m MEMOEEAM Charles Josselyn fs^::h. BEYOND THE BORDERLINE OF LIFE BY GUSTAVUS MYERS A summing up of the results of the scientific investigation of Psychic Phenomena, with an account of Professor Botazzi's experiments with Eusapia Paiadino, and an abstract of the report of the cross-references by Mrs. Piper, Mrs. Verrall and others which so influenced Sir Oliver Lodge in his decision in favor of the spiritistic hypothesis w BOSTON THE BALL PUBLISHING CO. 1910 \.0}2^ EDUC, PSYCH. UBBABS Copyright, 1910 By The Ball Publishing Company BEYOND THE BORDERLINE OF LIFE "7 BEYOND THE BORDERLINE OF LIFE 'T^HE most significant, far-reaching, revolutionary event that has ever taken place in scientific circles — an event of unparalleled importance to the entire human race — is the recent defection, one after the other, of at least thirty-five of the world's most illustrious scientists, from the materialistic school of philos- ophy, evidenced by their declarations that a variety of attested phenomena prove that there are invisible forces about us, of which they previously had been unaware. 7 8 Beyond the Borderline of Life While all these men do not agree as to absolute conclusions, they are a unit on one point, which is that they no longer believe, as they had thought and taught for years, that physical death ended our life. They are also unanimous in assert- ing the indisputable fact of the phenom- ena known as psychic; although some of them have different interpretations from others, all of them now concede these phenomena to be scientifically estab- lished. Yet, until very recently all of these sci- entists had been bitter skeptics of psychic phenomena; in fact, had vigorously de- nied their existence. Every one of them was, in his sphere of science, a leading exponent of the materialistic dogma that our life ended in annihilation and that our consciousness was buried in the grave. But the whole teachings of a Beyond the Borderline of Life Q lifetime they have been compelled to re- verse, a very extraordinary transforma- tion of modern scientific thought, which is pregnant with a new message to man- kind. An equally remarkable fact, which ap- parently has thus far escaped attention, is that, among all the great scientists, only one remains who still adheres to the doctrine that our life is a purely mate- rial one terminating in destruction by bodily death. This lone exception is Haeckel, the eminent German savant. His associates in the world of science, and even his collaborators, have aban- doned his ideas and theories, which they now regard as obsolete and as shattered by the proofs investigated by them. There is no greater psychologist in the world than Enrico Morselli, for twenty- seven years professor of psychology in 10 Beyond the Borderline of Life the University of Genoa. He shares with Professor William James, of Har- vard, the distinction of being one of the very few of the world's consummate mas- ters of that department of science. Nor are there any names more authoritative in the various quarters of science than those of Filippo Botazzi, director of the Physiological Institute at the University of Naples and one of the foremost of European biologists; Professor Schia- parelli, the famous astronomer who dis- covered the canals on Mars; Pio Foa, professor of pathological anatomy at the University of Turin, a scientist who has a unique popularity and influence; Pro- fessor Mosso, whose works on fatigue and other physiological subjects are uni- versally regarded as classics; Camille Flammarion, director of the astronom- ical observatory, Juvisy, France, who has Beyond the Borderline of Life 11 done so much to popularize astronomy; Charles Richet, professor of physiology, in the University of Paris; Pierre Janet, another French scientific luminary; Lombroso, whose brilliant volumes on criminology have caused great discus- sion; and the distinguished German sa- vant, now of the Institut General Psy- chologique of Paris, Julien Ochorowicz. All of these scientists, after an entire career of indifference, severe doubt, or intense antagonism to psychic phenom- ena, have completely changed front, and now fully admit the presence about us of invisible forces hitherto unknown, giving voluminous reasons for their conversion. "^ Many other scientists, after experi- ments and investigations, have joined them. A few of these are Galeotti, pro- fessor of general pathology in the Uni- versity of Naples; Luciani, de Amicis, 12 Beyond the Borderline of Life Bianchi, Patrizi, Murani, Queirolo, Gigli, Vizioli, Scarpa, Pansini, Tambu- rini, Tassi, Ascensi, Lombardi, Porro, Limoncelli, d'Enrico, Virgilio, Venzano, Ottolenghi, and many others too numer- ous even to mention, all of them promi- nent professors in the various universities of Italy, and for the most part, psychia- trists and psychologists. The whole corps of Morselli's assistants have like- wise discarded their former materialist beliefs, as also have Mosso's well-known aids, Herlitzka, Charles Foa, and Agga- zoti. The continued former hostile position of practically all of these men may be judged by Morselli's recent pronounce- ment of his recognition of psychic phe- nomena. 'T was myself for many years," he writes, "from the commencement of my scientific career at the age of seven- Beyond the Borderline of Life 13 teen, not only an inveterate and irre- claimable 'anti-spiritist,' with regard to the hypothesis of survival and interven- tion of the defunct, or other occult enti- ties, . . . but I was also a bitter skeptic with regard to the objective real- ity of the phenomena themselves, with respect to the existence of new 'forces,' different from the physico-chemical ones and from the known bio-psychical activ- ities. . . . To-day, furnished with an experience perhaps sufficient, after long and mature reflection on what I have seen and touched with my hand, after having studied the question of me- diumship indefatigably for years, I have changed my belief. The result is that I can no longer deny the reality and genu- ineness of the greater part of these phe- nomena, which, at first, I held to be purely imaginary." 14 Beyond the Borderline of Life Pio Foa likewise publicly stated his altered views in a memorable address de- livered recently in Turin. The absorb- ing interest shown by the general Euro- pean public in the revolution of scientific thought was demonstrated by the num- ber of persons in the audience. "The theatre was crowded/' says La Stampa, "and what a public! Ladies of the aris- tocracy and of the upper as well as of the middle classes, professors, doctors, lawyers, engineers, merchants, workmen, and a large number of university stu- dents. The Duke of Genoa and the Duke of Abruzzi were present in their respective boxes. Many people had to be turned away. When at nine o'clock the lecturer came on the platform, he was received by prolonged and deafen- ing applause. The public listened in ab- solute silence when the lecturer began to Beyond the Borderline of Life 15 speak in his well-known, easy, simple, and communicative style, which is one of the characteristic features of his ora- tory, the secret by means of which Pro- fessor Foa always draws such large audi- ences, not only from among persons given to study of scientific subjects, but also from the general public." After giving a clear exposition of the philosophy of the subject, and the pro- longed doubt, mistrust, prejudice, and criticism met with, he described in de- tail the marvelous phenomena which he and many other scientists had seen and tested, and included this statement, all the more worthy of consideration com- ing from so conservative a scientist as he: "We can affirm without exaggeration that the greatest progress made by con- temporary science has been but the au- daciously progressive conquest into the l6 Beyond the Borderline of Life region of the ultra-sensible, the ultra- visible, and the ultra-ponderable. Be- yond what the eye can see, what the ear can hear, what the hand can touch, be- yond the world of taste and smell and of ' all the other senses, there exists a world invisible, inaudible, impalpable, of which we know only a few manifesta- tions." The same radical change of opinion is expressed by Botazzi in his "The Unex- plored Regions of Human Biology" — a work which when issued in book form, as it will be shortly^ will claim a world- wide interest. He starts out by saying: ''I was, I scarcely know whether I should say, incredulous or indifferent with regard to mediumistic phenomena . . . I was more disposed to deny the truth of those phenomena than to ac- cept them." Proceeding then to narrate Beyond the Borderline of Life 17 the fullest and most specific details of these various phenomena as seen and tested by him, he concludes: "From henceforward, skeptics can only deny the facts by accusing us of fraud and charla- tanism. I should be very much sur- prised if anyone w^ere bold enough to bring this accusation against us, but it should not disturb our minds in the least." These foregoing citations instance how the leading scientific thought of the time has entirely changed. This change car- ries with it three very remarkable aspects. One is that it must inevitably have the profoundest effect upon all conduct, laws, religions, institutions, and peoples. If there is a life beyond this, a continuation of consciousness, a survival of that mys- terious thing which we call intelligence, spirit, or soul, then the human race, once 18 Beyond the Borderline of Life it realizes the truth of this, will be com- pelled by its own moral, ethical, and spiritual growth, to make its earthly ex- istence conform to the cognition of an ^'hereafter." Another is that for the first time in the history of man science has arrived at the point of asserting that the continuity of the soul or intelligence is being demon- strated by scientific tests. Hitherto a belief in "a life beyond" has been the possession of religions only from the most primitive tribes to the present civil- izations. It has until now, however, ap- parently remained merely a belief without knowledge, nothing more. No scientific proof was adduced that the spirit, which guided the body, did not die with the body; to all appearances it flickered out with the passing of physical life. Since no evidence to the contrary Beyond the Borderline of Life 19 was presented, science regarded this re- ligious belief as a superstition. The third aspect is that the great body of foremost scientific men has slowly come round to recognizing the truth of the fact of the phenomena as brought out thirty and forty years ago by those emi- nent pioneer investigators of physic phe- nomena, Alfred Russell Wallace, Sir William Crookes, Sir Oliver Lodge, William James, Frederic W. H. Myers, Henry Sidgwick, Edmund Gurney, and their many associates in the British So- ciety for Psychical Research, which so- ciety was organized by them. Professor ZoUner, the great German physicist, dealt with these phenomena thirty years since in his monumental work, ^'Trans- cendental Physics." But he, like Wal- lace, Crookes, Lodge, and their fellows, was ridiculed, sneered at, and denounced. // 20 Beyond the Borderline of Life Zollner was accused of being insane for venturing to declare that he had seen various extraordinary psychic phenom- ena. The scientific worldj at that time, and until a few years ago, was wholly under the influence of the materialist teachings. Stoutly denying that any- thing of a super-normal character could exist, it dismissed the evidence presented by these advanced investigators as con- trary to human reason. Strikingly indicative of how com- pletely scientific knowledge has become revolutionized by psychical research was the reception accorded to Sir Oliver Lodge's declaration before the British Society for Psychical Research recently that exhaustive tests had proved the sur- vival of human intelligence in discarnate form. "Well known persons," said he, "are constantly purporting to communi- Beyond the Borderline of Life 21 cate with us with the express purpose of patiently proving their known personal- ities, and giving evidence of knowledge appropriate to them. Not easily or early do we make this admission, in spite of long conversations with what purports to be the surviving intelligence of those friends and investigators. We were by no means convinced of their identity un- til crucial proof, difficult even to imag- ine, had according to some of our beliefs been supplied." Twenty or even five years ago such an assertion would have called forth impas- sioned taunts and flings from the gener- ality of scientists. But only the deepest interest and acquiescence were mani- fested by his brother scientists on this oc- casion. His address was eagerly looked forward to, and as engrossingly wel- comed, listened to, and read. For thirty- 22 Beyond the Borderline of Life five years Sir William Crookes had been made the subject of most virulent de- nunciation; he was accused of being credulous and lightheaded in his psychic- al investigations; and every conceivable attempt was made to discredit him. When, however, in his celebrated address to the British Society for the Advance- ment of Science, not long since, he re- iterated his conviction that the human personality survives, and gave scientific reasons which led him to that conclusion, not a discordant murmur arose. Wallace, Crookes, Lodge, James, and their fellow pioneers had passed through precisely the same stages that Morselli, Janet, Richet, Botazzi, Foa, and the other more recent converts have only just un- dergone. Wallace, who divided with Darwin the distinction of developing the Beyond the Borderline of Life 23 theory of evolution, was an intense and avowed materialist^ as also were Crookes, Lodge, and the others. All were pro- nounced skeptics as to the possibility of supernormal phenomena; in fact, their investigations of the subject arose from an aim to expose certain apparently oc- cult happenings as fraud and charlatan- ism. "Some slight but inexplicable phe- nomena," says Wallace, "first attracted my attention. I set out to expose them, but the facts beat me." Years of investigation convinced Wal- lace, Crookes, Lodge, Sidgwick, and the rest that the phenomena were true. Still they were unwilling to believe that these seemingly extraordinary occur- rences were of supernormal character. Only after many more years of patient re- search and thought did they conclude 24 Beyond the Borderline op Life that the phenomena were the manifesta- tions of disembodied human intelli- gences. Although pioneers in a modern scien- tific sense, Wallace and his associates were by no means the discoverers of these phenomena. There is the fullest reason to believe that the ancients had the wid- est knowledge of them. If the evidence inherited from the past signifies anything, the Egyptian priesthood knew of and was intimate with a world invisible to the senses. The Bible contains many refer- ences which, interpreted by the light of present scientific research, indubitably confirms the belief that many of the so- called miracles were^ in reality, mani- festations of a power or force outside the realm of bodily senses. Shu King, the oldest Chinese book, and the Chandogya Upinishad, one of Beyond the Borderline of Life 25 the earliest works of India, contain ac- counts of mediumistic communications. Descriptions of automatic writing and speaking occur constantly in ancient lore. Modern literature, as distinguished from the remote historic and classic, is freelv interspersed with the supernormal — such as ghost stories, oracles and mysterious voices, witch tales, apparitions, so-called second sight, and other unusual happen- ings unexplainable by any known force or theory. More than a century ago, the great German philosopher, Kant, attest- ed in his works to some very extraordi- nary exhibitions of clairvoyant power by Swedenborg, the celebrated Scandinavian scientist, philosopher and mystic. It may be charged that the present sci- entific affirmation is simply a recrudes- cence of the study of phenomena long since known. A great distinction, how- 26 Beyond the Borderline of Life ever, exists between vague, indetermi- nate observation, and scientific investiga- tion and collation of facts surrounded by the most rigid precautions against possi- ble fraud or error. This is a scientific age when none but absolutely authenti- cated facts are held worthy of consid- eration. That science has been able by infinite patience to explore into a domain far removed from our customary senses is its greatest triumph so far. If it has ac- complished this much in penetrating in- to some of the secrets of nature within a few decades, what may we not expect from the still finer development of the future? Strange as it may seem, psychical re- search came about in a fortuitous, hap- hazard way. Notwithstanding the co- pious ancient and medieval records, and the traditional and numberless unattested Beyond the Borderline of Life 27 accounts of supernormal occurrences, scientists deliberately ignored the sub- ject. To them it was not deserving of serious thought; they dismissed it as the offspring of blind superstition or cre- dulity. They saw in it not a series of con- crete facts invested with a supreme meaning for the human race, but a shad- owy, imperceptible, elusive maze of airy concoctions, perhaps the result of ex- treme religious ecstasy or of demented minds. Kant was one of the few men ^ who grasped the purport of these singu- ""--^ lar manifestations; for as far back as 1765 that great mind predicted that the time would come when they would be scientifically proved. Not until 1847 did the modern psy- chical movement begin. It really had its origin in the manifestations dis- played in the presence of two American 28 Beyond the Borderline of Life girls, the Fox sisters, Margaret and Katherine, then living in the town of Ar- cadia, New York. In that year they began to hear strange noises and see strange forms. These phenomena, it be- came certain, were not produced by hu- man causes. The Fox sisters asserted that they soon learned by raps to commu- nicate with invisible intelligences whom they called spirits. The age was a se- verely incredulous one; the wave of ma- terialism was at its height; and the claims of the Fox sisters met with gener- al derision. A few minds, then young, but since become among the world's greatest scientists, declined to join in the chor- us of ridicule that went up. From those meagre beginnings, with but scanty foundation of known fact to build upon, the whole immense movement, the Beyond the Borderline of Life 29 most important in all times, slowly de- veloped. Phenomenon after phenom- enon has been uncovered by Wallace, Crookes, and their colleagues. Still for many years the run of scientists looked on and smiled sardonically. Henry Sidgwick, one of the great ethical writers of the age, declared that the apa- thy of scientists and the absence of seri- ous organized investigation of these phe- nomena, constituted a public scandal and a standing reproach to science. In 1882, he with a number of associates organized the British Society for Psychical Re- search, a society which has done momen- tous work in unbosoming the secrets of the great unknown. Nothing less than a mass of absolute- ly verified facts could have effected this tremendous overturning of all former scientific theory and thought. For more so Beyond the Borderline of Life than half a century, the findings of Wal- lace, Crookes, and others have been be- fore the whole world's scrutiny; if un- sound, unestablished, or fallacious there has been the amplest opportunity to ex- pose the falsity of the results. But far from reaching that conclusion, the scien- tific world more and more recognizes the truth of those pioneer observations, and is continuously adding fresh records to the overwhelming evidence already brought out. CHAPTER II NATURE OF PHENOMENA WHAT is the nature of the phenom- ena, the substantiation of which has compelled science to throw away much of its old teachings as so much rub- bish? They are of various kinds ap- parently disassociated, but fundamentally all manifestations of the same invisible power. They come under two general classes — intellectual and physical phe- nomena. In turn these two classes em- brace seven orders — telepathy, clairvoy- ance, materialization, levitation, auto- matic or trance writing and talking, clairaudience and possession. Again, 31 32 Beyond the Borderline of Life in turn, each of these groups has a num- ber of subdivisions. All of these phe- nomena are strictly beyond the range of the normal senses and are not subject to the operation of any known law. In fact, they contravene and overthrow all hitherto known so-called cosmic laws. They seem to be subject to the laws of another cosmos.^; How, then, are they determined? What property or power in a human be- ing makes them apparent? A certain faculty dormant in a large number of persons, extremely active in some, which is called mediumistic power, constitutes the ability to respond as a transmitting instrument to the messages of discarnate personalities. What underlies this abil- ity? One might as well ask what the electricity is which causes the telegraph or telephone to act. No one knows. If, Beyond the Borderline of Life 33 as maintained by many scientists, the soul has an existence of its own entirely independent of the body, then some per- sons seem to have a psychic power far more highly developed than that of others. We do not know whether or not this psychic capacity has any relation to heredity, environment, or any other earthly condition, inasmuch as we have not yet sufficient data covering that point. Mediums are found among all classes and kinds of people — the ignorant as well as the educated ; the coarse not less than the refined; men as well as women. The noted Italian medium, Eusapia Paladino, whose mediumistic manifestations have had a great share in convincing virtually all of the French and Italian scientists, is an illiterate peasant. To speak of any power as being psychic often invites the charge that one is los- S4s Beyond the Borderline of Life ing oneself in mysticism and in the oc- cult. But nothing is actually occult. It only seems so. As Professor Janet ob- serves : "There are no terms more vague and undefined than ^occult' and ^mystic' Every phenomenon is occult to those who know it imperfectly. Thunder and lightning were occult phenomena for savages. The study of the properties of metals was a mystical affair with the al- chemists of the middle ages." Assum- ing that many of the great scientists are correct in their hypothesis of a spirit life beyond the mundane, and that when we "die" we become instantly metamor- phosed into spirits, we do not know why it is that these discarnate beings select certain embodied persons as a means of transmitting messages or giving other manifestations. But that this is the case Beyond the Borderline of Life 35 seems to be abundantly proved beyond a doubt. The ^Vhys" and "wherefores" remain as yet a mystery. Nothing mysterious, however, any longer envelopes the phenomena them- selves. They are objective and tangible. Under certain favorable, but thoroughly tested, circumstances, they have been seen, touched, heard, or felt, and some of them frequently photographed. TELEPATHY Telepathy and clairvoyance by their nature belong to the intellectual class of psychic manifestations. It is very diffi- cult, however, to draw any sharp line of demarcation between the intellectual and the physical forms. "The physical phe- nomena of mediumship," says Professor Caesar de Vesme, "are never exclusively 36 Beyond the Borderline of Life physical; they are blended with intelli- gence." Telepathy is no longer considered a conjectural power. Great scientists be- lieve that they have fully established its existence. They have demonstrated be- yond a doubt that it can be carried on between living persons, provided their minds are so mutually receptive and at- tuned as to exclude difficulties of trans- mission. vThis may seem an extravagant statement, but it should be recalled that even a mechanical instrument^ such as wireless telegraphy mechanism, must be ''tuned" to receive messages properly. The analogy holds, and the condition ob- tains to a far greater extent when the human mind is the mechanism, which is an inconceivably more delicate and sensi- tive instrument. If corporeal persons can communicate Beyond the Borderline of Life 37 telepathically, how much more easily, sci- entists