The Spiritualist—if any Spiritualist reader has persevered thus far—will be surprised to hear that many Rationalists censure me because I decline to admit that his movement is "all fraud." For heaven's sake, he will exclaim, let us hear something about our honesty for a change! Even the impartial outsider will possibly welcome such a change. How is it possible, he will ask, that so many distinguished men have given their names to the movement if it is all fraudulent?

Now let us have a word first on these supposed distinguished Spiritualists. During the debate with me Sir A. C. Doyle produced a tiny red book and told the audience that it contained "the names of 160 people of high distinction, many of them of great eminence, including over forty professors" (p. 19). He said expressly that "these 160 people ... have announced themselves as Spiritualists" (p. 20). The book was handed to me, and it will be understood that I could not very well read it and attend to my opponent's speech, to which I had to reply. But I saw at a glance several utterly destructive weaknesses. Several men were described as "professor" who had no right to the title. Several men were included who were certainly not Spiritualists (Richet, Ochorowicz, Schiaparelli, Flammarion, Maxwell, etc.). And in not one single case is a precise reference given for the words which are attributed to these men. My opponent regretted that chapter and verse were not "always" (this word is omitted from the printed Debate) quoted in his little book. As a matter of fact, "chapter and verse" (book and page) are never given, in any instance; and in the vast majority of the 160 cases not even words are quoted to justify the inclusion. He further said that he quite admitted that some of the "forty professors" in the book did not go so far as Spiritualists. But I have already quoted his words to the effect that they had "announced themselves as Spiritualists," and the same impression is undoubtedly conveyed by the book itself, the title of which is Who Are These Spiritualists?

I have the book before me, and any reader who cares to glance at the printed Debate and see what Sir A. C. Doyle said about it will be astonished when I describe it. The printed text gives 126 names, and 32 further names (many illegible) are written on the margins in Sir A. C. Doyle's hand. Only in 53 cases out of the 158 is any quotation given from the person named, and in not one of these cases are we told where the quotation may be verified. There are 27 (not 49, as Sir Arthur said) men described as "professors"; and of these several never were professors, and very few ever were Spiritualists. Sir A. C. Doyle has himself included Professor Morselli, who calls Spiritualism "childish and immoral." There are men included who died before Spiritualism was born, and there are twenty or thirty Agnostics included. Men like "Lord Dunraven, Lord Adare, and Alexander Wilder" are described, with the most amazing effrontery, as "some of the world's greatest authors." Padre Secchi, the pious Roman Catholic, is included. Thackeray, Sir E. Arnold, Professor de Morgan, Thiers, Lord Brougham, Forbes Winslow, Longfellow, Ruskin, Abraham Lincoln, and other distinguished sceptics are dragged in. For sloppy, slovenly, loose, and worthless work—and I have in twenty years of controversy had to handle a good deal—this little book would be hard to beat.

A list of distinguished Spiritualists could be accommodated on a single page of this book. A list of distinguished Rationalists in the same period (1848-1920) would take twenty pages. The truth is that in the earlier days of Spiritualism, when less was known than we now know about mediumistic fraud, a number of distinguished men were "converted." They were in every case converted by the impostors I have exposed in the course of this work—by Home, Florrie Cook, Mrs. Guppy, Eglinton, Slade, Morse, Holmes, etc. What is the value of such conversions? Who are the "distinguished" Spiritualists to-day? Sir A. C. Doyle, Sir O. Lodge, Sir W. Barrett, Mr. Gerald Balfour.... The reader will be astonished to know that those are the only names of living men of any distinction that Sir A. C. Doyle dares to give, either in the text or on the margins of his book. What their opinion is worth the reader may judge for himself.

Let us pass on. I wrote recently in the Literary Guide that "there are hundreds of honest mediums." Some of my readers resented this as over-generous. Possibly they have only a vague idea of Spiritualism, and it is advisable for us to reflect clearly on the point. In the eyes of Spiritualists every man or woman, paid or unpaid, who is supposed to be in any way in communication with spirits is a "medium." The word does not simply apply to men and women who, for payment, sit in cabinets or in a circle, and lift tables, play guitars, write on slates, produce ghosts, pull furniture about, tug the beards of sitters, and so on. I should agree with the reader that these people, paid or unpaid, and all mediums who operate in the dark or in red light, are probably frauds. That is a fair conclusion from the preceding chapters, in which I have exposed every variety of their manifestations, and from the history of Spiritualism.

