The will to disbelieve

Here's one  of the more tendentious and irritating book reviews I've seen: the New York Times'  August 20, 2006, review of Deborah Blum's excellent Ghost Hunters.

Although you wouldn't guess it from the review, Ghost Hunters goes to great lengths to show that early experimenters in the field of "psychical research" were competent, methodical, honestly skeptical, and worthy of emulation today.

The Times' reviewer, Anthony Gottlieb, doesn't see it that way. Here are a few choice excerpts. I've added emphases in bold.

Episodes of high comedy in the history of science are rare, but here is one ...

Members of the Society for Psychical Research wanted to be sure. But above all, they wanted to believe. ...

Blum's strange tale shows how and why many British and American intellectuals (including some prominent scientists) ended up on a fruitless but determined hunt for ghosts. ...

[William] Crookes was the discoverer of thallium -- a toxic element that some skeptics alleged had adversely affected his mind ...

Perhaps [Blum] tells her tale too even-handedly, since readers may be left with the impression that the Society for Psychical Research was on to something. ...

[Blum's] narratives obscure the methods that mediums like Mrs. Piper used -- methods that have been explained by debunkers like Martin Gardner, who in 1992 published a long exposé called ''How Mrs. Piper Bamboozled William James.'' For example, Blum's ghost narratives do not show, as Gardner did, how Mrs. Piper fished for information by gauging her sitters' responses to all her wrong answers, or mined the information available from earlier sittings, from sittings with others and from things said while her sitters believed she was unconscious in a trance.

Despite the meticulous and often Herculean efforts of the society, more than a century of psychical research has added nothing to the stock of human knowledge. There is today no more reason to believe in spiritualism or telepathy than there was in the Victorian era, when the bearded men of science groveled earnestly at the feet of dubious mediums.

A couple of quick notes. Mrs. Piper conducted numerous proxy sittings in which the methods suggested by Gardner would have been of no avail.  Her trance was unquestionably genuine; to test her reactions, researchers went so far as to subject her to physical abuse while in she was entranced - something Blum mentions, and Gottlieb does not. And there is certainly far more evidence of life after death today than there was in the Victorian era - not to mention telepathy, which has been proven beyond reasonable doubt by the ganzfeld tests.

At the end of the piece, The Times soberly informs us that Anthony Gottlieb is "currently writing a book about the idea of nothingness."

Somehow that little coda makes the whole review worthwhile.

Comments

"For example, Blum's ghost narratives do not show, as Gardner did, how Mrs. Piper fished for information by gauging her sitters' responses to all her wrong answers, or mined the information available from earlier sittings, from sittings with others and from things said while her sitters believed she was unconscious in a trance."

What the hell? Did this guy even read the book? Blum clearly documents how James and the other researchers were aware that the Phinuit "control" would sometimes fish for information and pass off facts that "he" gleaned from the sitters as if "he" discovered them.

[TomC]

from amazon, one of the reviews for this book also bothered me quite a bit:

from Rob Hardy
"It must mean something that investigators who most earnestly wanted to believe that the spiritualists were dabbling in a newly scientifically-explorable metaphysics were the investigators that had their hopes confirmed. Evaluating even the impressive Mrs. Piper, one investigator concluded that her auditors found meaning in what she had to say in her trance utterances merely because they wanted to find meaning there. It must also mean something that the research proved to be a dead end. There have been huge advances in science in the past hundred years, and yet no advances in the scientific investigation of the occult. As everyone knows, you can't prove a negative, and so no investigation will ever show that there are no such things as ghosts. Blum's sober and yet entertaining study shows, however, that sometimes even the brightest of minds won't give up hope that science might give evidence for seductive pseudoscience. "

his review is a perfect example of defining science as a position. he clearly showed his position by using the term 'seductive pseudoscience'

it's amazing that how some of the brightest minds are also most narrow-minded and rigid in their beliefs in science as an occult.

i also find it interesting that he said "There have been huge advances in science in the past hundred years, and yet no advances in the scientific investigation of the occult."

wow, whatever happen to EVP, OBE, NDE, Stevenson's research on reincarnation, and gary schwartz's research?

obviously he didnt bother to look around when he make such an ignorant statement.

it's interesting how dogmatic skeptics can read that book and come to the conclusion that those researchers of the past were trapped in their 'will to believe' mentality.

i think those skeptics are trapped in the very mentality that they accused those researchers for. if they honestly read through the book, and other resources, they would know that their 'will to believe' did not compromise their integrity as researchers (hodgison, wallace, james...)

makes me so mad. sigh.

[TomC]

one more note:

that reviewer from amazon is certainly not one of the 'brightest minds' skeptics that i know of.

cheap shot, i know, but heck, his review was a cheaper shot!

[Alex]

If you want to hear Blum's response to this review, check out this interview on wpr (her segment is near the end):

http://wpr.org/book/061203a.html

[Matthew C]

I've pretty much come to the conclusion that most elite scientists and their fellow-travellers (the editors of the NYT and most news magazines most assuredly qualify here) have completely bought into a paradigm of materialism and it is an utter and complete waste of time to argue for anything different with them.

"I've pretty much come to the conclusion that most elite scientists and their fellow-travellers (the editors of the NYT and most news magazines most assuredly qualify here) have completely bought into a paradigm of materialism..."

You have to remember that the scientific establishment has a political, economic, and social agenda. They have to viciously oppose anything that is even vaguely associated with religion.

[Vitor Moura]

I really would like to read 'How Mrs. Piper Bamboozled William James.' Someone has this article (in fact, I think is a chapter of a book)?

[Cyrus]

That review was so condescending. I'm going to go sniff some thalium now and catch up on Sam Parnia's NDE research.

[Troy]

I really would like to read 'How Mrs. Piper Bamboozled William James.' Someone has this article (in fact, I think is a chapter of a book)?

I think it's in his book "Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?" but I wouldnt bother if I were you. He basically makes the contention that the James and the Piper households had a domestic servant in common and that that servant could have fed information to Mrs. Piper. Perhaps. But Gardner's "hypothesis" is completely exploded by some of the very instances Blum highlights in her book. I suspect the reviewer knew this, but is too blinded by the current paradigm (or perhaps, too intellectually dishontest) to admit it.

[william]

Why do we give such creditability to scientists?

Those advanced degrees can have a paradigm paralysis effect on their ability to accept new incoming information.

Once in a while I meet a scientist that is willing to consider new data outside their existing paradigm but it is a rarity.

In all of my years of conducting seminars it was not the PhD’s that were the most open to new information but it appeared to be those with a two-year degree. Personal observation only.

Think about it once we start to focus in on one field of study with advanced degrees that can have a closing down effect on our ability to think outside our existing interests and beliefs.

[Vitor Moura]

>I think it's in his book "Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?"

No, this is not the book. The book is:

Are Universes Thicker Than Blackberries?: Discourses on Godel, Magic Hexagrams, Little Red Riding Hood, and Other Mathematical and Pseudoscientific Topics (Paperback)

http://www.amazon.com/Universes-Thicker-Than-Blackberries-Pseudoscientific/dp/0393325725

If you regurlary buy books in Amazon, you can use the tool "Search inside the book". I can't use the tool.

Well, using that tool, you just need to write "piper" and I think ALL the chapter about Piper will be avaliable. I think are just 10 pages, and Amazon let you see 30 pages of the book. The pages are 252-253-254-255-256-257-258-259-260-261-262.

So you just need "PrintScreen" and it's over! You will have the chapter about Piper.

Can someone do this? Please? :-)

Best wishes,
Vitor

[Ulrich Mohrhoff]

The hardcover edition is available for a bargain price of $5.19 at

http://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Hunters-William-Search-Scientific/
dp/1594200904/ref=ed_oe_h/103-8536390-6581468?
ie=UTF8&qid=1186454162&sr=1-1

(You need to make this one line.) It's definitely worth the bucks. Pity that the title is so misleading. I appreciated the book even more after reading (and reviewing) Kelly et al.'s voluminous Irreducible Mind.

[Vitor Moura]

A friend of mine already send me the chapter! Soon I will be posting!

[Michael Prescott]

>Soon I will be posting!

Okay, but please don't quote too much. The book is protected by copyright. A few short excerpts would be all right, but not the entire chapter.

[Vitor Moura]

Ok, Michael, I will take off all the References :-)

But you don't need to worrie about, don't you know fair use?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

"Fair use is a doctrine in United States copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders, such as use for scholarship or review."

Follows the chapter, without the References :-)

EDIT BY MICHAEL PRESCOTT: I'm sorry, Vitor, but quoting the entire chapter, even sans references, is not fair use. As an author, I'm sensitive to these things.

What I'll do is read the material you posted and summarize it with a few excerpts. This may take a little time.

Again, I'm sorry to have to remove the material, but I can't allow large chunks of copyrighted text to be reproduced on my site without permission.

Sit tight, and I'll post a comment with the redacted material when I can. - MP

[Michael Prescott]

Okay, I've now read Martin Gardner's essay, "How Mrs. Piper Bamboozled William James," which is said to have "first appeared in The Encyclopedia of the Paranormal, edited by Gordon Stein (Prometheus, 1996)."

Gardner gets off to an unfortunate start. His very first sentence reads:

"Mrs. Leonora Piper (1859-1950) was the most famous direct-voice medium in American history."

Wrong. Mrs. Piper was not a direct-voice medium. Gardner doesn't know the terminology.

His second sentence is not much better:

"Unlike other mediums of the time, she never produced physical phenomena."

Actually, there were many mediums of the time who did not produce physical phenomena. Mrs. Piper was not unusual in this regard.

After a brief bio of Mrs. Piper, Gardner reports on her ability to go into trances.

"During one trance she ignored a small cut James made on her wrist. She was undisturbed when a needle was forced into her hand and when a French investigator stuck a feather up her nose."

But just a few paragraphs later, Gardner has already forgotten these details when he writes:

"Unlike other cases of persons with subliminal personalities, Mrs. Piper’s trances never occurred spontaneously. They never began when she was alone or asleep. Yet whenever a sitter paid for a séance, she had no difficulty going into a trance. Moreover, persons suffering genuine trance seizures do not go in and out of them in theatrical ways calculated to impress audiences."

So were the trances genuine or fake? I guess it depends on which part of the article you're reading.

At one point Gardner notes that private detectives were hired to tail Mrs. Piper. "When [the deceased George] Pellew began coming through Mrs. Piper, Hodgson was so skeptical that he hired detectives to shadow Mrs. Piper and her husband for several weeks to make sure they were not researching information about his friend. Finding no such evidence he became convinced he was indeed conversing with his deceased friend."

What Gardner neglects to tell us is that the private detectives did more than tail Mrs. Piper. They intercepted her mail. And they weren't just looking for evidence that she was researching Pellew. They were looking for any evidence of collusion with accomplices. They found none. She was not meeting with anyone or receiving information through the mail (and she had no telephone).

Perhaps Gardner's omission of these details is explained by his speculations a few paragraphs later:

"Mediums in a city know one another. Those who patronize one medium usually visit others. At the time there were scores of mediums in Boston, forming a network of scoundrels who passed information freely back and forth."

Gardner's armchair speculation apparently outweighs the private detectives' legwork.

Strangely, Gardner sometimes notes facts that undermine his case for bamboozlement:

"In later years Mrs. Piper’s voices were replaced by automatic writing. While in trance her right hand rapidly scribbled messages. Frequently she pressed so hard the pencil broke. For a while she spoke and wrote simultaneously. On several occasions three discarnates came through, one speaking, one writing with one hand, one writing with the other. (Mrs. Piper was strongly ambidextrous.)"

So here we have someone writing two different messages and talking at the same time. Yet Gardner wants us to believe that it was all a trick. Some trick!

Then comes the inevitable appeal to cold reading:

"Records of Mrs. Piper’s séances show plainly that her controls did an enormous amount of what was called 'fishing,' and today is called 'cold reading.' Vague statements would be followed by more precise information based on how sitters reacted. Mrs. Piper usually held a client’s hand throughout a sitting, sometimes holding the hand against her forehead. This made it easy to detect muscular responses even when a sitter was silent. Moreover, her eyes were often only half closed, allowing her to observe reactions."

Somehow, Gardner forgets to tell us that many of the readings involved proxy sitters - people who did not know the facts of the case they were inquiring about. Strange how this little fact was overlooked. Could Gardner have forgotten to mention it because cold reading is useless in a proxy sitting?

"Books about Mrs. Piper by believers seldom mention her information failures," Gardner writes. I wonder how many books "by believers" he's read. The ones I've seen explicitly acknowledge that Mrs. Piper could be both astonishingly accurate and dismayingly inaccurate, sometimes in the very same session. The same is true of all mediums.

"Although cunning cold reading may account for most of Mrs. Piper’s hits, I believe she had other tricks up her sleeves. She constantly saw friends and relatives of clients. A vast amount of personal information can emerge in the give and take of séance conversation, to be fed back to sitters in later séances."

Gardner should know that Richard Hodgson, who investigated Mrs. Piper for years, was initially an arch-skeptic after Gardner's own heart. He permitted no such information leakage of the type that Gardner imagines. He once berated a sitter for bringing an umbrella into the house on a rainy day, because, he said, the umbrella could have concealed a secret message!

"Obtaining facts about prominent persons is not difficult. Obituaries can be checked. Courthouses contain birth and marriage records, real estate sales, and so on."

Problem: Many of the sitters were brought in anonymously. Some were from out of town or even from other countries. They were not all "prominent persons," and they were by no means limited to friends and relatives of the investigators.

Besides, what about those private investigators? Wouldn't they have noticed Mrs. Piper's trips to the courthouse? Oh, but we're supposed to have forgotten about them by now.

Gardner then discusses the fact that William James' sister Alice despised spiritualism.

"Alice’s opinion of James’s spiritualist friends could not have been lower. In one letter to her brother she called [F.W.H.]Myers an 'idiot.' "

What this is meant to prove is unclear. Alice seems to have had orthodox religious objections to spiritualism. So did many people of that era (and so do some people today - perhaps even including Gardner, who started out as a fundamentalist Christian). In any event, anyone who thinks Myers was an idiot is hardly a paragon of good judgment. Whatever his faults, Myers was a pioneering genius in the field of psychological theory.

Gardner proceeds:

"In 1901 Mrs. Piper wrote an extraordinary two-and-a-half-page article for the New York Herald (Sunday. October 30). Its headline: 'I Am No Telephone to the Spirit World.' She was, she said, retiring as a medium. She wished to be 'liberated' from the ASPR, for which she had served as an 'automaton' for fourteen years. She desired freedom for more congenial pursuits. She wanted to tell the world that nothing she had said or written while in trance could not be explained as coming front her unconscious or obtained by telepathy from sitters or persons elsewhere. 'I must truthfully say that I do not believe that spirits of the dead have spoken through me. When I have been in a trance state ... it may be that they have, but I do not affirm it.'"

Skeptics make much of this statement, apparently forgetting that if deception was Mfrs. Piper's intent, penning an article of this kind was a strange way to go about it. In any event, what Mrs. Piper said is not much different from many statements made later by another famous medium, Eileen Garrett. Some mediums have real doubts about the source and meaning of the information they produce. Garrett spent her whole life seeking answers. Mrs. Piper knew that William James, among others, was inclined to attribute her abilities to a variety of "super-psi" (though he didn't use this term). She may have provisionally accepted this explanation herself. Note that this is hardly the same thing as saying that she was a fake or a fraud; it's simply a different kind of paranormal power.

Gardner goes into some detail about the efforts of Granville Stanley Hall to discredit Mrs. Piper. He quotes Hall:

"Here then is a wide and copious margin in which suggestion can work. Never in our own or in other Piper sittings was any full record kept of what her interlocutors said. Still less have involuntary exclamations, inflections, stresses, etc., been noted, and even the full and exact form of questions is rarely, if ever, kept, while the presence of a stenographer which we proposed was objected to. Thus, unlimited suggestions are unconsciously ever being given off to be caught and given back or reacted to in surprising ways."

In other words, we're back to cold reading. But what about the proxy sittings? They are not a problem for Gardner, because he never mentions them. Out of sight, out of mind!

Amusingly, Gardner writes, "Although Mrs. Piper always insisted she never recalled anything that transpired during a seance, Hall noticed a growing coldness in her attitude toward him and his assistant." He apparently takes this "growing coldness" as evidence that she did remember what happened while she was in trance. Another possibility, of course, is that she sensed Hall's hostile skepticism, which may not have been very well concealed.

"In a hilarious final séance, Hall openly revealed to Hodgson his many deceptions, and did his best to convince him he was not really Hodgson but only a fragment of Mrs. Piper’s mind. Hall and Tanner could not hold back laughter at Hodgson’s discomfort and evasions."

By "his many deceptions," Gardner means Hall's many deceptions - he had made up a deceased relative and asked the Hodgson persona to get in touch with her, had pretended to know Hodgson in life, etc. It is true that Mrs. Piper's failures in this area are a notable weakness. I've discussed this in an earlier post. But the bottom line is that her errors and inaccuracies in dealing with the duplicitous Hall do not cancel out the huge quantity of correct information she produced throughout her long career, often under circumstances in which cold reading - contra Gardner - could not have been a factor.

---

I want to thank Vitor Moura for transcribing Martin Gardner's article.

[Vitor Moura]

>"Unlike other mediums of the time, she never produced physical phenomena."

>Actually, there were many mediums of the time who did not produce physical phenomena. Mrs. Piper was not unusual in this regard.

***In fact, you both are wrong :-)

http://www.survivalafterdeath.org/mediums/piper.htm

Mrs. Piper did not exhibit physical phenomena, except one single manifestation: she could withdraw the scent from flowers and make them wither in a short time. To establish rapport with her spirit communicators she utilised psychometric influences, usually asking for an object which was about the person of the departed.

>I want to thank Vitor Moura for transcribing Martin Gardner's article.

You're welcome!:-)

[Alex]

"Yet whenever a sitter paid for a séance, she had no difficulty going into a trance."

I'm pretty sure that Piper didn't charge for seances. Can somebody back this up?

[Ginny]

More contradictions and misinformation from Gardner and/or Hall:

Gardner cites Hall’s complaint that a full record of the Piper sittings was impossible: “Never in our own or in other Piper sittings was any full record kept of what her interlocutors said. Still less have involuntary exclamations, inflections, stresses, etc., been noted, and even the full and exact form of questions is rarely, if ever kept, while the presence of a stenographer which we proposed was objected to.” Yet elsewhere in the article, we are told that “records of Mrs. Piper’s séances” plainly showed her controls fishing, cold reading, tailoring statements to sitters’ reactions, etc.

Hall and Tanner “approached Mrs. Piper with open minds”. As to Hall, at least – as Deborah Blum details in Ghost Hunters - nothing could be further from the truth. Hall, a bitter SPR dropout and longtime critic of psychical research, sought and secured the Piper project over William James’ objections because Lodge and Hyslop thought his prestige as a psychologist would lend credibility to the investigation. As soon as his appointment was secured, he revealed his true agenda: “Seriously to investigate the problem of whether discarnate ghosts can suspend any of the laws of matter seems to me not only bad form for any and every scientific man, but an indication of a strange psychic rudiment … that ought to be outgrown like the prenatal tail or gills.” The concept of communication with spirits belonged “more to the troglodyte age than our own.”

Gardner’s amnesiac sitter theory: We are asked to believe that sitters assembled and awaiting readings gabbed among themselves about their loved ones, revealing to one another obscure biographical and identifying details about the very dear departeds they sought to contact. A short time later, when those very details emerged in the reading, the sitters forgot all about having shared this information with strangers and were stumped as to how/where Mrs. Piper got her knowledge. This strikes me as implausible in the extreme.

[Michael Prescott]

>I'm pretty sure that Piper didn't charge for seances. Can somebody back this up?

I think she was paid a small annual stipend by the ASPR. As a condition of this payment, she did not accept any clients other than those brought to her by ASPR investigators. Of course, she could have made far more money by foregoing the experiments and becoming a celebrity medium, but she never evinced any interest in fame and fortune.

Thanks to Ginny for an excellent comment. Hall comes across as a thoroughly odious fellow; even Gardner notes that Hall laughed at Mrs. Piper when he thought he'd caught her out.

For fun, let's list some of the things Gardner did not include in his article.

He didn't mention the proxy sittings.

He didn't mention the fact that most of the sitters were anonymous and many were from out of town.

He didn't mention the fact that Hodgson was a highly skeptical researcher who had debunked countless mediums and spiritualists, most notably Madame Blavatsky, before being sent to America with the express intention of exposing Mrs. Piper.

He didn't mention the fact that the "G.P." control (Pellew) correctly identified scores of Pellew's friends and relatives when they appeared anonymously at the sittings.

He didn't mention the fact that Mrs. Piper took a trip to England at the request of the SPR, and was kept under virtual house arrest throughout her visit, with her mail and telephone calls screened - yet she still managed to produce valid information at sittings with anonymous British guests. (She had never been to England before.)

I realize Gardner couldn't include every detail of Mrs. Piper's life in a short essay, but isn't it interesting how he managed to omit the most evidential material?

[Vitor Moura]

PRESIDENT G. STANLEY HALL'S AND DR. AMY E. TANNER'S STUDIES IN SPIRITISM.

By James H. Hyslop.

It was perhaps a year ago or thereabouts that I heard from a friend that President G. Stanley Hall, of Clark University, Worcester, Mass., had had some sittings with Mrs. Piper and I wrote him to express my desire to see the detailed record, but it seems not to have been copied at the time, according to the statement of his reply to me. Again I wrote a week ago and received from him the following reply:
Clark University, October 11th, 1910. My dear Professor Hyslop :
Every single scrap of the record of our sittings with Mrs. Piper has just appeared in the work of Dr. Amy E. Tanner from the Press of Appleton two or three weeks ago under the title " Studies in Spiritism." I have myself in one chapter in the book and also in the introduction given my views full vent and I need not say that I shall await with very great interest your reactions which I hope very much for the benefit of the cause will be as frank as our work has been. With cordial greetings, I am, Very sincerely yours,
G. STANLEY HALL.