assert, can disembodied beings who are not hindered by the gross mate- rial existence, and who possess dimensions and powers of a character of which we are beginning to get the merest glimpse. Is the creature, they query, more power- ful than the creator? All of the wonder- ful complex attributes of civilization spring primarily from one faculty — thought. If a wireless machine, which is the product of thought, can flash messages thousands of miles through the ether, can- not the creator of that machine, which is thought, do even more extraordinary feats, independently of material means, once it fully understands and learns to operate its powers? This is what scien- tists pointedly ask, while they are busily seeking a solution. SS Beyond the BoRDERi.iNE of Life CLAIRVOYANCE Clairvoyance, which is the faculty of supernormal, lucid seeing — that is to say, a sight entirely distinct from purely human sight, and bears an analogy to perspicacity — is inseparably related to telepathy. One instance of a large num- ber of occurrences investigated by scien- tists vv^ill suffice to show the illimitable scope of the clairvoyant faculty. This particular case was exhaustively investi- gated by Professor William James, and a full account written by him was published recently in the Proceedings of the Amer- ican Society for Psychical Research. Miss Bertha Huse, a young woman liv- ing in Enfield, New Hampshire, suddenly disappeared early one morning. She was last seen on a bridge on Lake Mascoma near by. On the supposition that she had Beyond the Borderline of Life 39 been drowned, her employer, George Whitney, a mill owner, employed a pro- fessional diver from Boston to drag the lake thoroughly. After three days' search no trace of her body was found. On the evening of the third day, Mrs. George Titus, living at the village of Lebanon, four miles away, suddenly fell into a trance. On waking up, she in- formed her husband that she had had a vision in which she saw the exact position of Bertha's body in the lake. Her hus- band and the village folk laughed at her, but she insisted upon driving over to En- field. The diver was still in the village. He was disinclined to take up the work again, saying that he had explored the lake thoroughly. Finally he consented. The body was found in a deep, dark hole in the exact spot indicated by Mrs. Titus. ''It was so dark down there," said the 40 Beyond the Borderline of Life diver, Michael J. Sullivan, employed by the Boston Tugboat Company, "that I could not see my way. I had to feel." This was a case of pure clairvoyance. The great question is: What intelli- gence guided Mrs. Titus? Certainly not her own, nor that of any other incarnate living being. Neither did chance nor coincidence have any part. Science ex- plains it in but one way. The vision, it says, was telepathically put into Mrs. Ti- tus' mind by an external influence, that of one of those disembodied intelligences who are not bounded by time or space, and who have the supreme faculties of both retrocognition and precognition — faculties absent from the human race. That the vision could have proceeded from her subconscious knowledge is a theory not considered tenable. Were this an isolated instance no posi- Beyond the Borderline of Life 41 tive deduction could be made from it. But many scientists, including William James, Sir Oliver Lodge, James H. Hyslop, of the American Society for Psychical Research, have investigated many similar cases, and others have car- ried on the most rigid investigations w^ith Mrs. Leonora Piper, the noted Ameri- can medium, w^hose mediumship is in- tellectual rather than physical. Charles Richet has described a series of note- worthy experiments. Other scientists have deeply studied examples of clair- voyance elsewhere. Recently a Swed- ish boy of fourteen, John Flottner, has caused a great sensation in Europe by his display of clairvoyant powers. Not long ago on one occasion he found, by what he called his "inner vision," the body of a drowned man, for whom a party of seventy persons had searched in 42 Beyond the Borderline of Life vain for three weeks. In his case, as in the case of Mrs. Titus, the facts were telepathically communicated to his mind by an intelligence who knew where the body lay, and who, since no mundane person could have possessed that knowl- edge, as was proved beyond doubt, must have been supermundane. This boy is under close observation by the Swedish society. AUTOMATIC WRITING An even better substantiated phase of psychic phenomena than telepathy and clairvoyance, which I have already briefly described, is that of automatic writing and talking. The world's great- est scientists are convinced, after half a century of investigation, that in auto- matic writing and talking they have dis- covered an absolutely certain method of Beyond the Borderline of Life 4S giving and receiving messages from the so-called dead. ''We have discovered," said Sir Oliver Lodge, in a recent ad- dress to the British Society for Psychical Research, ''that there is a new human faculty for communicating with the dead. The most important set of phe- nomena are those of automatic writing and talking." When Sir Oliver used the word "dis- covered," he undoubtedly meant it not in a literal, but in a scientific sense. It is a grave question whether many of the illustrious personages of the past, such as prophets, philosophers, and poets, were not automatic writers and talkers. Thus, to mention one instance, Socrates was guided by a certain "monitory voice" which, according to him, con- stantly guided him, and which, when a word from him at his trial would have 44 Beyond the Borderline of Life saved his life, commanded him to remain silent. The evidence of past centuries, how- ever, cannot be considered scientific proof. But science believes that it has copiously demonstrated the actuality of the phenomenon. It seems fairly well established that a certain portion of these written or spoken messages originate in the medium's own subliminal mind. Most of us imagine that we are fully conscious of all within us. This, scien- tific research shows is a great error. [Beneath our conscious self lies a vast region of mind, up rushes of which come to the surface only now and then.) That distinguished English poet and scientist, Frederic W. H. Myers, whose work on psychical research, ^'Human Personal- ity and Its Survival of Bodily Death" is one of the greatest and most remarkable Beyond the Borderline of Life 45 constructive works of genius of modern times, compared the area of our sunken consciousness to an iceberg, nine-tenths of the bulk of which is submerged. But in much of the writing and talk- ing of automatic character scientifically investigated, there is a great part that cannot possibly proceed from within the mind or from any embodied mind what- ever. Wallace, Crookes, Lodge, and their colleagues do not doubt that the force or intelligence exerted is purely extraneous. To make this clear it is only necessary to point out that when the medium falls into a trance state, the resulting writing ceases to be in the medium's own style and chirography, and frequently becomes like that of the communicating intelli- gence. Yet, in practically all of the cases under investigation, it has been proved 46 Beyond the Borderline of Life that the medium did not know and could not have known anything of the hand- writing of the particular departed intel- ligence giving the messages. Nor is this all. Events, dates, identifications, inti- mate details, the most profound secrets, have been conveyed, which the me- dium could not by any possibility have known. James, Hodgson, Lodge, Crookes, Hyslop, and Newbold have published voluminous accounts of their experi- ments with Mrs. Piper. Mrs. Piper's "controls" are several — a Dr. Phinuit, "Imperator," "Rector" and others. Through her they have spoken and writ- ten messages, not only divulging details which no living person, even the intended recipients, could have known, but fore- casting events, such as the death of Rich- ard Hodgson from too violent exercise — Beyond the Borderline of Life 47 a warning which the doctor disregarded only to fall dead at the Gymnasium of The Union Boat Club. Flournoy carried on a similar series of experiments with the noted Swiss medium, Mile. Helene Smith (which name, by the way, is a pseudonym, for she dislikes publicity), and in summing up the phenomena that he observed, the professor says of her that she possesses the phase of automatic writing of an extraordinary character, "divinations, mysterious finding of lost objects, happy inspirations, exact presentiments, and just intuitions." In his "Preliminary Report on the Trance Phenomena of Mrs. Smead," which has been published in the Pro- ceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research, Professor Hyslop describes many striking instances of 48 Beyond the Borderline of Life automatic writing. In these, Dr. Hodg- son and others communicated through Mrs. Smead messages relating to events and incidents of a character which it was impossible for Mrs. Smead to know about. Cases of automatic writing and talk- ing are numerous enough to fill vol- umes. William T. Stead, the noted English journalist, asserts that he wrote that remarkable work, ^'Letters from Julia," automatically, and produces evi- dence to prove his claim. As for auto- matic talking, one of the most remark- able of the many modern examples is that of Laura Edmunds, a daughter of J. W. Edmunds, of New York City, who was for many years on the Supreme Court bench. Judge Edmunds vouched for the fact that the only language she knew besides English was a school smat- Beyond the Borderline of Life 49 tering of French. Yet when in a trance state, under the influence of her '^con- trols," she spoke thirteen languages flu-'^'^f^^ ently, including Greek, Polish, Italian, f and Indian. ''This happened," says Judge Edmunds, ''in the presence of eight or ten persons, all educated, intelli- gent, reasonable, and all as capable as any one of distinguishing between illu- sion and real fact." This case in par- ticular has been an insuperable stumb- ling-block to those who advance the hypothesis that automatic writing and talking are purely functions of the sub- conscious mind. In * The Immortality of the Soul, Sir Oliver Lodge says: "It is true that messages are often vague and disappointing even when ap- parently genuine; untrue that they are * Ball Publishing Co. 50 Beyond the Borderline of Life invariably futile and useless and inappro- priate, — such an assertion could only be made by people imperfectly acquainted with the facts. In certain cases it is quite clear that a bodily organism has been controlled by something other than its usual and normal intelligence, and in a few cases the identity of the control has been almost crucially established." Addicted as he is to great reserve in language, Sir Oliver speaks in still more definite and unmistakable terms, "On the question of the life hereafter," he said in part, "the excavators are en- gaged in boring a tunnel from the oppo- site ends. Amid the roar of the water and the other noises, we are beginning to hear the strokes of the pickaxes of our comrades on the other side. We have received what an investigation has proved to be messages from the dead Beyond the Borderline of Life 51 through the mediums, Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Verrall. The latter is endowed to a remarkable degree with the power to act as a translator or interpreter of the psychical and the physical worlds." In making this assertion Sir Oliver did not reveal the nature of the experiments. He announced that he would not antici- pate the facts contained in the report, but would ask the world to wait until the report itself comprehensively appeared, when a more proper judgment could be formed of the bases upon which he and his associates rested their conclusions. This report is summarized in the follow- ing pages. CHAPTER III CONCORDANT AUTOMATISMS IT was by no means a secret that the ex- perimenters had the purpose in view of attempting to carry on definite, un- mistakable communications with the spirits of Frederic W. H. Myers and Dr. Richard Hodgson. Clergyman, poet, classical scholar, and scientist, Myers was a luminously brilliant investigator of psychical phenomena. He was a lead- ing member of the British Society for Psychical Research, with a genius for fathoming the secrets of the great un- known, and his death in 1901 was greatly deplored. Dr. Richard Hodgson was long the secretary of the American 52 Beyond the Borderline of Life 53 Branch of the British Society for Psy- chical Research, and gave up years of his life to a painstaking, patient study of the whole range of psychical phenomena, closely questioning each, and distinguish- ing the genuine from the false. Apart, however, from the meagre in- formation that the experimenters pur- posed to get into communication, if pos- sible, with the discarnate intelligences of Myers and Hodgson, nothing was known of the methods of the experimenters or of the results of the tests. This knowl- edge was carefully guarded from the out- side world until the tests were brought to a conclusion and the results compared and weighed. To make the experiments as conclusive as the brain of mortal men could con- ceive the British Society for Psychical Research decided to put various well- 54 Beyond the Borderline of Life known mediums through a series of "con- cordant automatisms." Popularly ex- plained, this means that arrangements were made to have parts of the same pur- ported messages from spirit land con- veyed through different mediums at the same time although at a distance. One part, it was planned, would come through Mrs. Piper at one place, another part through Mrs. Verrall at another place, and other parts through the agency of other mediums at still other places. This system of cross-correspondence was an original one; it had never been tried before; and at every stage it was sub- jected to the severest and most rigid scientific precaution and tests. MRS. PIPER IN ENGLAND At the invitation of the Council of the British Society for Psychical Research Beyond the Borderline of Life 55 Mrs. Piper went to England. The man- agement of the sittings was intrusted by the council to a committee composed of the Right Hon. G. W. Balfour, then president of the society; Sir Oliver Lodge; Frank Podmore, a well-known impartial critic of the spiritistic hypoth- esis; Mrs. Henry Sidgwick, now presi- dent of the society, and J. G. Piddington. This committee decided that the main objects of the experiments to be con- ducted with Mrs. Piper should be to en- courage the developments of certain con- trols which had already been manifesting in her trance. These controls were dis- carnate intelligences giving the names of Henry Sidgwick, Frederic Myers and Richard Hodgson. Mrs. Piper gave seventy-four sittings in all. The first thirteen of these were held either at Liverpool or Edgbaston 56 Beyond the Borderline of Life under the direction of Sir Oliver Lodge. Then followed fifty-eight sittings in Lon- don, Mr. Piddington being in charge of thirty-five, Mrs. Sidgwick of nineteen, and Miss Alice Johnson of two others. All of the London sittings, with the ex- ception of five at Mrs. Piper's flat, took place in the smoking room of the Irish Literary Society at 20 Hanover Square, which the committee had rented for the purpose. At these sittings the person in charge was present before the trance be- gan, and remained until Mrs. Piper re- gained normal consciousness. In no case did the investigator enter the seance room or come in contact with Mrs. Piper until she was fully entranced, and in every case left the room before the end of the trance, not to come into contact again with Mrs. Piper until the next or some subsequent trance was in progress. Beyond the Borderline of Life 57 While Mrs. Piper was producing au- tomatic writing in either Liverpool, Edgbaston, or London, five other medi- ums or psychics were being experimented with simultaneously at different and dis- tant places. These were Mrs. Verrall, the wife of the noted English scholar; her daughter, Miss Helen Verrall; Mrs. Thompson, and two ladies known to the British Society for Psychical Research under the pseudonyms of Mrs. Forbes and Mrs. Holland. Mrs. Thompson's participation, however, was cut short by the unexpected death of her husband. Most of Mrs. Verrall's automatic writing was done either at Cambridge or Mat- lock Bath, or on the train between Lon- don and Cambridge. Mrs. Verrall wrote automatically at other places. Both Mrs. and Miss Verrall knew that experiments were being made with Mrs. 58 Beyond the Borderline of Life Piper, but Mrs. Holland was in India, and throughout the entire series of ex- periments remained in absolute igno- rance of what was written by the other mediums. So likewise, did Mrs. Piper, '^unless," the report says, ''it be that she remembers in her normal state things said to her during her trances, and even then the evidential value of the results would be unaffected, for all she could have learned in this way w^as either that an ex- periment had been successfully accom- plished or that it had failed." The script of Mrs. Verrall and that of Miss Verrall were sent at first to Mr. Piddington and then to Miss Alice John- son, a leading member of the British So- ciety, who in every case noted on the en- velope or on the script itself the date and hour when it reached them. Mrs. Holland's script was sent to Miss John- Beyond the Borderline of Life 59 son, who indorsed each script with the date of its arrival. In all, about one hundred and twenty experiments in cross-correspondence were made. ^'The external features of Mrs. Piper's trance," says the report, ^'may be briefly described as follows: Mrs. Piper sits at a table with a pile of cushions in front of her, and composes herself to go into a trance. After an interval varying from two or three to ten minutes her head drops on the cushions, with the face turned to the left and the eyes closed, her right hand falling at the same time onto a small table placed on her right side. A pencil is put between her fin- gers, and the hand proceeds to write. The writing being done without the aid of sight, and with the arm in a more or less strained position, it is often difficult 60 Beyond the Borderline of Life to decipher, at least without practice; but in spite of its not being easy to read, it is remarkably consistent in character, so that its peculiarities once grasped the correct interpretation of all but a very few words is not a matter of conjecture. The coming out of the trance is a longer process than the going into trance. After the hand has ceased to write the medium remains quiescent for a few min- utes. She then raises herself slowly, and often with difficulty, from the cushions. When the body is erect she begins to speak. Her utterance at first is usually indistinct, but as she gradually regains her normal condition it becomes clearer. All of the sittings which Mrs. Piper gave in England were, with one excep- tion, "writing'' and not "voice" sittings; that is to say, her automatism took the form of writing and not of speech, except Beyond the Borderline of Life 61 during the waking stage. The "writing" sittings possess one advantage over the "voice" sittings, namely, that the auto- matic phenomena which occur in them by their very nature record themselves." The report declares that the trance script was always kept out of Mrs. Piper's sight, and taken away at the end of the sitting, so that she never saw it or had access to it at any time. In her normal condition she neither asked for nor received any information whatever about what had happened at the sittings, except that "she was occasionally told that the results were considered interest- ing and promising, and that they were of a different nature from what had previ- ously been obtained." At the very beginning of the sittings there came correspondence of the most 62 Beyond the Borderline of Life definite character in the production of which there seemed to be the fullest evi- dences both of supernormal intelligent direction and of ingenuity. On Jan. 27, 1907, at 12:30 P.M., Calcutta time (6:30 A.M. Greenwich time), Mrs. Holland during a trance at Calcutta au- tomatically wrote a script containing the names Francis and Ignatius. Some five or six hours later, at a sitting in London, Mr. Piddington asked what purported to be the spirit of Myers what were the real names of Mrs. Piper's two controls who called themselves ^'Imperator" and "Rector." Myers, according to Mr. Piddington, spontaneously replied by the medium of Mrs. Piper's automatic writ- ing that they were Francis and Ignatius. It is possible that these coincidences might have been accidental, but this ob- jection could not be applied by any proc- Beyond the Borderline of Life 6S ess of reasoning to the results of the sit- ting of Jan. 1 6, 1907. At this sitting Mrs. Piper fell into her usual trance, and the spirit of Myers pur- ported to appear, writing by her hand. To make a definite, unmistakable test Mr. Piddington asked Myers to draw a certain design when giving his messages through other mediums. The report describes this conversation through Mrs. Piper: Piddington: Myers, when you send a message to, say, Mrs. Verrall, and then a similar message to Mrs, Holland, could you not mark each with some simple but dis tinctive des ig n ? Myers: I am not quite sure that I understand you. Do you mean when I give a message to make a sign after or before the written message? Piddington: Yes; if you wrote, for 64 Beyond the Borderline of Life instance, ^'sunshine'' through Mrs. Ver- rail, and then afterwards through Mrs, Holland, you might put, say, a triangle within a circle, or some simple sign like that, to show that there is another mes- sage to be looked for corresponding with the message so marked. When the investigators received the script of Mrs. Verrall's automatic writ- ing they were immensely astonished and highly gratified to note in it a circle with triangle within it distinctly drawn. This script embodied a cross-correspondence which Sir Oliver Lodge and his associate experimenters at once were forced to con- clude was undoubtedly successful. Mrs. Verrall's drawing was unmistakable. Although one of Mrs. Holland's scripts written in far-off India contained geo- metrical drawings in which were a circle and a triangle, the cross-correspondence Beyond the Borderline of Life 65 in this case was really confined to the three mediums, Mrs. Verrall, Miss Ver- rall and Mrs. Piper. The communications in which the figure of a triangle within a circle ap- peared were very remarkable. Com- municating through Mrs. Piper, Myers asked a few days later whether Mrs. Ver- rall had received the word "Evangelical." As Mr. Piddington had not as yet seen Mrs. Verrall's latest script, he replied that he did not know, but would inquire. Myers then said that he and Hodgson were together and were communicating through George Pelham, one of Mrs. Piper's spirit "controls." Myers said that in his messages through Mrs. Ver- rall he had repeatedly referred to Brown- ing's poems. "Look out," he wrote, "for Hope, Star, and Browning." This cryp- tic communication puzzled Mr. Pid- 66 Beyond the Borderline of Life dington. At a subsequent sitting with Mrs. Piper, George Pelham announced that Myers had given the name "Evelyn Hope" through Mrs. Verrall. It then appeared from Myers's explanation that this was the name he had been trying to give through "Rector," another of Mrs. Piper's controls, but that "Rector" had put it down as "Evangelical." Hence, Mr. Piddington understood that "Evan- gelical" was the word Myers had given through Mrs. Verrall. "It was very stupid of ^Rector,' " wrote George Pel- ham, "as Hodgson and Myers had kept repeating it over and over again to him." "It will," comments Mr. Piddington, "I think, be allowed that the modifica- tion of Evangelical into Evelyn Hope was spontaneous and not traceable to any suggestion from me. Indeed, I could not have given such a suggestion, as be- Beyond the Borderline of Life 67 yond the fact that 'Evelyn Hope' brought in the word 'hope' again, it conveyed at the time no more meaning to me than the word 'evangelical'; and, moreover, I did not then know that it was the title of one of Browning's poems." The significance of Myers's purported requests to look out for "Hope, Star, and Browning" was made clear. When Mrs. Verrall's script came, it contained quotations