spun about the room. No doubt I moved it, but I did so "automatically." I did not, consciously, exert any force. I said, "Ask the table a question," and a lady remarked, "Where are the watches?" The table then tilted; the others used the alphabet in the ordinary way. I did not know what was tilted out, but they told me that the message was, "The watches are in Frank's pocket in the children's room." I asked, "What watches?" and the lady said, "I gave two to Frank to take to the watchmaker, and he does not know what became of them."
"No more do I," I said, and thought no more about it. Frank was a boy, a nephew of the lady; I scarcely knew him by sight. Two months later, when I was in France, Frank's father, who had been present at the table-tilting, wrote to tell me that I "was the devil"! The watches had just been found in an old greatcoat of Frank's, in a drawer in the children's room,—which was not a room in the house where the table was so well inspired. Nothing else of the sort ever happened to me. It was an "automatism." I did not know what the table "said" till I was told, and of the watches I knew nothing at all. I simply do not understand the case; but "spirits" did not even pretend to be mixed up in it. The least inconceivable psychic explanation is that Frank, who was at school, "wired" on to me, without knowing it, a fact which he had forgotten, and that I, without knowing it, made the table tilt out the answer.
Frank at that time was a queer, visionary boy, "a sensitive," but to do all this was rather out of his line. The sceptical theory would be that Frank, having heard the story, and accidentally come upon the lost watches, put them in the place where the table said they were, "and the same with intent to deceive." But I did not even know that there was a room in his father's house called "the children's room."
These are examples of "automatisms," into which the society inquired. It also devoted very great attention to hypnotism, in which Mr. Myers and Mr. Gurney carried out many novel and striking experiments. Both of these gentlemen were deeply versed in the ordinary psychology and physiology of the schools, but subjective and experimental: all the science of brain and nerve, in health and in disease; all the phenomena of "split personalities"; and all the vagaries of hysteria, delusions, and hallucinations,—unreal experiences of sight and hearing, which, to the subject, appear to be real—as when, for example, I have spoken to, or opened the door for, a friend who was really at a distance, but apparently present.
The society also made many experiments in transferring thoughts from one person to another, whether present or at a distance. A draws and thinks of anything—a cat, a chair, a mathematical diagram, what you please,—and B, who is placed behind a screen, tries to "see" or "visualize" and draw the object that A has drawn. In many experiments there was an extraordinary degree of success; others were total failures.
I myself have been only concerned in crystal-gazing experiments. A thought of what he pleased—often of a person. B looked in a glass ball and described what he "saw." The extraordinary result was that B would not only "see" the persons in A's mind, but describe what they were doing (or had lately been doing), how they were dressed, and so on, the persons seen being in every case totally unknown to B. The answers, on inquiry, were found to be correct. The oddest thing was that a description given on a Saturday, at St. Andrews, of several persons and scenes in India, was corroborated on Sunday by a letter from India which then arrived.[1]
In addition to all these studies the society has for many years conducted experiments with Mrs. Piper of Boston. Her automatisms occur while she is in a state of unconsciousness, and there are persons who believe that she is then inspired by the souls of the dead. I understand that she, very properly, entertains no theory of the kind.
The society has hitherto found no case of objects moving about untouched by man; its envoys, that is, have never been present where such phenomena occurred. They have merely collected reports or discovered impostures.
- ↑ See Making of Religion, chapter on "Crystal-gazing," for a set of instances with full details.