President Hall is responsible for the first Introduction in the book and for Chapter XVI entitled " Current Notes by Dr. Hall." The remainder of the book, except interspersed comments, is avowedly by Dr. Tanner who has been his as¬sistant in Clark University work. The review of it will have to be divided, on this account, into two distinct parts, one dealing with the statements of President Hall and the other dealing with those of Dr. Tanner, tho I may have occasion to interfuse the references and discussions with each other.
I shall not enter into a critical defense of the spiritistic hy¬pothesis which the book rejects. That theory is quite ca¬pable of taking care of itself before honest and intelligent people. I do not regard argumentative or controversial de¬fence of that hypothesis as important in comparison with the truthful treatment of facts, and any attempt to change the issue by defending it before one has ascertained the exact facts is to expose oneself to refutation. I am not interested in any view of a subject which does not consist with facts and more than this I freely accord any man complete difference of opinion in regard to them. But woe unto him if he does not state the exact truth and shows either ignorance or prej¬udice about them. Then if there be any constructive lying about the facts I am going to avail myself of every advantage which an act of that kind offers.
Hence as I am not concerned with the views of the book, I shall confine my review of it to the correction of errors of fact and remarks on the character of them. Some of these errors are found in statements by President Hall, but, as Dr. Tanner is responsible for nearly all the statements of the book affecting the alleged facts of other records and students of the problem, it is she that will come in for the largest con¬sideration, and the errors are so astounding in this respect that I shall spare no feelings and indulge no chivalry what¬ever in the exposure of them. President Hall has asked me, as the letter quoted above indicates, to express myself frankly and I shall accept the invitation, taking an adaptation of Ma-caulay's language in his review of Barere's Memoirs as the promise of what I shall do.
" This book has more than one title to our serious attention. It is an appeal, solemnly made to contemporaries by one who plays a conspicuous part in academic respectability and authority and who represents herself or himself as ag¬grieved by the prejudices of those who believe in the existence of spirits on scientific evidence while she or he boldly pro¬claims belief without evidence and yet makes science the only criterion of truth in the treatment of the very creed they criticize. To such an appeal I shall always give ready au¬dience. I can perform no duty more useful to society, or more agreeable to my own feelings, than that of making, as far as my power extends, reparation to the slandered and persecuted devotees of academic science. I have therefore promptly taken into consideration this copious apology for scepticism.
" I was not conscious when I opened this book that I was under the influence of any feeling likely to pervert my judg¬ment. Undoubtedly I had long entertained a most unfavor¬able opinion of certain critics of psychic research and the spiritistic hypothesis; but to this opinion I was not tied by any passion or by any interest. My dislike was a reasonable dislike and might easily have been removed by reason and the truthful statement of fact. Indeed my expectation was that this book, now that academic reserve and authority had come into the arena, would amply vindicate the intelligence, the honesty and the fairness of respectable scepticism. That the author could vindicate herself or himself from all the suspicions and charges that had been made against the scientific priesthood I had hoped would be effected, tho fear¬ing it would be impossible. I thought it highly probable that some grave accusations against the type of minds under review would have been refuted and that many offences to which the class would have been forced to plead guilty would be greatly extenuated. I was not disposed to be severe. I was fully aware that temptations to which endowed respecta¬bility and scientific dogmatism were exposed must try se¬verely the strength of the firmest virtue. Indeed my in¬clination has always been to regard with an indulgence, which to some rigid students of the subject seems excessive, those faults into which those obsequious souls are sometimes
hurried by the necessity of pacifying the people who supply them bread and fame, or admiration and authority.
" With such feelings I read the book and compared it with other accounts of the same phenomena. It is now my duty to express the opinion to which the reading has led me. I have made up my mind and now I propose to do the authors, by the blessing of God, full and signal justice." The re¬mainder of Macaulay's observations may be taken as repre-, senting the manner in which it shall be done.
I shall largely confine my examination of the book to the statements made about my own records, statements and views. I may have occasion to diverge somewhat from this course. The first part of the book to come under this notice will be the statements of Dr. Tanner which I shall follow in their order. I shall not omit any important reference to myself in my review. I am referred to and quoted combined on 34 pages of the book. I shall leave the English group to take care of itself in most cases and lay the stress of this re¬view upon the questions affecting myself and statements. What I wish to do is to point out the absolute errors of fact and to show the documentary evidence of it so far as that is possible. I take up first the chapter on early trances.*

* In all references to Dr. Tanner's book I shall simply refer to the page and when not otherwise indicated other references will be to the English Proceedings with mention of volume and page.

Describing my experiments over a telegraph line to illustrate certain aspects of incidents given in proof of personal identity between the living, the author says (p. 38):

" At the same time the real question is not touched at all in such experiments. Hyslop assumes to begin with that communication with discarnate spirits is possible and that the investigator's problem is only to find out how it is established, whereas in fact the investigator has no right to assume the presence of any discarnate personality at all until he has exhausted all possible explanations by means of incarnate personalities."

Who said that my experiments " touched the real question"? What is the real question? Dr. Tanner does not tell us, tho elsewhere it is assumed that it is personal identity
with which I should agree. But here it is assumed that I did not know what the real question was. I carefully defined it in the very volume to which her animadversion refers (Vol. XVI, pp. 158, 289-296). Cf. also Science and a Future Life, Chapter III. This was personal identity of the deceased as conceivably provable by supernormal information bearing upon the past life of the deceased. Now as to these experi¬ments for testing incidents between the living for their influence on the receiver's judgment I was actually careful to tell the reader that they did not bear upon the proper question, and enumerated four objects which I had in view and these excluded the one implied by Dr. Tanner's remark. She is careful not to tell the reader this fact. The statement is an insinuation that I was trying to " touch the real question " when I distinctly denied this. Cf. Vol. XVI, pp. 537-540 and especially 543.

Again Dr. Tanner says I assume the possibility of com¬munication with discarnate spirits, apparently or evidently referring to these experiments in identification of personality. This is not true. I did not assume anything of the kind. The statements made in those experiments flatly deny any such assertion by Dr. Tanner and I do not see how any person having the slightest claim to intelligence could fail to see this, especially when it is actually stated. Besides I have in all I have ever written on this subject emphasized the fact that I do not even assume the existence of spirits. I assume the truth of the materialistic theory and shall not grant the ex¬istence of spirits until I obtain supernormal evidence of personal identity. That I have stated over and over again. Cf. above references, especially page 1, and also Chap. X in Sci¬ence and a Future Life, Journal Am. S. P. R., Vol. I, especially pp. 200-202. I have perhaps stated it in twenty-five other places. Moreover I actually stated in the volume Dr. Tanner quotes that we could not assume discarnate personalities until we had exhausted normal and incarnate explanations. You would think from Dr. Tanner's statement that I had not done so. That I had done so was indicated in many passages and statements on my Report and it was distinctly stated in certain places. Cf. Vol. XVI, pp. 16, 124. Chapter V of that Report is saturated with the idea. Cf. Science and a Future Life, p. 246.

Again Dr. Tanner says, referring to the character of " test messages," representing what is unknown to the sitter. " Since even Hyslop admits that these alone are strictly evidential; in any scientific sense, etc." This is not true. I have never said anything of the kind and I have never believed anything of the kind. I have often recognized that such messages were necessary to overthrow a certain form of al¬leged telepathy in which I do not believe and which I have vigorously attacked ever since I began discussing the problem of spirit communication. What I have always contended for is that anything which is not due to chance or to previous normal knowlege by the medium is evidence. It may not be evidence of spirits, but this was not at any time the primary object or point of view in my estimation of the facts. I was content to have evidence of the supernormal, and if the collective or synthetic unity of the phenomena consisted with a spiritistic hypothesis it was not the individual test that had the primary value but the selective and collective unity of the mass, I have stated this ad nauseam in my discussions of the subject and in the very Report quoted by Dr. Tanner. Cf.

Vol. XVI, pp. 132-133, and 158-176.
Again says Dr. Tanner, referring to the manner of making the records:

" Notes were taken in long hand, but, as far as can be judged, until Hyslop's sittings no attempt was made to take down everything that was said, especially remarks considered foreign to the matter in hand, or remarks of one sitter to the other, when two or more were present." (p, 45.)

There is not one word of truth in these statements, except that at some sittings used in the earlier Reports long hand notes were taken. The rest of it is pure fiction. It is the less excusable because the book pretends to show a knowledge of the various volumes published by the Society. (1) Stenographic records were made by Dr. Hodgson long before I had any sittings and in fact before I became interested in psychic research. Cf. Vol. XIII, pp. 288 and 413. (2) Besides the explicit statement of Dr. Hodgson the evidence stands printed on the page in which the statements of the sitter were recorded and Dr. Tanner herself has actually adopted in her own treatment of records exactly the same style of reporting them, without any acknowledgment where she learned it. (3) Whatever merit attaches to the manner of making my own record belongs entirely to Dr. Hodgson, and he was the one who made the notes under my eyes in all but the few times he was out of the room a few minutes and the fact was stated right in my Report. He had been prac¬ticing this care for years with exactly the same desire to en¬able readers and students to ascertain for themselves whether information had been imparted directly or indirectly by sitters, and all the borrowed wisdom displayed by the present authors on that point had been acted on for years by Dr. Hodgson. You would suppose from the authors of this book that they had discovered it and that psychic researchers were especially delinquent in this matter. (4) In his first report Dr. Hodgson remarked his habit of making stenographic records. (Vol. VIII, pp. 2 and 88.) (5) Professor James had made them before Dr. Hodgson came to this country. (Vol. XIII, p. 2 and American Proceedings, p. 103.)
Again Dr. Tanner (p. 48) says: " Hyslop says that in some of his sittings he spoke not a word from beginning to end." This also is pure fiction. There is not one iota of evidence for it. On this point the author contradicts this view of the case on page 72 where it is indicated truthfully that I did speak "in an assumed voice" and actually on the previous page (p. 45) refers to my inflections as if they oc¬curred in all the sittings. Besides the records every one of them have in the parentheses the indication of my speaking and when Dr. Hodgson spoke. The letter " S " stands for myself and precedes the record of my statements.
Immediately following the fictitious statement mentioned the author says: "Usually Dr. Hodgson betrayed through his voice his estimate of the accuracy of the control's statements, this estimate being in part determined through his receiving suggestions from Hyslop's appearance, manner, etc." Where is the evidence for this broad statement "usually"? Has it been applied to the details of the record? Not for a moment. It is pure fiction. If the author had said that at times he may have done so through suggestion from me there would be no quarrel. The incidents which at least appeared significant came usually before I had even had the chance to suggest anything regarding the subject of the com¬munication and recognition is not suggestion. Even a psy¬chologist ought to know that.
These are the less important errors of fact in the state¬ments of Dr. Tanner. They show sufficient carelessness of as¬sertion and want of respect for evidence on essential issues involved in the case to make one cautious about accepting any statement whatever that she would make. But the next group of facts representing the most important aspect of the whole problem are far worse in their falsification of the rec¬ord. The chapter is entitled " Test Messages." This means that the author intends to illustrate and discuss the " test messages" of the various records and Reports made of psychic phenomena. By a " test message " is meant one that is supposed to be evidence of the supernormal. The earlier Reports are drawn upon for instances and as I am at present concerned only with the references to my own state¬ments I shall not notice them farther than to remark that Dr. Hodgson's second Report is little more than mentioned. There is no attempt whatever to examine and criticize the facts to which Dr. Hodgson attached value. I may come to this again. The summary of my own record follows and I shall take up the incidents in their order. Dr. Tanner claims to select them as "test messages." The general conduct of the author in this respect will be noticed later. I take the summarized statements regarding my record as the author's representation of what I said and believed. When I am through with the subject the reader may decide for himself the amount of truth in Dr. Tanner's statements.

Dr. Tanner (p. 44) says that, " admit that these incidents alone are strictly evidential in a scientific sense, whose truth is unknown to the sitter." This is not true. I merely regarded such incidents as fatal to a limited telepathy and treated all incidents as evidential of the supernormal provided they were not due to guessing or chance coincidence. (Cf. Vol. XVI, pp. 131-134.)

A very important defect to remark is that the author gives no page references to the original documents which she pre¬tends to quote, and hence no one but the authors has any reasonable chance of examining the correctness of her statements. Readers are expected to take her ipse dixit about them, or at least that is all they can do with any reasonable ease. But I think all will agree, after the exposure of her misstatements, omissions, and misrepresentations, that it would have been a dangerous course to have given the references.

I propose to make it clear that I cannot be accused of garbling Dr. Tanner's statement and hence I shall quote every word of her summary of the incidents taken from my report. I shall neither abbreviate them nor represent the contents in terms of my own opinion. The reader shall have the full statements of Dr. Tanner and in reply I shall give the documentary evidence of the record which she claims to represent.

*******************************************

There's a lot more. In fact, I am in page 9 of 98. Michael, can I post more? This is an article of 1911, so, it's public domain. :-)

[Michael Prescott]

Yes, feel free to post more. The copyright has long since expired.

Thanks!

[Vitor Moura]

"Hyslop's father (that is, his purported spirit) asks if he remembers the story that he used to tell about a fire. Hyslop did not, but later his stepmother and sister said that his father was always afraid that his barn would burn, and on one occasion was greatly alarmed because he believed that another fire was his own barn burning.
" Note here that the real point, viz., that Hyslop, Sr., told his son a story is not proved; only a presumption is created that because he thought about fires he would tell stories about them." (p. 75.)

This statement by Dr. Tanner is almost pure fiction. I shall prove this by documentary evidence. Let me quote my own record and the reader may judge for himself.

" Near the beginning of the third sitting, after addressing me as ' James,' etc., my father asked me if I remembered the story he used to tell me of a fire when he was quite young (p. 324). In the effort to have it cleared up the subject was changed. But I brought him back to it by a question regarding it, and the reply was, ' Oh, yes, the fire. Strange I was forgetting to go on. I was nearly forgetting to go on with it. The fire did great damage and I used to think I never would care to see the like again.' I was unable to conjecture to what he referred with any assurance, es¬pecially as there were both exaggeration and discrepancies in it, so far as my memory of fires was concerned. Nothing more was volunteered on the subject in this series of sittings. But in the sitting by Dr. Hodgson on February 7th, Rector indicates that father is thinking of a fire about which he wishes to be clear (p. 372). Then on May 30th at my sitting (p. 430), father asks, ' And do you recall the fire I spoke to you about?' I replied that I re¬membered a fire, but was not certain what the fire meant. The reply came, ' We lived near, and although it did not interfere, it gave me a fright. My thoughts are quite clear on this point. I think there can be no mistaking it.' Singularly enough, this is followed by the spontaneous remark that some things which he has tried to say may seem muddled, as the first allusion to the fire evidently was, according to the sequel, in the following facts.

" Investigation at first discovered no probabilities in the first mention of the fire. Later my aunt recalled a fire when my father was young, which probably instigated the concern he felt about fire throughout his life. But on reading the passage in the sitting of May 30th to my stepmother (p. 430), she and my sister at once recalled a fire that gave my father quite a fright. It was not when he was young, but a short time before he moved west. He was also anxious about his barn and house, as he could never be induced to insure them until late in life. The occasion that fits the later message is described fully in my note (p. 364). It brings out the exaggeration and possible truth in the first message, as well as the certain truth in the second, so that a singular interest attaches to the statement that indicates an apparent consciousness of confusion in this incident."

The passages in the detailed records from which this summary of mine was drawn will be found in the references. So also the important Note 48, p. 503.

(I) I did not refer to this in my Report as evidential or a " test message." (2) I specifically excluded it from the evidential list and gave my reason (p. 89). (3) My stepmother and sister did not say that my father was always afraid that his barn would burn. It was I that said this (p. 503). My stepmother and sister rather accidentally recalled and stated that he had feared its actually being on fire on a certain specific occasion. (4) The point is not a " story about a fire," except in the first allusion to it and that idea is spontaneously abandoned in the later allusions. Dr. Tanner carefully avoids any mention of the later references to it in which it is about a fire that did damage or frightened him, etc. (5) The first allusion to the fire and the telling me about it was to an alleged fire that occurred when he was young, according to the message itself. Dr. Tanner omits to mention the incident of its occurring when he was young. Apparently the purpose is to identify this incident with those in the later allusions. (7) There is no evidence in the record that the allusions are all to the same fire. The incidents connected with them sufficed to suggest different occasions in my fa¬ther's life when he was concerned about specific and different fires. (8) The main point was whether there were any fires in his life that were related as stated and that affected him as stated. The allusion to one in his early life recalled to my aunt's memory one that had affected him. The interest of it was that the fire was caused by lightning, the one thing that always concerned him about his barn. I did not state this fact in my note, but only that there was a fire in his youth which my aunt knew affected his concern ever afterward. The allusion to fright recalled to my stepmother and sister another occasion in which a fire supposed to be that of his barn gave him a considerable fright. They did not know the incident the aunt recalled and the aunt did not know the incident they recalled. The only known fact to me was that my father was always extremely anxious about fire in his costly barn and. this recollection made it very pertinent to have a reference to a fire or fires that had affected him. It was not the simple allusion to a fire when he was young, or to one that had frightened him, that was significant, but the determinate and provable relation of both of them to the known concern of the man about specific fires that he feared. It is even quite possible that he actually told me the story of the early fire. I do not recall it. I helped to build the new and costly barn and remember discussing the importance of insuring it, as he had some ethical objections to life insurance.I would not recall his anxiety about the barn had it not been for this discussion, and hence I might easily forget the incident which originally gave rise to mental concern about fires in his barn. (9) The main object I had in analyzing the state¬ments and ascertaining their possible reference was to ascertain the actual facts in my father's life, not to treat the incidents either as evidence or "test messages." I nowhere made this group of incidents evidential. On the contrary I refused it this rank, and besides I actually indicated (Vol. XVI, pp. 20-21 and 293) that I had adopted this policy with the entire record of alleged messages. No mention of this is made by Dr. Tanner. It serves a better purpose to mis¬represent the facts and to make the reader believe that I was treating the incidents as evidence and betraying ignorance of the problem.