from Browning's poem and also these lines : "That gives the words, but an ana- gram would be better. Tell him that — rats, star, tars, and so on. Try this. It has been tried before. Reats, rear- range these five letters, or, again, tears, stare." To get the connecting link it is now necessary to quote Mr. Piddington. He says: 6s Beyond the Borderline of Life ^'When by reason of the coincidences involved, my mind began to concentrate itself on these two pieces of script (Mrs. Verrall's) and the words 'Hope, Star, Browning,' given in the Piper trance, a vague impression came over me that the words 'rats, arts, star' had somehow and somewhere come under my eyes before. At first I thought this must be a mere fancy, and when, after a little, I seemed to remember having seen them written on a piece of paper in Dr. Hodgson's handwriting when I went through his private papers in the early Summer of 1906, at Boston, I was inclined to accuse myself of suffering from a delusion of memory. Still, the memory — real or fancied — persisted, and to satisfy myself I wrote to Dr. Hodgson's executors in Boston, Mr. George Dorr and Mr. Henry James, Jr., Beyond the Borderline of Life 69 and asked them to search among the odds and ends, which, with other matter, such as letters, I had handed over, for a scrap of paper with the words ^rats, arts, star' upon it. On Aug. 23, 1907, Mr. James sent me the sheet of paper containing a rough draft of anagrams in the hand- writing of Dr. Hodgson. I confess that when this came into my hands I felt as I suppose people do when they have seen a ghost; for, though not surprised to see the 'rats, arts, star' ana- gram, I was positively startled when I saw the anagram 'rates, stare, tears, aster,' &c., of which I had no recollec- tion whatever." Nor is this all. In the Browning poem, written automatically by Mrs. Verrall, there appeared the drawing of a circle with a triangle inclosed. But the coincidence did not end there. Miss 70 Beyond the Borderline of Life Helen Verrall had also been receiving automatic communications, each of which contained the drawing of a star and the word ^'star" — a combination not found elsewhere in Miss Verrall's auto- matic writing during the remainder of the experiments. These star drawings were followed by the words : ^'That was the sign." Many other distinct points of connection were noted in the cross-corre- spondence communicated through three mediums. The committee for the Brit- ish Society for Psychical Research could not avoid considering the hypothesis that Myers and Hodgson were both commu- nicating at the same time, and that each was giving certain recognized signs of identity and certain tests, the significance of which was clear and indisputable. On Feb. ii, 1907, Mrs. Verrall, as it was learned later, drew three converging Beyond the Borderline of Life 71 arrows. On the next day what pur- ported to be Hodgson's spirit announced through Mrs. Piper that as a test he had given ''Arrow" to Mrs. Verrall. After this sitting Mr. Piddington received Mrs. Verrall's script, confirming Hodg- son's statement. On Feb. 17, Miss Ver- rall, living at a distance from her mother, automatically drew an arrow, followed by the words, "many together." Mrs. Verrall's script, written at 11:15 A.M., on Feb. 18, contained several words be- ginning with a and ar. On the same day about 1 1 130 A. M., Hodgson, through Mrs. Piper, reminded Mr. Piddington to ''watch for arrow." On Feb. 19, Pid- dington first saw Mrs. Verrall's script of Feb. 18, and Miss Verrall's of Feb. 17. On Feb. 20, Hodgson inquired: "Got ar- row yet?" Mr. Piddington answered that Mrs. Verrall had not written the 72 Beyond the Borderline of Life word, but had drawn arrows. Hodgson replied that he would make further attempts to have Mrs. Verrall write ^'ar- row." On March i8, Mrs. Verrall automatically drew a bow and arrow, an arrow and a target. On June 4, Mrs. Verrall learned for the first time that arrow had been the subject of a cross- correspondence experiment. The ''laurel wreath" test of Feb. 26 was another striking experiment. On that day the "control" George Pelham, speaking through Mrs. Piper, announced that "he had given her the words 'laurel wreath.' " The "her" evidently referred to another medium. On the following day the spirit of Myers pur- ported to be communicating through Mrs Piper. Myers said that he had given the words "laurel wreath" to Mrs. Verrall. When Mrs. Verrall's auto- Beyond the Borderline of Life 73 matic script arrived it was found to be- gin with the phrase, "Laurels and an- other." As it went on the words "laurel bough" occurred several times. Finally in the last lines was written the phrase "laurel wreath," followed by these broken sentences : "Corona laureata (laurel crown) has some meaning here. With laureata wreath his brow serene was crowned. No more to-day — await the better news that brings assurance with a laurel crown." This script was covered with drawings representing laurel leaves and a laurel wreath. Neither the word "laurel" nor "wreath" was written or represented by drawings in any other of Mrs. Verrall's script at any time. The report thus conservatively ob- 74 Beyond the Borderline of Life serves: "The extracts given explain themselves, and need no comment, except it be to remark that whatever the agency- it is that effects the coincident phenom- ena, it is not a force that is working blindly and mechanically, but with in- telligence and design." CROSSING THE BAR The following extracts from an article by John W. Graham, M.A., in The Hib- bert Journal sum up Mr. Piddington's report on this incident: On the 29th of January 1907, Mrs. Verrall propounded to the Myers of the Piper trance a test question, which had been carefully selected so as to be wholly meaningless to Mrs. Piper herself, and to suggest matter which was so familiar to Frederic Myers in his life, and had en- Beyond the Borderline of Life 75 tered so fully into his habitual thoughts, that there was good hope of his recollect- ing it. On account of the difficulty of getting questions through the well-inten- tioned but rather ill-educated amanuensis called ''Rector," who appears to work Mrs. Piper's hand, the question had to be very short; and in order to avoid the chance of lucky guesses, and to make the result comfortably certain, this short question was to be such as would have large allusiveness, and might open up many recollections in the mind of Myers. It was thought also that if the question bore some kind of affinity to a subject already touched by Myers, though an affinity unrecognisable by the medium, there would be still more hope that his mind would again travel on that path. It was also necessary that the result should be verifiable, and not dependent 76 Beyond the Borderline of Life Upon Mrs. Verrall's or upon anyone else's impressions. These conditions appeared to be all fulfilled by the three Greek words (^^Tos ovpavb^ aKVfXiov (''the Very heavens without a w^ave"), which were painfully spelt out, frequently repeated so as to be transmitted correctly, and plainly caught by Myers on the above date. These words are from the Enneades of Plotinus, and are part of a description of the circumstances which accompany and condition ecstasy; that is, the condition in which the soul is sufficiently separated from the body, or from the bodily inter- ests, to be in such close communion with the divine as to receive visions in rapt contemplation. The last of the three words is a rare one, not known even to Mr. Piddington, still less, of course, to the absolutely Greekless minds of Mrs. Piper and of "Rector." Beyond the Borderline of Life 77 Now for the connection of the words with F. W. H. Myers. In his treatment of Ecstasy in Human Personality (Epi- logue, vol. ii, p. 291), he quotes the para- graph in which they occur, not in Greek but in English. He translates the sen- tence containing them — ''Calm be the earth, the sea, the air, and let Heaven itself be still." Moreover, the actual Greek words are used by Myers as the motto to his poem on Tennyson, which is printed in Fragments of Prose and Poetry (p. 117). These words, which state that clear outward calm in nature is propitious to the trance condition of ecstasy, were pretty sure to have been often pondered by Myers in writing his careful inquiry into the experience of ecstasy — an in- quiry, it is safe to say, more scientific, more wide in its outlook, alike more penetrating and more comprehensive, 78 Beyond the Borderline of Life than any preceding treatment of the phe- nomenon. It was therefore reasonable to expect that Myers would still be able to translate the words and to quote illus- trative allusions to its subject matter from Tennyson and from Plotinus, and pos- sibly from his own works. It was not yet seen by any of the experimenters how closely connected were Tennyson and Plotinus in the mind of Myers, and prob- ably also in the mind of Tennyson him- self; and how deeply appropriate it was that that motto from Plotinus should be placed at the head of a poem on Tenny- son. The words out of that poem to which the motto is appropriate are these : — Once more he rises; lulled and still, Hushed to his tune the tideways roll ; These waveless heights of evening thrill With voyage of the summoned Soul. Beyond the Borderline of Life 79 The allusion is, of course, to Tenny- son's Crossing the Bar; they are indeed little but a paraphrase of that lovely lyric : — And may there be no moaning of the bar, When I put out to sea, But such a tide as moving seems asleep. Too full for sound and foam, When that which drew from out the bound- less deep Turns again home. We have therefore to do with the idea of calm, particularly as a preliminary to spiritual exaltation; calm of nature as conducive to calm of spirit; and we shall expect, if the experiment be successful, allusions to that idea in Tennyson, and reference to Plotinus. It was carefully discovered that Mrs. Piper had never seen the volume. Frag- ments of Prose and Poetry, and even if 80 Beyond the Borderline of Life she had read the English rendering of the words in Human Personality^ it would not convey the Greek. A previous connection with the words ^'halcyon days" in Mrs. Verrall's script was, as was intended, remote and un- recognisable. Let it be remembered that we have to do in this investigation with the operation of a mind which appears to dream, and to bring out of its treasures unexpected allusions, glimmering at- tempts at a central idea, which it appar- ently takes time and effort for the speaker to make clear, and then to pass through an ill-made machine. It is something like writing a letter in the dark, which you hand to a sleepy postman, who will carry it through an unknown land, past ancient block-houses of prohibitive tar- iffs and along unsealed passes, to a tem- porary and movable address; and the re- Beyond the Borderline of Life 81 sponses are brought by dictation to an illiterate scribe, who does not always know the meaning of what he writes. We shall not, therefore, be surprised that the first answers to the test question were glimmering approaches to it only. The day that the question was pro- pounded, Myers, through Mrs. Piper, al- luded to a ''haven of rest," which he con- nected with a low armchair in Mrs. Verrall's house, and to ''celestial halcyon days," both of which he claimed to have referred to in her earlier script since he left this life. This was, on the whole, a well-founded claim, and it was doubtless made because Mrs. Verrall had told him that the answer to her question would have some slight connection with some- thing previously given. We thus see him on the right track, having apparently caught the idea of calm. He went on to 82 Beyond the Borderline of Life speak of ^'larches" and ''laburnum." A dreamer who was dreaming of Tennyson in connection with the word "halcyon" might easily pass on to the verse: — When rosy plumelets tuft the larch, And rarely pipes the mounted thrush; Or underneath the barren bush Fhts by the sea-blue bird of March. For the "sea-blue bird of March" is the kingfisher or halcyon. Just at the end of the sitting, however, all that could be expressed was the word "larches," and that led on to another nature reminiscence from In Memoriam: "laburnums drop- ping wells of fire." All this would de- serve the name of fanciful if it stood alone; but we will proceed. We now turn to Mrs. Verrall's script, which on the 12th of February ran thus : — Beyond the Borderline of Life 83 The voyage of Maeldune faery lands for- lorn and noises of the western sea — thundering noises of the western sea. It Is about Merlin and Arthur's realm — Merlin's prophetic vision — "all night long mid thundering noises of the western sea" and how he would not go — the passing of Arthur. And then the Island valley of AvUIon where blows not any wind nor ever falls the least light — no not that but you have the sense — there falls no rain nor snow nor any breath of wind shakes the least leaf. I will try to get the Idea elsewhere con- veyed — but it Is hard and I know I have failed before. Why will you not put the signature? Surely you know now that it is not you. FWHM. Here we have more Tennysonian calm with the island valley of Avilion, which he could not manage to quote quite cor- rectly. The words near the end, "Why 84' Beyond the Borderline of Life will you not put the signature? Surely you know now that it is not you. FWHM," appear to be remarks which have leaked through, addressed by Myers to Mrs. Verrall as medium. The Keats quotation ''faery lands for- lorn," is also used as title of a poem by Myers published in his Fragments, and in that poem are references to "that heaven- high vault serene," and ''unearthly calms." He is thus giving a clear al- lusion from his own words to the idea required of him. Myers's poem speaks of a voyage north from Aalesund to "Isles unnamed in gulfs unvoyaged," just as does the Voyage of Maeldune. We have, therefore, here an allusion than which few could have been more characteristic of Myers and more appro- priate to the idea he was desired to con- vey. Beyond the Borderline of Life 85 On the 25th of February Mrs. Verrall's hand wrote: — I stretch my hand across the vapourous space, the interlunar space — twixt moon and earth — where the gods of Lucretius quaff their nectar. Do you not understand? The lucid interspace of world and world — Well, that is bridged by the thought of a friend, bridged before for your passage, but to-day for the passage of any that will walk it, not In hope but in faith. Here is an allusion to the Lucretius of Tennyson, to a passage descriptive alto- gether of calm contemplation and such communion as is possible to men : — The Gods, who haunt The lucid Interspace of world and world. Where never creeps a cloud, or moves a wind. Nor ever falls the least white star of snow, Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans, Nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar 86 Beyond the Borderline of Life Their sacred everlasting calm ! And such, Not all so fine, nor so divine a calm. Not such nor all unlike it, man may gain Letting his own life go. On the next day we have, through Mrs. Verrall's hand, the first reference to the three Greek v^ords connected with Cross- ing the Bar: — I think I have made him [probably "Rec- tor"] understand, but the best refer- ence to it will be made elsewhere, not Mrs. Piper at all. I think I have got some words from the poem writ- ten down — if not stars and satellites, another phrase will do as well. And may there be no moaning at the bar — ^my Pilot face to face. The last poems of Tennyson and Brown- ing should be compared. There are references in her writing to both — Helen's, I mean. The fighter fights one last fight, but there is peace for him too in the end — and peace for the seer who knew that Beyond the Borderline of Life 87 after — after the earthquake, and the fire and the wind, after, after, in the stillness comes the voice that can be heard. Here we have the first clear allusion to the connection betw^een the motto from Plotinus and the poem Crossing the Bar, to w^hich it alluded in Myers's poem on Tennyson. He evidently feels the diffi- culty of communication, and adds that though he cannot get the allusion "sunset and evening star," he does get part of the lines about "the pilot" and the "moaning at the bar." He then alludes to the vs^ell- w^orn comparison of this last poem of Tennyson's w^ith Brow^ning's valediction to life: — "Strive and thrive ! " cry "Speed, fight on, face ever There as here." 88 Beyond the Borderline of Life The appropriateness of the comparison of Tennyson the seer, to Browning the fighter, is plain ; and finally, we have the allusion to the '^still small voice" heard by Elijah on Mount Horeb. On the 6th of March Mrs. Verrall's hand wrote : — I have tried to tell him of the calm, the heavenly and earthly calm, but I do not think it is clear. I think you would understand if you could see the record. Tell me when you have un- derstood. Calm is the sea — and in my heart, if calm at all, if any calm, a calm despair. That is only part of the answer — just as it is not the final thought. The sym- phony does not close upon despair — but on harmony. So does the poem. Wait for the last word. Here we have more allusions to the same thought, though Myers expresses doubt as to whether he has made ^'Rector" under- Beyond the Borderline of Life 89 Stand; but he thinks that the record of the Piper trances will be plain to Mrs. Ver- rall. He then runs in another quotation from In Memoriam, but corrects its final word, inasmuch as the conclusion of that poem is hope and not despair. He put his special signature to this bit of script. Then on the nth of March we have a beautiful passage written by Mrs. Ver- rall's hand, dwelling on the fact that both Plato and Tennyson had communion with the unseen: — Violet and olive leaf purple and hoary. The city of the violet and olive crown. News will come of her. Of Athens The shadow of the Parthenon. It is a message from Plato that I want to send. It has been given elsewhere, but should be completed here. It is about dim, seen forms, half seen in the evenings grey by a boy and after- wards woven into words that last — I 90 Beyond the Borderline of Life want to say it again. I think there is a verse in Tennyson about it. Plato and the shadow and the unseen or half-seen companionship — shapes seen in the glimpses of the moonlit heights. To walk with Plato (or some phrase like that), with voiceless communing, and unseen Presence felt. (No, you don't get it right.) Presences on the eternal hills (that Is better). The Presence that is on the lonely hills. (That Is all for now. Wait.) This script is an allusion to Frederic Myers's poem on The Collected Works of G.F, Watts:— Then as he walked, like one who dreamed. Through silent highways silver-hoar, More wonderful that city seemed, And he diviner than before: A voice was calling, "All Is well"; Clear In the vault Selene shone. And over Plato's homestead fell The shadow of the Parthenon. Beyond the Borderline of Life 91 For purposes of mere evidence it is enough to say that Tennyson and Plotinus, who were plainly connected in the mind of Frederic Myers, were also connected in the script; and any reader who feels that he would like to keep his mind closely bent upon the thread of evidence, will do well to skip the following para- graphs. It is in itself, however, a deeply interesting quest to point out how the great mystics in all ages speak the same tongue. It is well known that Tennyson was all his life subject to periods of trance, which he could sometimes produce by the device of repeating his own name over and over; he was "wound into the great Soul," had the sensation of leaving his body and liv- ing in a larger air, a consciousness of ex- alted happiness and communion, at once 92 Beyond the Borderline of Life broken by any interruption, or even by his own hand suddenly touching the ta- ble. He gives an account of this experi- ence in In Memoriam, stanza xcv., in The Ancient Sage, and in Arthur's speech at the conclusion of the Holy Grail, and it is referred to pretty fully in his son's Memoir. With regard to the particular point of the desirability of external calm to induce ecstasy, Mrs. Verrall has noted that be- fore the trance described in In Me- rnoriam, xcv., there w^as — Calm that let the tapers burn Unwavering: not a cricket chirred; The brook alone far off was heard, And on the board the fluttering urn, and that the vision "v^as stricken through with doubt" in the sudden breeze of dawn. Mrs. Verrall also points out that there are some interesting verbal paral- Beyond the Borderline of Life 93 lels between In Memoriam and Plotinus, who speaks of the "illuminating entry of the soul bringing a golden vision." Ten- nyson speaks of ''the spirits' golden day." ''iEonian" occurs in both writers, and both speak of ''That which is" as com- pared with the present, past, and future ideas appropriate to time, which is a mere image of eternity. It is known also that Arthur Hallam, the subject of In Me- moriam, was a student of Plotinus. We will now turn to Mrs. Piper's trance, which we left on the 30th of Janu- ary, giving then its first hints of a solu- tion to the question which had been pro- pounded to those who write through her hand the day before. On the 6th of March there were writ- ten by her hand the three words, "Cloud- less Sky Horizon. Don't you under- stand?" and immediately afterwards the 94* Beyond the Borderline of Life sentence: ^'A cloudless sky beyond the horizon." This is a paraphrase of the three Greek test-words. Mrs. Piper's trance concludes with a waking stage, in which, after the writing has ceased, she utters all kinds of disconnected sentences, during the time when her personality is resuming control, or, as Myers put it, through her hand, ^'When the spirit is returning to this light." The things said at this time are probably partly Mrs. Piper's own and partly from the same source as her script; they are often faint, and can only be caught by putting the ear close to her mouth. When she was thus recovering after this sitting, she said, "Moaning at the bar when I put out to sea." Shortly after she uttered "Arthur Hallam" twice, and "Good-bye, Margaret" (the Christian name of Mrs. Verrall, who, however, was Beyond the Borderline of Life 95 not present). She then said for the third time, ^'Arthur Hallam. Myers said it was he. He says that he will give evi- dence, and he is glad to know that he had a good definite idea in his innermost soul. He said it affected his innermost soul to talk to you, and he was so glad." Then, a week later, at the next sitting, Myers, through Mrs. Piper, attempted to draw roughly what was said to represent a bar — in fact, three attempts at drawing it were made altogether. He claimed that he had spoken of '^crossing the bar" to Mrs. Verrall also, which was quite true, though at that time unknown to Mr. Piddington, the experimenter. Myers also declared that he had tried to draw a bar with Mrs. Verrall, adding, "I thought she might get a glimpse of my understanding of her Greek." Then Hodgson appeared and asked whether 96 Beyond the Borderline of Life Mrs. Verrall had drawn a bar. Myers also came and asked the same question. As a fact, this drawing had not succeeded, though Mrs. Verrall had written, ''May there be no moaning at the bar." Myers replied that he was not sure that he had succeeded in giving her the full impres- sion, but that he had quoted the words to her as well as to Mrs. Piper. He added that he had given to Mrs. Piper both the words "Arthur Hallam" and the drawing of the bar — "so as to get the words with the author's individuality." These references to Hallam and Cross- ing the Bar occurred in Mrs. Piper's trance before Mrs. Verrall had grasped the significance of the appearances in her script of the Tennysonian quotations. She did not see the point till six days later; and the paraphrase, "cloudless sky beyond the horizon," does not appear Beyond the Borderline of Life 97 with Mrs. Verrall at all, and could not have come from her. To sum up in the words of Mr. Pid- dington: ^'It appears that in the absence of all intercourse between Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Verrall after 30th January, on the one hand, the 'Myers' of Mrs. Verrall's script on 26th February and 6th March respectively, connected Crossing the Bar and In Memoriam with ovto^ ovpavos aKVfxoiv' while, on the other hand, the 'Myers' of Mrs. Piper's trance on 6th March