Spiritualists distinguish between physical phenomena and psychic phenomena. The use of this distinction is obvious. When a man reads some such history of the movement as Podmore's, and then the works of Truesdell, Robinson, Maskelyne, Carrington, and others who have time after time exposed the ways of mediums, he is very ill-disposed to listen to stories of materialization, levitation, spirit photographs, spirit messages, spirit music, spirit voices, or anything of the kind. He knows that each single trick has been exposed over and over again. So the liberal Spiritualist urges him to leave out "physical" phenomena and concentrate on the "psychic." It is a word with an aroma of refinement, spirituality, even intellect. It indicates the sort of thing that respectable spirits ought to do. So we will turn to the psychic phenomenon of clairvoyance.

Here at once the reader's resolution to approach the subject gravely is disturbed by the recollection of a recent event. Many a reader would, quite apart from the question of consolation, like to find something true in Spiritualism. He may feel, as Professor William James did, that the mass of fraud is so appalling that, for the credit of humanity, we should like to think that it is the citizens of another world, not of ours, who are responsible. He may feel that, if it is all fraud, a number of quite distinguished people occupy a very painful position in modern times. He would like to find at least something serious; something that is reasonably capable of a Spiritualist interpretation. But as soon as he approaches any class of phenomena some startling instance of fraud rises in his memory and tries to prejudice him. In this case it is the "Masked Medium."

A recent case in the law courts has brought this to mind. In 1919, when the Sunday Express was making its grave search for ghosts, in order to rebuke the materialism of our age, it offered £500 for a materialization. A gentleman, who (with an eye on the police) genially waived the money offer aside, offered to bring an unknown lady and present a materialization, and some startling feats of clairvoyance in addition. A sitting was arranged, and the lady, who wore a mask, gave a clairvoyant demonstration that could not be surpassed in all the annals of Spiritualism. Her ghost was rather a failure; though Lady Glenconnor, who has the true Spiritualist temperament, recognized in it an "initial stage of materialization." But the clairvoyance was great. The sitters, while the lady was still out of the room, put various objects connected with the dead (a ring, a stud, a sealed letter, etc.) in a bag. The bag was closed, and was put inside a box; and the lady, who was then introduced, described every object with marvellous accuracy. Sir A. C. Doyle said that the medium gave "a clear proof of clairvoyance." Mr. Gow said that he saw "no normal explanation."

And it was fraud from beginning to end, as everybody now knows. Clairvoyance must be distinguished from prophecy, which Spiritualists sometimes claim. Prediction means the art of seeing things which do not exist, and it is therefore not even mentioned in this book. Clairvoyance means the art of seeing things through a brick wall (or any other opaque covering). Now this was an admirable piece of clairvoyance. Even Spiritualists present were suspicious, because the lady was quite unknown. Yet they could not see any suggestion of fraud or any "normal explanation." Did they turn back upon their earlier experiences of clairvoyance, when the fraud was confessed, and ask if those also may not have been due to trickery? Not in the least. Everything is genuine until it is found out—and, sometimes, even afterwards.

Mr. Selbit, the conjurer who really conducted the performance, is naturally unwilling to give away his secret. He acknowledged immediately after the performance, as Mr. Moseley describes in his Amazing SÉance, that he had fooled the audience. The masked lady was an actress with no more abnormal power than Sir Oliver Lodge has. Mr. Stuart Cumberland suggested at the time that, when the assistant went to the door to call the medium, he handed the box to a confederate and received a dummy box. He thought that the medium would then have time to study and memorize the contents of the real box (including a sealed letter in dog-German) before she entered the room. From the account, which is not precise enough, I can hardly see how she would have time for this. But Mr. Selbit acknowledged that a dummy box was substituted. He says that a person entered the room in the dark, took the box from the table and substituted a dummy, and afterwards impersonated the ghost. This is most important for us. The room had been searched, and such acute observers as Mr. Stuart Cumberland and Superintendent Thomas, of Scotland Yard, were on the watch; yet a confederate got into the room. After this an ordinary Spiritualist sÉance is child's play. A long and minute description of the objects in the bag, which must have been spelled letter by letter in parts, on account of the difficult wording of the sealed letter, was in some way telegraphed or communicated to the girl under the eyes of this watchful group. It would be scarcely more marvellous to suppose that Mr. Selbit, after studying the contents of the box, took her place before their faces and they never knew it!