This rules out all professional mediums and a large proportion of the amateurs. Perhaps the reader does not know, and would like to know, what a sÉance is like. As far as the "more powerful" (and more certainly fraudulent) mediums are concerned, I have already given a sufficient description. A cloth-covered frame or "cabinet" is raised at one end of the room, or a curtain is drawn across an alcove or corner. In this the medium generally (not always) sits, and the curtains are closed until the medium thinks fit to have them opened. The medium is sometimes hypnotized, and sometimes falls into a natural trance; it matters little, for the trance is invariably a sham, and the medium is wide awake all the time, though he simulates the appearance of a trance. The lights are lowered or extinguished. Generally a red-glass lantern or bulb (sometimes several) is lit. Then, after a time, which is occupied by singing or music (to drown the noise of the medium's movements), the ghost appears, or the tambourine is played, or the table is lifted, and so on.

These are the heavier and more expensive performances, and are constantly being exposed. The medium has apparatus in the false seat of his chair or concealed about his person. But the common, daily sÉance is quite different. You sit round a table or in a circle, or (if you will rise to the price) sit alone with the lady. The light may be good. The medium "sees" and describes spirit forms hovering about you. If you are one of the people whom the medium has, through an intermediary, attracted to the circle, you get some accurate details. If not, the medium begins with generalities and, studying your expression, feels her way to details. It is generally a waste of time. Friends of mine have gone from one to another medium in London, and they tell me that it is simply a tedious and most irritating way of convincing oneself that these people are all frauds.

But beyond these are hundreds, or thousands, of private individuals who discover that they are mediums. They take a pencil in their hands, fall into a passive, dreamy state, and presently the pencil "automatically" writes messages from the spirit world. Others use the planchette (a pencil fixed in a heart-shaped board which, when the medium's fingers are on it, writes on a sheet of paper) or the ouija board (in which the apex of the heart spells out messages by pointing rapidly to the letters of the alphabet painted on a larger board over which it travels). I have studied all three forms, and may take them together as "automatic writing."

The first question is whether this can be done unconsciously. If such messages are consciously spelt or written by the medium, it is, of course, fraud, because the messages purport to come from the dead. My own experience convinces me that even here there is a vast amount of fraud. The social status and general character of the medium do not seem to matter at all, as we have repeatedly seen. People get into the attitude of the child. "I can do what you can't do," you constantly hear the child say to its fellows. There is a good deal of the child in all of us. Prestige, distinction, credit for a rare or original power, is as much sought as money; and this motive grows stronger when the medium already has money. Everybody knows, or ought to know, the perfectly authentic story of Mozart's Requiem. A wealthy amateur, Count Walsegg, secretly paid Mozart to compose that famous Mass, and it was to be passed off by Walsegg as his own.

But while there is much fraud even in automatic writing, there are certainly hundreds of mediums of this description who quite honestly believe that they are spirit-controlled. Mr. G. B. Shaw's mother was an automatic artist of that class. I have seen some of her spirit drawings. A high-minded medical man of my acquaintance was a medium of the same type. The class is very numerous. Psychologically, it is not very difficult to understand. A pianist can play quite complicated pieces unconsciously or subconsciously. A writer, who cannot normally write decent fiction, may have wonderful flights of imagination in a dream. An expert worker can do quite complicated things without attention. Something of the same faculty seems to come in time to the automatic writer or artist. Consciousness is more or less—never entirely, perhaps—switched off from its usual connection with the hand, and the part of the brain-machine which is not lit by consciousness takes over the connection.

That this can be done in perfect honesty will be clear to every reader of Flammarion's book, Les forces naturelles inconnues. Flammarion never became a Spiritualist, but he was quite a fluent automatic writer in his youth. Victorien Sardou, the great dramatist, belonged to the same circle, and was an automatic draughtsman. Flammarion gives specimens of the work of both. Quite without a deliberate intention, he signed his automatic writing (on science) "Galileo."