alluded to Crossing the Bar and mentioned the name 'Arthur Hallam' in close conjunc- tion with Mrs. Verrall's Christian name; claimed on 13th March to have given to Mrs. Verrall a quotation from Crossing the Bar, and further explained that he thought this reference would make Mrs. Verrall understand in part what signifi- cance the Greek words had for him." 98 Beyond the Borderline of Life The situation then was that, whilst abundant allusion to the Tennysonian connection with the three Greek words had been made, the passage in Human Personality where they are translated, and the name of their author Plotinus, had not yet appeared. It was therefore thought better to see whether this field also would yield a harvest, and for that purpose Mrs. Verrall sat with Mrs. Piper on the 29th of April, and asked Myers if he could make allusion to some other group of associations, and also give the author's name. No clue was given to Myers to guide him as to which of his communications had been found to be an- swers to the question. This was a very confused sitting, pos- sibly due to the newness of the experi- menters and their difficulty in decipher- ing the script; and to everyone's surprise Beyond the Borderline of Life 99 allusions, evidently made with great diffi- culty, occurred to Swedenborg, to Dante, to St. Paul, and to Francis of Assisi. References also occurred to "Azure a blue sky," and to "Halcyon days," both concordant with the central idea. Still this was not what was wanted. The next sitting produced even more unexpected results, inasmuch as Myers stated that the three Greek words re- minded him of "Homer's lUiard." This piece of illiteracy only shows how great are the mechanical difficulties in passing a word through. Without definitely giving the author's name, we have first an attempt to begin the word Plato, and then we have the word "Socratese." This was very confusing to all the ex- perimenters, and seemed as though it might be nothing better than bad guess- ing; the riddle was hard to read; it was 100 Beyond the Borderline of Life all the better riddle for that, nevertheless. Afterwards Mrs. Verrall remembered that in Human Personality, near the Plo- tinus passage wherein the three Greek words are translated, occurs an account of the famous vision of Socrates, de- scribed in the Crito of Plato, in which a fair and white-robed woman appeared to him in his prison, and quoted to him, as he waited for death, a line from the Iliad (ix. 363) — ''On the third day hence thou comest to Phthia's fertile shore." Soc- rates took this as a promise of immortal- ity, whence came its fitting place in Hu- man Personality, Further, the original Greek of this passage from the Crito is given as the motto to the Epilogue of Hu- man Personality, in which the passage from Plotinus occurs. The experimen- ters now felt that they understood the allusion to the Iliad, though neither the Beyond the Borderline of Life 101 word ''Iliad" nor the word ''Homer" oc- curs in the text of Human Personality at that place. Surely no one but Myers could have made that allusion. As Mr. Piddington says: "It would not, there- fore, have been possible for anyone but a Greek scholar, familiar with Greek lit- erature, to discover from these pages of Human Personality any connection be- tween the vision of Socrates and Homer's Iliad, even if he had sufficient familiarity with these pages to be reminded of the vision of Socrates by an allusion to the vision of Plotinus." In this chapter on Ecstasy in Human Personality we have the passage: "We need not deny the transcendental ecstasy to any of the strong souls who have claimed to feel it; — to Elijah or to Isaiah, to Plato or to Plotinus, to St. John or to St. Paul, to Buddha or Mahomet, to 102 Beyond the Borderline of Life Virgil or Dante, to St. Theresa or to Joan of Arc, to Kant or to Swedenborg, to Wordsworth or to Tennyson." On the same page we find the passage: "Our daily bread is as symbolical as the furniture of Swedenborg's heavens and hells. . . . Plotinus, 'the eagle soar- ing above the tomb of Plato,' is lost to sight in the heavens. . . . But the prosaic Swede — his stiff mind prickly with dogma, the opaque cell walls of his intelligence flooded cloudily by the ir- radiant day — this man, by the very limi- tations of his faculty, by the practical hu- mility of a spirit trained to inquiry but not to generate truth, has awkwardly laid the corner stone, grotesquely sketched the elevation of a temple which our remotest posterity will be upbuilding and adorn- ing still." In the Epilogue of Human Personality Beyond the Borderline of Life 103 we find this significant passage: — ''I be- lieve that some of those who once were near to us are already mounting swiftly upon this heavenly way. And when from that cloud encompassing of un- forgetful souls some voice is heard, — as long ago, — there needs no heroism, no sanctity, to inspire the apostle's ^-n-tOvfiU ds TO avaXvaai^ the dcsirc to lift our anchor, and to sail out beyond the bar. What fitter summons for man than the wish to live in the memory of the highest soul that he has known, now risen higher — to lift into an immortal security the yearn- ing passion of his love? ^As the soul hasteneth,' says Plotinus, 'to the things that are above, she will ever forget the more ; unless all her life on earth leave a memory of things done well.' " Here in one paragraph we have Myers's deepest and most original 104) Beyond the Borderline of Life thought, beginning with a quotation from the Apostle on whose inward experience he had based in earlier life his well- known mystical poem St. Paul. Next comes an allusion to Crossing the Bar, and finally a passage from Plotinus; all within a few lines. Without actually giving as yet the name of the author of the three Greek words, it may surely be said that the com- munications are full of Myers's rich and radiating personality, not easy to mistake for anyone else's by any who knew him. But we now come to the final achieve- ment. On the 6th of May, Mrs. Sidg- wick, before she had asked a single ques- tion in the Piper trance, was met by the word "Plotinus," to be transmitted with every sign of triumphant emphasis to Mrs. Verrall. The atmosphere of the in- terview was like that after an athletic con- Beyond the Borderline of Life 105 test in which victory had been won; Myers congratulated himself on having fully answered the Greek as he had previ- ously answered a certain important Latin question. He said that he had "caught" Rector at their last meeting, and had spelled it out to him clearly. That there are great difEculties to over- come in these transmissions is what we should expect; and that it actually is so is plain from the gradual process by which success arrives. As Mr. Pidding- ton acutely remarks, the first shots at the Tennysonian allusions in the words "larches" and "laburnum" — indirect, only partial answers as they were — ^were given on the day after the test question was put; and when a new set of associ- ations was demanded we had Homer's Iliad, Socrates, Swedenborg, St. Paul, and Dante — the dramatis personae, in 106 Beyond the Borderline of Life fact, of the concluding chapters of Hu- man Personality, before the awakening strands of earth memory gave forth the name Plotinus. By way of guarding against a tele- pathic origin for the messages from a mind still on earth, it may be noted that the whole range of thought and knowl- edge is alien from the circle of Mrs. Piper's mind; that Mr. Piddington de- clares himself to have been wholly un- aware of all the literary connections and allusions brought out, and wholly unable to assist the medium unconsciously in any way, and that Mrs. Verrall — the only other person concerned — did not know or think of a large part of this complex of al- lusions, and did not even recognise them in the script until the 12th of March, which is after the Piper answers of 6th March had come. It is also hard to un- Beyond the Borderline of Life 107 derstand, if her subliminal mind is to be credited with both her own and Mrs. Piper's script, why the name Plotinus, which must have been on the tip of her tongue of expectation all the time, was the last to be unearthed. The telepathic hy- pothesis will, I think, be found insufficient by anyone who reads the scripts. Mrs. Verrall's mind is the only one on earth which needs consideration as a possible source of the knowledge displayed ; but it is not only knowledge that is displayed, but every token of a particular personality. There are conversations overheard be- tween the communicators, their amanu- ensis, and their medium, either spoken during the waking stage of trance, or written by the hand. Moreover, we must remember that we can only properly re- gard the subliminal self, enlightening generalisation as it is of many phenomena. 108 Beyond the Borderline of Life telephathic, hypnotic, and so forth, as an entity provisionally covering a good many facts, not as an actually defined or- ganism, the bounds of w^hose faculties are even beginning to be known. There may be several subliminal selves, or it may be rather a link of connection with other potencies behind it than a great organ in itself. In any case, if all this is due to the operation of Mrs. Verrall's underly- ing mind, it is entirely unique among our records. The narrative which I have attempted here to summarise, and which covers 65 pages of Proceedings, Part Ivii., is only one — though one of the best — of twenty- three cross-correspondences described in this volume, in addition to the eight which were described in Miss Johnson's paper on Mrs. Holland in Part Iv. The care shown over minutiae by Mr. Pid- Beyond the Borderline of Life 109 dington, and the perfect candour of his exposition, win the reader's confidence; his ingenuity in the tracking of allusions, and insight into the working of the frag- mentary mental operations of the trance personalities, is nothing less than delight- ful to those who care for intellectual athletics and like to see a mark neatly hit. If the curious reader wants to know what news of our life hereafter is vouch- safed by this revelation, the best answer is to exhort to patience and to be cautious in statement. ^^Myers" and "Hodgson" declare that they are very much more alive than they were on earth, that they are not really dreaming, that they would not desire to come back again, and that they are still, nevertheless, in possession of much at any rate of the memories and attachments of earth; they say that they are still almost as far as we are from the 110 Beyond the Borderline of Life innermost Presence and Counsel of God, but they confirm the claims and sanctions of the religious life. They state that a period of unconsciousness, varying in length, supervenes upon death — a period unusually prolonged in Myers's case; and that after a few years — say half a dozen — the spirit moves in its development too far from earth life to have any further communication with it. Doubtless there are numerous exceptions to this ; and we gather that Myers himself is voluntarily staying near us for the sake of the service of our faith. After giving in full the whole context of the communications received and critically analyzing them, the report states that they are undoubtedly all con- fluent parts of the complex answer de- sired to the question of the Greek words. The report continues: Beyond the Borderline of Life 111 ^^To sum up : In this concordant epi- sode of Mrs. Piper's trance and Mrs. Verrall's script the controlling influence in both cases claims to be one and the same personality, namely, Frederic Myers. To a question which could have been answered by Frederic Myers, this personality, Myers, gives various answers — all intelligent and all but one provably correct. Before Myers gives his first an- swer he shows knowledge of what his an- swer will be. Besides this, he shows that he knows that he had previously shown knowledge of his answer. One of the facts in his first answer cannot be proved to have been known to Frederic Myers, but there are good grounds for thinking that it might well have belonged to the great body of specialized and character- istic knowledge with which his mind was stocked. The facts involved in the re- 112 Beyond the Borderline of Life mainder of the answer given by Myers were all known to Frederic Myers, and they emerged in a manner which indi- cates that the intelligence responsible for their emergence was as intimately con- versant with the closing chapters of 'Hu- man Personality' as Frederick Myers, its author, must have been." This summing up is, in effect, an ad- mission that the communicator could not have been other than the discarnate intel- ligence of Frederic Myers. THE LATIN MESSAGE The ''Latin Message" incident 'was an- other remarkable test. A long Latin message was constructed and transmitted through Mrs. Piper. This message was worded in such an involved way that its translation was exceedingly difficult — Beyond the Borderline of Life 113 even with the help of a dictionary — by a person possessed of only a small knowl- edge of Latin. The object was to pre- vent the normal consciousness of Mrs. Piper, who knows no Latin, from affect- ing the result, and partly to test whether the purported spirit of Myers could dis- play any of the knowledge of Latin that the corporeal Frederic Myers had pos- sessed. The substance of this long, intricate message was a hope expressed by the in- vestigators that Myers would go on with his scheme of cross-correspondences and would give definite replies by dififerent mediums. As the last word of the first clause of the Latin message was given to Mrs. Piper — each word being spelt out, letter by letter — the clock struck 12. ^'At 12 o'clock on the same morning," the report states, ''Mrs. Verrall at Cam- 114 Beyond the Borderline of Life bridge sat down to write automatically, and the script then produced would form a most appropriate answer to the first clause of the first sentence of the Latin message." At a second sitting the second clause of the message was spelt out to Mrs. Piper, and at the identical time Mrs. Verrall at Cambridge wrote out auto- matically a reply which exactly corre- sponded. In answer to two more sections of the Latin message communicated through Mrs. Piper further exact replies came through Mrs. Verral. Precautions had been taken which made it absolutely certain thvat Mrs. Verrall could not have known of the nature or language of the questions. "This script of Mrs. Ver- rall's," says the report, "is undoubtedly in the style of Myers." An equally impressive test was that on Beyond the Borderline of Life 115 April 17, when Mrs. Piper in London automatically wrote out the word Than- atos (Greek for death). When Mrs. Holland's script, written at Calcutta on April 16, 7:30 P.M. Calcutta time (1:30 P.M. Greenwich time), was re- ceived in London it was found to contain exactly the same word, a trifle misspelled. On the night of April 29 Mrs. Verrall wrote an automatic script which in vari- ous ways referred to death. Very as- tounding coincidences, surely. CHAPTER IV MATERIALIZATION AND LEVITATION TT is the phenomena of materialization -"- and levitation which have most im- pressed the mass of scientists. Material- ization is the appearance of spirits in objective form, visible not only to the psychic but also to the non-psychic. Levitation in its strictest meaning is the raising or other movements of human bodies by supernormal agencies. It is often confused with telekinesis, which signifies the supernormal movements of inanimate objects such as tables, chairs, and the like. In materialization the resumption of the body or the appearance of the spirit 116 Beyond the Borderline of Life 117 in human form is not always entire. On occasions the full figure is perceived; in most instances only fragmentary parts are seen, the head and the face, or a hand. By their nature materialization and levi- tation are susceptible of greater and more direct material proof than other phases of physic phenomena, such as, for example, clairvoyance. Although a modern term, the fact of materialization is by no means new. Curiously worthy of mention is the changed attitude of science towards the popular superstitions; more than one of these have been confirmed by scientific research. In his notable work, ^'Mira- cles and Modern Spiritualism," Alfred Russell Wallace deals with various au- thenticated cases of apparitions. Three persons driving along an English road- way saw a woman's figure in white float- 118 Beyond the Borderline of Life ing above a hedge. If it was a halluci- nation of a subjective vision on their part, Wallace asks, how was it that the horse suddenly stopped and shook with fright? Dogs have often been known to cower in a state of pitiable terror when appar- ently no cause existed. Wallace narrates a number of instances. Crookes has written numerous ac- counts of phenomena which he investi- gated under strictly test conditions, with the most elaborate precautions against possible fraud. In his final extended re- port in 1874 to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, of which he was president, he dealt at great length with the phenomena of materiali- zation and levitation. He gave a clas- sification of thirteen distinct varieties of materializations that he had seen and Beyond the Borderline of Life 119 tested. Among these were luminous floating clouds, star-like points of light, the appearance of hands either self-lu- minous or observable by ordinary light, and the sight of phantom forms and faces. Many of these experiments took place in the presence of the mediums, Kate Fox, Florence Cook, the Rev. Stainton Moses, and that very extraor- dinary medium, D. D. Home. On one occasion, after Home had passed into a trance, Crookes tells, ''a beautifully formed hand rose up from an opening in the dining table and gave me a flower . . . This occurred in the light in my own room while I was hold- ing the medium's hands and feet." Crookes frequently saw phantom hands, and sometimes forms and faces. At times these materializations were solid 120 Beyond the Borderline of Life and life-like; at other times they had the appearance of nebulous clouds con- densed into corporeal forms. The most startling of the many mate- rializations witnessed by Crookes were the repeated materializations of a spirit form whom Miss Cook called Katie King. "Three separate times," writes Crookes, "did I carefully examine Miss Cook crouching before me, to be sure that I held a living woman, and three separate times did I turn the lamp to Katie and examine her with steadfast scrutiny until I had no doubt of her ob- jective reality." All of these experiments with these various mediums were accompanied by levitations and telekinesis. It was only necessary, Crookes reported, for Katie Fox to place her hand on any substance and "instantly thuds would be heard like Beyond the Borderline of Life 121 a triple pulsation." Crookes heard a great variety of sounds which he and his fellow-investigators declared could not have been produced by human causes. On one occasion a bell he had left in a room which he had carefully locked, came tinkling into the room in which he and Miss Fox were. How did it get there? It must have been transported through solid walls by invisible mind and power. No other explanation could be found. On another occasion at a sitting with Home other singular manifestations hap- pened. While Home was sitting a con- siderable distance away in a trance, Crookes' chair was twisted partly round and rose from the floor. A chair was seen by all present to move slowly up to the table from a far corner. A heavy dining table rose five feet from the floor. 122 Beyond the Borderline of Life These and many other phenomena took place, according to Crookes, "under spe- cially prearranged conditions which ren- dered trickery impossible." But the most astonishing phenomena was Home's levitation. Crookes notes at least a hun- dred instances, witnessed by a large as- semblage, of Home's rising in the air. One day when in a trance he floated upward, then through a window, out over an intervening space seventy feet from the ground, and then through another window which was opened by some unknown force. At about the same time, Alfred Russell Wallace was carrying on similar experi- ments, many of which he describes in his work on the subject. Likewise was Zollner, in Leipzic, with the American medium, Slade. Not to dwell upon the great number of phenomena witnessed Beyond the Borderline of Life 123 by these scientists and the repeated in- stances brought to the world's attention by the British Society for Psychical Re- search, it is sufficient to say that from thence on for many years the fiercest controversy raged in the scientific world as to the reality of these phenomena. Charges of fraud and imposition were frequent; the ''confession" extorted from Margaret Fox, when she was physically, mentally, and morally sunk in dissipa- tion, and no longer in a balanced condi- tion, was made much of. The attitude of the great majority of scientific men was one of thinly disguised prejudice and stubborn opposition. The slowly growing recognition of the facts has de- veloped into an almost unanimous con- viction. CHAPTER V EUSAPIA PALADINO TN Italy and France the investigation -** of psychic phenomena has taken on so great an impetus because the savants there have had unrestricted opportunities for studying the phenomena manifesting through those exceptional native me- diums, Eusapia Paladino and Amedee Zuccharini. Every one of the phenom- ena seen and recorded by Crookes, Wal- lace, Lodge, and ZoUner has been again and again witnessed by several dozen of the most famous Italian and French scientists recently. Before referring to the Paladino man- ifestations a brief description of her will 124 Beyond the Borderline of Life 125 be appropriate. She is now about fifty- five years old. Born in an Italian village of peasant parents, she was left an or- phan, and was taken care of by the vil- lagers. A fall she experienced when a year old left a depression in her head. This is the famous ^^hole," from which when she is in a state of trance a cold breeze is said to issue. Taken to Naples when a girl by a native of the village, she did household work, but was considered so incorrigibly lazy that she was turned out within a year. She was given shelter by a family at home. Friends called one night and in a spirit of jest began to speak of tables that danced and gave raps. Jokingly they proposed that the circle try it. The group had not been seated ten minutes before tables began to rise, chairs dance, curtains swell, glasses and bottles move about, and bells ring. 126 Beyond the Borderline of Life This incident was the discovery of her mediumistic powers. Subsequently a saleswoman in Naples, she had to give up the work, so great were the scientific and lay demands upon her time, as soon as her mediumistic powers became known. She has given seances in Paris, Toulon, Milan, Naples, Genoa, St. Petersburg, Moscow, and many other cities. Invited to Paris by the Institute Psychologique, she was experimented upon by Camille Flammarion, Curie, the discoverer of radium; Richet, Janet, and other conspicuous French scientists. At Toulon, Lodge carried on a series of investigations. All of the assembled scientists at these experiments were deeply impressed. Curie, in particular, was astounded. "These experiments,'' commented Beyond the Borderline of Life 127 Flammarion, on Curie's attitude, ^Vere to him a new chapter of the great book of nature, and he was also convinced that there are hidden forces, to the investiga- tion of which it is not unscientific to de- vote oneself." The accounts of Morselli, Botazzi, Bozzano, and others of this group of scientists, deal, in sober, restrained, sci- entific terminology, with the many phe- nomena they observed. In his mono- graph just published ''Eusapia Paladino and the Genuineness of Her Phenom- ena," Morselli groups the manifestations of materialization witnessed by him and his colleagues during thirty separate sit- tings into nine classes and thirty-nine varieties. At these seances, he says, touching, feeling, and grasping by in- visible hands form very common phe- 128 Beyond the Borderline of Life nomena; the appearances are seen either in the dark, in a faint light, or a red light. ''They are really human hands," he goes on, "which touch, press, grasp, pull, push, pat lightly, strike, pull the sitters' beards or hair, take off their