The reader will not fail to see why I have minutely pointed out the features of this recent case. It is, in the first place, an example of "psychic," not "physical," phenomena; and it was conjuring pure and simple. It was, further, "most successful and convincing," as Sir A. C. Doyle pronounced; yet there was not a particle of abnormal power about it. Finally, it was done in the presence of three keen critics, as well as of leading Spiritualists; yet the fraud was not discovered. To invoke the "supernormal," after this, the moment some ordinary individual fails to detect fraud, is surely ludicrous.

Now let me put another warning before the reader. It is notorious that Spiritualists are particularly, even if innocently, apt to mislead in their accounts of their experiences. Unless the experience is recorded on paper at once, it is almost worthless; and even then it is often quite wrong. There is such a thing as "selection" in the human mind. When two people, a Spiritualist and a sceptic, see or read the same thing, their minds may get quite a different impression of it. The mind of the Spiritualist leaps to the features of it which seem to be supernormal, and slurs or ignores or soon forgets the others. The mind of the sceptic does the opposite. You thus get quite inaccurate accounts from Spiritualists, though they are often quite innocent. One once asked me to explain how a medium, two hundred miles from his home, in a place where no one knew him, could tell his name and a good deal about him. By two minutes' cross-examination I got him to admit that he had been working for some weeks in this district and was known to a few fellow-workers. No doubt one of these had given a medium information about him, and then induced him to visit her. These indirect methods are very effective.

A very good example is Sir A. C. Doyle himself. In the debate with me he made statement after statement of the most inaccurate description. He said that Eusapia Palladino was quite honest in the first fifteen years of her mediumship; that he had given me the names of forty Spiritualist professors; that the Fox sisters were at first honest; that I did not give the evidence from his books correctly; that Mr. Lethem got certain detailed information the first time he consulted a medium; that in Mme. Bisson's book you can see ectoplasm pouring from the medium's "nose, eyes, ears, and skin"; that Florrie Cook "never took one penny of money"; that in the Belfast experiment the table rose to the ceiling; and so on. His frame of mind was extraordinary. But I will give a far more extraordinary case which will make the reader very cautious about Spiritualist testimony.

About forty years ago, when the old type of ghost story was not yet quite dead, Myers and Gurney, who were collecting anecdotes of this sort, received a particularly authentic specimen. It was a personal experience of Sir Edmund Hornby, a retired Judge from Shanghai. A few years earlier, he said, he had one night written out his judgment for the following day, but the reporter failed to call for a copy. He went to bed, and some time after one o'clock he was awakened by the reporter, who very solemnly asked him for the copy. With much grumbling Sir Edmund got up and gave him the copy. He remembered that in returning to bed he had awakened Lady Hornby. And the next morning, on going to court, he learned that the reporter had died just at that hour, of heart disease (as the inquest afterwards found), and had never left the house. He had been visited by the reporter's spirit.

Here was an experience of most exceptional weight. Who could doubt either the word or the competence of the Chief Judge of the Supreme Consular Court of China and Japan? The story was promptly written up in the Nineteenth Century ("Visible Apparitions," July, 1884), and sceptics were confounded. But a copy of the Nineteenth Century reached Shanghai, where the incident was said to have taken place, and in the same monthly for November there appeared a letter from Mr. Balfour, editor of the North China Herald and the Supreme Court and Consular Gazette. It proved, and Sir E. Hornby was compelled to admit, that the story was entirely untrue. It was a jumble of inaccuracies. The reporter had died between eight and nine in the morning, not at one, and had slept peacefully all night. There had been no inquest. There was no judgment whatever delivered by Sir E. Hornby that morning. There was not even a Lady Hornby in existence at the time! Sir Edmund Hornby sullenly acknowledged the truth of all this, and could mutter only that he could not understand his own mistake.

