patiently for developments. Presently a rap is heard under the table—disjointed knee of the medium,—and then mirabile dictu! the table-cloth shakes and a delicate female hand emerges and shows itself above the edge of the table. A guitar being placed close to the fingers, they soon strum the strings, or rather appear to do so, the medium being the deus ex machina. The cleverest part of the whole performance is the fact that the medium never takes his hands from the table. ”

“ Napoleon III had two sittings with Home—and it is [Pg 105] said Home materialized the spirit of the first Napoleon, who appeared in his familiar cocked hat, gray overcoat and dark green uniform with white facings. “My fate?” asked Louis, trembling with awe. “Like mine—discrowned, and death in exile,” replied the ghost; then it vanished. The Empress swooned and Napoleon III fell back in his chair as if about to faint. The medium in his first séance with the French Emperor succeeded only in materializing some flowers and a spirit hand, which the Emperor was permitted to grasp. ”

“ Are man’s highest spiritual qualities, into the production of which all this creative energy has gone, to disappear with the rest? Are we to regard the Creator’s work as like that of a child, who builds houses out of blocks, just for the pleasure of knocking them down? For aught that science can tell us, it may be so, [Pg 16] but I can see no good reason for believing any such thing.”
A scientific demonstration of immortality is declared to be an impossibility. But why go to science for such a demonstration? ”

“ All occult thinkers declare that life is from within, out. In other words life, or a spiritual principle, precedes organization. Science proceeds to investigate the phenomena of the universe in the opposite way from without, in; and pronounces life to be “a fortuitous collocation of atoms.” Still, science has been the torch-bearer of the ages and has stripped the fungi of superstition from the tree of life. It has revealed to us the great laws of nature, though it has not explained them. We know that light, heat, and electricity are modes of motion ”

“ From the first dawning of life we see all things working together toward one mighty goal, the evolution of the most exalted spiritual qualities which characterize Humanity. The body is cast aside and returns to the dust of which it was made. The earth, so marvelously wrought to man’s uses, will also be cast aside. ”

“ As a last word let me add that if, in my opinion, modern Theosophy has no right to the high place it claims in the world of thought, it has performed its share in the noble fight against the crass materialism of our day, and, freed from the frauds that have too long darkened its poetical aspects, it may yet help to diffuse through the world the pure light of brotherly love and spiritual development. ”

“ During the dark séance when the Davenports were supposed to be bound hand and foot within the closet and when the guitars were apparently floating in the air, the students struck their lights, whereupon the spirits were found to be no other than the Davenports themselves, dodging about the stage brandishing guitars and playing tunes and waving at the same time tall poles surmounted by phosphorescent spook pictures. ”

“ If we are to believe this, as apparently we must, we are face to face not only with a fact extraordinary in itself, but with a kind of fact which does not fit in with anything we know at present in the region either of physics or of physiology. It is true, no doubt, that we do know plenty of cases where energy is directed along a given line, like water in a pipe, or like electrical energy along the course of a wire. But then in such cases there is always some material guide existing between the two termini, between the place from which the energy comes and the place to which the energy goes. ”

“ Though there may be some moral gain from the change of beliefs, as will no doubt be the case in the long run, we have too recently escaped the intellectual, religious, and political tyranny of the Middle Ages to contemplate the immediate consequences of the reaction with any complacency. But no one can calculate the enormous effect upon intellectual, social, and political conditions which would ensure upon the reconciliation of science and religion by the proof of immortality. ”

“ Home’s extraordinary feat of alternately cooling and heating a lump of coal taken from a blazing fire, as related by Mr. H. D. Jencken and others, is easily explained. It is a juggling trick. The “coal” is a piece of spongy platinum which bears a close resemblance to a lump of half burnt coal, and is palmed in the hand, as a prestidigitateur conceals a coin, a pack of cards, an egg, or a small lemon. The medium or magician [Pg 107] advances to the grate and pretends to take a genuine lump of coal from the fire but brings up instead, at the tips of his fingers, the piece of platinum. ”

“ The reader will see from the above-described séance that unless the medium (or a confederate) is enabled to read the names and questions, prepared by the sitter, his hands are practically tied in all experiments in psychology.
When investigators bring their own marked slates with them, screwed tightly together, and sealed, the medium has to adopt different tactics from those employed in the tests before mentioned. He has to call in the aid of a confederate. The audacity of the sealed-slate test is without parallel in the annals of pretended mediumship. ”

“ Considerable controversy has been waged over this question, and the hypothesis of telepathy is scouted. Minot J. Savage has come to the conclusion that such cases stretch the telepathic theory too far; there can be but one plausible explanation—a communication from a disembodied spirit, operating through the mind of the medium. For the sake of lucidity, let us take an example: A has a relative B who dies in a foreign land under peculiar circumstances, unknown to A. A attends a séance of a psychic, C, and the latter relates the circumstances of B’s death. ”

“ In the meantime, as the objective mind ceases to perform its functions, the subjective mind is most active and powerful. The individual may never before have exhibited any psychic power, and may never have consciously produced any psychic phenomena; yet at the supreme moment his soul is in active communication with loved ones at a distance, and the death message is often, when psychic conditions are favorable, consciously received. The records of telepathy demonstrate this proposition. ”

