That is the broad question; but it is complicated here by a subsidiary question: whether, namely, any previous incarnations of Mlle.
Smith"s--other phases of her own spiritual history, now involving complex relationship with the past--have any part in the crowd of personalities which seem struggling to express themselves through her quite healthy organism.
Mlle. Smith, I should at once say, is not,[183] and never has been, a paid medium. At the date of M. Flournoy"s book, she occupied a leading post on the staff of a large _maison de commerce_ at Geneva, and gave seances to her friends simply because she enjoyed the exercise of her mediumistic faculties, and was herself interested in their explanation.
Her organism, I repeat, is regarded, both by herself and by others, as a quite healthy one. Mlle. Smith, says Professor Flournoy, declares distinctly that she is perfectly sound in body and mind--in no way lacking in equilibrium--and indignantly repudiates the idea that there is any hurtful anomaly or the slightest danger in mediumship as she practises it.
"It is far from being demonstrated," he continues, "that mediumship is a pathological phenomenon. It is abnormal, no doubt, in the sense of being _rare_, _exceptional_; but rarity is not morbidity. The few years during which these phenomena have been seriously and scientifically studied have not been enough to allow us to p.r.o.nounce on their true nature. It is interesting to note that in the countries where these studies have been pushed the furthest, in England and America, the dominant view among the _savants_ who have gone deepest into the matter is not at all unfavourable to mediumship; and that, far from regarding it as a special case of hysteria, they see in it a faculty superior, advantageous, healthy, of which hysteria is a form of degenerescence, a pathological parody, a morbid caricature."
The phenomena which this sensitive presents (Helene Smith is Professor Flournoy"s pseudonym for her) cover a range which looks at first very wide, although a clearer a.n.a.lysis shows that these varieties are more apparent than real, and that self-suggestion will perhaps account for all of them.
There is, to begin with, every kind of automatic irruption of subliminal into supraliminal life. As Professor Flournoy says (p. 45): "Phenomena of hypermnesia, divinations, mysterious findings of lost objects, happy inspirations, exact presentiments, just intuitions, teleological (purposive or helpful) automatisms, in short, of every kind; she possesses in a high degree this small change of genius--which const.i.tutes a more than sufficient compensation for the inconvenience resulting from those distractions and moments of absence of mind which accompany her visions; and which, moreover, generally pa.s.s un.o.bserved."
At seances--where the deeper change has no inconveniences--Helene undergoes a sort of self-hypnotisation which produces various lethargic and somnambulistic states. And when she is alone and safe from interruption she has spontaneous visions, during which there may be some approach to ecstasy. At the seances she experiences positive hallucinations, and also negative hallucinations, or systematised anaesthesiae, so that, for instance, she will cease to see some person present, especially one who is to be the recipient of messages in the course of the seance. "It seems as though a dream-like incoherence presided over this preliminary work of disaggregation, in which the normal perceptions are arbitrarily split up or absorbed by the subconscious personality--eager for materials with which to compose the hallucinations which it is preparing." Then, when the seance begins, the main actor is Helene"s guide _Leopold_ (a pseudonym for Cagliostro) who speaks and writes through her, and is, in fact, either her leading spirit-control or (much more probably) her most developed form of secondary personality.
"Leopold," says Professor Flournoy (p. 134), "certainly manifests a very honourable and amiable side of Mlle. Smith"s character, and in taking him as her "guide" she has followed inspirations which are doubtless among the highest in her nature."
The high moral quality of these automatic communications, on which Professor Flournoy thus insists, is a phenomenon worth consideration.
I do not mean that it is specially strange in the case of Mlle. Smith.
But the almost universally high moral tone of genuinely automatic utterances has not, I think, been sufficiently noticed or adequately explained.
In evidential messages--where there is real reason to believe that an identified spirit is communicating--there is a marked and independent consensus on such matters as these spirits profess themselves able to discuss.
And again in non-evidential messages--in communications which probably proceed from the automatist"s subliminal self--I hold that there is a remarkable and undesigned concordance in high moral tone, and also in avoidance of certain prevalent tenets, which many of the automatists do supraliminally hold as true. But I also insist that these subliminal messages, even when not incoherent, are generally dream-like, and often involve tenets which (though never in my experience base or immoral) are unsupported by evidence, and are probably to be referred to mere self-suggestion.
Prominent among such tenets is one which forms a large part of Mlle.
Smith"s communications; namely, the doctrine of _reincarnation_, or of successive lives spent by each soul upon this planet.