I have no doubt that at the time both these distinguished men were strongly tempted to embrace the Spiritualist theory. These experiences, and the experiences of the sÉance, can be exceedingly impressive and dramatic. The man who has never been there is too apt to think that all Spiritualists are fools. I have been to sÉances, and I do not admit that. I am quarrelling with Spiritualists because they will not realize the possibilities and the actual abundance of fraud. But the sÉance is undoubtedly very impressive at times. I have held a serious conversation, in German and Latin, through an amateur medium of my own acquaintance, with the supposed spirit of a certain German theologian of the last century whose name (as given) was well known to me. I do not at all wonder that many succumb in sittings of this sort. But I found invariably that, if one resolutely kept one's head and devised crucial tests, the claim broke down. So it is with Flammarion and Sardou. What "Galileo" wrote in 1870 was just the astronomy of that time; and much of it is totally wrong to-day. Sardou, on the other hand, drew remarkable sketches of life on Jupiter; and we know to-day that Jupiter is red-hot!

This is a broad characteristic of automatic writing since it began in the fifties of the nineteenth century. At its best it merely reflected the culture of the time, which was often wrong. Stainton Moses, for instance, wrote reams of edifying revelation. But I find among his wonderful utterances about ancient history certain statements concerning the early Hindus and Persians which recent discoveries have completely falsified. He had been reading certain books which were just passable (though already a little out of date) fifty years ago. Among other things the spirits told him that Manu lived 3,000 B.C., and that there was a high "Brahminical lore" long before that date! So with Andrew Jackson Davis, the first of these marvellous bringers of wisdom from the spirit world. He had probably read R. Chambers's Vestiges of Creation, and he gave out weird and wonderful revelations about evolution. In the beginning was a clam, which begot a tadpole, which begot a quadruped, and so on. Davis certainly lied hard when he used to deny that he had read the books to which his "revelations" were traced, but no one can deny his originality.

Then there was Fowler, an American medical student and pious amateur medium, who was regarded with reverence by the American Spiritualists. I invite the reader's particular attention to this man, as he is one of those unpaid individuals who are supposed (by Spiritualists) to have no conceivable motive for cheating. Yet he lied and cheated in the most original fashion. He told his friends that ghostly men entered his bedroom at nights, produced ghostly pens and ink, and left messages in Hebrew on his table. An expert in Hebrew found that the message was a very bad copy of a passage from the Hebrew text of Daniel. This did not affect the faith of Spiritualists, who put a piece of parchment in Fowler's room for a further message. They had a rich reward. They found next day a spiritual manifesto signed by no less than fifty-six spirits, including some of the statesmen who had signed the Declaration of Independence.

The frauds were very gross in those early decades. Franklin, Washington, even Thomas Paine, sent hundreds of messages from the "Summerland." As time went on, Socrates, Plato, Sir I. Newton, Milton, Galileo, Aristotle, and nearly everybody whose name was in an encyclopÆdia, guided the automatic writers. When one reads the inane twaddle signed with their names, one wonders that even simple people could be deceived. Dante dictated a poem of three thousand lines in the richest provincial American. One automatic writer wrote, under inspiration, a book of a hundred thousand words. It is estimated that there were two thousand writing mediums in the United States alone four years after the foundation of the movement.

Mrs. Piper was chiefly an automatic writer in the latter part of her famous career as a medium, but we need scarcely discuss further her accomplishments. In her later years she said that she did not claim to be controlled by spirits, and this is sometimes wrongly described as a confession of fraud. What she directly meant was that she did not profess any opinion as to the source of the knowledge she gave to sitters. She seemed to favour the theory of telepathy. When, however, we remember that she spoke constantly in the name of spirits (Longfellow, Phinuit, Pelham, Myers, etc.), the plea seems curious. Those who believe that she was really in a sort of trance-state, and knew not what she was doing, may be disposed to accept Podmore's theory, that her subconscious personality dramatized these various spirits or supposed spirits. Some of us do not like this idea of trance. In the hundreds of exact records of proceedings with mediums that I have read, I have not seen a page that suggested a genuine "trance," but I have noted scores and scores of passages which showed that the medium feigned to be in a trance, but was very wide awake.