spectacles, etc." Heads, arms, shoulders, and faces were frequently seen. This, it should be noted, is precisely the same set of phe- nomena noted long before by Wal- lace, Lodge, Crookes, and ZoUner. Re- ferring to the phantom hands, Morselli says: ''On grasping them we felt the im- pression of hands dissolving away, as though composed of semi-fluid sub- stance." Appearances of forms were very numerous. "These forms," Mor- selli relates, "advance toward the sitters, touch and feel them, embrace, grasp, draw them nearer or push them away, Beyond the Borderline of Life 129 caress and kiss them, with all the move- ments of living and real persons." Levitations and telekinetic movements v^ere also extremely frequent and strik- ing. Morselli says that he has felt oscil- lations and movements of the table with his own hands, and has also seen them hundreds of times. Of movements and beatings of the table, which could be in- terpreted into distinct messages, there were a great multitude. For instance, two blows by the unseen intelligences meant ^^no," and three "yes." Many times, Morselli, Botazzi, Foa, and their collaborators record, the table rose in the air and floated. This phenomenon was photographed a number of times. ''Several times," says Morselli, ''I was pulled violently on my chair back in the room. Sometimes we felt our chairs pulled from us." 130 Beyond the Borderline of Life At one of the sittings a '^barlock" typewriter weighing thirty pounds was transported by invisible hands from a little table in a far corner of the room and deposited on a large table in front of Morselli. One of the most amazing of the phe- nomena was the levitation of Eusapia Paladino together with her chair. The combined report of the assembled scien- tists says: ^'Suddenly Professors Mor- selli and Porro perceived that Eusapia had been raised, along with her chair, and carried up to a level above that of the surface of the table, upon which she redescended in such a way that her feet and the two front legs of the chair rested on the surface of the table, which was partially broken. Meanwhile the medi- um moaned as if intensely frightened and asked to be put back with her chair on Beyond the Borderline of Life 131 the floor. But almost instantly she was carried up again with the chair, and this levitation lasted for some seconds, so that M. de Albertis and Professor Porro, without preconcerted arrangement and with completely simultaneous thought, succeeded in passing their hands under the feet of the medium and of the chair. Shortly afterwards, Eusapia, still seated redescended on to the table ; she was held by those to right and left of her; the chair was pushed or thrown down back- wards on the floor, and the medium, seized by several of those present, whilst still moaning, was carried to the floor and seated again in her place." Porro insists that the levitation was of such a nature that the result could not have possibly been brought about by artifice. ^'Eusapia," he says, "was ac- tually drawn up and sustained in a posi- 132 Beyond the Borderline of Life tion absolutely contrary to static laws, by an invisible force, inexplicable in the present state of our knowledge of phys- ics." At another sitting held at the house of Count Verdun, in Turin, at which Foa, Mosso, Aggazoti, and other scientists were present, a seventeen-pound table rose in the air, floated, descended, and then, to the utter mystification of the be- holders was torn to pieces by invisible hands before their eyes. This took place in a strong red light; every movement could be followed. These are a very few of the hundreds of phenomena noted by the assembled scientists. At all of the sittings Eusapia Paladino's hands and feet were tightly held, and sometimes bound with strong cords. Specially devised scientific ap- paratus was also installed in the room Beyond the Borderline of Life 133 to note any possible fraud. Morselli, regarding these phenomena, observes that they are the most marvelous of all mediumistic phenomena, because they seem to transcend the ordinary physical laws, and are therefore the most liable to suspicion, and require the greatest evi- dence for proof. The general public which hears them described and cannot see them in action, does not believe them. It looks upon them as gross frauds or illusions of judgment. ''This was my state of mind for years," Morselli points out. "But now I am convinced that nearly all of these phe- nomena are genuine." CHAPTER VI MUNSTERBERG AND PALADINO AVERY remarkable example of the credulity of the incredulous is the universal acclaim with which the so- called expose of Eusapia Paladino by Professor Hugo Miinsterberg has been received. The publishers of this volume, being personally acquainted with Mr. Hereward Carrington, had doubts as to the accuracy of the report. They be- lieve, as Professor Miinsterberg stated in his article in The Metropolitan Mag- azine, that Mr. Carrington is an honest investigator and wrote to him for his ex- planation. Mr. Carrington had been sent to Italy by the British Society for 134 Beyond the Borderline of Life 135 Psychical Research to investigate the so- called phenomena by Paladino. He is an expert prestidigitateur; he has been as- sociated with Professor Hyslop for some time in the investigation of psychical phenomena and he was well equipped for the task which he undertook. His ex- perience was such that he was forced to agree with the many other scientists who believe that the phenomena by Paladino cannot be explained by fraud. In order that American psychologists might have an opportunity to pass judgment on the phenomena he arranged with Paladino to come to the United States. It was his original intention to limit her audiences to scientific investigators of psychical phenomena. When Paladino landed, Mr. Carrington announced that if it were possible, he would keep her away from all newspaper men. The agents of the press, 136 Beyond the Borderline of Life however, were very persistent in their hunt for her and he finally arranged to give a free seance before newspaper rep- resentatives. There was probably not a more indig- nant man in the world than Mr. Car- rington when Professor Miinsterberg's article appeared in the Metropolitan Magazine and he had every reason to be indignant. The last he had heard from Professor Miinsterberg was when the Professor had left the seance. He had been invited by Mr. Carrington to inves- tigate Paladino so that when the scientific series commenced he would have a knowl- edge of the facts to be investigated. In leaving, Professor Miinsterberg had ex- pressed himself as very much impressed with the phenomena; he made no men- tion of any fraud; on the contrary he Beyond the Borderline of Life 137 said that he had a feeling of faintness which he gave as his reason for leaving. The publishers submitted these claims to Professor Miinsterberg and advised him that they were about to publish them in this book. At the same time he was given the opportunity to reply. He thanked the publishers for the courtesy, but said that he had nothing to add to what he had already written. Those who are acquainted with all the facts in the case agree that Professor Miinsterberg has said either too much or too little in this case, for his own reputation. If, as he stated, he believed Mr. Car- rington to be honest; if he believed that Mr. Carrington was really seeking for an honest explanation of the Paladino phenomena, then it would have been courteous to have apprised him of his 138 Beyond the Borderline of Life suspicions rather than to sell them to a magazine in the form of a sensational article, unsupported by anything but Professor M (ins terb erg's own word and lacking consistency even in its own state- ments. That his statements are not con- sistent will, we think, be conceded by every reader of Mr. Carrington's REPLY TO PROFESSOR MUNSTERBERG It is probable that Professor Miinster- berg's article in the February Metro- politan Magazine has proved to many thousands of persons in America that Eusapia Paladino is nothing more than a common fraud; that her trickery is now ^'exposed," and that all attempt at scientific investigation must, of course, be dropped immediately. Nothing of the sort, however, has occurred. If Prof. Miinsterberg's article be examined in de- Beyond the Borderline of Life 139 tail, it will be found to be full of self- evident contradictions. (i) Prof. Miinsterberg admits that he himself is incompetent to investigate a case of this character; yet he has under- taken to decide upon the case after two sittings, — ^when his scientific colleagues in Europe (after studying her for twenty years) have decided that the majority of the phenomena are genuine — and this not after a mere cursory examination, but after having thoroughly tested the medium w^ith ingenious mechanical de- vices of all kinds. (2) Prof. Miinsterberg states that he believes Eusapia to be unconscious of the fraud she herself produces, yet, a little later on in his paper, he accuses her of having prepared an ingenious mechan- ical device, by means of which Eusapia 140 Beyond the Borderline of Life could cause cold air to blow from a cer- tain point on her scalp, beneath her hair, etc. These two statements do not seem to agree. It is, of course, preposterous to suppose for a moment that such a con- trivance (including metal tubes running up her neck, beneath her hair, etc.), could have been overlooked for years by in- vestigators who were always on the look- out for just such a contrivance. (3) Prof. Miinsterberg admits at the beginning of his article that he saw cer- tain movements of the table in full light that he could not account for; yet, at its conclusion, he says that all Paladino's phenomena are fraud and trickery and nothing else. Again his statements do not seem to agree! (4) Prof. Miinsterberg tells us that he has always been interested in abnormal psychology and in hysteria. In another Beyond the Borderline of Life 141 place, he tells us that Eusapia presents evidences of hysteria and of a split per- sonality; yet finally he tells us that he will have nothing more to do v^ith her. One vs^ould be tempted to ask, why? — since on his own showing this should be a case after his own heart. (5) As to the "foot grabbing inci- dent," this is really the only definite point made in Prof. Munsterberg's whole article, and is due largely to an accident. Earlier in the evening, Eusapia had asked her sitters whether they wished to tie her feet with rope, and they had replied that they did not. If only this had been done, this famous incident would never have happened. Then what would have be- come of Prof. Miinsterberg? If only Eusapia had been tied! But she was not, and the seance progressed. It is asserted that, at a certain moment, Eusapia's left 142 Beyond the Borderline of Life foot was grasped by one of the sitters, lying upon the floor, partly within the cabinet, and hidden from Eusapia by the darkness, and by the cabinet curtain, which had blown out over him. Granting the strict accuracy of this ac- count, what has been proved? Probably that Eusapia attempted to produce phe- nomena fraudulently, with a free mem- ber. Every group of sitters in turn (our- selves included) knows very well that she will resort to such devices if she is al- lowed to do so; and Eusapia frequently says to her sitters, ^'Hold me tight, con- trol me well, for if you do not I shall probably attempt to produce phenomena myself in a more or less automatic man- ner." What could be fairer than this? Eusapia warns her sitters beforehand that she has this tendency to cheat in her Beyond the Borderline of Life 143 trance-like condition, if she is not pre- vented from doing so. For the same reason, doubtless, she asked to be tied. It is quite possible, also, that Eusapia was merely kicking to and fro with her foot under her own chair, as she often does when distant phenomena are pro- duced, — sympathetic muscular twitch- ings which have often been observed when it was perfectly evident that there was no contact possible between the medium's body and the object moved. Further, the shorthand report of this seance shows us that, at the time this foot was grabbed, both Eusapia's knees were being held by the controller on the right, while Professor Miinsterberg himself was holding both her hands. This being so, I ask, how far can anyone under such circumstances, reach backward with 144i Beyond the Borderline of Life either foot, without being detected or without displacing the knees that are be- ing held? Prof. Miinsterberg asserts that the touches upon his arm and side were pro- duced by the toes of Eusapia's left foot. He had not the audacity to say that they were produced by the medium's head — ■ (which was perfectly visible) nor by her hands — both of which he himself was holding at the time ; nor by any mechan- ical contrivance; and his only recourse was to assert (without the slightest shadow of proof) that the touches were produced by the toes of her left foot. Apart from the difficulties presented by the fact that these touches were experi- enced when both Eusapia's knees were held under the table; apart from the fact that they have often been experienced when Eusapia's feet were tied with Beyond the Borderline of Life 145 rope, to the floor, to her chair, or to the feet of her controllers; apart from the fact that it has often been sufficiently light to see that Eusapia did nothing of the kind; apart from the fact that Eu- sapia would have had to slip her foot out of her shoe, in order to produce these touches — while, as a matter of fact, her high laced shoe was not undone — there is this other trifling difficulty in accepting Prof. Miinsterberg's explanation of the facts: that, a minute or two after this "foot grabbing" episode, Eusapia placed her left foot and leg across Prof. Miins- terberg's knees (as the stenographic record shows) and that under these con- ditions, Professor Miinsterberg was again touched on the left arm and side — he still holding both the medium's hands, and her head still being clearly visible. If anyone persists in believing, in face 14f6 Beyond the Borderline of Life of this evidence, that Eusapia produced the touches in the manner postulated by Professor Miinsterberg, there is, of course, nothing more to be said — except, perhaps, that we might, in common hon- esty, ask him to repeat the phenomena under the same conditions, or to find a contortionist who, with his right foot, can touch the side of a person sitting on his left, his knees being held beneath the table ! Those who have attended seances with Eusapia Paladino will pay, of course, not the slightest attention to Professor Muns- terberg's article, or to the absurd sug- gestions which it contains, but it is that vast bulk of the American public who have not attended seances, that will be in- fluenced by an article of this character. Popular sentiment being all on his side, it is impossible to offset the effects of such Beyond the Borderline of Life 147 an attack by a mere counter-argument. One can but show that the explanations offered do not explain, and that the state- ments contained in the article do not agree with one another, or, in many cases, coincide with actual fact. Even if fraud were clearly proven on this occasion, what would have been established? Merely that Eusapia cheats whenever she can (which all her investigators have known all the time) and that this one phenomenon must consequently be dis- carded as evidence of any supernormal power. It does not in any way prove that the rest of her phenomena are fraud- ulent, or that the case must be rejected in toto — merely on the strength of this one fact. Let us examine the case as a whole — bearing in mind all the phenomena that have been presented, not only those occurring during her American visit, but 148 Beyond the Borderline of Life those in the past; and when this has been done, I think that any fair-minded critic will realize that Professor Miinsterberg's so-called ^'expose" is far from being such in reality; that it presents evidence of no new form of trickery, and that the case is as far from being ''explained away" or shown to be due to simple fraud as it has ever been. Indeed, the American sit- tings may be said to have added much to- wards proving the supernormal char- acter of these manifestations. This, I think, the evidence, when presented, will show. Hereward Carrington. CHAPTER VII BOTTAZZI'S EXPERIENCE WITH PALADINO PROFESSOR Filippo Bottazzi, Di- rector of the Institute of Physiology of the Royal University of Naples, in an article entitled ^'In the Unexplored Re- gions of Human Biology" in the Revista d'ltalia, gives a detailed account of seven seances with Eusapia Paladino. These took place in the laboratory of the Institute under the strictest scrutiny. None of Paladino's friends were present and she submitted herself to every de- mand of the investigators. Mechanical devices, located in the adjoining room and connected by electricity, recorded the pressing down of a telegraph key and the ticks of the instrument. Professor 149 150 Beyond the Borderline of Life Bottazzi admits the existence of the phe- nomena but does not accept the spiritistic hypothesis as the explanation of the same. He thinks that the medium has the power of forming fluidic appendeci or arms which duplicate the movements of the medium's real arms. A translation of parts of two of the sittings is here given and also Professor Bottazzi's de- fense of those who believe in the reality of the Paladino phenomena. '^Galeotti, Scarpa and I had agreed that at this sitting we must discover any fraud if there were any, and eliminate every doubt from our minds. On this account, we had placed all the objects in the cabinet within reach of Paladino's hands, and a lamp with which to illumi- nate the interior at the opportune mo- ment. Galeotti and I were in charge of Beyond the Borderline of Life 151 the arms of the medium for almost the whole of the sitting and we were deter- mined that nothing should be substituted for them. Scarpa assumed the responsi- bility of leaving from time to time the ring of sitters to place himself at the point at which he thought he could exer- cise the greatest vigilance. I placed my- self at the left of Paladino (she is left- handed and works by preference with the left hand) and I did not separate my- self from her for one single instant. Galeotti was at the right. Towards the middle of the sitting, Pal- adino, as if she understood our sus- picions, called Scarpa near to her. He went, and placed himself between me and the medium and passed one arm around her back, redoubling in this way, the watchfulness on the left side, where there was the most danger of the hands being 152 Beyond the Borderline of Life freed. The sitting began at nine o'clock precisely. Eusapia was in good humor. DeAmicis was a little late. He arrived almost at the moment when John King revealed his presence. We invited the table to salute the newcomer. Suddenly it began to move, rose up, struck blows upon the floor and moving up towards him, pushed him, with little courtesy backwards. THE MANDOLIN EPISODE The mandolin is at first touched and then strummed. Eusapia, seconding a request from DeAmicis, wishes to take it and put it upon the table and com- mences with her shoulder, with the arm and the left hand, to make a slight move- ment that I notice and follow diligently, similar to those which the same arm would have made had it been free and Beyond the Borderline of Life 153 not able to really grasp the instrument, which was situated on the left side of her. In the meantime, Scarpa, coming close to me, placed himself directly behind the back of my chair and distinctly saw the mandolin rise, fall back again, rise again WITHOUT ANY HANDS TOUCHING IT, with light enough for us to discern every movement of Paladino's arms. Paladino said to me, bearing my right arm with her left towards the floor in the direction of the mandolin, 'Let us take it — help me,' and strove to grasp and raise it. In the meantime, the mandolin, cov- ered by the curtains, rose a little from the floor but fell down again, and Eusapia exclaimed in her dialect with visible anguish, 'It has passed away from me,' but the failure seemed to stimulate her. Again she attempted to raise it, but with- 154 Beyond the Borderline of Life out success, and as it pained me to see her, I tried to persuade her to give up these vain attempts to place the instru- ment upon the table; but she seemed to be obsessed by this idea and continued to strive without paying any attention to me. It is absolutely necessary to have had Paladino's fingers in one's hand, as I had them that evening, to convince oneself how the rising and the falling of the man- dolin to the floor, the playing of the strings, etc., all are synchronous with the very delicate movements of her fingers, with the pulling and the pushing of the hand of the medium as if it were di- rected by a will conscious of the effect to be obtained. They were not irreg- ular, impulsive, disordered movements. They were precise and corresponded with those of a finger, or fingers ; identical with those which it is customary for one to Beyond the Borderline of Life 155 make who wishes the strings to vibrate with precision and delicacy. There were two of us with the gaze fixed upon the mandolin, Scarpa and I, and we can affirm with certainty that the instrument, well lighted by the lamp above it, was not touched by the visible hands of Eusa- pia that were, at least, sixty centimeters from it, but that it moved by itself, as if by enchantment it had been furnished with organs of motion; and it seemed as we looked at it, as if it were the carcass of some monstrous reptile to which life had returned. It is impossible to de- scribe the impression made upon one who sees an inanimate object move, AND MOVE NOT FOR A MOMENT ONLY, BUT FOR MANY MINUTES CONTINUOUSLY, move with- out anyone touching it, under the influ- ence of a mysterious force, while all is silence around, among the other immo- 156 Beyond the Borderline of Life bile objects. Finally the mandolin is left in peace. Paladino was very much dissatisfied with it. I, no. Because the simple moving of the mandolin would have deprived us of the long and minute examination which we were able to make of the correspondence between the in- tentional movements of the medium and the movements of the objects upon which were applied her invisible power. ****** Eusapia opened my right hand and spread out the three middle fingers and pressing them down, and rubbing upon the table with the fleshy part underneath said to me in a low voice, 'How hard it is. What is it?' I did not understand, and she, 'There upon the chair; what is it?' 'It is chalk,' I hastened to reply» 'Make an impression of the face.' 'No,' she replied, 'it is hard; it is too Beyond the Borderline of Life 157 hard; take it away.' 'Also the chair?' I asked. 