Let us take the next incident which Dr. Tanner treats as supposedly considered as evidence by me. She says: " In describing his last illness he said that his eyes had troubled him, which was true, but unknown to Hyslop."
(1) I did not treat this as evidence. (2) I specifically omitted it from the list of incidents supposedly interesting (Vol. XVI, pp. 86-89). (3) I attached no individual impor¬tance whatever to the trouble with the eyes. (4) Dr. Tanner omits from this passage all the incidents that give it impor¬tance and that collectively tend to discredit if they do not absolutely exclude, chance and guessing from the expla¬nation, this being the hypothesis which the author wants to sustain. (5) The main points were reference to the stomach, the difficulty of breathing, the allusion to his heart and the mention of congestion, all of them having special pertinence to his last moments, having occupied his attention and interest on account of the specially distressing conditions that marked the last struggle, the reference to the heart being less important for obvious reasons, tho suggesting the intense interest he had in watching its action and the signs of death. The mention of " going to sleep " was an interesting, and perhaps significant coincidence and the " trouble with the eyes " an additional circumstance, both of which were men¬tioned and the former not remarked by Dr. Tanner. Let me prove my contention from documents, and the reader may be his own judge of the spirit of the author.
Knowing the incidents of my father's last illness and dying hour I resolved to ask a question about them. He had never been told what his trouble was and I knew that, if I got the statement that it was cancer of the larynx it would not be evidence of personal identity but of telepathy from my mind.
(Do you know what the trouble was when you passed out?)
No, I did not realize that we had any trouble, James, ever. I thought we were always most congenial to each other. I do not remember any trouble, tell me what was it about. You do not mean with me, do you.
(Father, you misunderstand me. I mean with the sickness.)
Oh, yes, I hear. I hear you. Yes, I know now. Yes, my stomach.
(Yes, was there anything else the matter?)
Yes, stomach, liver and head.
(Very well. Tell all about it.)
He has taken off this condition, but tells me he could not see clearly. What was meant by his eyes. His stomach and.... speakplainly... [to invisible] I do not get it. Sounds like Bone [?] Bone [?] Bone [?] he is telling me. Wait. He places his hand over his he art... he art beat [?]
(Heart?)
Yes, let me reach thee, friend. [Hand moves over to R. H.'s head.] Think I am finding it hard to breathe.. .my heart, James ... my heart, James... difficult to breathe. Do you remember how I used to breathe?
(Yes, father, you are on the right line now.)
Yes, I think it was my heart which troubled me most, and my lung. Stomach and heart. I felt a * * * [undeciphered] and tightness of my chest. . .and my heart failed me, He says distressed in the region of the heart but at last I went to sleep. Was it not congestion, James?
(Not that I know of.) [ I had catarrh in mind in saying this when I should have had the death scene.]
I will try and remember all about it, he says, yet I remember heart and head well.
(Do you remember what medicine I got in New York?)
Yes, I do faintly. Never mind. . .tell me about it later when you feel clear. [From Rector to communicator.] Give him something... [From Rector to sitters.] [Accordion given.]
James, it was my heart, and I remember it well, and my eyes troubled me also. Do you remember this?
'(No, I do not remember this.)
Do you not remember what the swelling meant? [Not read at first.] He says swelling. I remember taking hold.. .hold of my own hands and holding them over my chest. But strange I cannot think of the word I want. I know it so well too.
(Do I know it also?)
Oh, yes, very well.
(Did I ever have the same sickness?)
Yes, long ago.
This is what I cannot think, and it troubles me a little, James, because I know it so well.
[Later in the sitting he returned spontaneously to the same subject and gave the following.]
Yes, my head grows lighter and lighter. Do you know the last thing I recall is your speaking to me.
(Yes. Right.)
And you were the last to do so. (Vol. XVI, pp. 327-330.)
Now the question here is not whether the incidents in this real or alleged communication are true or not. The fact is that the long passage contains a remarkable number of excellent hits, but let us assume for the sake of argument that they are all false and irrelevant. The demand that I have to make is twofold. First give the facts of the record and secondly state what I had regarded as interesting and possibly evidential. The reader is made to believe that I had referred only to the trouble with the eyes as a "test mes¬sage " when, in fact, I had specifically laid the stress on other facts. It is hard to characterize the conduct of a critic who will be guilty of such reprehensible misrepresentation. There are, in fact, several remarkable evidential incidents in the passage, but they are carefully suppressed and only one chosen by the author to which I had attached no special importance in my discussion of the incident.
The points to which I had called attention were the allusion to the tightness of the chest, congestion, going to sleep, the swelling whose meaning he did not know and some¬times asked about, the action of the heart as being an object of special interest to him, the stomach which had refused to do its work for days, the difficulty in breathing, holding of his hands on his breast, and my being the last to speak to him. Some of these were fundamental to the actual situation, in fact, nearly all of them, and some of them not being even guessable naturally by one who may have known the disease and Mrs. Piper knew nothing about this. To select from these only the trouble with the eyes, which I had not regarded as especially significant and to deliberately represent this as an incident which I regarded as a " test message " is absolutely inexcusable on the part of any one who claims to be either intelligent or honest.
Let me quote Dr. Tanner again. " Hyslop, Sr., referred to a little brown-handled knife that he said he carried in his vest and coat pocket. Hyslop did not know of any such, but his stepmother and sister remembered it, but said that he carried it in his 'pants pocket.' "
Dr. Tanner, with apparent deliberation, omitted the most important incident in this case, and also omitted the important remark of the supposed communicator which explained the defect in the message. What I actually said in the record was the following (Vol. XVI, pp. 42 and 336):
Do you remember the little knife I used to pick out my nails
with ?
(I am not sure, father.)
The little brown handle one. I had it in my vest and then in the coat pocket. You must certainly remember it.
(Was this after you went out West?)
Yes, I seem to lose part of my recollections between my ab¬sence and return, just before I had this change.
Compare this with Dr. Tanner's quotation. (1) The main point was not the brown-handled knife, but the picking of the finger nails. (2) The important point of the communica¬tor and the record was the use of the knife, and not the kind of knife. (3) The allusion to the character of the knife followed that of its use, and the impressive interest of it lay in the confirmation which I received of the incident in the ref¬erence of my stepmother to this use when she did not know what had been said through Mrs. Piper. Her statement showed that the chief use of it was paring his nails both of his hands and feet. All this was specifically stated in the record and Dr. Tanner, with the preconception of explaining it by guessing selects the remark about the brown-handled knife and fails to tell the reader either the exact facts or what I had said about them and then expects psychic researchers to ac¬cept her veracity. The poor public which cannot go to the original records has nothing to inform it about the real facts. It must trust those who pretend to desire the truth and yet do not tell it. We psychic researchers are accused of coming to the examination of the facts with a predisposition to be¬lieve they are spiritistic and in that way of showing an un¬justifiable bias and distorting even our facts. Does it ever occur to Dr. Tanner that the sceptical bias is just as great and that it can lead to equal distortions? Why assume that you must explain things by guessing? Why not come to the facts with a complete indifference to the question whether they are guessing or spirits, and then, instead of allowing your a priori and preconceived opinions to distort and misrep¬resent very different records to suit them, simply state the facts of the record in their completeness, and see that you are not accusable of deliberately deceiving the public, or at least of manifesting as much or more bias than the despised spiritualist. Veracity ought to be a virtue even with a scep¬tic. Let us take the next incident.
" He said that strychnine was one of the medicines he took in his last illness. Hyslop did not remember this, but later found an old letter from his father in which he said he was taking strychnine and arsenic.
" These three incidents are surely not very evidential. The medicines referred to are frequently given and might be guessed by any one, while any elderly person is likely to have trouble with his eyes when ill. The brown-handled knife, too, is so common a sort of possession that it would be a relatively safe guess." (p. 75.)
Let us examine these statements, (I) I did not say that he was taking strychnine and arsenic in his last illness. (2) The record does not say that he was doing it or that I had said it. (3) I was careful to state that they were taken in connection with the Hyomei which came as an answer to my inquiry about the medicine that I had gotten him in New York, and it was long before his last illness. (4) Dr. Tanner omits the statement of the record about the Hyomei. This was the most important feature of the incident. (5) The record does not show that the communicator said he was taking arsenic with the strychnine. There was no message whatever about the arsenic and Dr. Tanner cannot point it out in the record. The allusion to arsenic was in an old let¬ter of his to me which he had written to me long before his death.
The facts summarized are these. As a test I asked the communicator purporting to be my father what medicine I got for him in New York. In the next sitting I got the name Himi and in a later sitting spontaneously the name Hyomei which was correct. The message was followed by the at¬tempt to give another medicine and after much difficulty strychnine was given. I had gotten him the Hyomei but not the strychnine, and I did not at the time know or recall any¬thing about the strychnine, and in fact never knew the fact except from my stepmother's statement and a casual allusion to it and the arsenic in an old letter of his that I had pre¬served. The fact was mentioned partly for its documentary proof of the pertinence in the allusion to strychnine and partly for the benefit of those who wished to explain the facts by telepathy, if they thought the incidents were not due to chance.
It will thus be seen that Dr. Tanner does not report the rec¬ord at all, but only my father's letter before his death!! Dr. Tanner sometimes uses two exclamations at the end of a state¬ment as her criticism of an incident. I hope I may here be par¬doned for a similar method. However, such deliberate falsifi¬cation of a record is absolutely unpardonable. It grew out of the preliminary error referred to above, namely, saying that " even Hyslop admits that these alone [incidents not known] are strictly evidential," which I showed was false, and that I had not taken any such position (vide supra p. 8). But then I had actually stated in my note that the arsenic and strychnine had been known to me at one time, and did so to correct an earlier statement in which I had indicated that I had not known it. Hence the incident is not eviden¬tial on her own standard of" test messages." Again the bias of determining before hand and before you examine the facts that they must be guessing leads to deliberate or ignorant falsification of the record. Again take the next statement by Dr. Tanner (p. 76).
" The father asked if his son remembered their talks about Swedenborg. He did but only vaguely. But both father and son were much interested in religious matters and es¬pecially in immortality, and Swedenborg would be sure to come up at some time in conversation between two such per¬sons. We may also think it probable that Mrs. Piper would have some knowledge of all the prominent people who had powers akin to her own." (p. 76.)
Now what are the facts as compared with this pure fic¬tion? (1) Dr. Tanner does not quote the record at all. (2) My father and I never had any isolated talk about Sweden¬borg, as implied by Dr. Tanner's separation of the incident from its environment. It was only an incident in a more important group of facts. (3) Dr. Tanner makes no allusion whatever to the other incidents or the group of which the mention of Swedenborg was a part. It would take three pages of my Report to show the complete record of the facts. (4) The talk was not about Swedenborg in general, but a particular view of his. I shall only refer the reader to it and then indicate the real incidents (Vol. XVI, pp. 30-33, 318, 332, 341,438,474,484-485).
The conversation which the communications mentioned was about this subject of spirit return and not primarily about Swedenborg. The important points of coincidental interest were the reference to the fact of such conversations, to my doubts, to his not thinking it all hallucination, as I had so explained apparitions, to the " thought theory," to hypnotism which had been a subject of talk and experiment in those conversations, and especially to the dream of the young woman and my experiments with her. The allusion to Swedenborg was a part, an integral part, of these incidents and was not about him generally, but about his " spiritual sense " and " description of the bible." Again the reader can easily see how utterly unreliable the author is in her representation of the facts of other people. Can she expect any one to accept her record when she is so careless of that of others?
I am in no way concerned with the interpretation which Dr. Tanner puts on the incident of Swedenborg. She is entitled to her own opinion and I do not care even to differ with it. Interpretations have no importance in comparison with veracity. Is the next any better ?
"The father asked, 'And do you remember Thom... Tom. I mean the horse.' Hyslop was completely surprised by this reference to a favorite horse of his father." (p. 76.)
(I) I was not surprised at the mention of a favorite horse. (2) The record does not say that I was thus surprised. (3) Dr. Tanner omits to tell the reader that it was associated with the name of my brother and that the question was asked what he did with him, the horse, Let me quote the exact facts of the record which the reader may compare with the statements of Dr. Tanner. (4) I did not say he was a fa¬vorite horse, but one of a favorite pair. Let us see the docu¬mentary evidence.
Where is George? I often think of him but I do not worry any more about him.
(George is at home and all right. Do you remember where that is?)
Oh, yes, I often go out there to see him.
(Do you ever see him?)
Oh, yes, I think, if I U. D. [understand] your question, I do. Yes and do you remember Thom.. .Tom.. .and what has he done with him? I feel quite. . .yes... .yes, all right... I mean the horse.
(That's it. My conscience.)
My note on this was as follows: "As soon as I saw Tom written I thought of an old negro whom father often employed in the harvest field and with whom he used to have much fun. But I was completely surprised when the state¬ment came, ' I mean the horse,' possibly as information to Rector, who, perhaps, was puzzled at first to know what the passage meant." (Vol. XVI, p. 423.)
The surprise here was not at all at the mention of a favorite horse, but at the statement that he meant a horse, because this specification of the meaning was a direct repudiation of my actual state of mind. Here when I was hoping that something would be said about the old negro and the name of Tom was instantly recalled to my mind, the tele¬pathic process, as usually defined, was ignored and a result more natural on some other theory presented. It was this that surprised me, because the statement " I mean the horse " might imply Rector's actual inhibition of my thoughts to correct them. That is a good reason for surprise and the indication of what I had in mind is clear from the record.
I do not care what explanation you give of the facts. Let it be guessing if you like. I am not so ignorant of what people will say is guessing as Dr. Tanner assumes. I am quite aware that people of her type will believe that any¬thing could be guessed before they would admit the super¬normal. I could quite agree with Dr. Tanner and every one else in the view that any single incident, if it were the only coincidence measured off against all human experience to the contrary, however impressive the coincidence, might be attributable to chance. But when you falsify the record to make a thing guessing which does not look like it in its in¬tegrity the trouble is not with the explanation but with the reporter's veracity. Let us also see the next quotation.
"Do you remember Peter...who was...or belonged to Nanie ? " Hyslop saw no meaning in this at the time, but later found that the cousin who, he supposed, asked this question had had a dog named Peter when he was between two and four years old, but it seems to have had no connection with Nanie."
" Here are two doubts: first, that it really was the cousin who was speaking, and second, that the dog was referred to. There is nothing in the message to indicate that it was a dog, and as it is connected with Nanie, who had nothing to do with the dog, the presumption might be just the opposite from what Hyslop makes it." (p. 76.)
Now let us quote the record and see what the facts are as compared with this practically pure fiction of Dr. Tanner.
James was it George I have been trying to think. . .where is ....and do you remember Peter who was... .or belonged to Nanie ?
(I do not recall Peter now, but I remember some one by that name.)
Here.
(I do not know whether he is there or not. Is he on your side?)
Yes, we say yes. I am W. H. McAllen [ ?] The name does
not sound right to us friend. It is he says Mc sounds like
Mclellen. G. P.: Yes I am he.
(I am very glad to hear from you. What relation are you to me?)
Your cousin.
(That's right.) (Vol. XVI, pp. 96 and 428-39.)
[This was on May 30th and the following came on June 1st.]
What is meant by Peter? Was it the dog George had?
(I do not remember this.)
Can't you ask him ?
(Yes, I shall ask him about it.) (Vol. XVI, p. 452.)
Compare the statements of Dr. Tanner with this record. (I) Dr. Tanner says that there is a doubt about "that it really was the cousin who was speaking." The record both says it was my cousin and actually gave his name sufficiently well for evidential purposes. (2) Dr. Tanner says that there is a doubt about the dog being referred to. This of course is not indicated in the first passage quoted, but on the same page on which I quoted the first passage I also quoted the second one which definitely indicates that Peter was a dog. In both cases of the record I referred to the Note which ex¬plained the facts. I should of course had a cross reference in the detailed record to the second mention of the name Peter with the name George and the indication that Peter was a dog. But both incidents are presented together on page 96 and the references of the detailed record in each instance are to the same Note on page 516. (3) Dr. Tanner says not a word about the names and incidents that make the case interesting and evidential, if anything is evidential. (a) She omits to tell the reader that George is the name of the communicator's son and that this son had owned the dog.
(b) Nanie was the communicator's living sister who may be
supposed to have known all about the dog, and tho she did
not own it, was the natural person to confirm the incident.
(c) The reader is not told that both the communicator's name
and relation to me were specifically indicated by the com¬
municator, (d) The reader is not told that in fairly close
relation to the second message (Vol XVI, p. 452) the names
Lucy and Jennie are given, Lucy being the name of the living
wife of this cousin and Jennie the name of her sister. (4)
Dr. Tanner states that it was this cousin, the communicator,
that had owned the dog. This is not true and the record
does not say so. I explicitly said that the dog belonged to
his son George and to distinguish him as a cousin from the
communicator, his father and my first cousin, I said the
George was my second cousin. (5) That the detailed record
of the first passage quoted has not been the only source of the
information regarding the incident is apparent in Dr. Tan¬
ner's reference to the time when this cousin was supposed to
have had the dog. This is not referred to on page 428 or 429
of the Report, but on page 96 where both incidents are given
and connecting the name Peter with the dog, so that this
must have been seen, unless she saw only the Note on page
515, which is connected with the second reference to the dog
and the name Peter, and this is the natural order of the num¬
bering. The reference to this Note on page 429 was an after¬
thought when I had finally discovered the meaning of the
first allusion. This was indicated in the manner of making
the Note reference.
I think it is quite clear that the author has misrepresented this incident as badly as any other. As it stands it is worse than fiction. Evidently there was not the slightest effort to ascertain the facts. A man who happened to believe the in¬cident was an incident in a collective mass of evidence supporting a spiritistic hypothesis had to be regarded as know¬ing nothing about them and then the facts had to be coined to favor some other view. My interpretation of the incident as represented by Dr. Tanner would not be different from hers. But hers is not the fact of the case. It is purely imaginary and made so by the presupposition that nothing can be su¬pernormal and is not to be examined carefully if it claims to be this. You must be careful to falsify the facts in order to maintain another hypothesis. Is a spiritistic bias and its influence in any respect more distorting than the sceptical?

*****

Soon I will post more! :-)

[Vitor Moura]

Another incident.
" The father said that he used to read the paper in his chair, and the stepmother confirmed the remark.
" Most elderly men at home read the paper in ' their' chairs. This is really too trivial and commonplace to be worth remark." (p. 76.)
Examine these statements, (I) I did not regard this as an evidential incident. (2) I excluded it from the list of in¬cidents that I regarded as evidential (Vol. XVI, pp. 86-89). (3) I excluded it from the list that was made of those I did not know, as well as from all other lists, as having any pos¬sible significance. (4) The illusion of Dr. Tanner is that because I ascertain whether a thing is true or not and say that, if true, it is evidential! I specifically denied any such intention in incidents (Vol. XVI, pp. 20-21). (5) Dr. Tanner does not quote the record as it stands. My father did not say that he used to read his paper in his chair. He specified the kind of chair and associated it with two other things which the author has not told the reader. Let me quote the de¬tailed account.
I also recall a thin black coat or dressing gown affair I used to wear mornings.
(Yes, that is first rate.)
I can see myself sitting in my old arm-chair before the fire... open in the library.. .wait a moment friend, do not haste.. .morning. Reading over the paper. Look at me there James and see me in the gown I refer to and answer me. (Vol. XVI, pp. 387 and 54.)

Notice the points. (a) The main incident is not reading in the chair, but his thin coat. (b) The reading of the paper is a mere incident in a larger collective whole and clearly indicated in the record. (c) The communicator specifies that it was his arm-chair, not a chair in general, and associates both this and the reading with the open fire and mornings, all of which was true. It may not be evidential. I did not make it so. But what can be said of the veracity and in¬telligence of any one who falsifies the record in this manner? All readers are given to understand that I regarded it as evidence. I think most sane people not afflicted with prej¬udices about chance and guessing" and the necessity of garbling records to sustain them would regard this complex whole as representing coincidence not easily put together at one guess, tho standing alone and without other evidential incidents I would regard it as such. The method of classify¬ing the incidents under the heading " test messages " involves two grave errors. As the author has treated the problem it implies first that each individual message proves some theory. I have never thought such to be the case. I have always in¬sisted, and discussed the fact at great length in this Report, that the individual incident had very little value. I based the case on collective or synthetic evidence (Vol. XVI, pp. 158-176). The second implication is that the reporters of the facts regard them as described when they may not do any¬thing of the kind. " Tests " and evidence may be very dis¬tinct things. The title to the chapter should not be " Test Messages," but something that did not imply a character¬ization of the incidents.
The next statement by Dr. Tanner is perhaps as re¬markable a case of falsification as her book contains. I quote it in full as usual.
" The father asked if the son remembered the visit that he had paid to him just before his death. Hyslop did not, but later found that he had totally forgotten a visit his father had paid him severalyears before his death, and so he counts this remark as correct.
" This is a favorable sample of the way in which Hyslop secures his large number of correct items. Any father would be presumed to pay visits to his children from time to time, and so the only evidential part of the item is the statement that a partic¬ular visit came just before his death, but this is totally wrong." (pp. 76-77.)
Let us look at the errors in this account. (I) I did not regard this to which Dr. Tanner refers as an evidential in¬cident, much less a test message. (2) I did not regard it even as a correct incident. (3) My note showed that the communicator's statement was wrong instead of cor¬rect (Vol. XVI, p. 440). (4) I did not include the incident in the list of either true or evidential ones given by my fa¬ther (Vol. XVI, pp. 86-89). (5) I did not include it in the list affecting the telepathic hypothesis (Vol. XVI, pp. 131-133). (6) The incident as told in the record does not con¬form to the standard which Dr. Tanner adopts for deter¬mining what is evidential. (7) I specifically stated that the second reference to a visit to me was corrected to be my visit to him just before his death (Vol. XVI, p. 508). (8) I stated that my note was designed to show my own error of memory rather than the " pertinence of my father's state¬ment." Dr. Tanner does not tell the reader this fact. (9) I did not deem the incident deserving of mention in the " Sum¬mary of Facts," and so made no mention of it there. Now let us examine the exact statements of the Report.
My father had purported to communicate about our con¬versations on this subject and referred to his having told me that I would have to give up " the thought theory," when his place was taken by another, and immediately on his leaving my father purported to return and the following occurred. My notes are here included in the record (Vol. XVI, p. 440).
James one thing more. . .more. Do you know that I was a lifelong friend to you all?
(Yes, I know it.)
[Evident change to father in the next sentence.]
And do you remember the visit I paid to you.. .you? [Cf. p. 474.]
(When was it?)
I cannot tell the date, but it was just before I came here.
[If this had been " the visit you paid me," it would have been nearer right and pertinent. J. H. H.] [See Note 53, p. 507.]