Mrs. Thompson is another clairvoyant and automatic writer who has been much appreciated by modern Spiritualists. It is well to recall that before 1898 she was a medium for "physical phenomena." She even brought about materializations. Then she met Mr. Myers, and her powers assumed a more refined form. Dr. Hodgson, that quaint mixture of blunt criticism and occasional credulity, had six sittings with her, and roundly stated that she was a fraud. The correct information which she gave him was, he said, taken from letters to which she had access, or from works of reference like Who's Who. In one case, which made a great impression, she gave some remarkably abstruse and correct information. It was afterwards found that the facts were stated in an old diary which had belonged to her husband. She herself produced the diary, and said that she had never read it; so, of course, everybody believed her. When Professor Sidgwick died, in 1900, his "spirit" used to communicate through her. She reproduced his manner, and even his writing (which she said she had never seen), very fairly; but she could give no communication from him of "evidential" value.

The impersonation of dead people by the "entranced" medium makes a great impression on Spiritualists. It is difficult to understand why. One medium quite convinced a friend of mine by such a performance. She sat, in the circle, in a trance one day, when she suddenly rose from her chair, stroked an imaginary moustache, and began to speak in a gruff voice. "He"—the young lady had become a cavalry man—explained in a dazed way that he had died at Knightsbridge Barracks on the previous day, and gave his name. Great was the joy of the elect on finding afterwards that a soldier of the name had died at Knightsbridge on the previous day.

It was quite childish. It is just by learning such out-of-the-way facts, as they easily can, and making use of them, that the mediums keep up their reputations. There was no reason whatever why the medium should not have learned of the death and made so profitable a use of it. Stainton Moses often did such things. One day he was possessed by the spirit of a cabman who said that he had been killed on the streets of London that very afternoon. By an unusual oversight the spirit did not give his name. It was afterwards found that the accident was reported in an evening paper which Stainton Moses might have seen just before the sÉance; and, by a curious coincidence, the reporter had not given the cabman's name. In other cases, where mediums had been invited to districts with which they were not familiar, yet they gave quite accurate details about local dead, it was found on inquiry that the information might have been gathered from the stones in the local cemetery.

A common retort of the Spiritualist, when you point out the possibility of the medium impersonating the dead, is that, "if she did so, she must be one of the cleverest actresses in England." You are asked, triumphantly, why the lady should be content with a few pounds a week as a despised medium, when she might be making five thousand a year on a stage. Any person who has seen these "trances" will know the value of their "dramatic" art. Almost anybody could do it. The medium makes from three to five pounds a week by such things, but if she tried the stage she would have, at the most, a minor part with fifty or sixty pounds a year. Spiritualists get their judgments weirdly distorted by their bias. I need only quote the extravagant language in which Sir A. C. Doyle refers to Mr. Vale Owen's trash or Mrs. Spencer's picture of Christ. He makes the miracle in which he wishes to believe.

Two particular cases of spirit messages by automatic writing have lately been pressed upon us, and we must briefly examine them. One is given in a book by Mr. F. Bligh Bond, called The Gate of Remembrance, which is recommended to us by Sir A. C. Doyle as one of the five particularly convincing works which he would have us read. He again fails to tell his readers that Mr. Bligh Bond draws a very different conclusion than his own from the facts. He has a mystical theory of a universal memory or consciousness, a sort of ocean into which the memories of the dead have flowed. He does not believe that the individual spirits of the dead monks of pre-Reformation days came along and dictated their views through his automatic-writing friend.

Any person, however, who reads the book impartially will see no need for either the Spiritualist view or Mr. Bond's. The main point is that, through Mr. Bond's friend, Mr. John Alleyne, what purported to be the ghosts of the old monks of Glastonbury Abbey wrote quite vivid sketches of their medieval life in the Abbey and, particularly, suggested the position and general features of a chapel that was at the time unknown. As to the character or impersonation of the monks, which seems to Spiritualists so impressive, we are told by experts on medieval language that it will not sustain criticism. The language is quaint and pleasant to read, but it is not consistent either in old English or Latin. It is the language of a man who is familiar with medieval English and Latin, but does not speak it as his own language, and so often trips. It is, in other words, Mr. John Alleyne writing old English and medieval Latin, and stumbling occasionally.