'No, leave the chair.' Some- body left the chair for a moment to sat- isfy Eusapia's desire, looked upon the plate, and saw the impression of the three fingers. At a more accurate examina- tion made the following day, we saw that the three imprints seemed to be made by the sliding of the three fingers. Evidently this corresponded to the analo- gous moving of Paladino's left hand pressed upon my fingers upon the table. Now, Eusapia commenced to "work" upon the chair freed from the weight of the plate. She placed her left foot against my right, and the right against the left of Galeotti and made a pushing movement. The chair moved, came up to the table and began to rise. Behold it mounting up on the table with the back inclined towards the front, covered in 158 Beyond the Borderline of Life part by the curtain; after many trials it mounted on top. We all exclaimed in chorus, ^Bravo, bravo!' Some one asked, ^Shall we carry it away?' ^No, no,' replied Eusapia. ^Leave me the chair.' While the chair was upon the table, other phenomena happened which I will describe. At a certain movement, however, the chair began to move again, slid towards the angle of the table that was between me and Paladino and fell to the floor in the same direction, upon the mandolin., Later, Scarpa used it with- out objection from Paladino. It seemed as if she had forgotten it. It is singular, however, that suddenly after any object is borne upon the table, Eusapia is angry and seems to suffer if anyone touches it or tries to carry it away, as if it were a part of herself, or as if to the object, for a Beyond the Borderline of Life 159 certain time, there adhered some part of her very sensitive body. THE ELECTRIC SWITCH But now the mediumistic appendici of Eusapia penetrate into the interior of the cabinet after exercising themselves upon the objects on the outside and com- mence the work which we hear, but which we cannot see. I beg all not to distract the medium with demands for touchings, apparitions, etc., but to concentrate their desire and will upon the things alone that I ask to have done. The medium throws away the trumpet, the brush, the ebony cane, which fall upon the floor, and which after being moved about are left in peace. The cord of the inside lamp which had fallen to the floor when the chair was borne upon 160 Beyond the Borderline of Life the table, and was then hung upon the back of Galeotti's chair is now drawn from the interior of the cabinet and then thrown with the electric switch, violently upon the table. I hasten to beg that no one will touch it, but I do not explain that pressing it will light a lamp in the cabinet, something which is only known to Galeotti, Scarpa and myself. The electric switch is thrown upon the floor. Eusapia is in a state of extraordinary tension; she looks vacantly into space as if she were searching for something which she cannot find. Her attitude is that of one who, blindfolded, gropes with the hands into space to find the object for which one is looking. At a certain mo- ment, Eusapia takes the index finger of my right hand that has almost the same form as the electric switch, presses it with her finger and, behold, a ray of light Beyond the Borderline of Life 161 illumines the room from the inside of the mediumistic cabinet, and an exclamation of content escapes from the mouth of Eusapia. It is easier to imagine than to describe the astonishment of those who could not understand that which had happened. I exclaimed, 'Bravo, bravo! Do it again.' And the others, 'Bravo what? What do you mean?' 'What has she done?' And I explain that the electric switch thrown upon the table is connected with an electric lamp, placed high in the cabinet; that Eusapia, with one of her invisible hands has searched and then found the electric switch after having thrown it again away from the table, and has pressed with that hand, while with the finger of the visible hand she pressed my index finger and has thus turned on the light which has filled them with wonder." l62 Beyond the Borderline of Life SEVENTH, SITTING ^'In the usual room of the physiological library at 9 o'clock there were present, Professors Bottazzi, Galeotti and Scarpa, and beside Mrs. Bottazzi, Dr. Gaetano Jappelli, professor in charge of technical physiology in this university and coadju- tor in the Institute of Physiology, and Dr. Gennaro d'Errico, coadjutor in the same Institute. The mediumistic cabinet is the same as in the 7th sitting. Upon the table in the inside, are to be found, among other objects, a trumpet, a vase of flowers, a telegraph key, etc. In the room, a photographic camera is pointed at the mediumistic table, and a bag of magnesia is placed so that at a certain moment, touching an electric but- Beyond the Borderline of Life 163 ton will make red hot a platinum wire in the middle of the powder and produce a flash. We have photographed in this way two small risings of the table together with the people forming the chain. Two iron rings are fixed in the floor at the side of the two table legs nearest the medium; two very strong ribbons lead from the rings and above are wound around and sealed to Eusapia's wrist, each in a double knot. Upon each knot of the ribbons there is placed a lead seal, in the same way in which are sealed the cords of a sack or of the doors of a rail- road car. The sealing is done in the presence of all of us. The seal bears on one side, the letters M E^ and on the other side, the word Napoli. Poor Eu- sapia allows herself to be tied like a 164) Beyond the Borderline of Life criminal, not without protesting that she does it in honor of science, in the full security of her own honesty. We had arranged that the length of the ribbons should be such that in what- ever position her hands should be placed, they would never be able to reach any of the objects placed in the cabinet. Here is the distance measured before the commencement of the sitting: To the right of Paladino: Distance from the right ring to Eu- sapia's wrist m. 1.07. Distance from the right ring to the vase of flowers m. 1.47. Distance from the right ring to the trumpet m. 1.50. To the left: Distance from the left ring to Eu- sapia's wrist m. 1.20. Beyond the Borderline of Life 165 Distance from the left ring to the vase of flowers m. 1.89. Distance from the left ring to the trumpet m. 180. As can be seen, the objects on the right were distant not less than 40 centimeters (15.7 inches) and on the left they were farther still from Eusapia's hand. At the greatest stretching of the two ribbons, and of Eusapia's fingers, and in the most fatal position, the fingers alone of the right hand could just touch with the ends the edge of the inside table, which was securely fastened to the wall, and were distant at least 12 centimeters (4.7 inches) from the vase of flowers and the trumpet. The ribbons could not be stretched. No matter how much we tried, we could not stretch them any ap- preciable length. 166 Beyond the Borderline of Life At the end of the sitting we all veri- fied before cutting the seals at each of Eusapia's wrists, that the knots and the four lead seals were intact. Japelli as- sured himself that the loops were so tight that it would not be possible to get the hands through them. Omitting to describe the carrying to the outside table of a bottle full of water, two chairs (twice, etc.), the many touchings, the tappings, the apparitions of hands, of colossal fists in the midst of us, I will record especially three phenomena that were, for us, the most important. I. The hands and feet of Eusapia (even though it was not necessary) were in the custody of, the left of Professor Japelli, the right of Mrs. Bottazzi, who from time to time testified to the position and the movements of the limbs of the medium. I was on the right of my wife. Beyond the Borderline of Life 167 Eusapia said to me, 'Extend your arm around the back of your wife.' I obey, and behold, I feel coming out from the curtain, the trumpet, which I recognize immediately by the touch. I grasp it and put it upon the table. 2. Later, without any announcement, there was felt a friction of the curtain on the side corresponding to the right of Eusapia; the curtain is moved a little, while from the same side is advanced the vase of flowers. As the two custodians (Mrs. Bottazzi and Dr. d'Errico) have been ordered not to break the contact with the hands of Eusapia for any reason whatsoever, I myself, who am the one in the chain nearest to that point, extend my right hand and grasp the vase of flowers and put it upon the table without any water being spilled. The trumpet and the vase of flowers, l68 Beyond the Borderline of Life as I have said, were at such a distance that the hands of Eusapia could not even touch them. The objects being at a dis- tance of lo or 30 or 50 centimeters from the visible hand of the medium amounts to nothing. That which is of impor- tance is that it was absolutely impossible that she could reach them. 3. Meanwhile, Galeotti, who had con- trol of Eusapia's right hand, distinctly saw the disappearance of her upper right arm. ^Behold,' he said, *I see two left arms, identically the same. The one arm is upon the table and is that of which Mrs. Bottazzi has hold of the hand. The other seems to sprout out from the shoulder; comes up to him, touches him and then returns to incorporate itself in Eusapia's body, disappearing. It is not an hallucination. I am awake. I am Beyond the Borderline of Life 169 entirely conscious of two visible sensa- tions which I prove while Mrs. Bottazzi says that she is touched.' Some other objects, among them the telegraph key and a Marcy receiver, were not touched, although we have insisted strongly, but have not secured the graphic tracings ; but upon this, I should add a few words. LIMIT TO EUSAPIA'S POWERS Eusapia repeatedly said it was impos- sible to touch them, because they were placed too far away, which is true. Perhaps because of the intimacy in which she found herself with all present, she made confessions which she had never made before. I accent the pro- longation of her arms by means of which she touches, moves, and bears away the different objects and leave to be under- 170 Beyond the Borderline of Life Stood that these prolongations are more or less great, according as during the sit- ting, the "fluid" is more or less plentiful. That is that mysterious "mediumistic power" that she feels in herself and of which she is confusedly cognizant. At the end of the first sitting, I had an intuition that the sphere of action of the medium had certain limits outside of which any movable phenomena is im- possible, and that such limits vary. It may be said at the present time, that the objects which were distant more than 20 or 30 or a few more centimeters from the extreme ends of Eusapia's limbs, could not be touched or moved by her. It seems that at one time her medium- istic power was much stronger, but, as I have said, these last few years it has be- Beyond the Borderline of Life 171 come weaker and, perhaps, it will not be long before it will be entirely spent. I know very well that in spite of the distance referred to by me, some of the more petulant will say: 'See, Paladino took only the objects which were near her. Those farthest away she has not touched. Who knows but what she succeeded in some way in grasping the first in spite of the fasten- ings at her wrists.'* But how? The bracelet made of ribbon around the right wrist was so tight as not to allow anything to be placed under it, at least the space was not more than a centimeter. This was proven before and after the sitting. We placed ourselves, one after the other, in the identical posi- tion of Eusapia and were able to con- vince ourselves that in the most favorable 172 Beyond the Borderline of Life position of the wrists and of the fingers and allowing the ribbon the greatest pos- sible tension, we could not reach farther than the edge of the table. And besides it was not necessary only to touch the objects; to bear them towards us, it was necessary to grasp them. A large glass, full of water, is not borne away without spilling a drop of water, or a flower, with the ends of two fingers. This under- stood, the reasons alleged by Eusapia to justify her in the impossibility in which she found herself to touch the objects farthest away with her mediumistic ap- pendeci, ought not to be taken as a vulgar pretext, but they have the same value as those made by me in the determinism of mediumistic phenomena. Let us confess, then, that the results of this sitting have made a very favorable impression, because they have driven Beyond the Borderline of Life 173 out the last trace of doubt or uncertainty in regard to the reality of said phenom- ena. The surety which we have acquired is of the same order as that which, daily, we acquire of the reality of the natural phenomena which we investigate, physi- cal, chemical or physiological. Now, to the incredulous, there only re- mains to accuse us ourselves of fraud and trickery. I should not be very much surprised if some, more bold and pre- tentious than the others, should dare to hurl such an accusation, but for that it would not disturb in the least the seren- ity of our minds." CHAPTER VIII BOTTAZZI'S DEFENCE OF PALADINO 4 4TT is thoroughly unfortunate that in J^ this kind of phenomena the exposi- tion of observed facts cannot be simple, plain and objective, but that they inevita- bly must assume a polemic character or a personal one. The reason lies in the ex- traordinary character of the phenomena themselves, and in the fact that the human mind is more conservative than progres- sive, where every new idea, that differs too much from the ordinary, disturbs and provokes a reaction as much more strong as is extraordinary the idea that tries to penetrate and take root among others that do not recognize it either as a 174 Beyond the Borderline of Life 175 brother or a sister. To this reaction, which certainly takes place among all those who see mediumistic phenomena, there is added in each observer, different ethical and sentimental motives, which contribute strongly to shape their opinion and judgment upon the same phenomena, to say nothing of their attitude towards other observers. In respect to medium- istic phenomena, the great majority of cultivated people is composed of those who have never seen anything. Medi- ums are much more scarce than tricksters and prestidigitateurs of all kinds, and they do not work upon the platform. For this reason, it is given to few to assist at real mediumistic sittings. Naturally, that contributes not a little to surround the phenomena with mystery and to place them in a sinister light; but this is not the fault of the medium. I should say 176 Beyond the Borderline of Life that it was rather the fault of the best prestidigitateurs who undertake to pro- duce mediumistic phenomena if these be only tricks, vulgar tricks, as many peo- ple think. Is it possible that a presti- digitateur, who amazes thousands of peo- ple, is not capable of raising a table or making a chair move in a way to make people believe they rise up and walk of themselves. The truth is, that more than one has tried it, and more than one has been discovered in fraud; and on the other side, a famous, ''honest" prestidigi- tateur, after having been present at ''hon- est" mediumistic sittings, had to confess that he could not reproduce those phe- nomena. These, in fact, or at least some of them, are ordinarily different from those of the phenomena with which jug- glers entertain the public. What those "who have never seen" understand to be Beyond the Borderline of Life 177 mediumistic phenomena is a matter of indifference. Those ''that have seen" can then be divided into tv^o groups; those who, from these sittings, bring away the belief that everything is trickery, vulgar trick- ery (this is a favorite expression, with a very strong accent upon the vulgar), and they are the few. The others, and they are the many, are those who, not having been able to discover any fraud, in spite of the most rigorous vigilance, and being certain of having experienced during the sittings, real sensations (visible, audi- ble, tactile), and not illusion and hal- lucination, conclude simply that the said mediumistic phenomena are marvelous, worthy not only of consideration, but of study. Now, it is worth the trouble to investi- gate, how of two people, both estimable 178 Beyond the Borderline of Life and cultivated, who assist at the same sittings and not at different ones, one ac- quires a conviction in one sense and the other in an opposite one. Let us see. If we were talking of different sittings, which is more than ordinarily the case, the question is more simple. Every bio- logical phenomenon has a complex de- terminism, and upon the manner of manifesting itself, influences not alone the exterior conditions, but besides and above all the interior condition of the living organism. Now, it is impossible that these conditions should be identical in every experiment. Furthermore, it is impossible even to obtain identical re- sults from experiments which seem to have been made under the same condi- tions. Let us take one example. You stimulate with an electric current the vago nerve and observe the function of Beyond the Borderline of Life 179 the heart, an organ which, for the regu- larity of its workings, has the most re- semblance to the regularity of a machine. The normal effect of the stimulation is the arrest of the cardiac movements, but the cases are not rare, in which only rarity of beating is obtained, or the diminution of the force of each beat without arrest, and in whichever case, after stimulating the nerve, the heart which beats weakly or slowly, or does not beat at all, returns in a little while to beat rhythmically. One who assisted at a similar experiment, and is ignorant of physiology, should he read in a treat- ise on this subject under the chapter ^'En- ervation of the Heart," that the stimula- tion of the vago nerve arrested the heart in its dilation, would he not say of it, 'It is not true; the heart does not stop in that way'? But the physiologist who 180 Beyond the Borderline of Life has seen the heart stop one hundred times to five times where it did not stop, smiles at such remark. He knows by previous observations that the different effects depend upon the different condi- tions in which the heart or the nerve may be found. Thus it is with the principal medium- istic phenomena, and particularly we wish to say it of that produced by Eu- sapia Paladino. Poor Eusapia is not a machine, but a living organism. In hundreds of mediumistic sittings, at which people worthy of trust have been present, she has produced phenomena of such a character as not to leave any doubt of the importance and reality of the same or of her honesty. On the other hand, in a few sittings, the phenomena have been few, weak, and such, in short, as to leave the observers unsatisfied, who be- Beyond the Borderline of Life 181 cause of this have been erroneously led to suppose that even those seen by others may have been of the same strength and nature and that they have been exagger- ated by human credulity and simplicity; from this to denouncing as fraud and to calling Paladino a fraud and a trick- ster, is a short distance. To affirm that, it is necessary to have discovered fraud." FRAUD BY PALADINO ^'Has Paladino, then, ever been discov- ered in fraud? It seems that she has. Leaving on one side unconscious trick- ery, it seems, however, that the only intentional conscious trickery to which Eusapia foolishly had resource more than once has been to make an object move in full light by means of one of her hairs. If she had been so rascally as is 182 Beyond the Borderline of Life said, she certainly would not do these things. She has been reproved by Flam- marion and by others, but her intelli- gence is so low that she continues, it seems, to divert herself still with the famous hair, trying, I believe, to deceive someone who she feels is not in sympa- thy with her, rather than to deceive in the hope of making a trick pass for the true thing. I believe also in another possibility. There are sittings during which, or part of which, Eusapia does not succeed in producing any phenomena, and this, for me, is one of the best proofs of the reality of mediumistic phenomena, when these have taken place; and these cases, it seems, occur oftener now that she begins to get old and to become weaker. (Who of us can assert that every day we are equally disposed or apt to work with the same energy and effi- Beyond the Borderline of Life 183 cacy?) But when she finds herself in such a condition, she ought to refuse to give sittings, one may say. True. But it is necessary to consider that she often finds herself in somebody else's house, where she has been called to ''work"; that often, persons who come from distant places are there to see ; persons, let us say it, as inexorable as the spectators at a theatre who, strong in the right which comes to them from having paid, wait anxiously to see and to hear. Persons, moreover, whom we are obliged to send away unsatisfied, complaining and hurl- ing insults like those of which we have spoken before. Who will refuse to ad- mit that Paladino under such conditions, anxious to satisfy as much as she can, the hopes of those persons, sometimes gives in to the temptation to commit a fraud; to give as mediumistic phenomena, 184? Beyond the Borderline of Life Others produced as best she can with her hands or with her feet. In our seven sittings we have never noticed one thing of this kind. Eusapia has never made use of expedients of any kind in order to deceive. On the contrary, she has never omitted to advise us every time that she moved the table or the curtain with her visible hands ; but it is absolutely impos- sible to deny that under the conditions given above she may have committed or does commit some little fraud, uncon- scious of the incalculable harm that is done her reputation and the true medi- umistic phenomena, in the estimation of the immense majority of people who, not being present at the sittings, have to trust to the faithful narration of those who have been present, in order to form any conviction whatever. And even that is the consequence Beyond the Borderline of Life 185 partly of her slight intellectual develop- ment, and partly because of the igno- rance in which, necessarily, she remains of the impression made by the notices to the public in regard to fraud (because she does not read), nor of the smile with which some speak in her presence of mediumistic phenomena. However that may be, it is highly unjust to deny the reality of mediumistic phenomena, bas- ing the denial upon the few cases in which the ingenuous and small frauds of Paladino have been observed, and not to take into consideration the great frauds of the tricksters by profession who, dis- covered once in their tricks, have been obliged to immediately disappear." MAL-OBSERVATION "He who has observed badly, many times is in a disadvantageous condition. 