Mrs. Piper the Society for Psychical Research | Page 9

left hand, so that
her face was turned to the left, and she was unable to see her right hand,
which soon began to write automatically.
During the trance the sensibility of Mrs Piper's organism to exterior
excitation is much blunted. If her arm is pricked, even severely, it is
withdrawn but slowly; if a bottle of ammonia is put to her nostrils, and

care is taken that it is inhaled, her head does not betray sensation by the
least movement. One day, if I am not mistaken, Dr Hodgson put a
lighted match to her arm, and asked Phinuit if he felt it.[7]
"Yes," replied Phinuit, "but not much, you know. What is it?
Something cold, isn't it?"
These and numerous other experiments show that if sensibility is not
abolished, it is at least very much blunted.
It might be concluded from the above that Mrs Piper would be an
excellent hypnotic subject. She is nothing of the kind. Without being
precisely refractory to hypnotism, she is only an indifferently good
hypnotic subject. Professor William James of Harvard has made
experiments to elucidate this point. His two first attempts to hypnotise
Mrs Piper were entirely fruitless. Between the second and third,
Professor William James asked Phinuit, during a mediumistic trance, to
be kind enough to help him to make the subject hypnotisable. Phinuit
promised; in fact, he always promises all that is asked. At the third
attempt Mrs Piper fell slightly asleep, but only at the fifth sitting was
there a real hypnotic sleep, accompanied by the usual automatic and
muscular phenomena. But it was impossible to obtain anything more.
Hypnosis and trance, in Mrs Piper, have no points of resemblance. In
the trance, muscular mobility is extreme. In hypnosis, just the contrary
is the case. If she is ordered during hypnosis to remember what she has
said or done, she remembers. During the trance, the control has more
than once been asked to arrange that Mrs Piper should recall, on
waking, what she had said; but this has never succeeded. During the
mediumistic trance she seems to read the deepest recesses of the souls
of those present like a book. During hypnosis there is no trace of this
thought-reading. In short, the mediumistic trance and the hypnotic
sleep are not one and the same thing. Whatever may be the real nature
of the difference, this difference is so great that it strikes the least
attentive observer at once.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] In the opinion of the chief witnesses of the Cambridge sittings the

frauds of Eusapia Paladino were not unconscious. Mr Myers said, in
the report to the Society immediately after the sittings:--"I cannot doubt
that we observed much conscious and deliberate fraud, of a kind which
must have needed long practice to bring it to its present level of
skill."--Journal of Society for Psychical Research for 1895, p. 133,
Trans.
[5] Proc. of the S.P.R., vol. vi. p. 444.
[6] Proc. of S.P.R., vol. xvi.
[7] Proc. of S.P.R., vol. viii. p. 5.
CHAPTER III
Early trances--Careful first observations by Professor William James of
Harvard University, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
I have already explained on what occasion Mrs Piper had her first
trance. Suffering from a traumatic tumour, she had gone to ask advice
of a blind medium named Cocke. This medium gave medical
consultations, but he also asserted that he had the power of developing
latent mediumship. At this first sitting Mrs Piper felt very strange thrills,
and thought she was going to faint. At the following sitting Mr Cocke
put his hands on her head. She felt at once that she was on the point of
losing consciousness. She saw a flood of light, as well as unrecognised
human faces, and a hand which fluttered before her face. She does not
remember what happened afterwards. But when she woke she was told
that a young Indian girl named Chlorine had manifested through her
organism, and had given a remarkable proof of survival after death to a
person who happened to be present.
Mrs Piper was therefore really a medium. Her personal friends
immediately began to arrange sittings with her. Little by little strangers
were admitted to this private circle. Various self-styled spirits
communicated by her means in the earlier days. Phinuit, who later took
almost sole possession of Mrs Piper's organism, was far from being
alone at first; his place was disputed. The first controls, if they

themselves are to be believed, were the actress Mrs Siddons, the
musician John Sebastian Bach, the poet Longfellow, Commodore
Vanderbilt the multi-millionaire, and a young Italian girl named Loretta
Ponchini.
At the outset Dr Phinuit, when he appeared, confined himself to
diagnosing and giving medical advice. He thought everything else
beneath him.
At last, one evening, John Sebastian Bach announced that he and all