The simple fact that such was probably the opinion both of Plato and of Virgil shows that there is nothing here which is alien to the best reason or to the highest instincts of men. Nor, indeed, is it easy to realise any theory of the _direct creation_ of spirits at such different stages of advancement as those which enter upon the earth in the guise of mortal man. There _must_, one feels, be some kind of continuity--some form of spiritual Past. Yet for reincarnation there is at present no valid evidence; and it must be my duty to show how its a.s.sertion in any given instance--Mlle. Smith"s included--const.i.tutes in itself a strong argument in favour of self-suggestion rather than extraneous inspiration as the source of the messages in which it appears.
Whenever civilised men have received what they have regarded as a revelation (which has generally been somewhat fragmentary in its first delivery) they have naturally endeavoured to complete and systematise it as well as they could. In so doing they have mostly aimed at three objects: (1) to _understand_ as much as possible of the secrets of the universe; (2) to _justify_ as far as possible Heaven"s dealings with men; and (3) to _appropriate_ as far as possible the favour or benefit which the revelation may show as possibly accruing to believers. For all these purposes the doctrine of reincarnation has proved useful in many countries and times. But in no case could it seem more appropriate than in this last revelation (so to term it) through automatic messages and the like. And as a matter of history, a certain vigorous preacher of the new faith, known under the name of Allan Kardec, took up reincarnationist tenets, enforced them (as there is reason to believe) by strong suggestion upon the minds of various automatic writers, and set them forth in dogmatic works which have had much influence, especially among Latin nations, from their clarity, symmetry, and intrinsic reasonableness. Yet the data thus collected were absolutely insufficient, and the _Livre des Esprits_ must simply rank as the premature formulation of a new religion--the premature systematisation of a nascent science.
I follow Professor Flournoy in believing that the teaching of that work must have directly or indirectly influenced the mind of Mlle. Smith, and is therefore responsible for her claim to these incarnations previous to that which she now undergoes or enjoys.
On the general scheme here followed, each incarnation, if the last has been used aright, ought to represent some advance in the scale of being.
If one earth-life has been misused, the next earth-life ought to afford opportunity for expiation--or for further practice in the special virtue which has been imperfectly acquired. Thus Mlle. Smith"s present life in a humble position may be thought to atone for her overmuch pride in her last incarnation--as Marie Antoinette.
But the mention of Marie Antoinette suggests the risk which this theory fosters--of a.s.suming that one is the issue of a distinguished line of spiritual progenitors; insomuch that, with whatever temporary sets-back, one is sure in the end to find oneself in a leading position.
Pythagoras, indeed, was content with the secondary hero Euphorbus as his bygone self. But in our days Dr. Anna Kingsford and Mr. Edward Maitland must needs have been the Virgin Mary and St. John the Divine. And Victor Hugo, who was naturally well to the front in these self-multiplications, took possession of most of the leading personages of antiquity whom he could manage to string together in chronological sequence. It is obvious that any number of re-born souls can play at this game; but where no one adduces any evidence it seems hardly worth while to go on. Even Pythagoras does not appear to have adduced any evidence beyond his _ipse dixit_ for his a.s.sertion that the alleged shield of Euphorbus had in reality been borne by that mythical hero. Meantime the question as to reincarnation has actually been put to a very few spirits who have given some real evidence of their ident.i.ty. So far as I know, no one of these has claimed to know anything personally of such an incident; although all have united in saying that their knowledge was too limited to allow them to generalise on the matter.
Helene"s controls and previous incarnations--to return to our subject--do perhaps suffer from the general fault of aiming too high.
She has to her credit a control from the planet Mars; one pre-incarnation as an Indian Princess; and a second (as I have said) as Marie Antoinette.
In each case there are certain impressive features in the impersonation; but in each case also careful a.n.a.lysis negatives the idea that we can be dealing with a personality really revived from a former epoch, or from a distant planet;--and leaves us inclined to explain everything by "cryptomnesia" (as Professor Flournoy calls submerged memory), and that subliminal inventiveness of which we already know so much.
The _Martian_ control was naturally the most striking at first sight.
Its reality was supported by a Martian language, written in a Martian alphabet, spoken with fluency, and sufficiently interpreted into French to show that such part of it, at any rate, as could be committed to writing was actually a grammatical and coherent form of speech.