As to the indication of a buried chapel, both this and the general impersonation of the old monks are intelligible to any man who has read the book itself, not Spiritualist accounts of it. Mr. Bond, an architect and archÆologist, expected to be appointed to the charge of the ruins, and he and his friend Mr. Alleyne steeped themselves, all through the year 1907, in the literature of the subject. They read all that was known about Glastonbury, and lived for months in the medieval atmosphere. Then Mr. Alleyne took his pencil and began to write automatically. The general result is not strange; nor is it at all supernatural that he should have formed a theory about the lost chapel and conveyed this to paper in the guise of a message from one of the old monks.

The next work recommended to us is a short paper by Mr. Gerald Balfour called "The Ear of Dionysius" (published in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. xxix, March, 1917). The writing medium, Mrs. Verrall, a Cambridge lady of a highly cultivated and refined type and an excellent classical scholar, found in her automatic "script" on August 26, 1910, a reference to "the Ear of Dionysius." Three years and a-half later another writing medium, Mrs. Willett, got one of those rambling and incoherent messages, which are customary, in reference to "the Ear of Dionysius." This seemed to be more than a coincidence, as Mrs. Willett is no classical scholar. But Mr. Balfour candidly warns us that Mrs. Willett said that she had heard nothing about the earlier reference to the Ear of Dionysius in Mrs. Verrall's case. It would be remarkable if the fact had been kept entirely secret for three and a-half years, as some importance was attached to it in psychic circles, and we may prefer to trust Mr. Balfour's memory rather than Mrs. Willett's. He says that he feels sure that one day, in the long interval, Mrs. Willett asked him what the Ear of Dionysius was.

Mr. Balfour, however, believes that in the sequel we have fair evidence of spirit communication. The reader who is not familiar with these matters should know that a new test had been devised for controlling the origin of these messages. It was felt that if the "spirit" of one of the dead psychical researchers (who could no longer read or remember the sealed messages they had left) were to give an unintelligible message to one medium, a second unintelligible message to a second medium, and then the key to both to either or to a third medium, and if the contents of these messages were strictly withheld from the mediums (each knowing only her own part), a very definite proof of spirit origin would be afforded. Thus the ghost of Mr. Verrall or Mr. Myers might take a line of an obscure Greek poet, give one word of it to Mrs. Thompson, another to Mrs. Willett, and then point out the connection through Mrs. Verrall. Mr. Balfour claims that this was done in connection with the Ear of Dionysius. Mrs. Willett, who does not know Latin or Greek, got messages containing a number of classical allusions. Among them was one which no one could understand, and the key to this was some time afterwards given in the automatic writing of Mrs. Verrall.

The reader will now begin to understand the serious and respectable part of modern Spiritualism. I presume that these cultivated Spiritualists regard the "physical phenomena" of the movement and the ordinary mediums with the same contempt that I do. They know that fraud is being perpetrated daily, and that the history of the movement, since its beginning in 1848, has reeked with fraud. It is on these refined messages and cross-references that they would stake their faith.

But, while we readily grant that these things offer an arguable case and must not be dismissed with the disdain which we have shown in the previous chapters, we feel that the new basis is altogether insecure and inadequate. Two mediums get a reference to so remote and unlikely a thing as "the Ear of Dionysius." When you put it in this simple form it sounds impressive; but we saw that there was an interval of three and a-half years, and we do not feel at all sure that people so profoundly interested, so religiously eager, in these matters would succeed in keeping the first communication entirely from the ears of medium No. 2. In point of fact, Mr. Balfour tells us that he has a distinct recollection of being asked by Mrs. Willett, during the interval, what the Ear of Dionysius was. Mrs. Willett denies it. We shall probably prefer the disinterested memory of Mr. Balfour. Now, the very same weakness is found even in the second part of the story. For any evidential value it rests on two very large suppositions:—

1. That one medium knew absolutely nothing about the most interesting and promising development which was for months agitating the minds of her own friends.