186 Beyond the Borderline of Life Worse Still, if he has come to look on with a prejudice that he is going to as- sist at trickery, which is the same as to say with an opinion already formed. Worse still, if he has come with the impudent intention of having the right, thinking he only has seen, to call others imbeciles who do not believe that they have been tricked, believing also, to put in relief his own superiority as an ob- server and critic. All those, and others who, in denying, are influenced by mo- tives still less noble, will not have the power to diminish the value of the now numerous contrary affirmations of per- sons who respond to the names of Crookes, Ramsay, Lodge, Lombroso, Richet, Flammarion, Luciani, Morselli. That is to say, of honest scientists whose fame cannot be shaken by the loud laugh- ter of the few who seem to think nega- Beyond the Borderline of Life 187 tion a sign of mental superiority. To those, then, who deny without having seen, affirming a priori the phenomena, to be impossible, we must reply, first see and then we will discuss with you. Worthy of respect are those, and they are not few, who refuse to see because they fear that the things observed may disturb them in their naturalistic convic- tions and the mechanical understanding of the world, which with fatiguing study and long meditation they have succeeded in forming. I do not share their fears, because the phenomena seen by me have not disturbed me in the least, nor shaken any of my naturalistic convictions. The new knowledge has been added to the old, and even if it is not strictly welded to it, at least, it has had the effect of confirming in my mind the sentence of Leonardo, that ^nature has many laws of 188 Beyond the Borderline of Life which we have no knowledge'; but, in fine, those people merit as much respect as those believers who refuse to recognize the principle of natural science, for fear that they may be disturbed or shaken in their religious faith. But for the others, for that small num- ber of ostentatious persons who pretend with their few and unsuccessful observa- tions, to annul the many, the very many observations made under different and often better conditions, by persons not inferior to them (and often superior) in acuteness of wit, in experimental capac- ity and in solidity of character, which is amply proven by the results of their life; to those around whom read- ily flock the ignorant and pretentious, for the same reasons, that the praise of the throng is given to him who destroys rather than to him who builds; Beyond the Borderline of Life 189 to him who trims up old motives, rather than to the innovator. For them, I, if it were worth the trouble, would be in- exorable. I content myself in saying to them: ^In what things are your senses superior to ours? What proof have you given of superiority of critical power? From what do you derive your convic- tions, that you alone, the few, have seen well, and that we, the many, have always been fooled; that we have never known how to discover the fraud? Is it simply your conviction? Then, our conviction is worth at least as much as yours, with the difference to our advantage that from our written reports, results the evidence that our observations were made under the best experimental conditions that can be imagined, and with another which consists in the greater number of our ob- servations.' " 190 Beyond the Borderline of Life ''These people do nothing but repeat, ^All is fraud and trickery'; but invited to say why they have come to such con- clusions, to tell what measures they have taken to discover fraud, and how the medium has tricked them, behold! We are no farther advanced, and we hear them repeat the customary foolishness, that they had a net intuition of the fraud, even though they cannot explain exactly what measures the medium took to com- mit fraud; even as they do not know the arts of the prestidigitateurs of which, nevertheless, they have not the least doubt. That the medium skillfully got her hands away from the custodians and worked with incredible skill and rapid- ity. Then those in charge of her hands, and all the others present at the sitting must have been in a dream to such an ex- Beyond the Borderline of Life IQl tent that they were unconscious of every- thing. That the medium has mechanism hidden under her clothing; that she lifts up the table, propping up one leg of this by placing her own foot under it and mak- ing it rise with her hands, arms, etc. These are things which might have been said some twenty or thirty years ago; not now, that observations of medi- umistic phenomena are many times multiplied and refined. But, how could she release her hands if they were, without interruption, in contact with mine? Release the other hand which is not in contact with mine, and of which I can know nothing. But admitted even this, how would it be pos- sible for the medium to move objects, situated on the side where I am, for ex- ample, upon the chair upon which I am seated and where the other hand abso- 192 Beyond the Borderline of Life lutely could not reach? And then why ought I not to see the arm or operating hand of the medium, while I can dis- tinctly see the arms and hands of all the others present, even those who are far- thest away from me? Eusapia's arms are not diaphanous. When they move, I see them, I follow them with my look. I see her hands that touch the curtain, that touch her head and my own. Why should I not also see them when they bear a bottle or a glass upon the table and when they are insinuated into the cabinet? Work with the legs and with the feet! But how, when her legs are stretched under my knees and her feet are propped against Jona's knees, or are held by Scarpa under the table? How can these feet bring out of the cabinet a table or a chair? How does Eusapia, poor, Beyond the Borderline of Life 193 small and ill, drag along the floor for 30 or 40 centimeters my body, which weighs 90 kilograms, with the chair upon which I am seated, making use in every case of only one arm, the left, because she would not have been able in any way to make her right hand reach to the back of my chair? Very rapid movements, so that we could not notice them! But some of the phenomena lasted minutes entire, and our eyes were fixed upon the moving ob- ject. How is it possible to admit that no one noticed Eusapia's arm, if it moved, as it went from the object moved to the hands of the custodians and vice versa? Hidden mechanism? But where and what kind? Scarpa and I had held our right arm around Eusapia's back for a 194 Beyond the Borderline of Life long time, while behind her back, in the mediumistic cabinet, was taking place, this or that phenomena. We have not seen anything nor felt anything. We have seen the table be- tween us rise a half meter from the floor without anyone touching it. Where are the props? Paladino was standing up with us with her hands in the chain. Were we blind? Dreaming? But we did nothing but whisper, even too much ; we laughed, we spoke and joked with Galeotti ; we spoke with Eusapia. We got up ; we sat down again, etc. Are these conditions under which phenomena take place — the phe- nomena of illusion and hallucination? He errs, who, never having assisted at a spiritualistic sitting, has been led to be- lieve that everybody is motionless, silent and astounded, as if "the dream incubus Beyond the Borderline of Life 195 were upon them." Galeotti says that spiritualistic sittings are the most divert- ing things in the world, and he is right. And, besides, mediumistic phenomena are not of one kind only; they are not exclusively phenomena of movement. If, for the first, there may be doubt as to trickery, for the other kind there can be no doubt. How could the medium produce that shining flame which seems to rise from her head, and then is seen moving slowly through space and lasts long enough to be seen by all, in what- ever position they may find themselves? And those apparitions of fists and of co- lossal hands or heads at such a height that not even the tallest of us could touch them. And another phenomenon abso- lutely excludes the idea of fraud, not- withstanding that this may be of ordinary movement. That is the synchronism of 196 Beyond the Borderline of Life the mediumistic phenomena with the muscular movements of the medium; a synchronism upon which I have re- peatedly insisted in this article, and that Mr. B. assures me that Signor DeRochas has already noted in his book, before Barzini took notice of it. Of this syn- chronism of movement, we believe we have succeeded in giving a graphic and irrefragable demonstration in regard to the beatings of the two electric keys ; but this was proven by us in many other movements that could not be registered skillfully. When Scarpa had Paladino's feet in his hands, he always felt her legs move in time with the movements made by the table or chair. Often Eusapia has her two hands in chain with the two custodians. Not upon the table, but upon her hips, and then her fingers are felt in continuous Beyond the Borderline of Life 197 movement, while from the cabinet the telegraph key is heard to tick, the liquid of one bottle is emptied into another, or some object is taken and brought outside. Now, when I experience simultaneously tactile sensation upon my hand, and acoustic or visible sensation at a distance, how can there be any doubt in my mind that the distant phenomena are operated by the same fingers that I feel in my hand. Not only fraud, but illusion and hallucination even on my part, can be excluded in such cases absolutely. Some- times it pleases Eusapia to release one of her hands from mine and I do not oppose it. She raises it and touches, for ex- ample, the curtains, but I follow it with my glance. I do not lose it for one in- stant from my view, and I see that it never penetrates in the cabinet and never goes beyond the limits of the curtains. 198 Beyond the Borderline of Life If, at the same time, in the cabinet, a telegraph key is touched, or I feel a touch on my breast or my ankle bone, or if a hand appears a long distance away from me and from Paladino, how can I believe that the hand which I see in- cessantly is the same that touches me, that closes the key or appears at a dis- tance? In our sittings there was neither fraud nor trickery. That I can affirm with se- curity, solemnly, in the name of all the others present. Different by the order of the studies that they cultivated, by tem- perament (what greater difference could there be in temperament than between Lombardi and Scarpa; Jona and Gale- otti, Galeotti and me) ? Because of the region in which we had been born (there were representatives from Venice, from Piedmont, from Tuscany, from Umbria, Beyond the Borderline of Life IQQ from the Abruzzi and from the Puglie; not one Neapolitan) and by reason of age. And all of us are of accord in the conviction that the phenomena observed by us were never produced by fraudulent means, but were real phenomena." ZUCCHARINI PHENOMENA Equally startling in some respects have been the recent experiments in levitation with Zuccharini. Employed in a muni- cipal office, Zuccharini was unaware of his psychic powers until out of curiosity he went as a spectator to a seance. He fell into a trance and manifested various phenomena. Only a mere fact or two can be noted here of the multifarious phenomena ob- served during nine sittings in Milan by Murani, Patrizi, Bianchi, and others. At one of the sittings, after his falling 200 Beyond the Borderline of Life ,u. . into a trance, movements of the table and the appearance of luminous phenomena ''"^^ were observed as usual. Then Zuccha- rini (he weighs 147 pounds) was uplifted by an invisible force on to the table. He rose in the air gradually, ''and," Murani reports, ''the medium's body remained poised in space for a period of from ten to twelve seconds." This levitation was afterward repeated many times. CHAPTER IX THE PIPER HODGSON-CONTROL THE following extracts from the re- port of Professor William James on Mrs. Piper's Hodgson-Control are taken from the Proceedings of the So- ciety for Psychical Research published in June, 1909. They are inserted to give the reader an idea of some of the start- ling communications received through Mrs. Piper and how they are regarded by one of the most conservative investi- gators. ''Miss M. Bergman, [pseudonym], had been in previous years an excellent sitter, and was known by name to Mrs. Piper. She dwelt in another state, and her social 201 202 Beyond the Borderline of Life connections were not in Massachusetts. At her first visit, December 31st, 1907, the communications were in writing and she had much difficulty in deciphering them. At the second sitting, January I St, 1908, the voice was used and things ran much more smoothly. At the first sitting R. H. quickly ap- peared, spoke of having seen two brothers of the sitter in the spirit- wo rid (names known to trance-personalities, and non- evidential), made a wrong statement about Christmas at the cemetery, and then, being asked to recall his meetings with Miss Bergman on earth, said: I will. Do you remember one even- ing when I came to the hotel where you were staying and I sat and told you of my experiences till It got very late and I asked you if you would not [Illegible] I told you so very many jokes, you and Beyond the Borderline of Life 203 Miss Pope were convulsed with laughter over it. [Correct, Ho- tel Bellevue, Boston, March, 1905.— M. B.] After a while, Hodgson reappears, say- ing: Do you remember my telling you about my German friends? Miss B. No. Perhaps Miss Pope remembers. [I found later that Miss Pope well remembered Dr. Hodgson's tell- ing about his "German friends" and that it was that which "con- vulsed us with laughter" the even- ing he had stayed so late when calling at our hotel. At this point I had become so discour- aged by the great difficulty of reading the writing and the con- fusion in making things clear that I felt very indifferent and inert in mind.— M. B.] Bosh. 204> Beyond the Borderline of Life Miss B. What do you mean by that? You understand well. MissB. Bosh? Yes, I say bosh. BOSH BOSH Miss B. What do you mean by that? Oh I say it is all bosh. Miss B. What is bosh? Why the way you understand. It is simply awful. Miss B. That sounds like you, Dr. Hodgson. I could shake you. Miss B. How can I do better? Put all your wits to it, you have plenty of them. Miss B. I will do my best. Go on. Do. Do you remember I used to chaff you. Miss B. Indeed I do. Well I am still chaffing you a bit just for recognition. Miss B. It helps. Amen. Now you are waking up a bit. Miss B. I am. Capital. So am I. Don't you re- member I told you I would show Beyond the Borderline of Life 205 you how to manage if I ever came over before you did. Miss B. Indeed I do. [Sitter had often heard Dr. Hodgson say this.]^ Well now I am trying to show you. I used to scold you right and left and I shall have to keep it up, I think, unless you do better. Miss B. I deserve it. If you do not who does? Miss B. You are your old self. Oh I am the [two words not de- ciphered] I was. You'll find it out before I finish. Miss B. Have you a message for Theo [Miss Theodate Pope] ? Yes indeed give her my love and tell her I am not going to forsake her. I do not think she has been keep- ing straight to the mark. Miss B. What do you mean by that? I think she has been getting a little mixed up in her thoughts and ideas of us over here. I am the 1 The bracketed comments in the third person are by Miss Bergman herself. 206 Beyond the Borderline of Life same old sixpence and I wish she were the same. I want to see her very much. ["Theo" had had no sitting for a long time, her interest being les- sened by the circumstance that records of several sittings had not been kept systematically, as before Dr. Hodgson's death. At this point the hand wrote comments relating to circumstances which had arisen In Theo's life since Dr. Hodgson's death. These com- ments were singularly appropri- ate.— M. B.] At the second sitting, when R. H. ap- peared, the voice began speaking very rapidly and heartily. Well, well, well, this is Miss Berg- man ; hullo ! I felt as though I could shake you yesterday. Miss B. Well, I was pretty stupid. I think we can do better to-day. Please repeat some of the messages you Beyond the Borderline of Life 207 wrote and left sealed to be opened after your death. One message I gave to Will. If I remember correctly it was "there Is no death." MissB. Who is Will? Will James. Miss B. Are you sure you are now giving this quotation correctly as you wrote it? Of course I am. [There followed an outburst spoken so rapidly that the sitter could not get it down, declaring that the speaker had not lost his memory any more than had the sitter, etc.] Miss B. Did you leave other messages? Yes, another. "Out of life" — how did I quote It — "Out of life, into life eternal." ... I know positively what I wrote. I have promised Piddington to repeat through Mrs. Verrall all the mes- sages that I give through this light. Every message given at this light must be repeated 208 Beyond the Borderline of Life through Mrs. Verrall before any one opens any of my sealed mes- sages. Mrs. Verrall is the clear- est light except this which I have found. Moreover she has a beautiful character and is per- fectly honest. That is saying a great deal. [The reader will no- tice that Mrs. Piper had been in England and returned, at the date of the sittings with Miss Berg- man. — W. J.] Do you remem- ber my description of luminiferous ether, and of my conception of what this life was like? I have found it was not an erroneous imagination. [The above words were spoken with great animation and interest. The sitter, although remembering Dr. Hodgson's ' description of ^'luminiferous ether," felt that she was not qualified to enter into a conversation of this character and began to say something else. The voice interrupted her:] Beyond the Borderline of Life ^09 It is never the way to get the best results by peppering with ques- tions. Intelligences come with minds filled and questions often put everything out of their thought. I am now going to give you a test. Mention it to no one, not even to Theo. Write down, seal and give to Alice or to William. [Directions here followed regarding such a test. After these direc- tions the voice spontaneously took up another subject.] Your school was — [correct name given], was it not? [Already known to controls, but probably not to Mrs. Piper when awake.] You are changing, your brother tells me, and he is very pleased. He thinks you are going to broaden out and do a better work. He is very glad. Do not under- take too much. Make use of as- sistance in the work. 210 Beyond the Borderline of Life Miss B. Where were your lodgings in Bos- ton? Well, now, that has brought back to my mind Boston — . Certainly — there were some doctors in my building — George Street — no — not George — Charles Street — I — • I believe. Now let me see, Charles Street. Up three flights, I think I was on the top. [Cor- rect, but known to Mrs. Piper. — W.J.] Miss B. Do you know when I was at your lodgings? You were there? Didn't we have tea together? [False.] Miss B. No. Did you come and read papers? Miss B. No. Did you go there after I passed out? Miss B. Yes. I went to get some articles be- longing to you, and did them up in rubber cloth. Capital, that Is good. Lodge and Piddington consider It good when I can't remember what did not Beyond the Borderline of Life 211 happen! What was the name of that girl who used to work in my office? Miss B. I do not remember. Edmund — Edwards — I am thinking of her going to my rooms to read papers. [Her name was Ed- munds, known to the medium. — w. J.] Now I want to ask you if you re- member Australia, remember my riding horseback? Remember my telling you of riding through the park In the early morning with the dew on the grass and how beautiful It was. Miss B. Yes, yes, I remember that very well. That is fine. I am Richard Hodgson. / am he. I am telling you what I remember. I told you, too, about my preach- ing. I believed I was In the wrong and I stopped. It hurt some of my people to have me. Miss B. Tell me about your riding. I remember telling you about my 212 Beyond the Borderline of Life dismounting and sitting and drinking in the beauty of the morning. Miss B. Tell me any experiences that befell you while riding. Oh, I told you about the experience with the fiery horse. You remem- ber he dismounted me. It was the first experience I had in see- ing stars. I lost consciousness. I experienced passing into this life. I remember my being un- conscious and recovering con- sciousness. I remember telling you this at the hotel. [Sitter's mind was filled here with recollections of how Dr. Hodg- son had once told her all this when talking with her at the Parker House in Boston, in 1904. He had related just this experience and had said that when he recov- ered consciousness after being un- conscious for some time, it seemed to him he had been In a spiritual universe. He also told her at Beyond the Borderline of Life 213 that time of his having given tes- timony in Methodist meeting as a a lad in his teens, and afterwards giving it up because he became skeptical in matters of faith. This, he said, had troubled some of his kinsfolk.— M. B.] Miss B. What did you use to order for lunch- eon when you lunched with us at the hotel? Oh, I have forgotten all about eating — m — m — I was very fond of protose. [The sitter did not have "protose" in mind, but remembers Dr. Hodgson sometimes asking the waiter for one of the prepared breakfast foods, but does not re- call its name. — M. B.] When I found the light it looked like a tremendous window, open window. The canopy — do you remember how they used to talk about the canopy? It is an ethe- real veil. If your spiritual eyes were open you could see through 214 Beyond the Borderline of Life this veil and see me here talking to you perfectly. [The sitter did not care to talk about this, although she remem- bered perfectly Dr. Hodgson's telling her "how they talked about the canopy," so she asked a question, referring to the intimate personal affairs of one of her friends. The replies showed a strange knowledge of the circum- stances known only to the sitter and her friend, and were entirely a propos. The voice then went on speaking, and burst out with what follows, in a tone of mingled indignation and amusement:] Will thinks I ought to walk into the room bodily and shake hands with him. I heard him say "Hodgson isn't so much of a power on the other side." What does he think a man in the ethereal body is go- ing to do with a man in the phys- ical body? [Seems to show some Beyond the Borderline of Life 215 supernormal knowledge of the state of my mind. — W. J.] Miss B. To whom did you speak first from that world? Theodate, yes, Theodate, she was the one to whom I first spoke. [Correct.] [The sitter now asked to talk with another spirit, and reply was made that R. H. would continue talk- ing until he came. R. H. did this by again referring to the ac- cident in the park. He spoke of being seated when he first told us of the incident, and of getting up and walking around the room as he talked. He said it chanced that this incident had been told to few people, and again dwelt upon having seen stars after falling, having been unconscious, having had visions while unconscious, as if the spirit had left the body and passed into another world. All of this corresponded exactly with fact. Dr. Hodgson had com- 216 Beyond the Borderline of Life menced the story seated, and had risen and walked about as he talked.— M. B.] The accurate knowledge thus displayed of R, H.'s conversations at the hotels in Boston where the ladies stayed, seems to me one of the most evidential items in the whole series. It is improbable that such unimportant conversations should have been reported by the living R. H. to Mrs. Piper, either awake or when in trance with other sitters; and to my mind the only plausible explanation is supernor- mal. Either it spells ^^spirit-return," or telephatic reading of the sitter's mind by the medium in trance. I think that by this time the reader has enough documentary material to gain an adequate impression of the case. Addi- tional citations of sittings would intro- Beyond the Borderline of Life 217 duce no new factors of solution. The en- tire lot of reports, read verbatim, would, it is true, give a greater relative impres- sion of hesitation, repetition, and bog- gling generally; and the "rigorously scientific" mind would of course rejoice to find its own explanatory category, "Bosh," greatly confirmed thereby. But the more serious critic of the records will hold his judgment in suspense; or, if he inclines to the spiritistic solution, it will be because an acquaintance with the phe- nomenon on a much larger scale has altered the balance of presumptions in his mind, and because spirit-return has come to seem no unpermissible thing to his sense of the natural dramatic probabili- ties. Before indulging in some final reflec- tions of my own on Nature's possibilities, I will cite a few additional evidential 218 Beyond the Borderline of Life points. I will print them in no order, numbering them as they occur. (i) First of all, several instances of knowledge that was veridical and seemed unquestionably supernormal. These were confidential remarks, some of which naturally won't bear quotation. One of them, plausible after the fact, could hardly have been thought of by any one before it. Another would, I think, hardly have been constructed by Mrs. Piper. A third was to the effect that R. H. thought now differently about a cer- tain lady — she was less "selfish" than Tie had called her in a certain private con versation of which he reminded the sit- ter. (2) Again, there was intense solici- tude shown about keeping the records of a certain former sitter from publicity. It sounded very natural and Hodgsonian, Beyond the Borderline of Life 219 but the trance-Mrs. Piper might also have deemed it necessary. (3) The following incident belongs to my wife's and Miss Putnam's sitting of June I2th, 1906: — Mrs. J. said: "Do you remember what happened in our li- brary one night when you were arguing with Margie [Mrs. J.'s sister]?" — "I had hardly said ^remember'," she notes, ''in asking this question, when the medium's arm was stretched out and the fist shaken threateningly," then these words came: R. H. Yes, I did this in her face. I couldn't help it. She was so im- possible to move. It was wrong of me, but I couldn't help it. [I myself well remember this fist- shaking incident, and how we others laughed over it after Hodgson had taken his leave. What had made him so angry was my sister-in-law's defence of some 220 Beyond the Borderline of Life slate-writing she had seen in California. -w. J.] (4) At a written sitting at which I was present (July 29th, 1907) the following came : You seem to think I have lost my equilibrium. Nothing of the sort. W. J. YouVe lost your handwriting, gone from bad to worse. I never had any to lose. Mrs. M. It was a perfectly beautiful hand- writing [ironical]. Ahem ! Ahem ! William, do you remember my writing you a long letter once when you were ill? You had to get Margaret [my daughter — ^W. J.] tO' help you read it and you wrote me it was detestable writing and you hoped I would try and write plainer to a friend who was ill, next time. How I laughed over that, but I was really sorry to Beyond the Borderline of Life 221 make you wade through it. Ask Margaret if she remembers it. [Perfectly — it was in London. — M. M. J.] (5) Another item which seems to mean either telepathy or survival of R. H., came out at a sitting of Miss Pope's on Feb. 7th, 1906. I am not going to make a botch of anything if I can help it. Not I. Do you remember my telling you what I would do if I got over here first. Miss P. You said several things about it. I said if I couldn't do better than some of them I was mistaken. I said some of them were awful. Remember? And if I based my opinion on what they tried to give I should expect to be said to be in the trick. Rememberf Miss P. Of course I remember. Do you remember a story I told you about my old friend Sidg- 222 Beyond the Borderline of Life wick? Don't you remember how I Imitated him? Miss P. Yes, what word did you say about SIdgwIck? [I had not decipher- ed the word "Imitated." — T. P.] If I believed In It they would say I was In the trick. [Still not understanding, T. P. said:] Miss P. What about SIdgwIck? I Imitated him. Miss P. What did you do? I said s-s-s-should-be i-n th-e t-r-i-c-k. Miss P. I remember perfectly, that's fine. No one living could know this but yourself and Mary Bergman. [It was most Interesting to see the hand write these words to Imitate stuttering, and then for the first time It flashed over me what he had some time ago told Mary and me about SIdgwIck, imitat- ing at the same time SIdgwick's stammer: "H-Hodgson, If you b-b-belleve in it, you'll b-be said to be In the t-trlck." I cannot Beyond the Borderline of Life 223 quote the exact words, but this is very nearly right. Sidgwick referred to Hodgson's belief that he was actually com- municating, through Mrs. Piper, with spirits. He meant that people not only would not be- lieve what Hodgson gave as evi- dence, but would think he was in collusion with Mrs. Piper. — T. P.] (6) At a sitting of Miss Pope's and mine, Oct. 24th, 1906, R. H. said of Miss P. — "She goes on and puts on bays and piazzas, changes her piazzas, her house, makes it all over again." As this w^as literally true, and as no one in Boston could well have known about it, it seemed like mind-reading. [R. H.'s saying is possibly explained, however, by a previ- ous sitting (April i6th) of Miss Pope's, in which another of Mrs. Piper's controls 224 Beyond the Borderline of Life had already of his own accord made the same veridical remark, so that the fact had got, however inexplicably, into the trance-consciousness, and could be used by the controls indiscriminately.] (7) On Jan. 30, 1906, Mrs. M. had a sitting. Mrs. M. said: Do you remember our last talk, at N., and how, in coming home we talked about the work? (R. H.) Yes, yes. Mrs. M. And I said If we had a hundred thousand dollars — Buying Billy ! ! Mrs. M. Yes, Dick, that was it — "buying Billy.'