And here I reach an appropriate point at which to remark that this book of Professor Flournoy"s is not the first account which has been published of Mlle. Helene. Professor Lemaitre, of Geneva, printed two papers about her in the _Annales des Sciences Psychiques_: first, a long article in the number for March-April, 1897--then a reply to M. Lefebure in the number for May-June, 1897. In these papers he distinctly claims supernormal powers for Mlle. Helene, implying a belief in her genuine possession by spirits, and even in her previous incarnations, and in the extra-terrene or ostensibly Martian language. I read these papers at the time, but put them aside as inconclusive, mainly because that very language, on which M. Lemaitre seemed most to rely, appeared to me so obviously fact.i.tious as to throw doubt on all the evidence presented by an observer who could believe that denizens of another planet talked to each other in a language corresponding in every particular with simple French idioms, and including such words as _quisa_ for _quel_, _quise_ for _quelle_, _veteche_ for _voir_, _veche_ for _vu_;--the fantastic locutions of the nursery. M. Lemaitre remarks, as a proof of the consistency and reality of the extra-terrene tongue, "L"un des premiers mots que nous ayons eus, _metiche_, signifiant _monsieur_, se retrouve plus tard avec le sens de _homme_." That is to say, having transmogrified _monsieur_ into _metiche_, Helene further trans.m.u.tes _les messieurs_ into _cee metiche_;--in nave imitation of ordinary French usage. And this tongue is supposed to have sprung up independently of all the influences which have shaped terrene grammar in general or the French idiom in particular! And even after Professor Flournoy"s a.n.a.lysis of this absurdity I see newspapers speaking of this Martian language as an impressive phenomenon! They seem willing to believe that the evolution of another planet, if it has culminated in conscious life at all, can have culminated in a conscious life into which we could all of us enter affably, with a suitable Ollendorff"s phrase-book under our arms;--"_eni cee metiche one qude_,"--"ici les hommes (messieurs) sont bons,"--"here the men are good";--and the rest of it.
To the student of automatisms, of course, all this irresistibly suggests the automatist"s own subliminal handiwork. It is a case of "glossolaly,"
or "speaking with tongues"; and we have no modern case--no case later than the half-mythical Miracles of the Cevennes--where such utterance has proved to be other than gibberish. I have had various automatic hieroglyphics shown to me, with the suggestion that they may be cursive j.a.panese, or perhaps an old dialect of Northern China; but I confess that I have grown tired of showing these fragments to the irresponsive expert, who suggests that they may also be vague reminiscences of the scrolls in an Oriental tea-tray.
It seems indeed to be a most difficult thing to get telepathically into any brain even fragments of a language which it has not learnt. A few simple Italian, and even Hawaiian, words occur in Mrs. Piper"s utterances, coming apparently from departed spirits (_Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xiii. pp. 337 and 384 [960 A and -- 961]), but these, with some Kaffir and Chinese words given through Miss Browne (_Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. ix. pp. 124-127 [871 A]), form, I think, almost the only instances which I know. And, speaking generally, whatever is elaborate, finished, pretentious, is likely to be of subliminal facture; while only things sc.r.a.ppy, perplexed, and tentative, have floated to us veritably from afar.
I need not here go into the details of the Hindow preincarnation or of the more modern and accessible characterisation of Marie Antoinette, but will pa.s.s on to certain minor, but interesting phenomena, which Professor Flournoy calls _teleological automatisms_. These are small acts of helpfulness--_beneficent synergies_, as we might term them, in contrast with the _injurious synergies_, or combined groups of _hurtful_ actions, with which hysteria has made us familiar.[184]
"One day," says Professor Flournoy (p. 35), "Miss Smith, when desiring to lift down a large and heavy object which lay on a high shelf, was prevented from doing so because her raised arm remained for some seconds as though petrified in the air and incapable of movement. She took this as a warning, and gave up the attempt. At a subsequent seance Leopold stated that it was he who had thus fixed Helene"s arm to prevent her from grasping this object, which was much too heavy for her and would have caused her some accident.
"Another time, a shopman, who had been looking in vain for a certain pattern, asked Helene if by chance she knew what had become of it.
Helene answered mechanically and without reflection--"Yes, it has been sent to Mr. J." (a client of the house). At the same time she saw before her the number 18 in large black figures a few feet from the ground, and added instinctively, "It was sent eighteen days ago." [This was in the highest degree improbable, but was found to be absolutely correct.]
Leopold had no recollection of this, and does not seem to have been the author of this cryptomnesic automatism."
A similar phenomenon has also been noted (p. 87) when warning is conveyed by an actual phantasmal figure. Mlle. Smith has seen an _apparition_ of Leopold, barring a particular road, under circ.u.mstances which make it probable that Mlle. Smith would on that day have had cause to regret taking that route.
This case of Professor Flournoy"s, then--this cla.s.sical case, as it may already be fairly termed--may serve here as our culminant example of the free scope and dominant activity of the una.s.sisted subliminal self. The telepathic element in this case, if it exists, is relatively small; what we are watching in Mlle. Helene Smith resembles, as I have said, a kind of exaggeration of the submerged constructive faculty,--a hypertrophy of genius--without the innate originality of mind which made even the dreams of R. L. Stevenson a source of pleasure to thousands of readers.
In reference to the main purpose of this work, such cases as these, however curious, can be only introductory to automatisms of deeper moment. In our attempt to trace an evolutive series of phenomena indicating ever higher human faculty, the smallest telepathic incident,--the most trivial proof, if proof it be, of communication received without sensory intermediation from either an incarnate or a discarnate mind outweighs in importance the most complex ramifications and burgeonings of the automatist"s own submerged intelligence.
