The Wanderings of a Spiritualist, Arthur Conan Doyle [best short novels of all time .TXT] 📗

Institut Metaphysique, at 89, Avenue Niel. Now that poor Crawford has gone, leaving an imperishable name behind him, Geley promises to be the greatest male practical psychic researcher, and he has advantages of which Crawford could never boast, since the liberality of Monsieur Jean Meyer has placed him at the head of a splendid establishment with laboratory, photographic room, lecture room, séance room and library, all done in the most splendid style. Unless some British patron has the generosity and intelligence to do the same, this installation, with a man like Geley to run it, will take the supremacy in psychic advance from Britain, where it now lies, and transfer it to France. Our nearest approach to something similar depends at present upon the splendid private efforts of Mr. and Mrs. Hewat MacKenzie, in the Psychic College at 59, Holland Park, which deserve the support of everyone who realises the importance of the subject.

I made a faux pas with the Geleys, for I volunteered to give an exhibition of my Australian slides, and they invited a distinguished audience of men of science to see them. Imagine my horror when I found that my box of slides was in the luggage which Major Wood had taken on with him in the "Naldera" to England. They were rushed over by aeroplane, however, in response to my telegram, and so the situation was saved.

The lecture was a private one and was attended by Mr. Charles Richet, Mr. Gabrielle Delanne, and a number of other men of science. Nothing could have gone better, though I fear that my French, which is execrable, must have been a sore trial to my audience. I gave them warning at the beginning by quoting a remark which Bernard Shaw made to me once, that when he spoke French he did not say what he wanted to say, but what he could say. Richet told me afterwards that he was deeply interested by the photographs, and when I noted the wonder and awe with which he treated them—he, the best known physiologist in the world—and compared it with the attitude of the ordinary lay Press, it seemed a good example of the humility of wisdom and the arrogance of ignorance. After my lecture, which covered an hour and a quarter, we were favoured by an extraordinary exhibition from a medium named Aubert. This gentleman has had no musical education whatever, but he sits down in a state of semi-trance and he handles a piano as I, for one, have never heard one handled before. It is a most amazing performance. He sits with his eyes closed while some one calls the alphabet, striking one note when the right letter sounds. In this way he spells out the name of the particular composer whom he will represent. He then dashes off, with tremendous verve and execution, upon a piece which is not a known composition of that author, but is an improvisation after his manner. We had Grieg, Mendelssohn, Berlioz and others in quick succession, each of them masterly and characteristic. His technique seemed to my wife and me to be not inferior to that of Paderewski. Needles can be driven through him as he plays, and sums can be set before him which he will work out without ceasing the wonderful music which appears to flow through him, but quite independently of his own powers or volition. He would certainly cause a sensation in London.

I had the honour next day of meeting Camille Flammarion, the famous astronomer, who is deeply engaged in psychic study, and was so interested in the photos which I snowed him that I was compelled to leave them in his hands that he might get copies done. Flammarion is a dear, cordial, homely old gentleman with a beautiful bearded head which would delight a sculptor. He entertained us with psychic stories all lunch time. Madame Bisson was there and amused me with her opinion upon psychic researchers, their density, their arrogance, their preposterous theories to account for obvious effects. If she had not been a great pioneer in Science, she might have been a remarkable actress, for it was wonderful how her face took off the various types. Certainly, as described by her, their far-fetched precautions, which irritate the medium and ruin the harmony of the conditions, do appear very ridiculous, and the parrot cry of "Fraud!" and "Fake!" has been sadly overdone. All are agreed here that spiritualism has a far greater chance in England than in France, because the French temperament is essentially a mocking one, and also because the Catholic Church is in absolute opposition. Three of their bishops, Beauvais, Lisieux and Coutances, helped to burn a great medium, Joan of Arc, six hundred years ago, asserting at the trial the very accusations of necromancy which are asserted to-day. Now they have had to canonise her. One would have hoped that they had learned something from the incident.

Dr. Geley has recently been experimenting with Mr. Franek Kluski, a Polish amateur of weak health, but with great mediumistic powers. These took the form of materialisations. Dr. Geley had prepared a bucket of warm paraffin, and upon the appearance of the materialised figure, which was that of a smallish man, the request was made that the apparition should plunge its hand into the bucket and then withdraw it, so that when it dematerialised a cast of the hand would be left, like a glove of solidified paraffin, so narrow at the wrist that the hands could not have been withdrawn by any possible normal means without breaking the moulds. These hands I was able to inspect, and also the plaster cast which had been taken from the inside of one of them. The latter showed a small hand, not larger than a boy's, but presenting the characteristics of age, for the skin was loose and formed transverse folds. The materialised figure had also, unasked, left an impression of its own mouth and chin, which was, I think, done for evidential purposes, for a curious wart hung from the lower lip, which would mark the owner among a million. So far as I could learn, however, no identification had actually been effected. The mouth itself was thick-lipped and coarse, and also gave an impression of age.