After this awful example we think twice before we take the testimony of Spiritualists at its face value. Sir A. C. Doyle, in particular, is especially guilty of such confusions, to the great advantage of his stories. During the Debate, as I said, he told of a wonderful Glasgow clairvoyante, who was consulted by a Mr. Lethem (a Glasgow J.P.), who had lost a son in the War. She at once told Mr. Lethem, Sir Arthur says, his son's name, the name of the London station at which he had said farewell, and the name of the London hotel at which they had stayed. This sounded very impressive indeed. But I happened to have read Mr. Lethem's articles (Weekly Record, February 21 and 28, 1920), and I have them before me. Mr. Lethem was a well-known man in Glasgow, and was known to be "inquiring." Now it was eight months after his son's death that he met this clairvoyante, yet all she could tell him was his son's name and appearance. It was, he confesses, "not much" and "not strictly evidential." It was at a later sitting that she gave the other details. Sir A. C. Doyle has fused the two sittings together and made the experience more impressive. The medium had time to make inquiries. There is a further detail which Sir A. C. Doyle does not tell. The brother of the dead officer asked, as a test question, the name of the town where they had last dined together. It took "more than a year" to get an answer to this!

Thus a quite commonplace and easily explained feat of a medium is dressed up by Sir A. C. Doyle as supernormal. He does this repeatedly in his books. In the New Revelation he says, quoting Sir Oliver Lodge's Raymond, that a medium described to Sir Oliver a photograph of his son, "no copy of which had reached England, and which proved to be exactly as he described it." Here he has done the same as in the case of Mr. Lethem—fused together several successive sittings. The first medium consulted by Sir Oliver Lodge made only a very brief statement. It was wrong in three out of four particulars; and the fourth was a very safe guess (that Raymond had once been photographed in a group). The particulars which so much impressed Sir O. Lodge were given much later, and by a lady medium; and by that time there were plenty of copies of the photograph in England! Sir O. Lodge gives the various dates.

Sir William Barrett and Sir O. Lodge are just as slipshod. I have amply shown this in the case of Lodge in my Religion of Sir O. Lodge (and Raymond is even worse than the books I analysed), and Sir W. F. Barrett's On the Threshold of the Unseen is just as bad. I have previously said how he tells his readers that it would take "the cleverest conjurer with elaborate apparatus" to do what the Golighers do at Belfast; and I showed that one limb of one member of the circle of seven mediums would, with the help of a finger or two perhaps, explain everything. Sir William also says (p. 53) that the London Dialectical Society "published the report of a special committee" strongly in favour of Spiritualism. On the contrary, the London Dialectical Society expressly refused to publish that egregious document. He says (p. 72), in describing the Home levitation case, that "nothing was said beforehand of what they might expect to see," and "the accounts given by each [witness] are alike." These statements are the reverse of the truth. The book contains many such instances.

Here is another, which is expressly concerned with the greatest of all "clairvoyantes," Mrs. Piper, and the most critical Spiritualist of modern times, Dr. Hodgson. In the Debate Sir A. C. Doyle introduces him (p. 21) as "Professor Hodgson, the greatest detective who ever put his mind to this subject." He is fond of turning the people he quotes into "professors." It makes them more weighty. Hodgson was never a professor, but he was an able man, and he exposed more than one fraud like Eusapia Palladino. But I have been permitted to see a letter which puts Dr. Hodgson himself in the category of over-zealous and unreliable witnesses; and as this letter is to be published in the form of a preface to the second edition of Dr. C. Mercier's book on Spiritualism, I am not quoting an anonymous document.

Mrs. Piper, the great American clairvoyante, the medium whose performances are endorsed as genuine even by men who regard Spiritualism as ninety-eight per cent. fraud, began her career as a "psychic" in 1874. At first she was controlled, in the common Spiritualist way, by "an Indian girl." Then the great spirits of Bach and Longfellow and other illustrious dead began to control her. Next a deceased French doctor, "Phinuit," took her in hand, and she did wonderful things. But when people who were really critical began to test Phinuit's knowledge of medicine, and inquire (for the purpose of verification) about Phinuit's former address on earth, he hedged and shuffled, and then retired into obscurity, like the Indian girl and Longfellow. Her next spirit was "Pelham," a young man who modestly desired to remain anonymous. For four years "George Pelham," a highly cultivated spirit, gave "marvellously accurate" messages through Mrs. Piper, and the world was assured that there was not the slightest doubt about his identity. He was a very cultivated young American who had "passed over" in 1892.

