The New Revelation | Page 8

which
had not been explored by Science. It is a most singular fact that if the
verdict had been against spiritualism, it would certainly have been
hailed as the death blow of the movement, whereas being an
endorsement of the phenomena it met with nothing by ridicule. This

has been the fate of a number of inquiries since those conducted locally
at Hydesville in 1848, or that which followed when Professor Hare of
Philadelphia, like Saint Paul, started forth to oppose but was forced to
yield to the truth.
About 1891, I had joined the Psychical Research Society and had the
advantage of reading all their reports. The world owes a great deal to
the unwearied diligence of the Society, and to its sobriety of statement,
though I will admit that the latter makes one impatient at times, and one
feels that in their desire to avoid sensationalism they discourage the
world from knowing and using the splendid work which they are doing.
Their semi-scientific terminology also chokes off the ordinary reader,
and one might say sometimes after reading their articles what an
American trapper in the Rocky Mountains said to me about some
University man whom he had been escorting for the season. "He was
that clever," he said, "that you could not understand what he said." But
in spite of these little peculiarities all of us who have wanted light in
the darkness have found it by the methodical, never-tiring work of the
Society. Its influence was one of the powers which now helped me to
shape my thoughts. There was another, however, which made a deep
impression upon me. Up to now I had read all the wonderful
experiences of great experimenters, but I had never come across any
effort upon their part to build up some system which would cover and
contain them all. Now I read that monumental book, Myers' Human
Personality, a great root book from which a whole tree of knowledge
will grow. In this book Myers was unable to get any formula which
covered all the phenomena called "spiritual," but in discussing that
action of mind upon mind which he has himself called telepathy he
completely proved his point, and he worked it out so thoroughly with
so many examples, that, save for those who were wilfully blind to the
evidence, it took its place henceforth as a scientific fact. But this was an
enormous advance. If mind could act upon mind at a distance, then
there were some human powers which were quite different to matter as
we had always understood it. The ground was cut from under the feet
of the materialist, and my old position had been destroyed. I had said
that the flame could not exist when the candle was gone. But here was
the flame a long way off the candle, acting upon its own. The analogy
was clearly a false analogy. If the mind, the spirit, the intelligence of

man could operate at a distance from the body, then it was a thing to
that extent separate from the body. Why then should it not exist on its
own when the body was destroyed? Not only did impressions come
from a distance in the case of those who were just dead, but the same
evidence proved that actual appearances of the dead person came with
them, showing that the impressions were carried by something which
was exactly like the body, and yet acted independently and survived the
death of the body. The chain of evidence between the simplest cases of
thought-reading at one end, and the actual manifestation of the spirit
independently of the body at the other, was one unbroken chain, each
phase leading to the other, and this fact seemed to me to bring the first
signs of systematic science and order into what had been a mere
collection of bewildering and more or less unrelated facts.
About this time I had an interesting experience, for I was one of three
delegates sent by the Psychical Society to sit up in a haunted house. It
was one of these poltergeist cases, where noises and foolish tricks had
gone on for some years, very much like the classical case of John
Wesley's family at Epworth in 1726, or the case of the Fox family at
Hydesville near Rochester in 1848, which was the starting-point of
modern spiritualism. Nothing sensational came of our journey, and yet
it was not entirely barren. On the first night nothing occurred. On the
second, there were tremendous noises, sounds like someone beating a
table with a stick. We had, of course, taken every precaution, and we
could not explain the noises; but at the same time we could not swear
that some ingenious practical joke had not been played upon us. There