(Who is speaking now?)
It is father who is speaking now.
(Yes.)
But he seems a little dazed.
This sitting was on May 31st and at the sitting" of June 6th the following came (Vol. XVI, p. 474).
Do you remember our conversations on this subject?
(Yes, I do. Can you tell me when it was? Yes, I do remem¬
ber the )
Yes, do you remember of my last visit. . .your last visit?
(Yes.)
With me. [Cf. p. 440.]
(Yes, I remember it well.)
It was more particularly on this occasion than before.
(Yes, that is right. Do you know what I was doing just be¬fore I made the visit ?)
Yes. I believe you had been experimenting on the subject and I remember of your telling me something about Hypnotism. [Correct.—J. H. H.]
(Yes, I remember that well.)
And what did you tell me about some kind of manifestation which you were in doubt about?
(It was apparitions near the point of death.)
[Excitement in hand.]
Oh, yes, indeed, I recall it very well, and you told me a young woman who had had some experiments and dreams.
(Yes, that is right.)
Which interested me very much, but yet you were doubtful about life after so called death. Remember the long talks we had together on this, James?
(Yes, I remember them well, and I am no more doubtful.)
I have quoted the incident in full because the allusion to the visit is so definitely and explicitly associated with the talks we had on the subject of spirit return, and because I wish the reader to see how Dr. Tanner separates incidents from their context to use them and thus misrepresents their real nature by eliminating the one characteristic that gives them meaning and evidential importance. The reader will observe how she omits the remarkably good incident about the " young" woman who had had some experiments and dreams." I had talked with my father before his death about Hypnotism on that occasion and I told him of a remarkable coincidental dream by a lady and of my experiment in identi¬fying a certain living person by a photograph. This person was one that she had never seen or heard of before, but in her dream she saw a face associated with her sister 700 miles distant and then identified it among six other photographs without knowing what I wanted done. These correct in¬cidents at least suggest an interesting interpretation and they give special meaning to the allusion to the last visit, which took place in 1905 and my father died in 1906.
Now the important point to be noticed is that the state¬ment at first takes the form that it had done in the state¬ment on May 31st and then was spontaneously corrected. Had the correction not been made I should have had to say the statement was false. The interesting thing, however, was that the statement of May 31st about my father's visit to me was associated with the attempt to talk about these very conversations and the reader may notice that apparently the message was not completed there and that it is possible that the pronoun " you " was a beginning of the correction which was made on June 6th. When I made the note show¬ing what was necessary to make it pertinent—I did not say evidential—I did not notice the possible connection with this message on June 6th. Hence when I wrote Note 53, p. 507 I had in mind, as actually indicated in that Note, my interest¬ing failure of memory about an actual visit of my father to me, and carefully indicated that it was not because of any pertinence in the message, which Dr. Tanner has said I had treated as evidential (Vol. XVI, p. 508).
Another interesting thing is this. It would have been technically correct for me to have said that my father had paid me a visit instead of saying that it should have been my visit to him, tho the time relation would have been erroneous, as I indicated in the Note. The later Note explained that it was my stepmother who recognized that my father had visited me in Chicago, this being recalled by the words stating the visit, without considering the association of it with the end of his life. The fact was this. He was on his return from the west and stopped over in Chicago, as my note ex¬plains (p. 507) and I was at Lake Forest, Ill. I went down to see him, so that you would be correct technically in saying that I visited him or that he visited me.
Now all this explanation is not to make the incident evidential or strictly correct, as I distinctly indicated that it was not correct and explained the whole incident as showing how my memory did not recall a fact which ought to have been clearer than many which I recalled easily. So far from making it correct and evidential I showed that it was false and worthless.
I think this discussion shows very clearly how little foundation there is for Dr. Tanner's remark that this is a " favorable sample " of the way I get my large number of correct items. It is a sample of how careful I was to tell the truth and to exclude such incidents from the evidence. Dr. Tanner ought also to know that the insinuation that the certification of the other incidents in the record is no better than is imagined in this instance is absolutely false and that this falsification can be supported by documentary evidence which it would take a number of this Journal simply to record. She has read my Report to no purpose at all unless she knows this. Let us examine the next statement.
" A new spirit suddenly appeared and, without announcing who he was, asked, ' Where is the book of poems?' Hyslop inferred that this was a certain cousin, and upon inquiry found that in his last illness he had had a book read to him in which there was a poem at the end of each chapter.
" Here, of course, there is one doubt and one mistake. The doubt is as to whether the spirit really was this cousin. The mis¬take is in calling a book of prose with occasional poems in it a book of poetry." (p. 77.)
This statement is nearer the truth than any previous one examined, but it has its erroneous implications and its omis¬sions. (1) I did not regard it as a "test message." (2) I explicitly stated that, " taken altogether, his communications are neither clear nor rich in evidential material." (Vol. XVI, P. 99) (3) On the same page as the last I explicitly stated
that it was an incident that could only possibly be admitted to consideration at all. (4) In my Note (Vol. XVI, p. 518) I did not say that the reference to " the book of poems " was correct, but that it was pertinent, and throughout this whole Report I used that term " pertinent " to exclude the idea of evidential character, unless other incidents made a fact so. That should be apparent to the variest tyro in scientific read¬ing. (5)I did not call a book of prose a book of poetry, nor did I treat the incident as implying it. I simply showed the degree of connection between the facts and the message. (6) In one statement, Dr. Tanner admits that there was a poem at the end of each chapter—both my notes indicated that it was a long poem—and in the other when minimizing its supposed significance speaks of " occasional poems in it." This is altering the facts again. (7) Dr. Tanner does not tell the reader that I explicitly stated that the supposition that my cousin was the communicator was only a conjecture on my part. I might have shown good reasons for this conjecture, but I preferred to discredit the fact rather than to exaggerate it. The reader might suppose that the " doubt " mentioned by Dr. Tanner was hers alone and thus, with her imperfect account of the facts assumed by the reader to be true, imply that I had overestimated the incident, the fact being that I had not given it the alleged value at all. The reader should have been told exactly the facts. (8) In Appendix IV, pp. 608-616 Dr. Tanner might have found far less definite and more confused incidents to be evidential.
The next two. passages from Dr. Tanner should be quoted together, because they are concerned with the same group of facts and show as remarkable a piece of falsification as I know.
" James McClellan said that his brother John would be there soon, the context indicating plainly that his brother would die soon and join him. It turned out, however, that John had already died, nearly a year before, and of course the control proceeds to explain his ambiguous phrases and Hyslop accepts the ex¬planation."
" The same control said that the same John had had a sun¬stroke from which he had never fully recovered. After much labor, Hyslop found that once he had been a little overcome with the heat but had never suffered permanently from it, and yet he counts this statement as correct." (p. 77.)
What are the facts? (I) The incident of predicting the death of John McClellan is only one closely connected with a large number of important ones which Dr. Tanner does not mention and which were evidential. (2) It is not true that he had died nearly a year before the prediction. 0(3) It does not state in the record that he died nearly a year be¬fore. (4) The Report explicitly states that he died nine months after the prediction. The sitting was on June 6th, 1899, and I found the. man living at that time. A letter of the son to me, dated May 16th, 1900, informed me that his father, this John McClellan, died on March 30th, 1900. The reader may decide for himself regarding Dr. Tanner's state¬ment. Cf. Vol. XVI, p. 471. (5) The control made no ex¬planation of any failure in the prediction, but owing to Dr. Hodgson's ignorance of the relationships and the facts was confused on other matters, after correctly indicating the per¬son that had died and the relationship to James McClellan. (6) This John McClellan was not reported by me as ever having had a sunstroke. So far as I know he never had such a stroke. (7) I did not report any John McClellan as having had a sunstroke. (8) The Report (Vol. XVI, p. 472) states that it was a "brother David," referring to another John McClellan's brother, that had the sunstroke. Cf. Note in same Report, pp. 520-521 and Note 94, pp. 535-536. (9) Dr. Tanner does not avail herself of an error in the facts at this point. It was this John McClellan's father whose " brother" David, in fact a brother-in-law, not a brother, had the sunstroke while the John McClellan apparently meant by the incident about losing a finger in the war was probably a cousin of this John McClellan's father, while John Mc¬Clellan's father was never in the war and never lost a finger there or elsewhere, all of which is explained in the Report. That is to say, there was no " brother " David to any of them that had a sunstroke and the McClellan apparently meant by the incident of the war and the lost finger was not related to this brother-in-law David. Dr. Tanner has falsified the truth and neglected the recorded errors which might have been used to pick flaws with. (10) The remark about the sun¬stroke by Dr. Tanner is an equivocation. The record did not say that he " suffered permanently" from it, but he was " never well after he received it." My father had a slight sunstroke and his head never recovered from the effect of it, tho he was disqualified for work only twenty-four hours, I asked several physicians about the effect of sunstroke and their reply was that no one ever recovers entirely from the effect of it. I made this inquiry because the record in con¬firmation of the fact of sunstroke shows that it was only a slight one. The physicians' opinion may not be true, but it was consulted, just because the testimony of the son was that it was a slight stroke, and their statements were re¬corded in the Report (p. 522). Dr Tanner slurs over the facts that the sunstroke was correct and that the name David was correct at the same time, and also neglects to make a point of the error in the relation expressed, to say nothing of her own errors in statement. (11) I did not treat the state¬ment of the record that the patient was never well after the sunstroke as correct. I distinctly and explicitly indicated that the testimony was to the effect that it was incorrect. I quoted the similar case of my father and the testimony of physicians to compare with that of the living sons. Dr. Tanner prefers to believe the testimony of persons who have no medical knowledge whatever of sunstroke and its effects to that of physicians. I do not know which is correct and did not decide between them.
I shall quote the record and let readers decide the char¬acter of Dr. Tanner's statements. (Vol. XVI, pp. 470-472.)
I am here once more. I am James McClellan if you wish to know and you are my namesake.. .name.
(Yes, I remember you and that you. .. .that I am your name¬sake.)
Yes, all right. We cannot quarrel about that, can we, James, but I despised the name of Jim.
[Pertinent. We always called him by another name. But I never knew why we did so, nor that he despised the name Jim. -J. H. H.]
(Very well, I understand.)
What is it you want to know about Frank, or was it John who wanted to know?
(There was some confusion when Frank was mentioned, and also when John was mentioned. Who is this cousin John that was mentioned before?)
It was not cousin, that was a mistake.
(Yes. Is he in the body or in the spirit?)
He is here, and [Hand dissents violently] I intend to straighten this out, but the light went out, and I could not remain there. He is a brother. . .Yes all right... and he will be here soon. But it is still not straight. ..straight [Perhaps from G. P. to spirit.] Wait and I will explain. You remember brother John very well, you must if you are James.
(Yes. I remember him well.)
He was the one who went to the war.
(Very well. Go on.)
Let me see. [This is evidently intended to correct the above.]
Well perhaps you remember father, don't...do [superposed on don't] you not?
(Do you mean your father?)
Yes.
(Is this my uncle James McClellan?)
Yes.
(Yes—no I do not remember your father.)
Well, he was John.
(Very well.)
John James McClellan. [James written first. John written in front of James, then McClellan written after.]
(R. H.: " James John McCellan ? ")
No. John James McClellan.
(Very well. I understand and shall inquire about it.)
Well, go ahead and inquire. I think I know.
(Well, all right. Please tell me anything you wish to tell.)
I wanted to tell you about his going to the war, and about one of his fingers being gone before he came here.
(Very well. Go on, please. I understand.)
And he had a brother David, who had a S U N stroke.
(I understand. That is perfectly new to me. I never heard it before, and it pleases me very much to learn this fact.)
Well, he never was well after he received it until he came here. Then one more I wanted to speak of was Nancy but I cannot tell you any more now.
(R. H.: Very good.) [Indicating to sitter to make some such remark.]
(Very good. Thank you very much. Rest now.)
Be brave, upright, honorable, do the best you can and don't forget your uncle James Mc.., . Good-bye.
(R. H. to sitter: Say....) (Good-bye, uncle for the pres¬ent.)
* * * [Undeciperable. James or yours?] James McClellan.
The facts are these. I had an uncle James McClellan who died while I was at college in 1876. I always under¬stood that I was a namesake of his, tho more particularly that of my grandfather, as I learned after the publication of this Report from an aunt who was strongly prejudiced against this work. I did not know that he despised the name Jim. We always called him uncle Mack, for no reason that I knew, but supposed it was to distinguish him from an uncle Jim, his brother-in-law. He had two living daughters at the time this sitting occurred. One of them knew nothing about his despising the name Jim. The older daughter, however remembered it well and told me that he and her mother had a great deal of trouble trying to get the neighbors not to call him Jim. The interest in the circumstance was that my fa¬ther always called me Jim and Jimmie until 1877 when I graduated and ever after that he called me James. This uncle died the year before my father ceased to call me Jim and Jimmie. The reader will observe in the Report I am quoting that my father always called me James in these sit¬ings and we may suppose that it was noticed by my uncle and the fact recalled his early experiences before I was born.
His brother John was well known to me as the treasurer of the university from which I graduated. He was living at the time of this sitting, as I ascertained after it. He died nine months later than the sitting and I sent a request to Dr. Hodgson to call up my father at some sitting and ask him the question: " Has anything happened recently that you wish to tell James ? " Dr. Hodgson was not told what had happened. When the question was put on June 4th, 1900, the reply was that John McClellan had come and that he was the brother of James McClellan, tho this latter statement was accompanied by much confusion and error.
I ascertained after this sitting that James McClellan's father was named John, not John James. He died in 1867. Whether I ever saw him I do not know. I do not remember anything about him, tho I was thirteen when he died. He was never in any war and never lost a finger. But I found another John McClellan probably a cousin of James Mc¬Clellan's father and belonging to the Kentucky branch of the family. Several things were stated in the messages about him in other sittings notably the name Hathaway and several of the Williams, these being verifiable as correct in that con¬nection. This John McClellan had lost a finger in the war of
1812.
James McClellan's father John did not have a brother David, but he had a brother-in-law David who had a sun¬stroke soon after the Civil War in 1865. His sons thought it never affected him, but the testimony of physicians was that the subject of it never wholly recovers.
James McClellan's mother was named Nancy.
Now readers may decide whether Dr. Tanner has properly represented the complex whole in which the prediction of John McClellan's death occurs. She has picked it out of a large number of significant names and incidents about which she says nothing and then falsifies it in order to condemn my statement of its correctness! The value of the facts in this quoted passage lies in their collective relevance, not in the truth of each individual incident and throughout the volume I insisted on this. It is never regarded by this author. Her whole representation of the incident is as inexcusable a dis¬tortion as I ever saw on the part of any one. Let us take the next.
" The father said that he had a box of minerals when he was a boy. Hyslop found that he had a box of Indian arrow heads and relics, and so counts this as correct. But Indian arrow heads are not minerals, and minerals are something practically every child makes a collection of at some time, so that the guess is an easy one." (p. 77.)
Let us see what foundation the author has for her re¬marks. (I) I did not say or suppose that this incident was correct. (2) I did clearly indicate that it was not probable and that no verification of it could be ascertained from my father's two living sisters. (3) I excluded the incident en¬tirely from the list of incidents that were true or evidential. (4) I excluded it from the list of incidents that were true and not known by me. (5) I excluded it from the Summary of Facts. (6) The statement that " Practically every child makes a collection of [minerals] at some time " represents more knowledge of the population of the globe than most people have. I do not believe there is the slightest ground to make any such assertion. The author gives absolutely no reason or evidence for it and I think every intelligent person would say that it is an assertion fabricated to suit her prej¬udices. I have known perhaps 500 young children well in my life and I never knew but one of them that had a collec¬tion of minerals of any sort, even of the type suggested by the possibilities of my record. This one exception is one fifth of one per cent. of those I know. Outside of my personal ac¬quaintance I knew of but one young child in a town of ten thousand inhabitants who had a collection of any kind, and my life for three years in that town, with wide acquaintance of the young people both through the schools and otherwise did not reveal to me any other person so interested in min¬erals or Indian relics save the one mentioned. I doubt very much if there is the slightest reason to believe that more than one per cent. of the children, if that much, are interested in collections of minerals or make them. But grant that fifty per cent. of them do, this would not justify such a statement as the author makes. (7) The only indication that I had identified the " box of minerals " with Indian relics is my re¬mark in the first Note (Vol. XVI, p. 522) that " he may at one time have had some Indian relics which might pass here for ' minerals,' " putting this word in quotation marks for the purpose of indicating the limitations under which the connection could be made. When I wrote the second Note I was showing how my memory had been faulty in the earlier one, as in the visit incident, and named the actual collection which my father had as a boy and the remains of which ex¬tended into my boyhood, we children perhaps being instru¬mental in destroying it. Such as I named are " minerals " in the sense indicated, and in suggesting the possible, not the assured connection, I had in mind such mistakes as the word " library " for sitting room, " open fire " for a stove which imitated an open fireplace, " coach " for carriage, and similar confusions. The incidents had proved the meaning of the term " library," especially as the sitting room contained all the books—a small library—that my father had. It was apparent in many instances that visual functions on the part of the subconscious of Mrs. Piper were used and this on any theory whatever of the phenomena, so that I had a right to suggest possibilities of confused perception and apperception as explanations of a possible mistake which I distinctly rec¬ognized. But I did not regard the incident as either correct or evidential, and my omission of it from the list of such ought to have prevented the author from her error, Let us examine the next instance of the author's account of my record.
" The father spoke of visits to liyslop's brother which Hyslop did not remember. But do not most fathers visit their children? Any one could make such a reference without knowing anything whatever about a family." (pp. 77-8.)
This is another suggestio falsi as well as a complete dis¬tortion of the facts. I did not refer to any visit to my brother as an isolated incident. As the incident is stated by Dr. Tanner it is pure fiction. Let me prove this.
The incident of the visit to two brothers was associated with what Dr. Hodgson and myself regarded as the best sit¬ting in the whole series, owing to its psychological com¬plexity and the mixture of evidential incidents and confusion. I had failed in previous sittings to get the name of my step¬mother correctly, it having been confused with that of an aunt, but identified by the incidents associated with it and by the failure to append the word " aunt " to it when mentioning incidents related to my stepmother. I resolved to clear this up and in order to do so the communicator, recognizing the difficulty, as always on any theory, of getting the name sought to distinguish between the two by the incidents and to make clear whom he meant by the name "Nannie" as applied to my stepmother. A part of the effort to clear up things is found in the following portion of the record. It came after some allusion to a trip out west had been made which I used in a statement to help get the name I wanted.
I think I will let you speak now and finish what you started to say. It was Aunt Nannie.
(R. H.: " About Nannie.")
About Aunt Nannie. I thought it all over about the cap when I spoke of her. I say I...
(The cap was made by Aunt Nannie. You told me rightly a moment ago.)
You are not U. D. [understanding] me, James, let me explain. I thought ofH... HAR ... H ... No, go on... I thought of my mother and aunt my sister both at the same time, and I wanted to say that both of their names came into my mind as you spoke of Mary here, and I got a little confused about it. I am all right now. I wanted to say something about our visit to her also.
(R. H.: George ... ) [R. H. was about to say to G. P. that there still seemed to be some confusion.]
(S. to R. H.: That's going right. I understand every bit of it.) [I said this with reference to the explanation rather than the other incidents.—J. H. H.]
[Hand listens to R. H.]
What.
[Hand returns to R. H.]
(R. H.: All right. Never mind.)
And between the visit to the boys and Aunt Nannie I got confused a little.
(Yes, I understand perfectly.)
Well, we saw George. We saw George and Will. Now what did I ... oh yes, I then arranged to go out there to live. I . [Pause.] (Vol. XVI, pp. 481-482.)
The central point of interest here is not a visit to my brother, but a trip west to identify my stepmother and the visit is an associate of that. The reader too will observe that the record does not speak of a general visit to rny brother, but of a visit to two brothers who were named and then stated that my father went out west to live after this visit to them. Dr. Tanner omits four things in the incident. (I) The relation to a trip west with my stepmother: (2) that it was a visit to two boys who were named: (3) that the visit followed this trip out west: (4) the arrangement to go out west to live after this visit.
This is a compact whole which is not only correct but is an incident not easily guessed at one attempt. But suppose it could be guessed, that is not the question. Veracity about the facts is the important point, and the reader can see that there is no attempt on the part of the author to respect this duty. Instead of coming to the record in an unbiassed state of mind to find just what the facts are, the explanation is preconceived and makes her blind to the real incidents, or possibly even wilfully determined not to tell them correctly. Tho we concede that this last may not be the fact the other alternative is not escapable. Either bias or falsification are there, and yet spiritists are treated with contempt for having prejudices, which are in most cases, held sufficiently in restraint to tell the truth, but which in the case of this writer are deliberately made the basis of misrepresenting the facts. And I am not allowed to resent it with any indigna¬tion! Take the next example of the same fault.
" The father said that they had put an organ into the United Presbyterian Church at his former home, and Hyslop found that this really had been done a few months before.
" But the control left the time when this had been done in¬definite, so that if it had happened at any time in the years after the father's death it might have been counted as correct. Further, if the control knew, ashe probably did the change of sentiment in recent years in the stricter demoninations with regard to using musical instruments in the churches, he would be entirely safe in making such a guess." (p. 78.)
Look at the real facts again. (1) The communicator did not say that an organ was put in the United Presbyterian Church. (2) Dr. Tanner takes the incident from my statement of the facts and not from the statements of the com¬municator. (3) Dr. Tanner reverses the order of incidents in the case. Let me again quote the original record.
(You will remember Harper Crawford I think.)
[Excitement in hand.] Yes I do, very well. What about him ? I have tried, and tried, and tried to spell his name for you, but I could not seem to articulate for their U. D. [understanding].
(Yes, I understand perfectly. I shall mention another too. Do you remember Robert Cooper?)
Certainly I do, very well indeed, and I have intended to speak his name for you also, but tell me about the mortgage.
(I have not heard about it, but shall learn this summer.)
And then let me know about HARPERS.
(Harper Crawford you mean?)
[Assent.] [Assent and dissent were often indicated by ap¬propriate movement of the hand.]
(All right. I shall ? do so.) [I did not catch the word missing.—R. H.] [The word was probably " certainly."]
I want to know this one thing only. Are they doing any¬thing about the church? Yes only [rereading of sentence above].
(What church do you refer to, the church in your old Ohio home?)
[Assent.]
(I have not heard but shall inquire.)
They have put in an organ ... organ.
[R. H. turns from his note of sitter's remarks to read the writing, and sees that the order of the words is not clear.]
(R. H. to S.: When was that written?) [Pointing to the yes only.] [S. indicates that yes only was written first.]
They have put in an organ, James.
(Very well. I shall look that up. Do you mean the first church? Do you mean the first U. P. Church?)
I cannot seem to get that, James. [Hand listens again.]
(Do you mean the first United Presbyterian Church?)
I cannot get that. Can you say it for me slowly?
(Do you mean the first United Presbyterian Church?)
Say the two last slowly ... got it all but that.
(United.) Yes. (Pres-by-ter-ian.) Yes I do.
(Very well. I understand. You say that they have an organ now.)
I say yes. Very well.
(I shall be glad to find out about it.)
Yes, but I am telling you. (Vol. XVI, pp. 491-492.)
Let the reader compare Dr. Tanner's statement and this record and see whether she has correctly stated the facts.
(1) She makes no mention of the man Harper Crawford.
(2) She does not tell the reader the relation of the incident to his name. (3) She does not tell the reader that the ref¬erence to the church and organ were made before any al¬lusion was made to the United Presbyterian Church by myself. (4) No hint of stricter denominations was made until after the organ was mentioned. So far as the control was concerned and its imagined knowledge there was no chance for its application until the incident had been mentioned. (5) Dr. Tanner starts from the end of the message for her conception of the facts instead of the beginning, which latter scientific and common veracity would require her to do, and hence evades the real psychological character of the fact to assert an imaginary one. (6) She does not tell the reader how the name Harper Crawford is qualified to suggest a church and an organ. Taking their own experiments for testing suggestibility of the control I think very few persons would have said " church " and " organ " in response to the name Harper Crawford. (7) Why did not the church and organ come with the name Robert Cooper? Why did that name suggest the correct reference to a mortgage and the name Harper Crawford the correct reference to a church and an organ? On the principle of their own tests the suggestions were of independent intelligences. (8) Dr. Tanner carefully omitted all reference to the mortgage and conceals from readers a part of the total incident.
I shall ask the reader what term should apply to this shameful misrepresentation of the real facts? Who is biassed in such matters? Try the next statement of Dr. Tanner.
" In the five sittings which Hodgson held for Hyslop, Hyslop, Sr., said that he used to pore over the pages of his books and write out little extracts in his diary. He did make extracts, but wrote them on slips of paper—and this was the characteristic item.
" Again, he said that one tune was running through his mind, 'Nearer my God to Thee,' and his wife said he had a particular aversion to this hymn. It looks here as if the control in guessing a common favorite struck it right by contraries.
" Again, he said he kept his spectacle case on his desk, and near it a paper cuttter, a writing pad, a number of ' rests,' and a square and a round bottle. He did not keep his spectacle case nor paper cutter in his desk, but (strange to say!) did have two ink bottles, a square and a round one. The ' rests ' Hyslop iden¬tifies with the pigeon holes of the desk, though it is hard to see why. Out of all these items the two of the bottles alone are cor¬rect, but the whole statement is counted as correct.
" In another sitting he refers to the roughness of the roads.
" In these sittings for Hyslop there is really not one incident which might not have been guessed, or which may have been known to Hodgson in a general way. Any one with a desk is likely to have writing pads and bottles in it, and any one who reads is likely to make extracts from his books. Hodgson knew that Hyslop, Sr., had lived in a country district, and might easily have given that impression to the medium, who would doubtless infer rough roads from it, especially since it was what she would call ' out west' in Ohio." (p. 79.)
Examine these statements. (I) There is not a word in my Report to show that I attached any value to the incident of his making extracts. The Note (p. 380) is perfectly color¬less. I neither indorse its correctness nor say it is false. (2) I did not mention the incident in the Summary of Facts where I selected those incidents which seemed most sug¬gestive. The author's implication about it is pure imagi¬nation. (3) In connection with the hymn incident she neglects to tell the reader the associated incidents which suggest its interest. I never regarded it as having and did not state that it had any isolated significance. Its entire interest was in its association with incidents which Dr. Tan¬ner does not state but as usual omits from the account. In the list of significant incidents I was explicitly careful to associate it with others (p. 87). (3) I did not attach any individual value to the incidents about the articles on the desk and there is not one word in the Report to justify the author's insinuation that I did. I stated only the facts and because they were in most cases correct Dr. Tanner imagines that I regarded them as tests and evidence when I explicitly denied the right to suppose that correctness in the facts deter¬mined the proper standard of evidence. (4) She says I iden¬tified the pigeon holes as " rests." I did not do so. I ex¬plicitly said there were no pigeon holes, but shelves in the desk and that they were used as rests, which they were. Dr. Tanner says, with reference to the hymn incident, that the guessing got right by contraries, and she seems here to guess wrong by going contrary to the facts for the sake of deceiving the public and supporting theories which are based upon her imagination. (5) I did not anywhere in the Report count the whole statement as correct, and there is not one iota of evidence for this. My Note (p. 414) stated in detail the true and false factors and that is all, with no hint or com¬ments on either the individual or collective interest of the facts. (6) I excluded every one of them from the list of incidents significant for theoretical explanations. (7) I men¬tioned some of them as true and possibly as having collective interest, in the list of the Summary of Facts, but neither implied nor asserted anything that justifies such statements as Dr. Tanner makes. (8) Dr. Tanner does not tell the reader a word about the origin of the reference to rough roads in the country. I had sent the statement to Dr. Hodg¬son : " I remember how we used to go to church " for the very purpose of seeing whether he would specify a group of incidents of which one was the rough roads and I hoped the rough roads would be mentioned with the others. I did not tell Dr. Hodgson a single item of what I wanted. I think usually such a statement would not suggest rough roads so much as it would a carriage or horse back. It is curious that no matter what is said this critic can say it is guessing. If she knows so much about guessing I think she might be better employed in the weather bureau. For all that I know it might be a guess, but we are entitled to know why my question should suggest it. But that is carefully suppressed and the facts indicated to be otherwise than they are. (9) I should also like to know what a guessing consciousness, supposed to know as much about rough roads in the country and my father's domicile, as insinuated by Dr. Tanner, speaks of a " coach " with the rough roads in the country! Of course it is not necessary to make your theory consistent, except by omitting all the facts that contradict it. Besides as a fact the roads had been smooth ones in that region for thirty years.

Dr. Tanner says of these five sittings that " there is really not one incident which might not have been guessed, or which may not have been known to Hodgson in a general way." As Dr. Tanner has represented the incidents having no value and omitted those which have value, her statement might not seem objectionable. But let us look at the record. (I) There is the black skull cap incident which I shall mention again. (2) There is the thin black coat and sitting in his arm-chair mornings before the open fire. (3) There is the reference to his preaching and the whole group of incidents collectively taken in connection with the hymn incident. (4) There is the preparation of oil not mentioned by Dr. Tanner. (5) There is the very clear and complex group of incidents about my aunt Nannie, Ohio, what the principal of the school said about George, and the correct association of aunt Nannie and myself with the anxiety about this brother George. Not a word is said by Dr. Tanner about this set of associated incidents. (6) Possibly the curved handled cane with the initials carved in the end, in spite of the slight error about his carving them, tho this contained a half truth, may be an¬other suggestive incident.
Let us examine the allusion to Dr. Hodgson. It seems that not a single incident in his five sittings, according to Dr. Tanner's statement, " may not have been known to Hodgson in a general way." (1) What evidence does the author have for this statement? Absolutely none. The statement is a pure invention. (2) I explicitly stated in my Report (p. 131) that he knew nothing about them. I had not even told him the truth of the incidents in the first four personal sittings, save in the most general way after the sittings and he did not see the Notes until long afterward. He did not know a single incident even " in a general way " of these five sittings save such as are repetitions or echoes of my previous personal sittings, and one wonders how Dr. Tanner will insinuate that he may have known them after 1 explicitly said that he did not. It was her duty after that to prove that I had either lied about it or was mistaken. (3) Dr. Hodgson asked me not to tell him anything till the sittings were over. (Vol. XVI, p. 367.) (4) What difference would it make if he had known them? Has the author any evidence that
he either would or did give himself away carelessly in such matters? She gives none and I see no reason to indulge in a priori insinuations without scientific evidence. What right has she to imply that Dr. Hodgson was careless in his work unless she proves it? He was perhaps as careful a man in this respect as ever worked with mediums. Indeed he had himself worked out the risks and liabilities on this matter with far more completeness and honesty, even to the extent of leaning: over backwards, than either of the authors under review. It is important for their purpose to conceal this from readers. Or does the author think that his possible knowledge of them exposes their acquisition by Mrs. Piper to the objection of telepathy? If so I would say (a) that this supposition is contrary to her own attitude about telepathy, and (b) it would involve supernormal knowledge to get it that way and the question here is not primarily whether spirits are concerned, but whether the information is super¬normal, as telepathy is a supernormal affair a thousand¬fold larger than the spiritistic theory. But it is hardly this supposition that is in the mind of Dr. Tanner. The later statement in the same paragraph implies that it was either carelessness or collusion with Mrs. Piper. It is easy to refute the carelessness, as these authors were anticipated by him in all the thoroughness of method which any one could wish, and I know personally that he was so cautious that he would not talk to her about matters affecting sitters and Prof. James stated in his Report that he was so careful about this that Mrs. Piper thought she was a mere machine for experiment. If she means collusion with Mrs. Piper, why not prove it? Besides Dr. Hodgson is dead and cannot reply. All this is a very cheap way to cast doubts on records made much better than the author's own and made with much more conscientiousness than the critics show. It would be just as easy to insinuate that, perhaps, the authors had acted in collusion with Mrs. Piper to get negative results (Cf. pp. 186 and 190), so anxious were they to prevent their getting supernormal information. May they not have fabricated the whole record which they give us? A man is very hard pushed if he has to escape the duty to explain the facts by such subterfuges as these, when the persons involved are admittedly intelligent men and have done acceptable sci¬entific work. But these authors make these insinuations about others and then expect us to display " colossal " cre¬dulity about their statements which are proved thus far to have been absolutely false.
The whole attitude of these authors is determined by the assumption that it is the duty of the psychic researcher to convince them of his theory. This is not true. It is their business to convince themselves. I carefully indicated this in the Report and explicitly stated that I was only trying to suggest a rational and consistent hypothesis (Vol. XVI, pp. 295-6). The authors carefully evade this issue.