Mr. Podmore, who, in spite of his high critical faculty, was taken in by this episode, thinks that telepathy alone can explain the wonderful things done. He does not believe in ghosts. Mrs. Piper's "subconscious self," he thinks, creates and impersonates these spirit beings, and draws the information telepathically from the sitters. But he says that the impersonation was so "dramatically true to life," so "consistently and dramatically sustained," that "some of G. P.'s most intimate friends were convinced that they were actually in communication with the deceased G. P."[12] It is true that when the dead G. P. was asked about a society he had helped to form in his youth he could give neither its aim nor its name, and Podmore admits that Mrs. Piper hedged very badly in trying to cover up her failure. But on other occasions the hits were so good that we have, if we do not admit the ghost theory, to take refuge in telepathy and the subconscious self.

There is no need even for this thin shade of mysticism. Podmore was misled by Hodgson's account. "G. P." meant, as everybody knew, George Pellew. Now a cousin of Pellew's wrote to Mr. Clodd to tell him that, if he cared to ask the family, he would learn that all the relatives of the dead man regarded Mrs. Piper's impersonation of him as "beneath contempt." Mr. Clodd wrote to Professor Pellew, George's brother, and found that this was the case. The family had been pestered for fifteen years with reports of the proceedings and requests to authenticate them and join the S. P. R. They said that they knew George, and they could not believe that, when freed from the burden of the flesh, he would talk such "utter drivel and inanity." As to "intimate friends," one of these was Professor Fiske, who had been described by Dr. Hodgson as "absolutely convinced" of the identity of "G. P." When Professor Pellew told Professor Fiske of this, he replied, roundly, that it was "a lie." Mrs. Piper had, he said, been "silent or entirely wrong" on all his test questions.[13]

I am, you see, not choosing "weak spots," as Sir A. C. Doyle said, and am not quite so ignorant of psychic matters, in comparison with himself, as he represented (Debate, p. 51). I am taking the greatest "clairvoyante" in the history of the movement, and in precisely those respects in which she was endorsed by Dr. Hodgson and the American S. P. R. and Sir O. Lodge and all the leading English Spiritualists. She failed at every crucial test. Phinuit, who knew so much, could not give a plausible account of his own life on earth, or how he came to forget medicine. When Sir O. Lodge presented to Mrs. Piper a sealed envelope containing a number of letters of the alphabet, she could not read one of them, and declined to try again. She could not answer simple tests about Pellew. She gave Professor James messages from Gurney after his death (1888), and James pronounced them "tiresome twaddle." When Myers died in 1901 and left a sealed envelope containing a message, she could not get a word of it. When Hodgson died in 1905 and left a large amount of manuscript in cipher, she could not get the least clue to it. When friends put test questions to the spirit of Hodgson about his early life in Australia, the answers were all wrong.

Mrs. Piper fished habitually and obviously for information from her sitters. She got at names by childishly repeating them with different letters (a very common trick of mediums), and often changed them. She made the ghost of Sir Walter Scott talk the most arrant nonsense about the sun and planets. She was completely baffled when a message was given to her in Latin, though she was supposed to be speaking in the name of the spirit of the learned Myers, and it took her three months to get the meaning (out of a dictionary?) of one or two easy words of it. She gave a man a long account of an uncle whom he had never had; and it turned out that this information was in the EncyclopÆdia, and related to another man of the same name. In no instance did she ever give details that it was impossible for her to learn in a normal way, and it is for her admirers to prove that she did not learn them in a normal way, and, on the other hand, to give a more plausible explanation of what Dr. Maxwell, their great authority, calls her "inaccuracies and falsehoods."

The truth is that the phenomenon known as "clairvoyance" rests just as plainly on trickery as the physical phenomena we have studied. Margaretta Fox explained decades ago how they used to watch minutely the faces of sitters and find their way by changes of expression. "I see a young man," says the medium dreamily, with half-closed but very watchful eyes. There is no response on the face of the sitter. "I see the form of a young woman—a child," the medium goes on. At the right shot the sitter's face lights up with joy and eagerness, and the fishing goes on. Probably in the end, or after a time, the sitter will tell people how the clairvoyant saw the form of her darling child "at once."