I pa.s.s on, then, to evidence which points, through motor automatisms, to supernormal faculty; and I shall begin by referring the reader to certain experiments (due to Professor Richet) in the simplest of all forms of motor automatism, viz., table-tilting, with results which only telepathy can explain. (See Appendix VIII. A.)
Trivial though they seem, such experiments may with a little care be made absolutely conclusive. Had Professor Richet"s friends, for example, been willing to prolong this series, we might have had a standing demonstration of telepathy, reproducible at will.[185]
And now I pa.s.s on to some experiments with Planchette, in which an element of telepathy was shown. The following account from Mrs. Alfred Moberly, Tynwald, Hythe, Kent, is corroborated, with some additional examples, by two other ladies present at the time.
(From _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. ii. p. 235.)
_May 9th, 1884._
The operators were placed out of sight of the rest of the company, who selected--in silence--a photograph, one of an alb.u.mful, and fixed their attention on it. We--the operators--were requested to keep our minds a blank as far as possible and follow the first involuntary motion of the Planchette. In three out of five cases it wrote the name or initial or some word descriptive of the selected portrait. We also obtained the signatures to letters selected in the same manner. We both knew perfectly well that _we_ were writing--not the spirits, as the rest of the company persist to this day in believing--but had only the slightest idea what the words might prove to be.
We have tried it since, and generally with some curious result. A crucial test was offered by two gentlemen in the form of a question to which we couldn"t possibly guess the answer. "Where"s Toosey?"
The answer came, "In Vauxhall Road." "Toosey," they explained, was a pet terrier who had disappeared; suspicion attaching to a plumber living in the road mentioned, who had been working at the house and whose departure coincided with Toosey"s.
Of course, in the case of the inquiry after the lost dog, we may suppose that the answer given came from the questioner"s own mind. Mrs. Moberly and her friends seem to have been quite aware of this; and were little likely to fall into the not uncommon error of asking Planchette, for instance, what horse will win the Derby, and staking, perhaps, some pecuniary consideration on the extremely illusory reply.[186]
And now we come to the palmary case of the late Rev. P. H. Newnham, Vicar of Maker, Devonport, who was personally known to Edmund Gurney and myself, and was a man in all ways worthy of high respect. The long series of communications between Mr. Newnham and his wife, which date back to 1871, and whose contemporaneous written record is preserved in the archives of the S.P.R., must, I think, always retain their primacy as early and trustworthy examples of a telepathic transference where the percipient"s automatic script answers questions penned by the agent in such a position that the percipient could not in any normal manner discern what those questions were. No part of our evidence seems to me more worthy of study than this.[187]
It must be distinctly understood that Mrs. Newnham did not see or hear the questions which Mr. Newnham wrote down.[188] The fact, therefore, that her answers bore any relation to the questions shows that the sense of the questions was telepathically conveyed to her. This is the leading and important fact. The _substance_ of the replies written is also interesting, and Mr. Newnham has some good comments thereon. But even had the replies contained no facts which Mrs. Newnham could not have known, this would not detract from the main value of the evidence, which consists in the fact that _Mrs. Newnham"s hand wrote replies clearly and repeatedly answering questions which she neither heard nor saw_.
In this case we have the advantage of seeing before us the entire series of questions and answers, and thus of satisfying ourselves that the misses (which in that case are very few) are marked as well as the hits, and consequently that the coincidences between question and answer are at any rate not the result of chance. In several other cases which I have known, where the good faith of the informants has been equally above question, the possibility of an explanation by chance alone has been a more important element in the problem. All our evidence has tended to show that the telepathic power itself is a variable thing; that it shows itself in flashes, for the most part spontaneously, and seldom persists through a series of deliberate experiments. And if an automatist possessing power of this uncertain kind has exercised it at irregular moments and with no scientific aim;--and has kept, moreover, no steady record of success and failure;--then it becomes difficult to say that even some brilliant coincidences afford cogent proof of telepathic action.[189]
I pa.s.s on to a small group of cases which form a curious transition from these communications _inter vivos_ to communications which I shall cla.s.s as coming from the dead. These are cases where the message professes to come from a deceased person, but shows internal evidence of having come, telepathically, from the mind of some one present, or, indeed, from some living person at a distance. (See the case given in Appendix VIII. B.)
But this, although a real risk, is by no means the only risk of deception which such messages involve. The communication may conceivably come from some unembodied spirit indeed, but not from the spirit who is claimed as its author.
The reader who wishes to acquaint himself with this new range of problems cannot do better than study the record of the varied experiences of automatic writing which have been intermingled with Miss A."s crystal-visions, etc.[190]