I stated above I would return to the skull cap incident and we now proceed to examine the author's statements about it. This occurred in the five sittings by Dr. Hodgson for me.
"Again, Hyslop, Sr., asks, 'Do you remember a little black skull cap I used to wear and what has become of it?' On in¬quiry, Hyslop's stepmother wrote emphatically that he never wore a skull cap in the daytime, and never but once at night, though he always complained of his head being cold. Hyslop says of this: 'I took this as sufficient to condemn the reference, but it has occurred to me since this frequent reference to the cap that the wish in life to have some covering for his head, which was very bald, and which suffered from the cold, might here crop up as an automatism !!' " (p. 80.)
It is well that Dr. Tanner's reply to the case is expressed in exclamation points: for if she had said anything more I have no doubt it would have been as false as her statement of the incident.
(1) The first reference to the cap was on December 27th previous, nearly two months before this sitting. The mes¬sage was: " and the cap I used to wear, the cap I used to wear. And this I have lost too." (Vol. XVI, p. 336.) It was with reference to this statement that I made my inquiry of my stepmother and not about any " black skull cap," as this latter characterization had not yet been given. Her statement was made just after the receipt of my letters on January 2d and 3d and answered at once. This was more than a month before the message under review had been given. It was about a cap in general that my stepmother's statement was made and not about the message in Dr. Hodg¬son's sitting of February 16th and 22d. The record shows this very clearly. (2) My statement condemning the ref¬erence was to the general incident in December 27th and not the incident to which Dr. Tanner applies her remarks. The record explicitly shows this. I was careful even to express this also in the past tense " took." (3) I explicitly stated that it was the repetition of the reference, with this more complex characterization of the cap, that led to further inquiries. Dr. Tanner makes no reference either to the repetition of the reference or to my statement about it and allows the reader to think that there was but one allusion to it. (4) Dr. Tan¬ner omits one very important incident in connection with the reference to the cap and that is its explicit association with my stepmother which the communicator gave it in this very sitting of Dr. Hodgson's. Her whole representation of the incident is unqualifiedly false. (5) She does not allude to two characteristics of it which might be used to diminish its value. The first is that both references to it use language which might indicate a habit which was not true and which made it so absurd to me. The second omission is the in¬terpretation of Nannie as referring to my stepmother whose name was not Nannie. Dr. Tanner might have made a point out of this, tho I made it clear from various allusions and the incidents connected with this name Nannie how the cor¬rect interpretation of it was proved. But Dr. Tanner is so desirous of finding superficial points against the case that I am glad to call her attention to this failure to avail herself of an objection. (6) How could Dr. Hodgson know " in a general way " a specific fact quite complex in its incidents and associations that Dr. Tanner implies is false? Neither telepathy nor collusion would explain that sort of thing.
Any one may believe the mcident is due to guessing. I would not care to disillusion them on that point. If it were the only incident in the record I think I should unhesitatingly accept guessing as the explanation, in spite of the fact that it has the proper complications and relationship to other facts to make it suggestive, and it is well qualified to make an im¬portant incident in a collective and organic mass of correct facts. It was only this relationship to the problem that led me to recognize it with other similar incidents, and I explicitly said so. Dr. Tanner carefully conceals this from readers.

****
Until now, 47 pages of 98...soon I will post more! :-)

[Vitor Moura]

Take another instance.
" But the most interesting part of these five sittings is to be found in the illustration of the way in which Hyslop interprets the remarks of the controls. Some of these are worth quoting verbatim as illustrative of the way in which he gets his large per¬centage of correct facts.
" In one sitting Hyslop, Sr., says to Hodgson: ' I am thinking of the time some years ago when I went into the mountains for a change with him, and the trip we had to the lake after we left the camp.' Hyslop's contemporary note on this is: 'Father never went into the mountains with me nor to the lake. Also the allusion to his doing this after leaving the camp has no mean¬ing whatever... .It would require a great deal of twisting and forced interpretaton to discover any truth in the statements.'
" Six months later he writes: ' That the reader may see how nearly the passage is to being correct, I may be allowed to re¬construct it somewhat with the imaginary confusion that ends in "mountains" and "camp." If we assume anything like the trouble that was manifest in the guitar incident, the following is conceivable:
"' [Hyslop Sr., speaks:] "I am thinking of the time some years ago when I went into [Father says Illinios. Rector does not understand this and asks if he means hilly. Father says, ' no, prairies.' Rector does not understand. Father says ' no moun¬tains.' Rector understands this as 'No! Mountains,' and con¬tinues] the mountains for a change with him and the trip we had to the lake, after we left [Father says Champaign. Rector under¬stands camp and continues] the camp." The name of the town is usually pronounced shampane, and according to my stepmother my father so pronounced it when living, though my own rec¬ollection is that he often pronounced it Campane. But, of course, we do not know the various tendencies to error which occur in the transmission of such messages.' Of course not!" (pp. 79-80).
Had Dr. Tanner told all the facts I should have had no objection to the exclamation point and the treatment of the incident. But she was very careful to suppress the largest part of the facts in my statements and reasons for treating the subject as I did. Let us examine this.
(I) She classes it among the incidents which she alleges I regarded as a " test message." I did nothing of the sort. I wholly excluded it from the list of incidents which seemed to have a coincidental interest. (3) I excluded it from the list of incidents having any bearing upon the question. (4) The author does not tell the reader anything about the phonetic, and sometimes visual, phenomena in the Piper case that are perfectly systematic and show analogies and coin¬cidences of possibly significant import. (5) She does not tell the reader that I based the reconstruction, which I ac¬tually said was imaginary, upon these phonetic consider¬ations. (6) She does not tell the guitar incident which was a good illustration of it and to which I appealed for sup¬porting the right of reconstruction. (7) She does not tell the reader that I had given illustrations of actual phonetic errors in experiments with the living that tend to prove the possibility of this reconstruction, and which I copiously il¬lustrated immediately after what she quoted. (8) She endeavors to leave the impression on the reader that my note made six months later altered my opinion of the iacts in the automatic record and carefully suppresses the following statement by me after what she quotes and after the illus¬trations of similar errors in my experiments through a tube. I said the following:—
" I do not present the above reconstruction, however, as prob¬able, but only an indication of what is possible, and I wish to be very cautious even in suggesting such speculative possibility." (Vol. XVI, p. 409.)
(9) She carefully omits all reference to my statement and allusion to another experiment in which living persons re¬constructed similar confused messages where they had noth¬ing to base their judgment upon except the written language. I referred especially to several of these and particularly to one remarkable instance which I shall quote here for the benefit of readers.
I sent to Prof. Gardiner of Smith College a number of statements which he was to show to a colleague there to see if she could recognize from whom they came. No state¬ment was made to him or to her where they came from. The receiver had the whole world to guess from. I had received from an acquaintance of the receiver of the message the incidents of a runaway on Mount Holyoke in which the communicator's sister took part and some columbines were involved, and a lady was with them by the name of Ross. I worked the facts up into the following confused message, the 7th incident sent, and it was the first incident in which the receiver became confident as to who the sender was.
"The columbines on M Hollyhock. How careful I
was ... the rains. No try againr. . . . r ns .... tight. My
what a fright! Two ahead of us. Sister and .... ss ... or ...
You thought of Ross. (Vol. XVI, p. 619.)
Instantly from this confused statement the receiver reconstructed the incidents and I had concealed the sender so fully that she had the world to guess from and to catch " Holyoke" from " hollyhock," holding the reins from " rains," etc. All this is concealed from the reader by Dr. Tanner.
(10) Dr. Tanner also conceals from the reader the nine points of fact coincident with the confused statement of the communicator and associated with a trip to the lake which he did take. (11) She conceals from the reader the two strong objections to my own reconstruction which I gave and leaves the impression that I had regarded the in¬cident as correct when all this is pure imagination and with¬out one iota of evidence. So far from implying it was a fact, I was careful to say that I did not treat it even as a proba¬bility, but only a possibility.*
* In the last Proceedings of the American Society (Vol. IV, pp. 1-8) I was able to publish the discovery that several incidents which my first Report had in a measure to discredit had turned out to be true,' one of them being the Maltine incident. I have now to thank the misrepresentations of Dr. Tanner in reference to the reconstruction of one false incident for the ac¬cidental discovery that another complex incident, which I was unable to verify at the time my sittings were held, and regarded as probably false is literally true in the life of my father. I refer to a complicated incident in the first of Dr. Hodgson's sittings (Vol. XVI, pp. 371-372). I give the incident.
" On one trip out west we or I was caught in an accident and I was badly

I think the reader will see by this time that I did not re¬gard the incident as a " test message " as represented by Dr. Tanner and that her representation of it is due either to the grossest neglect and ignorance of the truth or deliberate
shaken up in consequence. I received a nervous shock from which I never
recovered. We were delayed several days, if I remember rightly and I think
I do. I think we lost our forward cars and engine. Did they not go through
the bridge, James? I remember it seemed to be in the night and we were
going at quite a rapid rate when a sudden jerk and crash aroused me, only
to find we were in a dilapidated state. Yes, that is the rails, bridge, cars and
all." V B
Knowing as I did that we often find incidents correct as respects their details but incorrectly related, it occurred to me that possibly this set of incidents was correct and capable of reconstruction with less violence than the one I chose, as a further illustration of what I had done regarding the incident of the " trip to the lake after leaving the camp." I remembered that the Ashtabula disaster had made some impression on my father and had a vague recollection that he had passed over the bridge just before it. But I was not sure of this. So I asked my stepmother ifshe and father on the way to the Centennial in Philadelphia, in 1876, had been in any way related to the Ashtabula disaster and she replied that they had not, but that they had passed over the bridge and that father used to speak of it. This was evi¬dently what had given me my impression. But my stepmother went on spontaneously to remark that they went to see Niagara and thence to Phila¬delphia, but on arriving at Port Jervis they were stopped by an accident in which she mentioned details of the crash through the bridge and a bad smash up. The were delayed getting to Philadelphia 36 hours, after having to go back and take another route which required them to travel between scheduled hours and to stop for other trains. They arrived in Philadelphia worn out and the visit to the Exposition with this exhausted his nervous system so that he had a slight stroke of apoplexy soon after his return home. All this was told me spontaneously and without my questioning her and without any memory of mine about the incidents, tho I have no doubt that I at one time heard those of the accident. But this was Dr. Hodgson's sitting for me.
The false characteristics are (1) the direction of the trip, unless west of Boston be meant, (2) the amount of delay, (3) the implication that he was on the train that had the accident, and (4) that the accident gave him a shock from which he never recovered. On the other hand there are the correct characteristics: (1) that a train—a freight-—had crashed through a bridge with results as described, (2) that it was on a trip of my father, (3) that there was a delay, (4) that it was always associated by him and my stepmother with his final breakdown.
There are abundant evidences of the influence of secondary personality on the story, the associations and ideas of Mrs. Piper lending all their automatic tendencies to the production of the picture, with probable influences in addi¬tion. But the main features of the incident are correct and represent an actual and memorable set of incidents in the life of my father, discovered for me by mere accident.. I had been thrown off the track by its having been connected with his western trip and had so asked ray original questions about it. I had not tried to associate it with any other trip, and only the accident of mentioning the Ashtabula disaster started the memories of my stepmother to tell the story without knowing what I was after. It is only another evidence that probably all incidents have their basis of truth if we could only trace the connection of them.

falsification. Stopping at the point where I gave both facts and reasons for the reconstruction would seem to imply that it was not ignorance. The next instance is worse than the last. Dr. Tanner says:—
" Again, Hyslop, Sr., was trying to recall medicines which he used in his last illness. Hyslop remarks: 'This allusion to maltine here is very singular. .. The singular fact is that I had sent the spectacle case and contents to Dr. H. in an old maltine box, and this box was on the floor, out of which the spectacle case was taken a moment afterward.' In a later note he adds that he knew that Mrs. Piper had not seen the box in her normal con¬dition. .. . ' Hence I wrote to my brother, stepmother, and sister to know whether father had ever taken any maltine or contem¬plated taking it.' The stepmother and sister doubted.it, and the brother says he advised it, but the father did not do it. Then Hyslop concludes: ' The specific place which my brother's ad¬vice would have in (his father's) mind would naturally occur to him or any one else trying to think over the efforts to stay the disease with which he was suffering, though we must wonder why he did not name a more familiar medicine which I had in mind when I put my question.'
" The sceptic might suggest that the more familiar medicine was not named on a handy box which the medium probably caught a glimpse of." (p. 81.)
Let us see how near the truth this account is. (I) Dr. Tanner is wrong in saying that the communicator was trying to recall the medicines he had used in his last illness. No¬where in the Report is any such thing indicated or implied. (2) My brother had not advised that any medicine be taken in his last illness and was too ill himself to be there or at the funeral. (2) The attempt to give the names of medicines at all was due to a request of mine that he tell me what I had bought for him in New York, as above indicated (p. 17) and after he had given that correctly—an incident wholly omitted by the author as we saw—he went on to give others that he took. (3) Dr. Tanner does not tell the reader that I had my¬self assumed just what she says the sceptic would do, namely, that Mrs. Piper might have accidentally or otherwise seen the label of the box. She leaves the impression on the reader that I did not think of this point or even mention it. She

here parades it as an idea of her own when my whole dis¬cussion of it assumed and asserted that I had treated it at first as an incident within Mrs. Piper's possible knowledge, whether you chose to regard it as casually or purposely ac¬quired. (4) Dr. Tanner carefully omits Dr. Hodgson's Note on this very point showing that Mrs. Piper could not have obtained any normal information about it. I quote his state¬ment from the Report (Vol. XVI, p. 498).
" I was careful in all my sittings not to unwrap the box labelled Maltine until Mrs. Piper was in trance, and to wrap it up again before she came out of the trance, and I believe that prior to the incident in question the box was never within the field of Mrs. Piper's vision. I had also inferred from something that Professor Hyslop had said or written to me that this box had nothing to do with his father.—R. H."
What about the a priori probabilities in this case that Mrs. Piper had normally seen the box? Or are we to meet the insinuation that Dr. Hodgson is particeps criminis to fraud? If so let the author make it good by evidence. Falsification of records and insinuations are not science.
The reader must remember that Mrs. Piper, in her trance has her eyes closed buried in pillows and turned away from the sitter and Dr. Hodgson taking the notes. Had her eyes been opened and she in a normal state she could not have seen the box.
(5) Dr. Tanner is careful not to tell the reader that my reason for investigating the incident was just the fact that it was the only incident in my whole record that, at least super¬ficially, seemed to require explanation by Mrs. Piper's normal knowledge and that after excluding that I had either a re¬markably interesting instance of chance coincidence or some¬thing to be looked into carefully. Finding that Maltine had been suggested and thought of there was a mental fact which coincided with other messages that have come through Mrs. Piper representing past thoughts and not deeds of com¬municators. Hence I was considering the incident in relation to telepathy, assuming that previous knowledge was excluded and that it was not chance coincidence. (6) Dr. Tanner does not tell the reader that I had distinctly said in my Note that " I could not apologize for the spiritistic view by em¬phasizing the possibilities of this reference to Maltine." The reader will at once remark how much of a " test message " I regarded it, tho I placed it among the significant facts in the summarized lists.
(7) I must call attention to a specially garbled incident which shows the wilful misrepresentation of Dr. Tanner. Many of them might be attributed to careless reading or ig¬norance of the full facts, but this instance can obtain no apol¬ogies whatever. She cuts a sentence in two to accomplish her object, leaving out the statement which shows my actual state of mind about the incident. The reader will notice that she says: " Then Hyslop concludes, ' The specific place which my brother's advice,' etc." Now take the original record.
" The fact that my father would at least know the name of this medicine could not be given any weight in an apology for spiritism, but the specific place which my brother's ad¬vice would have in his mind would naturally occur to him or any one else in trying to think over the efforts to stay the disease with which he was suffering, tho we must wonder why he did not name a more familiar medicine which I had in mind when I put my question, but which he never mentioned at all. Whatever the difficulties in such a fact and in spite of the circumstance that we cannot apologize for the spirit¬istic view by emphasizing the possibilities of the reference to Maltine, yet they are great enough to preclude any attempt to insist on telepathy as the exclusive alternative, especially if we are permitted to use the reference to 'Munyon's .... Germiside' as an automatism." (Vol. XVI, pp. 498-9.)
I was here discussing telepathy in my quotation, not the possibility of Mrs, Piper's normal knowledge. I had dis¬posed of this in the previous note and Dr. Tanner quotes a note made with reference to something else, omitting the important points illustrating my position and point of view.
Altho it has nothing to do with the point at issue here I may be allowed to add that, since the publication of the Re¬port, I came across a receipt of my father's showing that he had bought the Maltine and that the memories of my mother and brother were faulty in that particular. Whether he actually used it is not known, but there is documentary evi¬dence that he bought it.
Let me take the next and only incident in which Dr. Tanner pretends to quote the record verbatim.
" Again this is the way in which the control gave the name of Hyslop's sister Henrietta.
' The hand first made various attempts, writing A Nabbse, Abbie, Addie, saying it was his sister, until Hyslop said:
' (Oh, well, I know. I know who you mean now. Yes, I know who you mean now. But it is not spelled quite right.)
' H Abbie.
'(The letter II is right.)
' Yes, but let me hear it and I will get it. G. P. Hattie.
' (That is very nearly right.)
'Harriet.
' (Pretty nearly. Try it one letter at a time.)
'Hettie. G. P.
' (That is right. Yes. That is right and fine.) '
" Hyslop adds in a note: ' The nickname Hettie is correct for her, though we never called her that, at least I never did so, and I know some of the others and her friends called her Etta. This seems to have been written partly at the end, "Ett... " But it was near enough for me to recognize it clearly for Henrietta, and I did not press for this last, which was probably not the natural form of using her name.'
" So the spirit father gave his daughter a nickname never used by any one, which he evidently supposed to be an abbrevi¬ation of Harriet instead of her real name, Henrietta, and yet it is accepted by Hyslop as correct." (pp. 81-82.)
Dr. Tanner says that I regarded this as correct and as a " test message." Let us see, and then quote the record as I had it in the Report, (I) I did not regard this as a"" test message " in any respect whatever. I merely said that the name Hettie is the correct nickname for Henrietta which was my sister's correct name. I did not speak of the incident as a whole and the record as quoted by Dr. Tanner herself shows that I did not regard it as correct, tho correctly in¬tended. (2) It was not my " spirit father " that gave the nickname. It was G. P. and the record before Dr. Tanner's
own eyes and as quoted shows that. (3) Dr. Tanner neg¬lects to note that I had referred to G. P. as here doing much the same thing as he had done a few pages before in connection with the name McClellan. She might also have noticed that I had twice referred to G. P.'s habit of using nicknames instead of the original ones (Vol. XVI, pp. 164 and 212). This was what I had in mind when I accepted the name Hettie. (4) There is no recognition whatever in Dr. Tanner's account that the name Hettie was not accepted by the communicator. The fact was that it was not accepted in spite of my recognition. I shall quote the whole record and then have some further comments. (Vol. XVI, p. 434.)
" Now I have not spoken of Abbie yet...
(Abbie is not quite right.)
Addie, no, did you say no?
(That is not quite right.) [Repeated.]
A Nabbie (R. H.: Is that Nabbie?)
A b sounds like Abbie, is it Addie?
(What relation is that to me?)
She is a sister.
(Do you mean Annie?)
No.
(Oh, well I know. I know who you mean now. Yes. I know who you mean now. But it is not spelled quite right.)
He seems to say .... let me hear it for you Rector. [Ap¬parently by G. P.]
H Abbie.
(The letter H is right.)
Yes, but let me hear it and I will get it.—G. P.
Hattie.
(That is very nearly right.)
Harriet.
(Pretty nearly. Try it one letter at a time.)
Hettie. G. P.
(That is right. Yes. That is right and fine.)
Ett [?] Hettie. G. P. [Cf. " McClellan G. P " p. 429.]
Yes, do you hear it, James.
(Yes, I hear it.)
(1) Dr. Tanner omits three parts of this passage in her quotation, one of the three not being important and I shall not make a point of that. But two of them are important.

(2) The first is the refusal of this fishing guessing secondary personality of her theory to accept my hint that Abbie and Addie may be a mistake for Annie. And the refusal was emphasized by putting it in italics! (3) Dr. Tanner omits that part of the record which shows that this fishing and guessing subject would not accept my recognition of Hettie as right, but went on apparently with an attempt to give Etta or Henrietta. It was convenient to omit this part in the interest of the desire to make Hettie the next guess from Harriet. This is the central point of interest for Dr. Tanner and she neglects to tell the reader that I had helped the com¬municator all through the passage. Perhaps she assumed that any one would see this, but she might have had insight enough to see that it was G. P. not my father who gave the Hettie, and this on her own view of the facts. I had de¬liberately helped the communicator in this name and told Dr. Hodgson so after the sitting when he reproached me for helping. I told him that I did not care anything about the name, except that I would not myself utter it. I had seen so much stumbling with proper names and regarded incidents as better means of identification than names, and so thought to help here for the purpose of getting over the ditch. I at¬tached so little value to the incident that I did not review it in the Summary of Facts, which is very far from regarding it as a "test message." I gave it no other importance in the list of evidential incidents than a part of a collective whole (Vol. XVI, p. 86). (3) My recognition of the fine¬ness of the message was based on the dramatic play of per¬sonality which always invokes G. P. to do for proper names what Rector is always less able to do, and the relation of the nickname to Mattie for Matilda which I remarked in two places of the discussion (pp. 164 and 212). I think readers can determine for themselves whether I regarded the incident as a " test message." Take next the last incident quoted from my first Report.
" In one of Hodgson's sittings for Hyslop, Hyslop sent this question for his father: 'Do you remember Samuel Cooper, and can you say anything" about him? '
" The father answered, ' He refers to the old friend of mine in the west,' and said they had talked on philosophic topics,
" Hyslop at first thought this all nonsense, but later learned that his father did know a Joseph Cooper with whom he had had many religious discussions. Unfortunately, Joseph lived in Al-leghany, east of their home, but he founded a Cooper School far west of their home, and perhaps this confused the spirit Hyslop." (p. 82.)
Let us examine these statements. (I) Dr. Tanner sug¬gests by italics in the word " religious " that there is a dif¬ference between religious and philosophical topics, which may be admitted or denied as you please. I do not care to make a point of that. But she does not tell the reader that the communicator actually mentioned religion as the topic of these conversations. (2) Joseph Cooper did not found any school anywhere east or west and the Report does not say that he did. The Report (pp. 54 and 411) explicitly states that it was a Memorial School built after his death! (3) Dr. Tanner tries to leave the impression on readers that I had indorsed the correctness of the allusion to " west " by omitting what I said about it and by saying that he had lived east of our home. My statement was: " The allusion to his being a friend out west is not strictly true " (p. 54). Whether " west " was true or false depends on the point of view from which the statement of the communicator was made. If we assume that this point of view was Boston, as it actually was from the point of view of either fraud or sec¬ondary personality, it would be strictly true, and there is no more reason for supposing that the communicator must speak from the conception of his home than from the other. But in my treatment of the facts I did not assume this and stated that the allusion was not strictly true, tho Dr. Tanner is care¬ful for her purposes not to tell the reader this. (4) Dr. Tan¬ner's remarks on the incident are based on only one of the messages, the first, and she omits the important—the most important—incidents in the case, tho showing that she must have seen them by alluding to the " Cooper School " which is connected with the later passages. Let me quote the im¬portant passage which she does not remark, or having remarked, deliberately omitted.