* Buying only Billy? Mrs. M. Oh no^ — I wanted Schiller too. How well you remember ! Mrs. M., before R. H.'s death, had had dreams of extending the American Branch's operations by getting an endow- Beyond the Borderline of Life 225 ment, and possibly inducing Prof. New- bold (Billy) and Dr. Schiller to co-op- erate in work. She naturally regards this veridical recall, by the control, of a private conversation she had had with Hodgson as very evidential of his sur- vival. (8) To the same sitter, on a later occa- sion (March 5th, 1906), the control showed veridical knowledge of R. H.'s pipes, of which two had been presents from herself. She asks him at this sit- ting about the disposal of some of his effects. He mentions books and photo- graphs in a general way, then says : I want Tom [his brother] to have my pipes, all except any that my friends wish. Mrs. M. Do you remember any special ones? Yes, I — the one you — [The hand points to me^ etc. — Mrs. M.] 226 Beyond the Borderline of Life Mrs. M. Which? Meerschaum. [I gave R. H. a meerschaum pipe some years ago.— M.] Mrs. M. You do remember! Give it to any one you would best hke to. . . . I want Billy James to have it. Will you give it to him? Do you remember, etc.? Mrs. M. Do you remember any other spe- cial pipe? You mean with a long stem? Cer- tainly. What about it? Mrs. M. Can you recall anything special about it? What? You mean the one you gave me long ago, some time ago, not the recent one ? Mrs. M. The last one I gave you. Last season, last season, yes. Mrs. M. a year or two ago, I think it was. I recall it well. You gave me what I call a briar pipe. [A number of years ago I gave R. H. a briar-root pipe, with rather a long stem, bound round the Beyond the Borderline of Life 227 bowl with silver, but this was not the one of which I was thinking. — M.] Mrs. M. The one I mean was an odd-look- ing pipe. I know it well, a big large bowl. Mrs. M. Wasn't that the meerschaum? Yes, Billy is to have it. The face one I want Tom to have. I want my brother Tom to have — face on it. The whole thing was a face. I mean the pipe bowl. [I had seen such a pipe, the whole thing a face, at the Charles Street rooms a short time be- fore. I never remember seeing Mr. Hodgson use it. The pipe of which I was thinking was a carved Swiss pipe which he evi- dently does not remember. — M.] (9) Among my own friends in the Harvard faculty who had ^^passed over" the most intimate was F. J. Child. 228 Beyond the Borderline of Life Hodgson during life had never met Pro- fessor Child. It looks to me like a su- pernormal reading of my own mental states (for I had often said that the best argument I knew for an immortal life was the existence of a man who deserved one as well as Child did) that a message to me about him should have been spon- taneously produced by the R. H. control. I had assuredly never mentioned C. to Mrs. Piper, had never before had a mes- sage from his spirit, and if I had ex- pressed my feelings about him to the living R. H., that would make the mat- ter only more evidential. The message through R. H. came to Miss Robbins, June 6th, 1906. There is a man named Child passed out suddenly, wants to send his love to William and his wife in the body. Beyond the Borderline of Life 229 MissR. Child's wife? Yes, in the body. He says . . . I hope L. will understand what I mean. I [i.e, R. H.] don't know who L. is. [L. is the Initial of the Christian name of Professor Child's widow. — W. J-] (lo) Miss Putnam had been consulted about the disposition of certain matters left undone by Hodgson at the date of his death. At her sitting, much later, these words came out. I copy the record as it stands: R. H. Did you get my Christmas present? [A calendar addressed by him to me before his death. — A. C. P.] I heard you In the body say you didn't want them sent. [Mr. Hodgson had left some Christmas cards addressed, but unenclosed. I had expressed unwillingness to mail them un- enveloped. — A. C. P.] 230 Beyond the Borderline of Life (ii) Mrs. M., on March 30th, placed a volume in manuscript in the medium's hands. R. H. immediately wrote: Well, well. Isn't that the book I lent you? Mrs. M. Yes. You loaned it to me at C . I remember, but you have it still ! Mrs. M. I returned it to you. Yes, but isn't it the one I loaned you? And the poems I used to love so well, I recall. [The book contained poems copied or composed by Hodgson, and after having been returned to him ere he died, had been taken from among his effects and brought to the sitting by Mrs. M.] These eleven incidents sound more like deliberate truth-telling, whoever the truth-teller be, than like lucky flukes. On the whole they make on me the im- pression of being supernormal. I con- Beyond the Borderline of Life 231 fess that I should at this moment much like to know (although I have no means of knowing) just how all the documents I am exhibiting in this report will strike readers who are either novices in the field, or who consider the subject in gen- eral to be pure "rot" or "bosh." It seems to me not impossible that a bosh-philoso- pher here or there may get a dramatic im- pression of there being something genuine behind it all. Most of those who remain faithful to the "bosh"-interpretation would, however, find plenty of comfort if they had the entire mass of records given them to read. Not that I have left things out (I certainly have tried not to!) that would, if printed, discredit the de- tail of what I cite, but I have left out, by not citing the whole mass of records, so much mere mannerism, so much repeti- tion, hesitation, irrelevance, unintelligi- 232 Beyond the Borderline of Life bility, SO much obvious groping and fish- ing and plausible covering up of false tracks, so much false pretension to power, and real obedience to suggestion, that the stream of veridicality that runs through- out the whole gets lost as it were in a marsh of feebleness, and the total dra- matic effect on the mind may be little more than the word ^'humbug." The really significant items disappear in the total bulk. "Passwords," for example, and sealed messages are given in abun- dance, but can't be found. (I omit these here, as some of them may prove veridi- cal later.) Preposterous Latin sentences are written, e.g. "Nebus merica este fecrum" — or what reads like that (April 4th, 1906). Poetry gushes out, but how can one be sure that Mrs. Piper never knew it? The weak talk of the Impera- tor-band about time is reproduced, Beyond the Borderline of Life 233 as where R. H. pretends that he no longer knows what ''seven minutes" mean (May 14th, 1906). Names asked for can't be given, etc., etc/ All this mass of diluting material, which can't be reproduced in abridgment, has its inevitable dramatic effect; and if one tends to hate the whole phenomena any- how (as I confess that I myself sometimes do) one's judicial verdict inclines accord- ingly. Nevertheless, I have to confess also that the more familiar I have become with the records, the less relative significance for my mind has all this diluting material 1 For instance, on July 2nd, the sitter asks R. H. to name some of his cronies at the Tavern Club. Hodg- son gives six names, only five of which belonged to the Tavern Club, and those five w^ere known to the controls already. None of them, I believe, were those asked for, namely, " names of the men he used to play pool with or go swimming with at Nantasket." Yet, as the sitter (Mr. Dorr) writes, "He failed to realize his failure." 234 Beyond the Borderline of Life tended to assume. The active cause of the communications is on any hypothesis a will of some kind, be it the will of R. H.'s spirit, of lower supernatural intel- ligences, or of Mrs. Piper's subliminal: and although some of the rubbish may be deliberately willed (certain hesitations, misspellings, etc., in the hope that the sit- ter may give a clue, or certain repetitions, in order to gain time) yet the major part of it is suggestive of something quite dif- ferent — as if a will were there, but a will to say something which the machinery fails to bring through. Dramatically, most of this "bosh" is more suggestive to me of dreaminess and mind-wandering than it is of humbug. Why should a "will to deceive" prefer to give incorrect names so often, if it can give the true ones to which the incorrect ones so frequently approximate as to suggest that they are Beyond the Borderline of Life 235 meant? True names impress the sitter vastly more. Why should it so multiply false "passwords" ("Zeivorn," for ex- ample, above p. 86) and stick to them? It looks to me more like aiming at some- thing definite, and failing of the goal. Sometimes the control gives a message to a distant person quite suddenly, as if for some reason a resistance momentarily gave way and let pass a definite desire to give such a message. Thus on October 17th, "Give my love to Carl Putnam," a name which neither Mrs. Piper nor the sitter knew, and which popped in quite irrelevantly to what preceded or fol- lowed. A definite will is also suggested when R. H. sends a message to James Putnam about his "watch stopping." He sends it through several sitters and sticks to it in the face of final denial, as if the phrase covered, however erroneously. 236 Beyond the Borderline of Life some distinct "intention to recall/' which ought not to be renounced. That a "will to personate" is a factor in the Piper-phenomenon, I fully believe, and I believe with unshakable firmness that this will is able to draw on super- normal sources of information. It can "tap," possibly the sitter's memories, pos- sibly those of distant human beings, possi- bly some cosmic reservoir in which the memories of earth are stored, whether in the shape of "spirits" or not. If this were the only will concerned in the per- formance, the phenomenon would be humbug pure and simple, and the minds tapped telephatically in it would play an entirely passive role — that is, the tele- pathic data would be fished out by the personating will, not forced upon it by desires to communicate, acting externally to itself. Beyond the Borderline of Life 237 But it is possible to complicate the hypothesis. Extraneous "wills to com- municate" may contribute to the results as well as a 'Vill to personate," and the two kinds of will may be distinct in entity, though capable of helping each other out. The will to communicate, in our present instance, would be, on the prima facie view of it, the will of Hodgson's surviving spirit; and a nat- ural way of representing the process would be to suppose the spirit to have found that by pressing, so to speak, against "the light," it can make fragmen- tary gleams and flashes of what it wishes to say mix with the rubbish of the trance- talk on this side. The two wills might thus strike up a sort of partnership and reinforce each other. It might even be that the "will to personate" would be comparatively inert unless it were aroused 2S8 Beyond the Borderline of Life to activity by the other will. We might imagine the relation to be analogous to that of two physical bodies, from neither of which, when alone, mechanical, ther- mal, or electrical activity can proceed, but if the other body be present, and show a difference of ^'potential," action starts up and goes on apace. Conceptions such as these seem to con- nect in schematic form the various ele- ments in the case. Its essential factors are done justice to ; and, by changing the relative amounts in which the rubbish- making and the truth-telling wills con- tribute to the resultant, we can draw up a table in which every type of manifesta- tion, from silly planchet-writing up to Rector's best utterances, finds its proper place. Personally, I must say that, al- though I have to confess that no crucial proof of the presence of the "will to com- Beyond the Borderline of Life 239 municate" seems to me yielded by the Hodgson-control taken alone, and in the sittings to which I have had access, yet the total effect in the way of dramatic probability of the whole mass of similar phenomena on my mind, is to make me believe that a "will to communicate" is in some shape there. I cannot demon- strate it, but practically I am inclined to "go in" for it, to bet on it and take the risks." CHAPTER X SUMMING UP THESE are a few of the phenomena that have caused science to revolu- tionize its ideas and conceptions of the world about us. It is the belief of many- scientists that they are the work of human intelligences in spirit form. (^Lombroso believed that these intelligences live in a radiant state invisible and impalpable to our senses.^ Morselli, Foa, and Bottazzi have not arrived at that conclusion, al- though they fully admit the presence of forces unexplainable by any known laws. Whatever their difference of interpre- tation most all agree in the essential fact that there is a realm peopled by intelli- 240 Beyond the Borderline of Life 241 gences, of which we are beginning to get the first real glimpses. In view of this accord, Lodge seems to be justified when he says in his recent work, "Life and Matter,'* of Haeckel, that "He is, as it were, a surviving voice from the middle of the nineteenth century; he represents in clear and eloquent fashion, opinions which then were prevalent among many leaders of thought, opinions which they themselves, and their successors still more, lived to outgrow; so that by this time Professor HaeckePs voice is as the voice of one crying in the wilderness — and not as the pioneer of an advancing army, but as the despairing shout of a standard bearer, still bold and unflinch- ing, but abandoned by his comrades as they march to new orders in a fresh and more idealistic direction." The work that is being done through 242 Beyond the Borderline op Life the investigation of psychic phenomena in this country by the American Society for Psychical Research, of which Dr. James H. Hyslop, formerly of Columbia University, is now the active head, is de- serving of equal support to that accorded to the various societies and organizations existing for the same purpose as the American organization throughout Eu- rope. During the time of the existence of the American Branch of the British Society of Psychical Research, of which Prof. Hodgson was the American secre- tary. Dr. Hyslop began his investiga- tions and is to-day, in connection with Prof. William James, formerly of Har- vard, one of the very few American men of science who have given the subject the same amount of consideration and care- ful study that practically all of the men of science of Europe are giving. Beyond the Borderline of Life 243 As to the hypotheses scientists hold of how intelligences can exist all about us, and yet not be visible to us, and of the ultimate meaning of this revelation — these constitute a realm of thought so vast and of so many different and novel aspects, that they cannot be dealt with here. They involve the whole range of new conceptions scientists are forming of cosmic laws, and of their entirely changed ideas regarding time, space, matter, and energy. But one thing is clear, the mass of^/^/^ learned scientists are united in asserting (^^-^^J that our souls or spirits do survive. Fur- ^ thermore, there is now the very closest connection between religion in its real sense, that is stripped of its formulas and dogmas, and these truths disclosed of scientific investigation. ADDENDUM THE journal of the Society for Psychi- cal Research for April, 1910, comes to hand from London just as this book is to be put on the press. It contains a letter from Mr. G. B. Dorr describing the events which took place on the night of the so-called ex- pose of Paladino. There is also an unsigned statement by the man who grabbed Pala- dino's foot and another by Professor Miin- sterberg. Mr. Dorr in describing the foot- grabbing says: "Suddenly my friend saw a foot, no boot upon it, above him in the dim light, and took hold of it. '' In sending the original description by his friend, Mr. Dorr calls attention to his own error in stat- ing that the foot was seen; the foot 244 Beyond the Borderline of Life 245 was not seen but was grasped on the in- dication of sound alone, as the dim light pre- cluded sight. The unsigned report by the sitter, who wishes to avoid notoriety, does not state whether a boot was on the foot or not. It says only, " My fingers closed firmly on a human foot in rapid motion which was stopped and arrested by my hand. My fingers were over the instep and my hand closed firmly upon it." Professor Miinster- berg writes: "The gentleman who caught Madame Paladino's foot in the cabinet told me a few minutes afterward— that the foot was without a shoe. " Mr. Carrington claims that the foot was enclosed in a high-laced boot. Paladino was searched that night quite thoroughly by two ladies who were present by Mr. Dorr's arrangement, but they did not take off her hoots which did not occur to them as necessary. Mr. Dorr sums up as follows: "In my 246 Beyond the Borderline of Life three sittings there was nothing that took place in connection with the cabinet that could not easily be explained by a free foot or hand, used skilfully; and that she does use both, and skilfully, there now can be no doubt. The levitation of the larger table in full light I am rather inclined to believe in as genuine, as I have already said, partly because the con- trol of the eye as well as touch seems, in this case to be so good; and if this be genuine, per- haps other things are genuine too. But I feel quite sure that none of those we saw were so, apart from the levitations of the table. " A committee composed of Dickinson L. Miller of Columbia University and six other professors has just published a report of its findings in regard to Paladino which says: "Many indications were obtained that trickery was being practised on the sitters. So far as these sittings afford data for judg- ment the conclusion of the undersigned is Beyond the Borderline of Life 247 unfavorable to the view that any super- natural power in this case exists" * * * * * " During a fourth sitting, at which the under- signed were present, something like this control" (i. e. such control as makes trickery absolutely impossible) "was exercised and while this was the case none of the so-called evidential phenomena took place." The report is signed by C. L. Dana Professor of Nervous Diseases, Columbia University W. Hallock Professor of Physics, Columbia D. S. Miller Professor of Philosophy, Columbia F. Peterson Professor of Psychiatry, Columbia W. B. Pitkin Lecturer on Philosophy, Columbia A. Trowbridge Professor of Physics, Princeton University 248 Beyond the Borderline of Life E. B. Wilson Professor of Biology, Columbia R. W. Wood Professor of Physics, Johns Hopkins University A long article by Professor Miller states that traps were laid for the medium and observers were placed, one in a bureau with a glass in the front of a drawer, one on top of the cabinet from where he could look through a peep-hole into the cabinet and another under the sitters' chairs from which the rounds had been removed. The claim is that Paladino was seen to free her hand and one foot and to substitute for the presence of both her right and left feet and hands that of one, leaving the other hand or foot free for action. They claim that she was able thus to raise the table by putting one foot under the table leg. The reader of Professor Bottazzi's Beyond the Borderline of Life 249 account will not find that this explains the Paladino phenomena. Neither does it ex- plain the table levitation when Mr. Dorr and Professor Miinsterberg were present nor the many photographs which have been taken showing the table clear from the floor. That Paladino commits fraud is unde- niable. That all the phenomena happen- ing at her seances are produced by means of fraud is possible; but that Professor Miller's report proves this to be so will not be accepted by those who have read the reports of other investigators. If the char- acter of Professor Miller and his associates were not above reproach it might be asked how it was possible for the hidden observers to detect movements from a distance which those nearby could not see. The room is usually dark and at the time of the foot- grabbing incident the foot could not be seen. BOOKS WORTH WHILE THE BALL PUBLISHING CO. LIST Essays in Criticism. Third Series. By Matthew Arnold. The publication of this volume of essays may be frankly claimed as the most important literary event of 1910. It includes for the first time Arnold's greatest essay, "On the Modern Spirit in Literature." The remainder of the volume contains some of Arnold's best critical work. Cloth nety 1.25 A Renegade Poet and Other Essays. By Francis Thompson. An English classic of humorous thought and delightful workman- ship by the author of the essay on "Shelley." Cloth, net^ 1.25 The Man Forbid and Other Essays. By John Davidson. A notable volume of essays by the poet who disappeared last year which will show him as fully equal to Gilbert Chesterton in caustic paradox. Cloth net^ 1.25 Views and Reviews. By Henry James. A series of literary es- says which will be welcomed not only by James enthusiasts but by all admirers of honest and artistic workmanship. Cloth, gilt top. 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These most remarkable experiences of the editor of the "Review of Reviews" are attested by reliable witnesses and are the most startling that have ever been published. Cloth . . nety .75 Kill UKJN lU UHM^ JfKUM WJrlH^tt UUKKUWUU COOaTION-PSYCHOU)]^ This book is due on the last aatestamped below, or on the date to which renewed. Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. 7 DAY USE DURING SUMMER SESSION MAY 1 3 1963 FEB 2 8 19G7 Mf^f^Wm I A//,R.2?.6f [.WRISRECD'-SAJ H' AUG 2 8 J974 NOV 4REC'D-4 r r,.. LD 21-50m-12,'61 (C4796sl0)476 General Library University of California Berkeley C03abt.bl27 !4t:.