2. That another medium heroically refrained from reading up any classical dictionaries or works on the subject, and reserved her mind strictly for whatever information the spirits might give her.

One can scarcely be called hypercritical if one has doubts about these suppositions. There does not seem to be any room for the theory either of telepathy or of spirit communication.

The two experiences I have just analysed are selected by Sir A. C. Doyle as the most convincing in the whole of the work of the more modern and more refined Spiritualists. I need not linger over other experiences of these automatic writers. For the most part, automatic writing provides only vapid or inaccurate stuff which is its own refutation. In the early years, when Franklin, Shakespeare, Plato, and all the most illustrious dead wrote nonsense of the most vapoury description, the situation was quite grotesque. Nor is this kind of thing yet extinct. There are mediums practising in London to-day who put the sitter in communication with the sages and poets of ancient times. In the very best of these cases there is a certain silliness about the communications which makes them difficult to read. Even the spirits of Myers and Verrall seem to be in a perpetual Bank-Holiday mood, making naive little puns and jokes, and talking in the rambling, incoherent way that scholars do only in hours of domestic dissipation. There is a world thirsting (it is said) for proof that the dead still live. Here are (it is said) men like W. T. Stead, Myers, Hodgson, Verrall, Sidgwick, Vice-Admiral Moore, Robert Owen, etc., at the "other end of the wire," as William James used to say. Yet, apparently, nothing can be said or done that quite clearly goes beyond the power of the mediums. The arrogance of the Spiritualists in the circumstances is amazing.

There are a dozen ways in which the theory could be rigorously tested. One has been tried and completely failed: the communication of messages which were left in proper custody before death. We shall, of course, presently have an announcement that such a message has been read. Some zealous Spiritualist will leave a sealed message, and will take care that some medium or other is able to read it. We may be prepared for such things. The fact is that half-a-dozen serious and reliable Spiritualists have tried this test, and it has hopelessly miscarried. Another test was that devised by Dr. Hodgson—to leave messages in cipher, though not sealed. This also has completely failed. A third test would be for one of these ghosts of learned Cambridge men, who are so fluent on things that do not matter, to dictate a passage from an obscure Greek poet through a medium who does not know Greek at the request of a sitter. It is a familiar and ancient trick for a medium to recite or write a passage in a foreign language. It has been learned beforehand. But let a scholar ask the spirit of a dead scholar to spell out through the ignorant medium there and then a specified line or passage within his knowledge. I have tried the experiment. It never succeeds. Another test would be for one of these ghostly scholars to dictate a word of a line of some obscure Greek poet (chosen by the sitter) to one medium (ignorant of Greek), and another word of the same line to another medium immediately afterwards, before there was the remotest possibility of communication.

A score of such tests could be devised. Three of the best writing mediums the Society for Psychical Research cares to indicate could be accommodated, under proper observation, in different rooms of the same building, and these tests carried out. We could invite the spirit to pass from medium to medium and repeat the message to all three, or give a part to each. Until some such rigorous inquiry is carried out, we may decline to be interested. I have before me several volumes of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. Candidly, they are full of trash and padding. There is very little that merits serious consideration, and nothing that is not weakened by uncertainties, suppressions, and over-zealous eagerness.

In fine, what impresses any man who reads much of all the volumes of "revelation" which have been vouchsafed to us is the entirely earthly character of it all. The Spiritualist theory is that men grow rapidly wiser after death. Plato is two thousand years wiser than he was when he lived. Ptah-hotep is six thousand years older and wiser. Neither these, nor Buddha nor Christ nor any other moralist, has a word of wisdom for us. In fact, a theory has had to be invented which supposes that they move away from the earth to distant regions of the spirit-world as they grow older, and so cannot communicate. It is a pity they are not "permitted" to do so for propaganda purposes. But even those who remain in communication have learned nothing since they left the earth. No discovery has ever yet been communicated to us. In Spiritualist literature, it is true, there is a claim that certain unknown facts about the satellites of Uranus were revealed; but Flammarion makes short work of the claim. The communications never rise above the level of the thought and knowledge of living humanity: never even above the level of the knowledge available to the mediums. It is scarcely an "insanity of incredulity" to suppose that they originated there.