" And the name Cooper is very familiar to me also as I had a friend by the name who was of a philosophical turn of mind, and for whom I had great respect, with whom I had some friendly discussions and correspondence. I had also several tokens [ ?] Which I recollect well. One was a photo to which I referred when James was present, and in my collection, among my col¬lection. Do you recall, James, the one to which I refer? I know this clearly and I met him here. He is, if you recall, on this side of life with me, and came some years before I did. I liked his philanthropic views, and as you will remember, a close companionship with him. I am too weak to remain, will return in a moment.
" Among my collection of letters you will find several of his which I preserved. I remember a discussion on the subject of religion with him some years ago. Doubtless you are thinking of this also. There are many things I can recall concerning him later. Look for my letters, also to the photo, to which I refer, James." (Vol. XVI, pp. 52 and 397.)
" I am here again. I am trying to think of the Cooper school and his interest there. Do you remember how ray throat troub¬led me. (Yes.) I am not troubled about it, only thinking.
(I am glad to hear that.)
I remember my old friend Cooper very well and his interests, and he is with me now. He maintained the same ideas through¬out. And perhaps you will recall a journey U. D. we took to¬gether." (Vol. XVI, pp. 52 and 420.)
The reader may determine the positive errors about the incident himself in comparing Dr. Tanner's statements. (I) Note that they did have religious discussions. (2) Note that Dr. Tanner omits the statement of the communicator that this Cooper had died some years before which was true. Joseph Cooper died in 1886, and my father in 1896. These facts were stated in the Report. (3) She omits the state¬ments about the correspondence between the two which I verified, tho I could not verify the statement about his having preserved some of the letters. All my father's old letters were destroyed after his death and before these sittings. The reader is not told this by the author. (5) Dr. Tanner does not tell the incident that connected this Joseph Cooper with my uncle James McClellan as a friend and that these two had discussed philosophically the doctrines of the resurrection and immortality (Vol. XVI, pp. 52 and 500). It would take too much space to quote the record here and I content my¬self with the references to the Report.
The reader will see, especially if he examines the entire record of the facts regarding these messages and Joseph Cooper, that it is not only very different from the represen¬tations of Dr. Tanner, but also that it has that type of com¬plexity and unity which gives it some significance in a collect¬ive mass of true incidents and comes much nearer to being a " test message " than most of those in my experiments with the living which were adequate to give assurance, and Dr. Tanner herself remarks that it is curious that so little evi¬dence is necessary to prove personal identity (Stud. p. 38). After distorting the incident the only explanation of it offered by Dr. Tanner is an exclamation point, not even fishing and guessing. Our reply might very well be the same after showing what I have done to prove how amazingly this in¬cident is falsified and garbled. She then continues with her conclusion about this first Report.
" These comprise all the incidents of importance unknown to the sitter and later verified. As the reader can see for himself, many of them are partly or wholly wrong, or are so commonplace that any one could have guessed them." (p. 82.)
Why does the author limit the incidents to those I did not know? Her statement, already noticed above (p. 18), was that I admitted that only this type would be evidence. I showed that this was not true and that I used such facts only against the telepathic hypothesis which this writer does not defend. I regarded all incidents not known by Mrs. Piper and not due to chance coincidence, guessing, fishing, and suggestion as evidential. But, besides garbling the facts to which she refers, Dr. Tanner omitted five incidents which I did not know and to which I attached some importance individually and much importance collectively, and in addition omitted twenty-three incidents representing facts that I did know and that Mrs. Piper did not know. I need make no further comment.

*******

59 of 98...we're coming close to the end :-)

[Vitor Moura]

The next paragraph of Dr. Tanner, after the one just quoted, apparently refers to my records alone and says that there are only 110 "test messages" scattered over twelve years of sittings. My own statistical summary, based upon her own standard of what test messages are, namely cor¬rectness of statement on the part of the medium,* shows 152 true incidents, 16 false and 37 indeterminate ones, in thirty hours' experiments. Since that account was written I have found that five of the supposed false ones were true, and probably one of the indeterminate ones, making 157 true ones 11 false and 36 indeterminate. A later statement of the author, however would lead us to believe that her 110 " test messages " refer to the total number of incidents in all the Piper Reports during twelve years of experiment. Any one who will take the trouble to count the true incidents that deserve scientific consideration in those records will find how absolutely false her statement is, especially when it is false in reference to my own Report alone, and I have not yet said anything about certain very important incidents which she carefully omits mentioning.
After reviewing Prof. Newbold's Report briefly Dr. Tan¬ner returns to my summary of sittings with Mrs. Piper after Dr. Hodgson's death, published in the Journal of the Ameri¬can Society for Psychical Research, Vol. I. Let me take the first of her statements. She is still dealing with "test messages." Summarizing my statements about the con¬ditions and circumstances which made it difficult to attach scientific value to this record after Dr. Hodgson's death she says:—
" Hyslop adds: 'I should admit frankly that if I were deal¬ing with ordinary professional mediums the facts which I expect to narrate would have no evidential or scientific value,' because they might be referred to knowledge possessed by the medium in her normal state. But Hyslop is perfectly convinced that the Paper controls do not know what Mrs. Piper knows, as well as vice versa." (p. 89.)
* The proof of this is the statement (p. 37) : "If he constantly refers to incidents known both to himself and the sitter, and does not describe incidents which did not occur, even if these incidents were known to other people, they create a presumption, as they become more numerous, that he is the person he claims to be."
(I) I did not say it was because Mrs. Piper did not know the facts. Dr. Tanner gave a reason which I did not give at that point, but an entirely different one, and I stated the value attached to the incidents in a very limited sense not told the reader by Dr. Tanner. The very next sentences of my statement omitted by her were :—
" It is because they follow a long history of accredited -facts that they derive at least a suggestive value. The reader may entertain the account as one of hypothetical im¬portance and await the investigation of cases where the same reservations will not have to be maintained." (Journal Am. S. P. R. Vol. I, p. 95.)
The statement about what I think the Piper controls do not know about Mrs. Piper is at least half fiction, I believe the controls know much more than Mrs. Piper ever knew. They may know all she knows, but they certainly know more than she knows, if the records published are true at all. I also believe Mrs. Piper does not know all the controls know, as that is only the converse of the first statement. But I did not say that they do not know what Mrs. Piper knows.
The next statement is a summary of an incident which it would not ordinarily be important to quote in full, but I shall do it to prevent any rejoinder of unfairness.
"Here is one of the incidents which Hyslop quotes: Dr. Hodgson and Hyslop had experimented with a certain girl medium, and later Hodgson had mentioned the experiment to Mrs. Piper's controls. After Hodgson's death a friend sitting with Mrs. Piper asked him if he would not communicate through some other medium, and he replied, ' No, I will not, except through the young light. She is all right,' and later on said that Hyslop would understand to whom he referred. About this time this young ' light' in a sitting with her parents said that her control' had seen Dr. Hodgson, of whose death she did not then know. Hyslop says of this incident: 'At least Mrs. Piper's subliminal can be supposed to have been aware of the facts suf¬ficiently to deprive the incident of the evidential value which we would like it to have. But the most striking incident is the last one quoted.' But what a forced interpretation is put on this. The control of the young ' light' did not say that he had seen Hodgson in the spirit world, but only that he seen him, and throughout Mrs. Piper's sittings the controls are always seeing people who are living, doing this, that and the other thing. As Hyslop gives the incident, there is nothing at all that makes it necessary to assume that the medium or her control was thinking ofHodgsonasdead." (pp. 89-90.)
(I) How can Dr. Tanner maintain that I regarded as a " test message " that which I had expressly denied as having that character, as the quotation which I gave and she omits' distinctly shows? (2) She omitted from the account of the incident the statement purporting to come from Dr. Hodg¬son that lie had seen the young light since his own death. It was this circumstance that did something to establish a coincidence with the experience reported by the parents. I said this in the article, and Dr. Tanner does not refer to it. (3) It is true that the technical limitation of my statement to the control's seeing" Dr. Hodgson without explicitly saying he was dead, when taken out of the environmental statements not quoted by Dr. Tanner would not imply that he had been seen after his death. But it was perfectly manifest that this was the intention of my statement both from environment and from my allusion to it at all. Besides I may state here, what was apparent in the record, that it was just this state¬ment that he had seen Dr. Hodgson on that side that was made by the control of the young light. Whether the in¬cident has any value or people may be the subject of differing opinions, but no one who was truthfully reporting my account of the incident would say that I had made it either a "test message " or one of special importance. Examine the next statement.
"Another incident to which Hyslop attaches ' great impor¬tance ' is this: In a seance Hodgson suddenly breaks out, 'Re¬member that I told Myers we would talk nigger talk.' Hyslop dissented to this, and Hodgson corrected it, saying, 'Ah, yes, James. I remember it was Will James.' Professor James did not remember any such remark, either then or later on, until in a general conversation on Spiritism with a guest he remarked that he had several times told Dr. Hodgson that' if he would only use a little tact (with the controls) he would convert their deific verbiage into nigger minstrel talk.' " (p. 90.)
Dr. Tanner applies no explanation to this incident, and thinks it sufficient simply to tell the facts without giving the least hint of that part of it, besides not telling it in full, which had made it important to me. She does not tell the reader that Professor James attached the same value to it as I did. The point was that it was a significant hit to mention nigger talk at all and to associate it correctly with Prof. James, and the error in it was important because of its relation to con¬fused memory on the other side, I having explicitly stated in the account that I came to the incidents with the hypoth¬esis, in my opinion, as rational on other evidence, and making all incidents here merely suggestive of it and having only a hypothetical value. This is wholly ignored and suppressed by Dr. Tanner. Besides she did not remark that I withdrew even this value in the same volume from this very incident myself making it a possible product of the subliminal (Journal Am. S. P. R., Vol. I, pp. 479-480). Its only value to me at any time was in its mixture of truth and error and I found out later that the subject had been spoken of to the controls by Dr. Hodgson when living.
In the statement of the facts about it, so far as Dr. Tanner goes, she is nearer the truth than in any other incident she has referred to and the difference is one of opinion about its value and I shall not defend my view. That is not the question here, but the accuracy of her reports about them, and tho I cannot understand, from previous mistakes, how she came to be so near the truth in telling this incident, she has omitted enough with reference to it to show carelessness in stating the facts. Let us see the next incident.
" One other incident will show how definite Hodgson is in his remarks about himself. In the course of a seance Hodgson began:—
' I shall never forget our experiments with so-called light when you took a bottle of red liquid.
(Very good. You know what a noise that man has made?)
' I do. I know all about it.
' (I have had some controversy with a friend of his.)
'Recently?
' (Yes, recently. Now, can you answer a question ? Tell me who it was or all you can recall about it.)
' Yes, which ? I remember our meeting there. I can remem¬ber the liquid experiment, which was capital. I also recall an experiment when you tied the handkerchief.
' (I do not recall it at this moment.)
'What's the matter with you?
' (I have tied handkerchiefs so often.)
' Remember the voice experiment?
' (Yes, I remember that well. That was when the liquid was used.)
' I am referring to it now. I know it perfectly well, but no one else does.
' (Yes, that's right.)
' I remember how she tried to fool us.
' (Yes, that was my first trial at that.) '
" Hyslop remarks that the liquid was not red but purple, and that no handkerchief was used, but Dr. Hodgson talked about handkerchiefs on the way home, ' and as any allusion to a hand¬kerchief in this connection is pertinent, one must imagine that the incident which I have mentioned was actually intended!' " (pp. 90-91.)
The record is well enough quoted this time, except that Dr. Tanner omits a suggestive coincidence at the end which has a perfectly natural psychological association with the ones which she does mention. But for one fact in the mat¬ter the only difference in this case would be one of opinion regarding the incidents of the record. She does not tell the reader what the incident was about which brought out the talk regarding handkerchiefs. Again she cut a sentence in two and did not tell what I said of the incident. I did not say that " Dr. Hodgson talked about handkerchiefs " on the way home, as if there was a general conversation about hand¬kerchiefs. I stated a very different and much more per¬tinent thing which a psychologist, or professed psychologist, should see at once and which gave the incident whatever importance it had. Let me quote my statements and the reader may see how Dr. Tanner garbles records to suit her purpose, not the truth of the records themselves.
" There was no handkerchief tied on the occasion, but on the train coming home Dr. Hodgson told me of a most interesting experiment with himself in which the handkerchief had been used to bandage his own eyes and he showed me how impossible it is to wholly exclude vision on the part of a shrewd person by bandaging the eyes. This of course is not indicated in the state¬ments of the communicator to remind me of what he had said and as an allusion to a handkerchief in this connection is pertinent one must imagine that the incident which I have mentioned was actually intended and that either his own amnesic condition or the misapprehension of [or] the trance personality is responsible for the mistake." (Journal Am. S. P. R., Vol. I, p. 102.) .
The reader will remark that it was not general talk about handkerchiefs that Dr. Hodgson engaged in but a specific form of experiment with one and our present instance was not only one of experiment, but was also of the type, in con¬nection with a liquid to exclude fraud, which made it espe¬cially pertinent to tell me the incident in his experience about the tying of a handkerchief. My experiment with the fluid had not been conclusive, as my report of it had said, and hence allusion to tying handkerchiefs, not general talk about them, was a very striking incident.
Dr. Tanner's remark would seem to imply that the al¬lusion to the liquid and " talk about handkerchiefs " were the central features of the case. But as she has quoted the record with more than the usual" accuracy the reader can see that the following correct points cannot be minimized and that the merely half mistake in the other two does not seri¬ously hurt the incident. (I) An experiment in which both of us took part. (2) That it was an experiment with a liquid. (3) That it was a voice experiment. (4) That tying a handkerchief was in some way associated in his mind with this case. Regarding the error in the color of the liquid I could have said that, when thinned it is red and the part that Dr. Hodgson saw the night of the experiment appeared reddish, but the large bottle of it from which I had taken a small quanity was a dark purple. I was thus overstating the case against my own estimate of the incident. Above all this I had not made it a " test message " as my preliminary statement made clear, but this was not told the reader by Dr. Tanner. She wishes the reader to think that the whole com¬plex incident is false and her only explanation consists of two exclamation points. She offers no proof or evidence of any fishing or guessing applied to the correct incidents in it which have considerable significance. I doubt if she would have the audacity to apply such an explanation to the collect¬ive group. If she had said that possibly Mrs. Piper had been told the facts by Dr. Hodgson, as she did in previous inci¬dents, she might have explained all but the allusion to hand¬kerchief tying. If she supposes that readers will ignore the true incidents for the errors which are insignificant in com¬parison, she mistakes the love of truth in other people very much.
But the most important reason for quoting the passage is the following statement made by Dr. Tanner immediately after what I quoted from her and it terminates what she has to quote or say about: my records in this connection.
" This is typical of the Hyslop conversations with Hodgson, and the reader can judge from it how far Hodgson has thereby proven his personal identity. Even if the medium had not known Hodgson personally, but had only known about him, little is said that she might not have said from her own knowledge." (p. 91.)
We shall see whether this is typical of the conversations mentioned, tho I am not going to burden readers with a de¬tailed statement of Dr. Tanner's omissions. As usual she has not told the reader the complicated incidents on which I laid more stress than those she has mentioned. If the reader will turn first to the Journal quoted and then to the detailed records published in our last Proceedings he will quickly discover that her statement is unqualifiedly false. But as she did not have a chance to see the Proceedings until July, tho these were accessible before she published this book, I must limit my animadversions to the record of the Journal (Am. S. P. R., Vol. I). (I) Dr. Tanner omits right in connection with the last quoted passage an inter¬esting coincidence involving Mrs. Piper's ignorance about the main feature of it. (2) She omits allusion to the double cross reference to very definite incidents in the case of Miss X. (3) She omits the interesting coincidence about the Washington case which, tho it is not satisfactory evidence, is all that I claimed for it. (4) She omits without a word of mention the very complicated and definite set of cross refer¬ences between Mrs. Quentin (private person) and Mrs. Piper, where Mrs. Piper could not possibly have known the facts. (5) She says not a word about the specific cross ref¬erences between Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Smith and between both and another young lady, where none of them had the opportunity to ascertain the facts. (6) She says not a word about the allusions to his intention to see me in New York soon, and to the writing of the reply to Mrs. Sidgwick which he had promised to write for me himself. (7) She says noth¬ing whatever about the cheese incident, which Prof. James thought an excellent one. (8) She says not a word about Newbold's last visit with Hodgson on the ocean beach. (9) She says not a word about the complicated and strik¬ing set of incidents associated with my writing up the sit¬tings for publication about which no one in the world but myself knew at the time. This set of incidents contains again a reference to Newbold and an incident in conversation with him, which Prof. Newbold recognized as true and I did not. (10) She makes no allusion to the set of incidents about the clergyman and his wife who was anxious about his trances.
Every one of the incidents which she has omitted is better than any she quotes and some of them much more complex in details and pertinency. The reader who will take the trouble to read the original records to which I have referred can decide for himself whether what she quotes is typical or not.
I have quoted from President Hall's and Dr. Tanner's book absolutely every word of her statements about the inci¬dents taken from my own reports. I have not attempted to summarize or misrepresent them. I have not selected parts of them for review, but given every single incident. There are 27 of them and in these I have enumerated 148 misstatements of fact and misrepresentations, and have ob¬served thirty-eight omissions of incidents far more significant than any that she has mentioned and about which she does not say a word. In addition I have called attention to a large number of omissions in connection with the incidents to which she does refer, besides noting a large number of errors and misrepesentations which could not easily be enumerated. I wonder what sort of scientific and mental habits students are taught at Clark University? Veracity is certainly not one of them.
In all this mass of misstatement and error I have not ref¬erred to a single incident taken from other Reports than my own. The no " test messages " which Dr. Tanner mentions cover all reports. On page 319 the author states that out of the whole of the published records there have been only no " test messages " so-called and this number represents what she regarded as that, not what the records represented. Of this no she selected twenty-seven instances from my records and we have seen that all but two of them are so full of misstatements and these remaining" two so misrepresented that the twenty-five are absolutely false and the remaining two practically that. How much confidence can be placed upon the remaining eighty-three incidents taken from the other Reports. I have no space to take them up seriatim here, and can only say that the English members can adequately take care of themselves in a matter of this kind. All that I shall say about them at present is that a slight examination of a few about which I happened to know the actual details in the records shows that the mis-statements about them are as bad or worse than about my own incidents.
I shall turn next to certain statements made at various places in the book about things not affecting the detailed rec¬ords of incidents about the sittings.
Quoting Professor James (p. 8) Dr. Tanner closes it with his language about " the total effect on the mind being little more than ' humbug,' and that ' the really significant items disappear in the total bulk.' She carefully suppresses his further statements (1) that he did not himself believe it was 'humbug'; (2) that if he were considering the total mass of Piper and other records his conclusion in this case would give less umbrage to spiritists; (3) that he frankly admits that the spiritistic theory is legitimate and that such agencies may be complicated with all the play of secondary personality in the medium, and (4) that he makes his clear confession in italics ' I myself feel as if an external will to com¬municate were there.' " Let readers go to the accounts and see whether his attitude of mind and views are here correctly stated by Dr. Tanner. Cf. Proceedings Eng. S. P. R., Vol. XXIII, pp. 29, 34, 35-37, 120-121; Am. S. P. R., Vol. IV, pp. 499, 506, 507-510, 588.
Speaking of my relation to the work and my having be¬come convinced, Dr. Tanner says " consequent upon this Hyslop gave up his work of teaching, and devoted himself to investigating the matter and to testing Mrs. Piper thoroughly and scientifically, in order to make it impossible for any scientist to assert that fraud is possible or any or¬dinary means of obtaining information given." This state¬ment is pure fiction, evidently taken from the newspapers, as I never knew the statement to be made anywhere else. Wherever it was made it is absolutely false and without a shadow of evidence. I gave up my work at Columbia with great regret because of a loss of health due to overwork. The only " consequent" about the matter was that I spent a year resting, a year writing and another year trying to or¬ganize the new Society in this country, never once trying to test Mrs. Piper in any way whatever. I had a few sittings after Dr. Hodgson's death at the instigation of the " con¬trols " and never dreamed of testing her, especially in the way described by Dr. Tanner. Her own account of the records contradicts her present statements.
On page 94 Dr. Tanner says: " Dr. Hyslop was con¬vinced by his sittings." This again is pure fiction. I ex¬plicitly stated in my Report (Vol. XVI, pp. 12 and 17) that I had not been convinced by my sittings but by the total mass of facts on record inside and outside the Piper case and I stated (p. 12) that the only thing cleared up for me by my sittings was an explanation of the mistakes and confusions. I had felt myself cornered for objections to a spiritistic inter¬pretation as early as 1893 and Dr. Hodgson's Report left me without a leg to stand upon except the mistakes and con¬fusions and the perplexities of the dramatic play of personality. I had kept my judgment in suspense for six years after I was cornered, and any intelligent person who had read my review of Dr. Hodgson's Report soon after its publication, in the Forum for August, 1898, can see that I definitely stated: "There is no doubt that spiritistic com¬munication is the easier explanation." This was before I had my sittings.
Dr. Tanner (p. 97) quotes Prof. N. S. Shaler and italicises a statement of his that he did not see how he could exclude fraud from the case. She does not tell the reader that in his book on "The Individual" he expressed himself very dif¬ferently and that in his review of Myers' "Human Personality, etc." in the New York Independent he expressly stated that in the case of a certain celebrated medium he got into very disagreeable communication with deceased friends, the lan¬guage being reported by me from memory.
Again (p. 99) she says: "When Hyslop published his enormous Report, Podmore subjected it to a scathing criti¬cism, and there have been various interchanges of civilities between the two, but throughout Podmore has remained un¬convinced."
Mr. Podmore did publish a criticism of my Report and those who do not read my reply might very well think it scathing. But why the reader should be told that there had been " various interchanges of civilities " without pointing to the reply cannot be understood except by supposing a desire to suppress the truth. Mr. Podmore's review was 15 pages long and of my 22 pages reply I had to devote 10 pages to the correction of his misstatements of facts, precisely after the manner of Dr. Tanner's methods, and the remaining 12 pages to the correction of his misrepresentations of my po¬sition, so that I did not devote one line to the defence of the spiritistic hypothesis. Mr Podmore never undertook a reply, as it was a rather dangerous business to admit that he had not quoted my facts rightly and that he had not stated my position correctly. This is what is called an " interchange of civilities."