To show the thoroughness of Dr. Geley's work, he had foreseen that the only answer which any critic, however exacting, could make to the evidence, was that the paraffin hand had been brought in the medium's pocket. Therefore he had treated with cholesterin the paraffin in his bucket, and this same cholesterin reappeared in the resulting glove. What can any sceptic have to say to an experiment like that save to ignore it, and drag us back with wearisome iteration to some real or imaginary scandal of the past? The fact is that the position of the materialists could only be sustained so long as there was a general agreement among all the newspapers to regard this subject as a comic proposition. Now that there is a growing tendency towards recognising its overwhelming gravity, the evidence is getting slowly across to the public, and the old attitude of negation and derision has become puerile. I can clearly see, however, that the materialists will fall back upon their second line of trenches, which will be to admit the phenomena, but to put them down to material causes in the unexplored realms of nature with no real connection with human survival. This change of front is now due, but it will fare no better than the old one. Before quitting the subject I should have added that these conclusions of Dr. Geley concerning the paraffin moulds taken from Kluski's materialisation are shared by Charles Richet and Count de Gramont of the Institute of France, who took part in the experiments. How absurd are the efforts of those who were not present to contradict the experiences of men like these.

I was disappointed to hear from Dr. Geley that the experiments in England with the medium Eva had been largely negative, though once or twice the ectoplasmic flow was, as I understand, observed. Dr. Geley put this comparative failure down to the fantastic precautions taken by the committee, which had produced a strained and unnatural atmosphere. It seems to me that if a medium is searched, and has all her clothes changed before entering the seance room, that is ample, but when in addition to this you put her head in a net-bag and restrict her in other ways, you are producing an abnormal self-conscious state of mind which stops that passive mood of receptivity which is essential. Professor Hyslop has left it on record that after a long series of rigid tests with Mrs. Piper he tried one sitting under purely natural conditions, and received more convincing and evidential results than in all the others put together. Surely this should suggest freer methods in our research.

I have just had a sitting with Eva, whom I cannot even say that I have seen, for she was under her cloth cabinet when I arrived and still under it when I left, being in trance the whole time. Professor Jules Courtier of the Sorbonne and a few other men of science were present. Madame Bisson experiments now in the full light of the afternoon. Only the medium is in darkness, but her two hands protrude through the cloth and are controlled by the sitters. There is a flap in the cloth which can be opened to show anything which forms beneath. After sitting about an hour this flap was opened, and Madame Bisson pointed out to me a streak of ectoplasm upon the outside of the medium's bodice. It was about six inches long and as thick as a finger. I was allowed to touch it, and felt it shrink and contract under my hand. It is this substance which can, under good conditions, be poured out in great quantities and can be built up into forms and shapes, first flat and finally rounded, by powers which are beyond our science. We sometimes call it Psychoplasm in England, Richet named it Ectoplasm, Geley calls it Ideoplasm; but call it what you will, Crawford has shown for all time that it is the substance which is at the base of psychic physical phenomena.

Madame Bisson, whose experience after twelve years' work is unique, has an interesting theory. She disagrees entirely with Dr. Geley's view, that the shapes are thought forms, and she resents the name ideoplasm, since it represents that view. Her conclusion is that Eva acts the part which a "detector" plays, when it turns the Hertzian waves, which are too short for our observation, into slower ones which can become audible. Thus Eva breaks up certain currents and renders them visible. According to her, what we see is never the thing itself but always the reflection of the thing which exists in another plane and is made visible in ours by Eva's strange material organisation. It was for this reason that the word Miroir appeared in one of the photographs, and excited much adverse criticism. One dimly sees a new explanation of mediumship. The light seems a colourless thing until it passes through a prism and suddenly reveals every colour in the world.

A picture of Madame Bisson's father hung upon the wall, and I at once recognised him as the phantom which appears in the photographs of her famous book, and which formed the culminating point of Eva's mediumship. He has a long and rather striking face which was clearly indicated in the ectoplasmic image. Only on one occasion was this image so developed that it could speak, and then only one word. The word was "Esperez."

We have just returned, my wife, Denis and I, from a round of the Aisne battlefields,