“ Evolution points to eternal life as the final goal of self-conscious spirit, else this mighty earth-travail, the long ages of struggle to produce man are utterly without meaning. Speaking of a future life, John Fiske, a leading American exponent of the doctrine of evolution, says (“The Destiny of Man”) : “The doctrine of evolution does not allow us to take the atheistic view of the position of man. ”

“ The subjective phenomena of Spiritualism—trance speaking, automatic writing, etc.,—have engaged the attention of some of the best scientific minds of Europe and America, as studies of abnormal or supernormal psychological conditions.
If there are any facts to sustain the spiritual hypothesis, these facts exist in subjective manifestations. The following statement will be conceded by any impartial investigator: A medium, or psychic, in a state of partial or complete hypnosis frequently gives information transcending his conscious knowledge of a subject. ”

“ If it is, it must obey the law—at least, we should expect it to obey the law—of all other forces which so act through a non-absorbing medium, and its effects must diminish inversely as the square of the distance. It must, so to speak, get beaten out thinner and thinner the further it gets removed from its original source. ”

“ Now, in dry weather, many persons within my knowledge, have only to walk with a shuffling gait over the carpet, and then approaching the lath hold out the finger instead of the glass, sealing wax or gutta percha, and instantly the end of the lath at L rises to meet it, and the end at L is depressed. Applying these principles, I arranged an apparatus exactly like that of Prof. Crookes, except that the spring balance was such as is used for weighing letters and was therefore very delicate, indicating quarter ounces with exactness, and that the board was thin and narrow. ”

“ Sometimes the stiffening of a muscle, the raising of a shoulder, the crooking of a knee, gives all the play required by the Brothers in ridding themselves of their bonds. Their muscles and joints are wonderfully supple, too; the thumbs can be laid flat in the palm of the hand, the hand itself rounded until it is no broader than the wrist, and then it is easy to pull through. ”

“ You may deceive the human eye, say the advocates of spirit materializations, but you cannot deceive the eye of science, the photographic camera. Then they triumphantly produce the spirit photograph as indubitable evidence of the reality of ghostly materializations. ”

“ The Great Unknown turned out to be a she instead of a he adept—a certain Mrs. Katherine Alice Tingley, of New York City. The reporters began ringing the front door bell of the adept’s house in the vain hope of obtaining an interview, but the newly-hatched Sphinx turned a deaf ear to their entreaties. ”

“ The servant who raps at the door brings with him, concealed under his coat, a second slate, upon which the long message is written. Over the writing is a pad cut from a book-slate, exactly fitting the frame of the prepared slate. It is impossible to detect the fraud when the light in the room is a trifle obscure. The medium makes an [Pg 54] exchange of slates, returns to the table, washes both sides of the trick slate, and carelessly exhibits it to the sitter, the writing being protected of course by the pad. ”

“ Sometimes she places a musical box on an oblong plate of glass suspended from the ceiling by four cords. The box plays and stops at word of command, much to the astonishment of listeners. “Electricity,” exclaims the reader! Hardly so, for the box is completely insulated on the sheet of glass. Then how is it done? Mr. Asprey Vere, an investigator of spirit phenomena, tells the secret in the following words: (“Modern Magic”) . “In the box there is placed a balance lever which when the glass is in the slightest degree tilted, arrests the fly-fan, and thus prevents the machinery from moving. ”

“ Is it even credible that the mere thoughts, or, if you please, the neural changes corresponding to these thoughts, of any individual could have in them the energy to produce sensible effects equally in all directions, for distances which do not, as far as our investigations go, appear to have any necessary limit? It is, I think, incredible; and in any case there is no evidence whatever that this equal diffusion actually takes place. The will power, whenever will is used, or the thoughts, in cases where will is not used, have an effect, as a rule, only upon one or two individuals at most. ”

“ It is true, that all evidence in support of telepathic communications is more or less ex parte in character, and does not possess that validity which orthodox science requires of investigators. Any student of the physical laws of matter can make investigations for himself, and at any time, provided he has the proper apparatus. Explain to a person that water is composed of two gases, oxygen and hydrogen, and he can easily verify the fact for himself by combining the gases, in the combination of H2O, and afterwards liberate them by a current of electricity. ”

“ The conditions involved in the tracing of a figure on a blackboard or other surface are of a like order, although this is a severer test of a muscle-reader’s powers. So long as the muscle-reader moves the crayon in the right direction, he is permitted to do so; but when he deviates from the proper course, the subject, whose hand or wrist he clasps, involuntarily indicates the fact by the usual slight muscular tremor. ”

“ Some Theosophists claim that Nirvana is not a state of unconsciousness, but just the converse, a state of the most intensified consciousness, during which the soul remembers all of its previous incarnations. ”

“ Professor Tamburini’s explanation fails to account for the innumerable well authenticated cases where facts are obtained not within the conscious knowledge of the planchette writer or table-tilter. If telepathy does not enter into these cases, what does?
There are many exhibitions, of thought transference by public psychics, that are thought transference in name only. One must be on one’s guard against these pretenders to occult powers. I refer to men like our late compatriot, Washington Irving Bishop—“muscle-reader” par excellence whose fame extended throughout the civilized world. ”