In some cases the medium is prepared in advance. Carrington tells us that he was one day strongly urged to give a man, who thought that he had abnormal powers, a sitting. He decided at least to give him a lesson, and made an appointment. The man came with friends at the appointed hour, and they were astonished and awed when Carrington, as a clairvoyant, told them their names and other details. He had simply sent a man to track his visitor to his hotel and learn all about him and his friends. Other cases are just as easy. When Sir O. Lodge and Sir A. C. Doyle lost their sons, the whole mediumistic world knew it and was ready. But mediums gather information about far less important sitters, because it is precisely these cases that are most impressive. It is quite easy to get information quietly about a certain man's dead relatives, and then find an intermediary who will casually recommend him to see Mrs. ——. I do not suggest that the intermediary knows the plot, though that may often be the case.

In other cases the medium tells very little at the first visit. The "spirit" is dazed in its new surroundings. It takes time to get adjusted and learn how to talk through a medium. And so on. You go again, and the details increase. You have, of course, left your name and address in making a fresh appointment. Some clever people go anonymously. Lady Lodge went thus and heard remarkable things; but Sir O. Lodge admits that her companion greatly helped the medium by forgetting herself and addressing her as "Lady Lodge." You may leave your coat in the hall, and it is searched. When Truesdell consulted Slade in New York, he wickedly left in his overcoat pocket a letter which gave the impression that his name was "Samuel Johnson." The first ghost that turned up was, of course, "Mary Johnson."

Still more ingenious was the "clairvoyance" of the famous American medium Foster, one of the impostors who duped Robert Dale Owen and for years held a high position in the movement. While he was out of the room you wrote on bits of paper the names of your dead relatives or friends, and you then screwed up the bits of paper into pellets. Foster then came in, and sat near you. He dreamily took the pellets in his hand, pressed them against his forehead, and then let them fall again upon the table. Slowly and gradually, as he puffed at his everlasting cigar, the spirits communicated all the names to him.

Such tricks can be fathomed only by an expert, and they ought to warn Spiritualists of the folly of thinking that "fraud was excluded." Truesdell, the great medium hunter, the terror of the American Spiritualist world in the seventies, had a sitting with Foster and paid the usual five dollars. He was puzzled, and consented to come again. On the second occasion Foster could tell him, clairvoyantly, the name of his hotel and other details. He had had Truesdell watched in the usual way. At last the detective got his clue. Foster's cigar was continually going out, and in constantly re-lighting it he sheltered the match in the hollow of his hands. Truesdell concluded that he was then reading the slips of paper, and the rest was easy. In pressing the pellets to his forehead Foster substituted blank pellets for them and kept the written papers in his hand. So the next time Truesdell went, and Foster had touched one of the six pellets and read it, Truesdell snatched up the other five pellets and found them blank. Foster genially acknowledged that it was conjuring, but he continued as a priest of the Spiritualist movement for a long time afterwards.

Another clairvoyant feat is to read the contents of a sealed envelope, provided the contents are not a folded letter. We shall see in the next chapter how the contents of a folded and sealed letter are learned. I speak here of the simple clairvoyant practice of taking a sealed envelope which contains only a strip of written paper, pressing it to the forehead and reading the contents. You need not pay half-a-guinea to a Bond Street clairvoyante for this. Sponge your envelope with alcohol (which will soon evaporate and leave no trace) and you can "see through it."

Some readers may expect me to say a word here about "clairaudience." The only word I feel disposed to say is that it is one of the worst pieces of nonsense in the movement. Clairvoyance means to read the contents of a sealed letter, or to see spirits which ordinary mortals cannot see. It is half the stock-in-trade of the ordinary medium. You pay your guinea or half-guinea, and the gifted lady sees your invisible dead friends and describes them. Sometimes she is quite accurate, "on information received." Generally the performance is a tedious medley of guesses and grotesque inaccuracies. As is known, Mr. Labouchere quite safely promised a thousand-pound note to any clairvoyante who would see the number of it through a sealed envelope. The French Academy of Science had invited clairvoyants, and thoroughly discredited the claim, years before.

Yet the imposture goes on daily, all over England and America, and some now offer the novelty of "clairaudience," or hearing spirit voices which we ordinary mortals cannot hear. It is the same fraud under another name. When some clairaudient comes along who can hear the spirits of Myers, and so many other deceased Spiritualists answer the crucial questions they have never yet answered, we may become interested. Until then a new addition to this world of cranks, frauds, decadents, and nervous invalids is not a matter of much importance.

[12] The Newer Spiritualism, p. 180.