On page 260 Dr. Hall says that Mrs. Piper peruses all the records of her trances. This is absolutely false and without one iota of excuse. Dr. Hodgson explicitly stated that Mrs. Piper never saw any records until they were published and these are but a small part of the whole.
Again (p. 306) " As I have noted before," says Dr. Tan¬ner, " even when Hodgson was abusing Phinuit by exposing his subterfuges and lies, he seems never to have questioned his actual existence, and so in other cases."
Dr. Hodgson made it very clear and explicit in his Reports that he had treated Phinuit as a secondary personality throughout until after the defence of Phinuit's claims by George Pelham and Imperator group had made another a reasonable hypothesis. He discussed Phinuit in much the same manner as this book before us. Let the reader go to his Reports. Besides let us remark what Dr. Tanner here says about " subterfuges and lies " and then on page 312 says that the trance personalities are not lying in any true sense of the term. When you are ridiculing a spiritistic hypoth¬esis and trying to discredit the dead Hodgson you can call the trance personalities' statements " subterfuges and lies," but when you are describing the utterances as those of Mrs. Piper's secondary personality, against which the book is constantly insinuating fraud, tho admitting there is none and that she is normally honest, the same utterances are set down as " impressionable and untrained consciousnesses " and not " subterfuges and lies "!!
I have only picked these general instances up at random and they involve the same kind of ignorance or wilful mis¬representation as the quotations of the records. They are only such instances as I happen to know the facts of and I doubt not the peccability extends to cases where I do not know the facts. In the first no pages and in 31 other pages toward the last of the book there are 25 more statements of a general kind that are fundamental to right representation of the subject and yet are false. But I have no space to take them up here.
In the comments on the third sitting the author says that Gurney has not made an appearance in any of the published record of Mrs. Piper's sittings. This is false again. Sir Oliver Lodge devoted twenty-two pages to him in his last report (Vol. XXIII, pp. 140-162, and referred the readers to Gurney's communications mentioned in the Report of 1889 (Vol. VI, pp. 516-7, 552-3 and 529). Another illustra¬tion of careless examination of the published records.
On page 205 they tell the story of Mrs. Piper's dream, before she had learned of Dr. Hodgson's death, in one way and on page 218 in another way, tho that may be due to different telling on the part of Mrs. Piper.
On page 190 the authors admit Mrs. Piper's honesty and the genuineness of the trance, unless they are lying to Mrs. Piper, as they confess elsewhere to doing, and then at various places in the volume they raise objections to incidents that are based upon the assumption that she is a fraud. Carthago delenda est, whether their policy be consistent or not, and yet we are asked to suppose them sympathetic and unbiassed.
Perhaps there is no statement in the volume that misses the point so fully as the following with its affiliated views throughout the book in appropriate connections,
" The facts in the case seem to point to the theory that the mediumistic power is encouraged and perhaps in the beginning caused by nervous shock, which, in persons of a certain diathesis, tends to split the personality." (p. 31.)
To say nothing of the facts that the statement is not true in many cases I shall, for the sake of argument, grant that it is true, is universally true. What difference does it make that "mediumistic power " originates in a "nervous shock" ? That concerns only the question of how to produce it, not the use of it when it occurs. What has " nervous shock " to do with an explanation of the George Pelham incidents collectively in Dr, Hodgson's Report? What has "nervous shock " to do with the explanation of the group of incidents in connection with Mrs. M. in the same Report? What has " nervous shock " to do with the group of incidents as¬sociated with the name of James McCIellan in my Report? What has " nervous shock " to do with the group of incidents representing the conversations with my father in that Re¬port? What has "nervous shock" to do with the Hyomei, the Robert Cooper and the Harper Crawford incidents ? What has a " nervous shock " to do with the cross references between Mrs. Quentin, Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Smith, carefully omitted from remark by the author? I should make a pres¬ent to the author of all the " nervous shocks " she could either prove or imagine and yet challenge her or any one else to maintain that it explained the phenomena. Her own resort to guessing and inference is a tacit confession of this position. Accidents and shocks create situations, not phe¬nomena of that kind, and it is only a subterfuge to insinuate that they explain anything but the occurrence of the situa¬tion. This is so plain that any one of the slightest intel¬ligence ought to see it and one can only suppose that the author in this case is either remarkably ignorant or is de¬liberately trying to deceive the public.
Before I go any further I wish to examine a statement or two which will enable me to explain the manner of criti¬cism that I have here and so frequently elsewhere employed against critics of psychic research. It will appear that this author, in fact both of them, have no sense of humor. Speak¬ing of my opinions on the subject Dr. Tanner says:—
" Furthermore, in the case of Hyslop at least, the credulity which has become increasingly manifest in his writings during the last few years makes it impossible to consider his judgment valu¬able, and makes one sympathize with Count Solovovo's estimate of his work. Not only this, but the heat and intolerance with which Hyslop attacks those who differ from him make one feel now at last, whatever may have been the case at the start, he holds a brief and has become unable to see the other side." (p. 100.)
Referring to Count Solovovo's view on the previous page she says:—" He considers Hyslop's report of little value be¬cause his colossal industry is coupled with an equally colossal simplicity and unconscious preconception. Some of the de¬vices he says, by which Hyslop interprets communications so as to make them veridical are beyond criticism. ' One can only hold up his hands in amazement.' "
I have no objections to the charge of credulity, as that is quite a natural inference for uninformed people to make who do not know how to experiment with mediumistic subjects where the least friction may spoil all the results. It is a cheap way of calling names without accepting responsibilty for evidence or intelligent methods of dealing with the mental processes of hysterics and other delicately poised minds. But in the reference to my " heat and intolerance " she has more excuse from my writings and has come nearer the apparent truth than in any other statement of the book. There is no doubt that I have used language often that naturally leaves the impression of" heat and intolerance " in it on minds that have no sense of humor. The accusation enables me to make a clear statement of the motives which I had in deliberately adopting that policy.
First I have always known what everybody who is not insane knows perfectly well, that prejudice is proportioned to one's knowledge and desire for respectability. Even the sceptic is unprejudiced only when he is ignorant. The only really unprejudiced person on a subject is a person who admits that he is ignorant of it. It is knowledge that makes all of us prejudiced and our duty is to do all we can to min¬imize its influence. I do not pretend to be able to eliminate the conditions now that make even me prejudiced. It is too late. I might have done it earlier in my life by not taking an education. All that I can do now is to check any judgment which my training prompts me to make and put it to a critical test of its evidential character. That applies to these authors as well as to myself, only they dp not seem to be conscious of it. They rest in the blissful conceit that they are not prejudiced because .they do not believe in spirit communi-caton. If they had said they knew nothing about it I would freely accord them an escape from the accusation which they make against the psychic researchers. The delightful na¬ivete and simple-mindness of their self-confidence in both their superior knowledge and unbiassed mind are spectacles to behold. We might more easily deal with this prejudice if it were conscious. Moral obliquity can be punished, intel¬lectual obliquity never.
In the second place I have known for a long time that the ' largest number of people who display the spirit of these authors against the psychic researchers form their opinions from motives of respectability and the fear of ridicule. In many cases it is simply swallowing in naive faith the state¬ments of their teachers and in others adopting what the public thinks just to use that public in behalf of better social standing. Knowing all this I simply resolved to fight the devil with fire. Sarcasm and abusive language were not natural to me and only because I knew that it was not fact and argument that influenced most people, but prejudice, desire for respectability and fear of ridicule, I resolved to meet the contempt that was poured on psychic research in the same spirit. I had no respect for academic prejudices and ideals. I had no fear of the public. I was not situated at the head of any institution where I had to practice hy¬pocrisy or conceal either my opinions or feelings in order to attract students to inoculate them with prejudices and de¬lusions, and I have always had contempt for duplicity and cowardice. The consequence was that I deliberately resolved to cultivate and employ as much of the language of sarcasm and abuse as the truth would allow. That is the plain secret of my whole style. I have no objections to being alone with the stars in the opinions I hold in this field. I am not trying to convert the academic man. He is complacently identified with other interests until the public moves. I definitely stated that in my Report, extending it to every one. If I were trying to convert him or others I should be obliged as a matter of policy to adopt more suavity and apparent scepti¬cism to suit the man who thinks his doubts entitle him to the respect of persons seeking knowledge when the fact is that he is not a sceptic unless he is among those seeking it. But as I have appealed only to intelligent, honest and open-minded people I have no obligations to that cynical self-complacent class that imagines, because it has stuffed its mind with physiological phrases, it has solved the problems of the cosmos. Hence I have, with some sense of humor, resorted to the language which even the authors of "Studies in Spirit¬ism " seem to feel. I have accomplished something when I have aroused their obloquy and contempt. I enjoy this sort of thing as my due and desired reward. All the doc¬trines which the authors now hold were once held in the same contempt, and the admission on their part that our knowl¬edge regarding the subconscious is not very great is hardly compatible with the assurance they express about its ex¬planatory powers.
Besides I have always had to reproach myself for my stupidity for not seeing the truth sooner than I did. I was so biassed by various materialistic theories and false irrel¬evant theories of suggestion, etc., that I was almost incor¬rigibly stupid in seeing the proper explanation of the facts. I am sure that the kindest thing I could do would be to abuse wiser people than I for their stupidity. A " colossal simple¬ton " like myself might be excused some stupidity, but I see no reason for extending this mercy to those who arrogate so much knowledge to themselves.
All that this problem lacks for its recognition is respecta¬bility. When it obtains this the authors of the work under review will accept its dicta probably without evidence of any kind. If it ever becomes respectable it is probable that I shall have to get out of it from natural instincts. Respecta¬bility is the soil in which we always find the culture of cow¬ardice and hypocrisy. No scientific man can be bred in it.
The reviewer is well aware that much of the criticism which he has to bear and will have to bear in the future comes from his apparently pugnacious habits of discussion. But critics are quite mistaken if they suppose he has no sense of humor about it. It has been a coolly and deliberately chosen policy. Indifference to either side of a question is not a necessary condition of good judgment and usually suc¬ceeds only in fooling the plebs and protecting one's salary. Insight seldom goes with the ceremonial balancing of the pros and cons in a discussion, and where the prejudice of respectability lurks behind this mask of ignorance and cow¬ardice there is no reason why an incisive logic and some measure of ridicule and abuse should not be indulged.
Having explained the real animus of a style that no pre¬vious occasion enabled me to mention I wish to return to certain positions in the book which must be considered before dealing with the records on which the authors rely for their confident negations.
In the statements about the qualifications of investigators (pp. 4-5) Dr. Tanner makes a number of good observations, some of them confused, however, between the idea of sitters and investigators. The investigator may not be a sitter at all, as was generally the case with Dr. Hodgson. Just for the reason that the authors tell us, without at the same time tell¬ing us that it was psychic researchers that first taught and practiced this advice, Dr. Hodgson and others remained often in the background to use strangers for experiment. The object of this is obvious, but we have not received any credit for this in the book. The veriest ignoramus is mixed up with men like Sidgwick, Gurney, Sir Oliver Lodge, Dr. Hodgson with his years of most obstinate scepticism, and then comes the final statement " A cynical man of the world, with no trust in the average man, would be the best investigator, if he had some psychological training."
I think no one but scientific idiots would make such a statement as that. Cynical men of the world are not fit to investigate any subject whatever, no matter what their train¬ing. They are pathological specimens of the race. These authors are either cynics or they are not. If they are not stich, they are confessedly disqualified to investigate the sub¬ject. If they are, they are intellectually and morally path¬ological and about as fit to investigate all subjects whatever as Nietzsche and Guy de Maupassant. The qualities which make a good investigator are humor, veracity, humility and open-mindedness. These are perfectly compatible with per¬sonal interest and healthy emotional life. The qualities of cynicism are compatible only with diseased minds. Note another statement.
The authors are constantly telling us or implying (pp. XIX, 45, 166 and 264) that we cannot pass judgment on sittings whose records are not published in full. Never¬theless the volume says, with reference to the Pelham series that constituted the basis of Dr. Hodgson's second Report, " If only the records of these sittings were complete they would prove one of the most interesting studies in the entire series, as showing suggestibility and the amount of informa¬tion involuntarily given by the sitters." How does this
author knew this ? She has not seen them, and has so misrep¬resented what she has seen that this omniscient information about what she has not seen is either a supernormal fact or something worse. Again examine another remarkable state¬ment.
After a lengthy outline of the ideas that have prevailed in history about life, the author remarks:—
" And right here lies the kernel of all our belief in im¬mortality. The person who is most concerned about the future life is not the one who has always been prosperous and successful, with means and children and fame to satisfy his natural desire to be of worth and value. It is always the one who has had brought home to him forcibly and painfully the limitations of the present life, and it is at the time that such limitations are the most felt that the belief in immor¬tality grows strongest, both in the individual and in a given generation." (p. 382.) " The unprecedented spread of Spirit¬ism in this country and England has its roots in the same motives." (p. 383.) And so on with several pages of implied assertion that a belief so formed is not legitimate.
There is undoubtedly a certain amount of truth in all this, but the whole truth has not been stated. The case is far more complex than that. I have often found the interest as intense, perhaps more so, among the successful than among the unsuccessful, due to other motives. But it is true that failure in the ideals that many set up brings them to this point of view. However why does this discredit their beliefs and sympathies? Let us assume that it does, what becomes of the opposite opinions based on success in the struggle for existence ? They are confessedly the product of beating others in the race. I suppose the author, if she had not gotten a position and salary in Clark University or been able to pursue fame—she does not say whether she has any children or not—she would have turned to psychic re¬search for consolation! What accidents make one contemp¬tuous of facts that tend to induce humility and sympathy with the multitudes whose hard earned pennies contribute to our university salaries and respectability!
However it is possible to turn the tables here. This exaltation of success as the standard of belief is of an individual¬istic and selfish characteristic. But when an interest in im¬mortality is aroused by grief and the need of consolation it has its roots in the altruistic and best social instincts, and for this reason is not to be sneered at in the manner of the author, but is to be appraised at a much higher value than the criterion which she accepts.
Und mich ergreift ein längst entwöhnter Schauer: Der Menscheit ganzer Jammer fasst mich an.
Even Faust had to renew his spiritual sympathies when he saw the world, tho a man whose nature had been in¬fluenced so much by Mephistopheles might have satisfied these authors with his cynicism. I am not ashamed of "Nil mihi humani alienum puto," and have no temptations to base my beliefs on my success in winning the respect or approval of organized prejudice and constructive lying about the facts. My salary has never influenced my opinions, tho it has in¬fluenced the untactful expression of them until I got my freedom from academic restraints and intolerance. And the gods nearly killed me to get me out of them. Success, respectability and a salary are poor criteria of truth, tho they often enough make cynics about the unsuccessful. This is just the morals of the cock-pit. But even Huxley said that ethics must put limits to the struggle for existence and I think he combined divine pity with a critical mind without having to contemn beliefs because those whom we have beaten in the race happen to have no salary or to have lost a friend. If you appeal to failure in the struggle for existence to discredit the belief in a future life you are bound to admit that success equally disqualifies the opposite attitude, and it is our business not to evade the bias which may hide in one as well as the other.
I suppose the charge of credulity against me for my course is based upon my method of experimenting, and I may not have made my purpose and position so clear as I should have done. I intended in my remarks in the Intro¬duction to the Report (Vol. XVI, pp. 11-13 and 16-17) to explain that sufficiently. I had learned from discussion with Dr. Hodgson that, no matter what I really believed about a statement made by the communicators, under the delicate mental state of Mrs. Piper's subconsciousness, the best course was to avoid tormenting and badgering it. It was clear enough from previous records that the suggestibility was marked and I deemed it best to avail myself of that to en¬courage it all I could while I reserved my estimate of the answers to myself. That I followed this course ought to be evident to the veriest tyro in the study of the records. This was not credulity that was thus displayed, but the tact that gets something instead of preventing the desired results and getting only what every student of the subject should have known would be gotten by a policy of lying to and confusing the subconsciousness. That is our instrument for getting the supernormal and all efforts to get it by confusing the sub¬conscious only show that you do not know how to experiment. No doubt more experience would have enabled me to meet the situation with more tact than I showed and to "have now and then been a little more oracular, but often I deliberately helped the trance personality to enable it to go on to more spontaneous messages. The unbiassed reader will often re¬mark the success of this policy in bringing out correct in¬cidents with correct psychological associations, the latter being the best part of the evidence.
Dr. Tanner is very solicitous about the danger of sug¬gestions from intonations and inflections of the voice (pp. 46 and 318). This is all very well for direct questions and their answers, but no sane person would insinuate its rel¬evance without applying it to the details of the record, and especially to the incidents which the writers of it had made evidential. What inflection of the voice would suggest Hy-omei to any one asking another what medicine he had got¬ten for him, unless in collusion? What inflection of voice would suggest the name of James McClellan; that he despised the name of Jim; that a John McClellan had lost a finger in the war; that a "brother" David had a sunstroke; that a mortgage was inferrible from the name Robert Cooper, or an organ from the name Harper Crawford! I might go on
with a hundred such instances, and unless an hypothesis applies to test incidents it is little better than deliberate de¬ception to insinuate that it had not been taken account of, especially when the Report explicitly says that it had been reckoned with throughout the record.
Another and inexcusable habit throughout the volume is that of telling readers about the various precautions needed in this subject, enumerating them from time to time, and never telling the reader that all these had been urged by psychic researchers for twenty-five years. The authors ap¬parently try to make readers believe that they had announced these precautions for the first time. They do not seem to think that possibly some psychic researchers may be a little intelligent and discover this little game of plagiarism and for¬gery. The really scientific men know better regarding the Society's policy and it might have conduced to the authors' gaining respect by honesty on this matter. These authors probably learned all they know about these questions and precautions from the work of the Society.
Altho most of the book shows a misconception of the position taken by most psychic researchers who come within the scope of scientific treatment, there are two passages in which Dr Tanner states clearly what the problem is. After much learned and irrelevant discussion of secondary per¬sonality as a limitation of the evidence and an explanation of much that the layman regards as spiritistic, she correctly states that the psychic researchers say that abnormal con¬ditions or secondary personality may be the condition of mediumship, and hence that messages have to filter through the subconscious to reach us (pp. 35 and 317). This has been emphasized. I devoted some pages in my Report to explaining this part of the hypothesis, and in my last Report, possibly not seen by the author when she published the pres¬ent volume, I discussed it at great length. After stating this position correctly she goes on rightly enough to examine the evidence that anything supernormal has been obtained and later says, when mentioning the position again, that she has tried the " test messages " and found them wanting. After the omission of the important incidents, and especially the synthetic ones from the account, and after the falsification of those she mentioned, I need not say anything" about her success in fulfilling the conditions of the hypothesis or ar¬gument.
I think no intelligent scientific man would find any fault for the examination of Mrs. Piper—and other psychics also, for that matter—from the psychiatrist's point of view. The authors have given us a number of interesting facts in that connection. We are all glad to have these. The experi¬ments in association have their interest for all of us. The authors gave a word to Mrs. Piper and desired her to name the first word that it suggested. This was done both in the normal state and in the trance. They were special forms of illustration of subconscious influence on the results. But all this was wholly irrelevant to the problem: perhaps not the problem that they were trying to solve for themselves, but that which had been solved by psychic reasearchers two decades ago. While it is interesting to learn about shocks and accidents being the cause of mediums, all this has noth¬ing whatever to do with the problem of estimating" the con¬tents of what occurs when any facts come that represent supernormal information. In fact they do not adequately explain any part of either the normal, the abnormal or the supernormal. They only indicate the cause of the conditions that make these phenomena possible.
Also while the association experiments are interesting, they do not concern the problem of the psychic researchers and we do not have to depend on our own statements to prove this. Dr. Tanner, as I have mentioned above, twice stated our problem as one which conceded all the secondary personality you might wish to demonstrate and yet the issue was (a) whether this was not itself the instrument for ob¬taining the supernormal and (b) whether any of the facts transcended this subconscious production. After that ad¬mission of our problem the authors might have seen with half an eye that all their work was aside from the issue. Psychic researchers will make them a present of all the secondary per¬sonality they have a mind to discover or assert; all the shocks and accidents or diseases they can either imagine or prove,
and they will also be indifferent to all questions whether Mrs. Piper is normal or abnormal, conscious or unconscious, aes-thesic or anaesthesic, in a trance or not in a trance, awake or asleep, healthy or unhealthy, honest or dishonest, and yet in¬sist that these have no more to do with the real problem than has gravitation or chemical affinity. The common man has more sense about these matters than have these authors. I repeat that all these questions are interesting and important for other purposes, especially as showing the common man that he must discriminate between the various contents of his material, but they have nothing whatever to do with the standards of the supernormal and it is only the most con¬summate ignorance that would assume or assert that they have. All these conditions may be factors in producing mediumship, but not in estimating the veridical or non-ve¬ridical nature of the phenomena. You might as well insist that because a telegraph line had fallen to the ground the message over it which you could prove on other evidence had come from a specific person was not true. The question here is not what caused mediumship, but what evidence have you that certain facts originated externally to the nor¬mal experience of the subject, and the criterion for deter¬mining this is our knowledge of normal sense perception and the proof, as in the civil courts, of coincidences, numerous enough to be causal rather than casual, between mental and external events involving a certain amount of identity. Scientific men who do not thus recognize the problem had better let it alone. They are sure only to make fools of them¬selves and to deceive every one who is not intelligent enough to discover the ignorance of such self-constituted authorities. The only criticism which we have to make of the authors' discussion of secondary personality is just what we have said and the other fact that they do not sufficiently recognize the fact that psychic researchers have insisted equally with these writers that all these abnormal conditions have their place in an understanding of the phenomena as a whole, tho not affecting the issue of the supernormal. There is too much arrogating to themselves the idea that only they have insisted on these secondary phenomena.

