DUPES OF SPIRITUALISM

Evening Star, Issue 17328, 16 April 1920, Page 7

DUPES OF SPIRITUALISM

SOME TRICKERIES EXPOSED

(Josei-h M'Cabe, in Sunday ' Chronicle.')

In the veiy_ curious history of human thought there is nothing half so curious as the modern development of spiritualism. During the Middle Ages the landscape swarmed with elves and ghosts and goblins. Haunted houses were as common as' disorderly houses. Headaches and nightmares were. engineered by gangs of ghostly tormentors. You never passed a graveyard at night without seeing a ghost. Even went Ashing in broad daylight you were apt—there is an instance given by a medirovsl chronicler—to get a wicked spirit on your line. The science, with its horrid broom, came along, and it prosily swept one department of life after another clean of these ghosts and ghouls and fairies. And just as wo were flattering ourselves that the world really belongs to us, the planet begins to ring again with spirit-rappings and : ghostly tambourines and solemn warnings from •' the Beyond." What does science sav to this extraord-

inary revival? Science, in the proper sense of the word, has nothing to do with it. Science deals with material things, not with the question whether there are other kinds of tilings as well. But as all these "phenomena"—a beautiful mouth-filling word—occur on "the physical plane," to 1140 the jargon of the hour, the teaching of science may very well be, applied to them.

It is quite clear, in the first place, that the present epidemio of spirituality requires little explanation. Death has reaped a ghastly harvest amongst us. Hundreds of thousands linger tenderly by tho ivory gates, straining to catch some echo of the retreating footsteps on' the other side. A great American psychologist, William Jame6, himself something of a spiritualist, has told us that the chief element of belief is "the will to bejieve." Never was it more resolute, moro deaf to tha cold rules of the logician, than it is to-day! The demand for communications from Beyond is far in advance of all precedents. Is it unnatural that the supply njeets the demand?

SIR OLIVER LODGE'S POSITION. It ie certainly not unnatural when wo reflect that thus supply is, from the very nature of the case, open to two influences —self-delus;on by people whose judgment is weighted by deep emotion, and trickery by professional mediums.

When Sir Oliver Ledge believes, on such flimsy evidence as he gives us in ' Raymond,' that he has been in communication with his dead -son, ordinary spiritualists may be very easily understood. A medium' tells Sir Oliver Lodge that' there is a photograph in existence of his dead son. The medium boldly gives details. Raymond is in a group, he has a stick, and so en.

What any reader who keeps his cool common-sense notices is that the medium \ only speaks confidently of such details as might be predicted with almost absolute confidence, of any young officer in the early period of the war. Other details are left vague or are given in alternative ways. Yet this distinguished scientist throws up his hands and exclaims that here is incontestable proof of a spirit communication. f The .spiritualist bias makes a.sport oj: common-sense. Only a few weeks ago Sir A. Conan Doyle, the creator of the superdetective, rushed into print with a spiritpainted picture, and within a few days the painter angrily replied that she had done it li all by her own self," and tore the story into ribands. MOVEMENT BORN OF FRAUD.

We must, then, notice that these people, j with their strained expectations and abnormal credulity, depend, as a rule, on professional mediums. There is no need to mince matters on this point. The frauds of mediums detected and exposed during- the last 80 years would fill a volume. The modern Spiritualist movement was born of a gross fraud—the trickery of the Fox family at Hydesville in 1847 and it has bubbled with fraud down to the hist medium who was publicly exposed in ' Light' only a few weeks ago. There is hardly a single well-known medium who has been submitted to serious criticism and not been exposed. Even those wlio used the most unctuous language about their " religion," such as Daniel Home and Eusapia Palladino, were detected in trickery. The history of the movement reeks with dishonesty! There are plenty of honest mediums, but they do nothing. The streams of commonplace stuff which they imagine to be communications from the Beyond have not the least value. There are also plenty of unpaid mediums, but if any person thinks that money is the only incentive to trickery he has a strange idea of human nature.

I was invited to attend the seances of another London medium (unpaid) who had reduced several brilliant and cynical young Oxford men to a state of childish belief. With- two eimple tests I silenced the mouthings of the " spirit." Men of " science" have investigated the6e things ever since the movement began. There is nothing new done to-day, and they decline to w-aste their time on Welsh colliers and Cheshire photographers. Spirit photographs have been exposed hundreds of times. Our men of science are not dogmatic materialists, but they know enough about life to see that the claims of the Spiritualists are absurd. Let me give a concrete instance, again, from one of the most distinguished' Spiritualists. Professor Piichet once got a materialised "ghost" to breathe into a flask of barvtawater, and the water was clouded. 'Tliis proved, as lie saw, that there was carbondioxide in the breath, and every physiologist knows that this carbon must have come from a living lung, with a whole series of complex chemical changes behind it.

Yet the Spiritualists, instead of seeing at once that the ghost was the medium—■ an aristocratic young lady, by the way—believed that & ghost body, or ether body, was capable of these chemical reactions*. All the stories and theories of the most advanced Spiritualists of the day reek with these physiological 'absurdities. There is not a physiologist in the movement, and physicists like Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir W. F. Barrett are not the men to appreciate these difficulties. CHARY OF CHALLENGE.

We do not need to be men of science to see that the myriads of things done in dark chambers and before strained and expectant audiences have no value whatever. Those are precisely the conditions which one would 6elect for successful fraud. We are prepared in London to set up a committee of distinguished scientific investigators and expert conjurors at anv time, and examine any serious claim. !But no such claim reaches us, or is likely to reach us. We have, offered in ' The Times' a reward of £I,OOO for a case of telepathy, and there was not the ghost of a claim." The serious discussion of Spiritualism may begin when some evidence is put before such a tribunal. Meantime, let us get on with the affairs of this world. They are rather pressing just now. According to Spiritualists, all the wisest men who ever lived are still alive, and are wiser than ever. We should be glad of their opinion on Home Rule or nationalisation. What we get would hardly win a prize in a Lancashire Sunday \ school \