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83 of 98...next post I will finish. :-)

[Vitor Moura]

There is another set of facts, however, regarding which we have no reason to manifest clemency. Had they not ac¬tually stated that psychic researchers insist that secondary personality and its congeners are instruments with which they work and conditions of getting the supernormal, or if not conditions, often concomitants of it, we might have shown some respect for the work under review. But to go about experiments of a delicate type with such rough meth¬ods, get only negative results as affecting psychic research¬ers, and then repudiate hypotheses based upon the super¬normal, is only to invite ridicule for bad psychology and bad logic.
Let me state what the scientific course would have been. If the authors had omitted their discussion of the various publications of the English Society and the falsifications of their records; if they had performed the experiments whose results they report, and if, having found negative results with much secondary personality, they had said they found no ade¬quate evidence for the supernormal, we could have heartily welcomed the book as a useful contribution to the subject. But they have sacrificed their opportunity for praise and in¬dorsement. The evidence of secondary personality in their records is to me a valuable proof of the contention that I have so long made and which they admit psychic researchers have made, namely, that secondary personality is both an instru¬ment and a limitation for the supernormal. Or if the term secondary personality expresses a too highly organized form of the subconcious, we may at least say that subliminal pro¬cesses are the instrument and limitation of the supernormal. Of this I shall speak again. All that I wish to indicate at present is the forfeit of respect which the authors have won by their misrepresentations, evasion of the problem, and con¬clusions which their own evidence does not establish. You cannot deny the existence of the supernormal because you failed to get it. You can only state a verdict of non-proven. Negative results do not establish a denial. They establish only our ignorance.
Another important point is this. The authors are con¬stantly insisting that the value of the reports depends on the fullness of the records. They stated what I have shown to be false that stenographic and complete records were not made until ray sittings, and thus they wish to imply that work previous to their own, if mine is to be excepted, which they do not except in other ways, is worthless. Cf. pp. XIX, 45 and 264. Behold, then, they confess that they were not able to make proper records, and to escape the logic of the situation they say that their " tests were planned so as to be independent of the exact words," and yet they have con¬demned all other sittings because they claim that the exact words were not recorded. Their own views require every word to be recorded as a condition of scientific results, and this is as true of secondary personality as of the supernormal. Their own work, thus by confession, stands as absolutely worthless. They might have had some sense of humor and logic on this point. Let me quote them more accurately.
Dr. Hall states: " Now, it is a very significant fact that stenographic records have rarely been kept, even of the ipsissima verba, that are consciously said to the control by the sitters," a statement that is false as shown above (p. 6), but is made to imply that past records of the Piper case are worthless, and then adds: " Even our record, which was made as full as long hand could be, does not do this." (p. 264). Dr. Tanner states (p. 166): " No attempt was made [by ourselves] to get the exact words of the sitters be¬cause we believe it would be impossible, unless we had two stenographers, and we could not even arrange to have even one."
Why discredit other people's records by telling what is false of most of them and then committing the same crime which you falsely charge against others? If you know how to experiment it is very easy to get the " ipsissima verba" of sitters. If you do not, of course, it is difficult.
I am far from passing any such judgment upon it. I do not agree that every word is necessary in such cases in order to establish scientific value. On any specific incident it is necessary to know what has been said before it, but if I omit to record the word " medicine " in my question about what I got for my father, I do not see that this discredits either the answer Hyomei or the incidents about the mort¬gage and the organ, or the group of facts about James McClellan, etc. This wholesale repudiation of records be¬cause a few insignificant words have been omitted, when nearly all have been recorded, is only to invite the accusation that you expect the public to accept the discrediting of others' records made better than your own while you get that public to accept your authority on records which you admit do not come up to the scientific standard which you apply to others. The authors berate the psychic researchers for ipse dixits and expect to depend on these only for their own cause, a fact well shown by the falsifications of the records without telling the reader where he can find the facts in the original, I repeat that I do not admit that their own record is value¬less altogether. It may be such for evidence of the super¬normal. That is not the issue here. But according to their own confessed statements it would have none except for the leniency which honesty and true scientific method impose on us, and these are that there is no hard and fast line for de¬termining the value of records as wholes in terms of ipsissima verba. There is no more an absolute standard here than in any other field of science. It requires many conditions to determine the value of any specific incident and to rest it, as these authors do, on an abstract rule which does not in¬dicate any proper application to the special case is only to descend to intellectual conjuring and to make as a law of science merely a condition of their own conversion. We are not converting people who have no sense of humor, no veracity, no humility and no open-mindedness. We are col¬lecting facts in the best way we can and testing hypotheses to see if they actually fit. The more complete the records the better. That goes without saying, but when the col¬lective mass of facts is involved a defect of record in any specific instance is not an accusation against the whole and these authors either know this fact or they are wholly ig¬norant of scientific method.
I shall not go into the detailed records with any critical care. There is time and space to deal with them only in a general way, and as I have no quarrel with the view taken of the sittings there is no reason to say much about them. I do not think any intelligent man would defend a spirit¬istic hypothesis upon them, tho Dr. Hall and Dr. Tanner seem to think, rather insincerely or ignorantly I believe, that psychic researchers would explain such stuff by spirits. The records contain a good deal of valuable evidence of subcon¬scious mental action, but not any more than could be dis¬covered by intelligent readers in previous records of the case. The authors seem either not to have examined this aspect of them or desired to deceive the public, very much as they did Mrs. Piper, by insinuating that they were the first to suspect or prove the existence of subconscious action. I cannot but welcome the evidence of subconscious phe¬nomena in all this, and especially to find evidence of what I had worked out in previous records, without wasting my time on proving what was so apparent.
The only criticism that I should have to pass is upon the method of experiment in connection with the theoretical observations made upon them. I shall not object to the method of experiment taken in connection with the desire to study the subconscious, but in connection with the authors' animadversions upon spiritistic theories.
I. The authors are forever telling us that the " controls " are extremely suggestible and often remind us that the sub¬conscious is a very delicate affair. That is what psychic researchers like Dr. Hodgson always said or acted upon, but we are not told this fact, as if no one knew it but anti-psychic researchers. But in spite of this view that secondary personality is so delicate an affair and suggestibility so re¬sponsive to the slightest influence, the authors went about their experiments like a man with a butcher knife to perform a delicate operation, or a man with a pitchfork trying to sew a button on a shirt. Any student of psychiatry has only to read their detailed records and compare them with the work of Dr. Hodgson to see that their firing question after ques¬tion in thick succession at times was calculated only to con¬fuse even secondary personality. And it is to be remarked, however, that in several instances this extreme suggesti¬bility did not work at all as desired and expected. But this fact is not remarked or discussed in the theoretical observa¬tions. Let that pass, as it is not the point here. What I want readers to see is that the slightest scientific knowledge of the delicacy asserted would induce sane people to proceed with a caution and delicacy proportioned to the admitted sensitiveness of the subject. Dr Hodgson had found that his earlier procedure in the use of rough methods for ascertain¬ing what may be very important to psychiatry, but wholly unimportant to the issue of the supernormal, had defeated his own object, and if these authors were in search for the supernormal, as they desire the reader to believe, they would never have bungled their methods as they actually did. If you wish to examine the case for anaesthesia and hyperaesthe-sia, very well, but do not expect so delicate a phenomenon to take place as is involved in the supernormal of any kind. Do not be disappointed if you do not get it. It is absurd to admit that you have a very delicate machine and then smash it only to complain it will not work.
2. As to suggestibility I would only say that was apparent to more people than these experimenters and the psychic researchers have always recognized that this was either a difficulty to be overcome or a necessary condition in the ob¬taining of the supernormal. The fact is, it is not a difficulty in the experimental problem, but a difficulty in the argument, as its existence offers uncandid and prejudiced people a chance to quibble and evade the issue. To me it is a more or less necessary condition for even trying to get the super¬normal, tho what I should mean by this wholly undefined term suggestibility would depend on more facts and ex¬planation that I can give here. However, I shall take no exception to the authors' use of the term, in spite of the fact that I do not believe there is a man in the world that has any clear conception of what he means by suggestibility. It is used for all sorts of different processes and phenomena, normal and abnormal, until it is only a convenient refuge to evade the discovery of one's ignorance. So far as it denotes automatic tendencies in the organism, often exhibited in echolalia, and involuntary associations with automatism, it is perhaps 'a definite conception. Outside of this limitation the term has no use but to confuse the public and to exult and bigotise the sceptic. But whatever it is, it is there in the Piper case, tho it may not always manifest itself. Besides as it is a part of the psychic researcher's instrument for getting the supernormal—this being conceded by the authors—their duty was to make a detailed refutation of this view, not to simply dogmatize about it. But it is no facing of the issue to experiment for proving this suggestibility by rough methods that will not allow even it natural and free play, and then propose theories which are based upon the results of this natural process. Methods of severely testing sensibility, however important they may be for de¬termining certain facts—facts often wholly irrelevant to the main psychic research problem—must produce certain phys¬iological shocks, which will have more or less a tendency to disturb that rapport which is necessary if any supernormal exists at all and this regardless whether it be telepathic or spiritistic. They tend to even break up the rapport with the persons present, or the living, if I may use that term. Both the rapid mental and severe physical tests applied would diminish even suggestibility for the sitters and so tend to limit the evidence for their own views while excluding the phenomena which others obtain. Then when the authors come to illustrate the records of others they ignore the most important incidents and falsify others, so that their readers have a totally false conception of what has been done. I do not fear for the consequences, however, as there are enough intelligent people in this country to discover this subterfuge.
If these authors had just proceeded on the assumption that a well organized secondary personality and the organic habits which a well organized secondary personality would produce, are necessary for the supernormal they would have conducted themselves, assuming that they wanted the super¬normal which they said they did not, so that it might have been possible. They would have encouraged that passivity of the subconscious which would isolate the tendency to act and talk on its own responsibility and left the automatic or echolalic functions to express other foreign influences than their own. They would have sought to establish another rapport than that of their own. The automatic functions, when rapport with the transcendental has been effected might have supplied what they say they did not want and pre¬vented by their irrational mode of experimenting. If they expected to pronounce judgment on the side of the case which they did not investigate they might have respected the terms on which it is possible. There are just three condi¬tions for what they neither got nor tried to get. (I) Well organized secondary personality; (2) organic habits pro¬duced by it terminating in automatic or echolalic functions; and (3) sympathetic rapport. Besides this perhaps the fourth condition would be a certain balanced adjustment between the secondary personality and the automatic functions which are associated or ought to be associated with it. Or perhaps we could express the same fact in terms of dissociation be¬tween the active and personal influence of this secondary per¬sonality and the automatic functions which express it, so that rapport with foreign influences might admit messages which may reflect all sorts of conditions between pure secondary personality and purely foreign intelligence, generally, how¬ever, an interfusion of both in greater or less degrees. Cf. Proceedings Am. S. P. R., Vol. IV, pp. 294-308. But if any mental desires or personal prejudices intervene on the part of the psychic and if the experimenter take a course to keep the rapport only with himself he will get just such results as these bunglers got and he will have only himself and the bias of the medium to blame for unsatisfactory results.
Both authors confess to deception. Dr. Hall even more frankly admits the " ugly word," that they lied to the trance personalities or the subliminal of Mrs. Piper, and then gloat over the evidence for suggestibility, as if we psychic re¬searchers had not long ago discovered that we should get nothing else by this policy, and so adopted the policy of encouraging this very delicate mechanism to see if anything more than an echo of our own statements would be forth¬coming. This was the only sane policy for any one seeking to test the nature of the phenomena. But these troglodyte experimenters have never learned any lessons from the fable of the goose that laid the golden egg. They confess to lying to accomplish their object, in naive ignorance of the simple fact that, if suggestibility is there, they will only get back what they give and disqualify themselves for passing judgment upon the possibilities of the supernormal. Even the despised Spiritualists long ago learned this lesson and their stock phrase: "You only get back what you give" is common parlance for just this liability of defeating rational experiments by trying irrational ones for settling the issue. Then immediately following this confession of lying conies the statement that they " endeavored to be sympathetic and open-minded " in the experiment. Perhaps their failure was due to the fact that the prejudice was so overmastering that they could not be sympathetic. But however that may be what can one say of the contradiction of lying to your sub¬ject and acting sympathetically! I can condone the lying, but not the bad psychology of this.
3. Throughout the book readers are made to believe, not only in the sincere desire of the experimenters to test the spiritistic theory and to ascertain whether there was any ground for supernormal facts. The reader is made to be¬lieve that this is the primary object of their suit. But to show what a piece of constructive lying this is I shall quote one statement which must have been an unconscious be¬trayal of their real object.
" We had no desire whatever to obtain 'test messages,' my results from the published sittings having shown their triviality and dreariness and the impossibility of getting down all the re¬marks and other circumstances which might explain them." (P- 186.)
(1) On pages 36-38 Dr. Tanner admits, if any meaning at all is to be attached to her statements that " trivial and dreary" incidents are just the ones to establish personal identity which she admits is the primary problem in a spirit¬istic theory. (2) From the review which I have made of her examination of the records, in which she omitted the best incidents and falsified all others, sane and intelligent people are not likely to have any confidence in the authors' representations of any facts whatever. (3) The insinuation that previous records were made in anything like the slipshod manner of their own is a work of pure fiction. If they suppose that Dr. Hodgson or I went about the experiments whispering and jabbering about them as these authors con¬fess to doing, they are not only laboring under an illusion but might have obtained information to the contrary if they had read the Reports carefully. We made it a most care¬ful business not to talk about anything connected with the experiments in Mrs. Piper's hearing either in or out of the seance room. A remark about the weather, future engage¬ments, or the comfort of the place was all that would ever escape us, and absolutely every word or whisper made during the trance was taken down. To talk about the impossibility of this is only to confess that you do not know how to ex¬periment. It is not necessary to jabber and talk as these experimenters did. Of course, if you go about in the manner they describe you will have difficulty in making an accurate record, but if you are seeking genuinely scientific evidence for the supernormal you do not jabber like idiots. You keep still. The authors, however, confess they were not seeking the supernormal, and simply assume without one iota of evi¬dence that other experimenters had been as incompetent as themselves either to experiment or to make records, when the slightest examination of the records would have shown them that adequate precautions had been taken. Dr. Hodg¬son and the group of English experimenters were not chil¬dren on this point, if the present authors were. Of course, as for myself I know I am only a " colossal simpleton," and must not retort with " heat and intolerance," tho I wish I had the language of insolence, sarcasm, contempt and ridi¬cule that Dr. Hall has: for I might use it more effectively than I can now.
One curious refrain of this book, with its insistence on " taciturnity," " cynicism," scepticism, and prejudice against a subject as the condition of good judgment in weighing evidence, is that it discredits every man who has formed a positive belief on the issue and makes him the best author¬ity in proving a case who never believes what he is proving!
This is a very characteristic assumption of nearly all critics of psychic research. If such a method were adopted in any other field of inquiry we should promptly assign its victims to the insane asylum where they really belong. The ques¬tion is not whether you disbelieve a conclusion as a condition of having a right to be heard, but whether you properly state and analyze the alternative views involved. There may be a legitimate difference of opinion whether a man has done this or not, but outside of an insane asylum there would be no difference of opinion on the question whether disbelief, " taciturnity," and " cynicism " were the qualities for producing evidence or belief. If they were what would become of them as soon as the belief was established? The subject would become a discredited person fit only for the jeers and sarcasm of the " taciturn cynic " !
But the primary point of the passage quoted is its con¬fession of the real object of the experiments while endeavor¬ing all through the book to make the reader think it was something else. What this reveals in their fitness to in¬vestigate or to tell the truth I do not require to discuss. All that I wish to further remark is the absurdity of attacking a spiritistic or telepathic hypothesis when your experiments were not intended to seek evidence for it and obtained none. You would think from their standing in psychology that they were intelligent enough to know that the absence of evidence is not evidence of the absence of the supernormal elsewhere. It furnishes only a verdict of non-probata (non-proven) for their own work. On this point I cannot be contradicted or refuted.
Another interesting point to be remarked is the constant implication and almost assertion that the authors knew how to experiment in all such cases. The refrain of the whole book, with its sneering and criticism of psychic researchers is that they do not know how to conduct experiments of the kind. These authors would have readers believe that they are exceedingly wise about these things and that all others have been credulous fools who have conducted the experi¬ments. Behold on page 258, after the sittings were over, they confess that they had not known about it all along!!
" She [Mrs, Piper] asked us whether we had reached any conclusions, and we had considerable discussion here. We said that we had not formulated our results, and felt that we had found many baffling things, that really we had been find¬ing out how to work."
It was certainly time to get a little humility, but then they wrote the book after that and seem not to have suspected that this statement might be supposed to be one of the lies they were telling' her. Besides you would not think from Dr. Hall's "Comments on the First Sitting" that he had found anything baffling at all. It is interesting to see these authors protesting that they were sympathetic and anxious to know the truth and to find these notes written apparently immediately after the first sitting (Cf. p. 184) lavishing all the author's powers of sarcasm and contempt on things which he had just begun to investigate! They certainly never wanted the reader to think that they were learning how to work.
Look at some incidents of the detailed record and see how little they really knew about doing their work. The authors, trying to make out that the name Helen might be a guess at some one they possibly knew, when the slightest familiarity with past records of Mrs. Piper's sittings would have given them an excellent illustration of a subliminal echo of Miss Helen Verrall whom Mrs. Piper knew both normally and in the trance.
Take again the far-fetched explanation of the religious personalities in the Piper case, represented by the Imperator group of trance personalities. On page 260 Dr. Hall sug¬gests that they are possibly a subconscious result of a desire on Mrs. Piper's part to return to the orthodox fold. Now the slightest acquaintance with Dr. Hodgson's Report and my own would have shown that Mrs. Piper had read Stainton Moses' Spirit Teachings, in which these same personalities are fully developed and in the same type of phraseology. If you want evidence for secondary personality why not go to psychic research records for it where we fools have stated it and not make guesses for which you do not give any evidence
at all ? All this after Dr. Tanner had actually recognized on page 32, what I say!
In the fourth sitting, near the end, Dr. Hall observed Mrs. Piper repeating what he said, and says of it that it was mim¬icry. He seems to have had a pretty illustration of echolalia which Prof. James remarked in 1886 and made notes of it, but Dr. Hall did not recognize it. Echolalia is automatic and mimicry is conscious and purposive imitation. It is this echolalic or automatic condition that represents just what we want, if it can be handled delicately and rightly, with the proper rapport to get the supernormal. Here the whole con¬duct of the investigators was to break up the very conditions for successful results and to ignore the nature of phenomena of which their own pretences of superior knowledge might have made them aware.
I shall not examine the detailed records for the instances in which their own theory of suggestibility did not work, tho they omitted to remark this in their comments, hopeful, prob¬ably, that readers would not be intelligent enough to discover it. Possibly they were not intelligent enough to observe it themselves, and might have omitted it, as they did so many other incidents and facts disproving their theories. But for¬tunately for intelligent readers the records are there and may be examined to prove what I have said. But what with the wholesale misrepresentation of the facts in published records; what with the omission of the most important facts in such records; what with the contradictory statements in the book; what with the avowal of open-mindedness and perpetual sneering and self-exaltation of their knowledge and ability to investigate; what with their confession in an unguarded mo¬ment that they did not know how to work but were learning how; what with the pretence of honesty in their beliefs and perpetual intimation of a desire to test the supernormal and then in two passages to confess that they had no such object, while the language of contempt is exhausted in sneering at the phenomena before their experiments had hardly begun; what with their pretended knowledge of the records where it was perfectly apparent that psychic researchers recognized secondary personality and never claimed spirits for such disorganized stuff as they got in their experiments, and then the insinuation that this was the kind of evidence upon which they based their spiritistic theories; what with their sneers and abuse of others and complaints that misrepresentation and stupidity are not tolerantly respected; what with the cant of certain orthodox phrases which are covered up in sci¬entific insinuations of another kind (pp. XXX and 381), what with all these the calm critic can only say that the book either displays the grossest ignorance of the facts and the subject, or it is a colossal piece of constructive lying. The authors may take either horn of the dilemma they like. On these points I defy refutation.
Every intelligent reader of this volume under review will remark that its attitude and perpetual implication represent two things. (1) That the phenomena are either all spiritistic or nothing. (2) That psychic researchers so treat the facts. The authors know, or ought to know, that this is not true. In an unwary passage (p. 317) Dr. Tanner admits that the psychic researcher regards secondary personality as the in¬strument for his work, but she does not tell the reader that this involves an intermixture of subconscious elements in the supernormal. This would be to suggest to readers that the insinuations regarding the spiritistic nature of non-evidential matter, impliedly ascribed to spiritists, was false and the whole animus of the book would be lost. I shall not say that it is gross ignorance on their part to take this attitude as it would afford a better excuse for misrepresentations than the evidence supplies. Of all the things insisted upon by psychic researchers it is the fact that large quantities of the stuff superficially claiming to come from spirits is subconscious impersonation or dreaming. That is so plain in the records of their work that the failure to treat the records accordingly looks so much like malice that it will not easily escape that suspicion. It would take too much space to illustrate and prove this and so I leave my general remarks to the con¬firmation of intelligent and unbiassed readers of the book.
There is no " heat and intolerance " in this judgment. It is only an acceptance of Dr. Hall's invitation to be frank, and I have no objection to being alone against the majority, and in treating it with contempt they must not complain, espe¬cially if I say that when I get in the majority I shall be merci¬ful to these poor outcasts who still insist that their stupidity shall be mercifully regarded. I do pity them for the neces¬sity of confessing that they did not know how to work, after trying so hard by contempt of psychic researchers to make readers believe that they were most accomplished experi¬menters.
The proof of all this lies in the consequences to Mrs. Piper of their six sittings. Dr. Hodgson spent fifteen years or more on the case without injuring it. These wonderfully skilled experimenters and students of psychology, always in¬sisting on the delicate character of secondary personality, re¬duced Mrs. Piper to nervous prostration in six sittings and she was disqualified for work during at least the most of a year, not being able even to go into a trance during that time.
I have always found it difficult to apologize for Dr. Hodg¬son's policy of excluding our soi-disant scientists from partic¬ipation in the Piper experiments. They were always abusing him for not letting them experiment as they desired and en¬deavored to throw suspicions upon his work because he re¬fused them their demands or opportunities. While I knew the facts and that he was really quite justified in his position, I could never venture upon a complete defence of it, as this required telling these men they knew nothing about the sub¬ject. But now Dr. Hodgson has received a vindication at the hands of his worst critics and opponents. He knew how to investigate and work. When they are trusted with a delicate machine they ruin it. Hereafter there will be no difficulty in refusing such men a chance to expose their ig¬norance. We shall not require any longer to apologize for a policy of excluding hucksters and bunglers from the handling of delicate machinery. That has been settled by the conduct of these self-styled scientists.
I repeat in closing that I make no defence of the spiritistic hypothesis. It is not half so important to protect that theory as it is to have the exact facts correctly stated. I have no objections whatever to the authors' hypotheses. Contrary to their own insinuations and statements I applied fishing, guessing, " shrewd inference," and suggestion and found them wanting (Cf. Vol. XVI, pp. 12, 16-17, 247-248). They apply readily enough to certain isolated incidents having no synthetic complexity and this was admitted. But they do not apply to certain complicated facts and no one of any in¬telligence at all would assert their application without giving" evidence of it. But there is not one single concrete example of this application by the authors to any synthetic incident in my records. There is assertion, but not evidence. Besides with all their talk about guessing, fishing, and suggestion they give not a single experiment showing any such results as are found in the Piper and other records. Their sole reli¬ance is on a reputation which sufficed to get them a place in academic life. Ipse dixits do not count any more against a subject than they do for it. All that we ask is that your "milieu" of suggestion, etc., be applied in the concrete, not merely in the abstract. Even psychic researchers knew enough to avoid this mistake.
I do not know a better example of evidence for the theory which I hold regarding the limitations and obstacles to super¬normal phenomena than the authors' six sittings. With the supernormal once proved, as intelligent people see that it is, and with the ignorant bungling method of experiment em¬ployed by the authors the difficulty or impossibility of foreign impressions was demonstrated, and then in revenge for their failure and confession, that they were learning how to work, they felt it best to ridicule the whole subject. One can sym¬pathize with the ignominy of their situation and will never have to apologize for a spiritistic hypothesis as long as this sort of book is written about it. It is an hypothesis that can take care of itself if only you can secure intelligence, veracity and freedom from misrepresentation and prejudice in the statement of the facts. I am quite sure that every intelligent and unbiassed reader who compares the book with the publications of the English Society and the various statements made within the book itself will agree to the justice of the comparison with Barere's Memoirs.

****
The end :-)

[Michael Prescott]

Wow. That's amazing. I haven't had time to read all this yet, but many thanks for posting it.

What I may do, when I have the time, is put the whole thing online on my regular Web site, so that people can refer to it more easily. I'll give you credit for the transcription, of course.

[Vitor Moura]

I have also the book "Studies in Spiritism". If you want, the only thing you need to do is ask :-)

Best wishes,
Vitor

[Leo]

Hi, Michael I cam across this statement from a skeptic on a skeptic forum.

Experience and consciousness is based on sensory systems filtering certain information out of the world and processing it (converting it) into actions.

The idea of a soul is false. Behavior is described by behavioral neurobiology. Your arm muscle is innervated by a motor neuron. That neuron is innervated by an afferent interneuron. That neuron is inervated by more interneurons. No neuron along that path back into the brain has "choice" or a soul. The idea of the distinction of objects such as you and me has to do with our brains.

The real truth of it is that what we are, as organisms, is an expression of our environment. "We" are part of that environment. Us neurobiologist can, and do, turn off individual neurons in complex organisms and characterize the behavioral change.

Neuron states = behavioral states = conscious states. This is clearly illustrated by modern neurobiology and electrical engineering. Neurobioloy allows us to characterize and see individual cells and electrical engineering gives us constructs of information processing systems and input/output system stability (that we apply to construct things like computers). Neuro illustrates the components and EE gives us constructs to describe how they behave.

We are a highly complex adaptive feedback control system. Soul is a null word. Our outputs correlate with our inputs.

[Greg Taylor]

Thanks to Michael and Vitor for providing so much (too much, given my time constraints) quality reading.

The one thing I am struck by, in reading through Hyslop's criticism, is how little things change in the presentation of the skeptical argument. Michael has pointed out on this blog a number of times now, how 'skeptics' have omitted important facts. Hall and Tanner's work seems much of the same (btw, I remember reading somewhere about the non-existent Bessie Beals thing perhaps being a case of Hall not telling the truth...does anyone else know more on this?).

Hyslop:

"It is hard to characterize the conduct of a critic who will be guilty of such reprehensible misrepresentation. There are, in fact, several remarkable evidential incidents in the passage, but they are carefully suppressed and only one chosen by the author to which I had attached no special importance in my discussion of the incident."

History never repeats, right?

Kind regards,
Greg

[Greg Taylor]

Michael,

I would respectfully suggest that your post deconstructing Gardner's essay should be posted as a standalone blog. I have my own input on it, but I think comments are bound to get lost a little in this thread due to the wide scope of discussion, and also Vitor's Hyslop repost (not faulting you though Vitor, I appreciate the posting!).

Kind regards,
Greg

[Matthew C]

Michael,

I was about to post what Greg just said -- this needs to be a stand-along blog post.

[Greg Taylor]

Some other worthwhile quotes from Hyslop's article (for those not inclined to read the whole thing) on the Hall/Tanner book, which are highly significant to the following criticisms made by Gardner:

* On 'full records' of seances never being recorded:

"Again says Dr. Tanner, referring to the manner of making the records:

'Notes were taken in long hand, but, as far as can be judged, until Hyslop's sittings no attempt was made to take down everything that was said, especially remarks considered foreign to the matter in hand, or remarks of one sitter to the other, when two or more were present.' (p, 45.)

There is not one word of truth in these statements, except that at some sittings used in the earlier Reports long hand notes were taken. The rest of it is pure fiction. It is the less excusable because the book pretends to show a knowledge of the various volumes published by the Society. Stenographic records were made by Dr. Hodgson long before I had any sittings "

* On Piper's use of 'fishing'/'cold reading':

"Contrary to their own insinuations and statements I applied fishing, guessing, "shrewd inference," and suggestion and found them wanting (Cf. Vol. XVI, pp. 12, 16-17, 247-248). They apply readily enough to certain isolated incidents having no synthetic complexity and this was admitted. But they do not apply to certain complicated facts and no one of any in¬telligence at all would assert their application without giving" evidence of it. But there is not one single concrete example of this application by the authors to any synthetic incident in my records. There is assertion, but not evidence. Besides with all their talk about guessing, fishing, and suggestion they give not a single experiment showing any such results as are found in the Piper and other records."

* On Hall and Tanner being open-minded scientists:

"what with their confession in an unguarded mo¬ment that they did not know how to work but were learning how; what with the pretence of honesty in their beliefs and perpetual intimation of a desire to test the supernormal and then in two passages to confess that they had no such object, while the language of contempt is exhausted in sneering at the phenomena before their experiments had hardly begun...what with their sneers and abuse of others and complaints that misrepresentation and stupidity are not tolerantly respected; what with the cant of certain orthodox phrases which are covered up in scientific insinuations of another kind (pp. XXX and 381), what with all these the calm critic can only say that the book either displays the grossest ignorance of the facts and the subject, or it is a colossal piece of constructive lying. The authors may take either horn of the dilemma they like."

Ooooh, *snap*!!
;)

Kind regards,
Greg

[Greg Taylor]

Returning to the review, after reading Gardner's essay this sentence rings rather hollow:

"Blum's ghost narratives do not show, as Gardner did, how Mrs. Piper fished for information by gauging her sitters' responses to all her wrong answers".

I don't think Gardner 'showed' anything of the kind. He merely mentioned it without any evidence.

Kind regards,
Greg