IN CHAPTS. XVII and XVIII, we considered and to some extent commented upon the
chief kinds of paranormal occurrences that appear to constitute empirical
evidence of survival. The point has now been reached where we must attempt to
say, in the light of the evidence and of the criticisms to which it may be open,
how stands today the question whether the human personality survives the death
of its body.
1. What, if not survival, the facts might signify
Only two hypotheses have yet
been advanced that seem at all capable of accounting for the prima facie
evidences of personal survival reviewed. One is that the identifying items do
indeed proceed from the surviving spirits of the deceased persons concerned. The
other is that the medium obtains by extrasensory perception the facts she
communicates; that is, more specifically, obtains them: (a) telepathically from
the minds of living persons who know them or have known them; or (b) by retrocognitive clairvoyant observation of the past facts themselves; or (c) by
clairvoyant observation of existing records, or of existing circumstantial
evidence, of the past facts.
To the second of these two hypotheses would have to be added in some cases the
hypothesis that the medium's subconscious mind has and exercises a remarkable
capacity for verisimilar impersonation of a deceased individual whom the medium
has never known but concerning whom she is getting information at the time in
the telepathic or/and clairvoyant manner just referred to.
In cases where the information is communicated by paranormal raps or by other
paranormal physical phenomena, the hypothesis that the capacity to produce such
physical phenomena is being exercised by the medium's unconscious but still
incarnate mind would be more economical than ascription of that capacity to
discarnate minds; for these - unlike the medium and her mind - are not
independently known to exist.
It must be emphasized that no responsible person who is fully acquainted with
the evidence for the occurrences to be explained and with their circumstances
has yet offered any explanatory hypothesis distinct from the two stated above.
As of today, the choice therefore lies between them. The hypothesis of fraud,
which would by-pass them, is wholly untenable in at least some of the cases;
notably, for the reasons mentioned earlier, in the case of the communications
received through Mrs. Piper. And, in the case of the cross-correspondences, the
hypothesis that the whole series was but an elaborate hoax collusively
perpetrated out of sheer mischief for over ten years by the more than half-dozen
automatists concerned - and this without its ever being detected by the alert
investigators who were in constant contact with the automatists - is
preposterous even if the high personal character of the ladies through whom the
scripts came is left out of account.
Still more so, of course, would be the suggestion that the investigators too
participated in the hoax, In this connection the following words of Prof.
Sidgwick are worth remembering. They occur in his presidential address at the
first general meeting of the Society for Psychical Research in London, July 17,
1882:
"The highest degree of demonstrative force that we can obtain out of any single
record of investigation is, of course, limited by the trustworthiness of the
investigator. We have done all that we can when the critic has nothing left to
allege except that the investigator is in the trick. But when he has nothing
else left to allege he will allege that ... We must drive the objector into the
position of being forced either to admit the phenomena as inexplicable, at least
by him, or to accuse the
investigators either of lying or cheating or of a blindness or
forgetfulness incompatible with any intellectual condition except
absolute idiocy."(1)
(1) Proc. S.P.R. Vol. L 12, 1882-3. Cf. in this connection an article, Science
and the Supernatural, by G. R. Price, Research Associate in the Dept. of
Medicine, Univ. of Minnesota. Science, Vol. 122, No. 3165, Aug. 26, 1955 and the
comments on it by S. G. Soal, J. B. Rhine, P. E. Meehl, M. Scriven, P. W.
Bridgman Vol. 123, No. 3184 Jan. 6156.
2. The allegation that survival is antecedently improbable
The attempt to
decide rationally between the two hypotheses mentioned above must in any case
take into consideration at the very start the allegation that survival is antecedently known to be improbable or even impossible; or on the contrary is
known to be necessary. In a paper to which we shall be referring in the next two
sections(2), Prof. E. R. Dodds first considers the grounds that have been
advanced from various quarters for such improbability, impossibility, or
necessity. In view, however, of our own more extensive discussion of those
grounds in Parts I and III of the present work, we need say nothing here
concerning Prof. Dodds' brief remarks on the subject. Nothing in them seems to
call for any revision of the conclusion to which we came that there is not
really any antecedent improbability of survival (nor any antecedent probability
of it.) For when the denotation of the terms "material" and "mental" is made
fully explicit instead of, as commonly, assumed to be known well enough; and
when the nature of the existents or occurrents respectively termed "material"
and "mental" is correctly analyzed; then no internal inconsistency, nor any
inconsistency with any definitely known empirical fact, is found in the
supposition that a mind, such as it had become up to the time of death,
continues to exist after death and to exercise some of its capacities. Nor is
there any antecedent reason to assume that, if a mind does so continue to exist,
manifestations of this fact to persons still living would be common rather than,
as actually seems to be the case, exceptional.
(2) Why I do not believe in Survival, Proc. S.P.R. Vol. XLIL 147-72, 1934.
3. What telepathy or clairvoyance would suffice to account
for
Prof. Dodds
considers and attempts to dispose of ten objections which have been advanced
against the adequacy of the telepathy-clairvoyance explanation of the facts. The
objections in the case of which his attempt seems definitely successful are the
following.
(a) The first is that telepathy does not account for the claim made in the
mediumistic communications, that they emanate from the spirits of deceased
persons.
Prof. Dodds replies that some of the communications have in fact claimed a
different origin; and that anyway the claim is explicable as due to the fact
that communication with the deceased is usually what is desired from mediums,
and that the medium's own desire to satisfy the sitter's desire for such
communications operates on the medium's subconscious - from which they directly
proceed - as desire commonly operates in the production of dreams and in the
determination of their content.
(b) A second objection is that no independent evidence exists that mediums
belong to the very small group of persons who have detectable telepathic powers.
In reply, Prof. Dodds points to the fact that Dr. Soal had in his own mind
formed a number of hypotheses about the life and circumstances of the - as it
eventually turned out - wholly fictitious John Ferguson (mentioned in Sec. 2 of
Chapt. XVIII) and that in the communications those very hypotheses then cropped
up as assertions of fact. Prof. Dodds mentions various other instances where
things actually false, but believed true by the sitter, have similarly been
asserted in the medium's communications and thus have provided additional
evidence that she possessed and was exercising telepathic powers.
To this we may add that there is some evidence that the trance condition-at
least the hypnotic trance - is favorable to the exercise of ordinarily latent
capacities for extrasensory perception(3).
(3) See for instance ESP card tests of college students with and without
hypnosis, by J. Fahler and R. J. Cadoret, Jl. of Parapsychology, Vol. 22:125-36,
No. 2, June 1958.
(c) Another objection is that telepathy does not account for "object reading"
where the object is a relic of a person unknown both to the sitter and to the
medium, but where the medium nevertheless gives correct detailed information
about the object's former or present owner.
Prof. Dodd's reply is in substance that these occurrences are no less puzzling
on the spiritistic than on the telepathic hypothesis. Since much of the
information obtained in such cases concerns occurrences in which the object
itself had no part, the object can hardly be itself a record of it; rather, it
must be a means of establishing telepathic rapport between the mind of the
sensitive and that of the person who has the information.
And of course the correctness of the information could not be verified unless
some person has it, or unless the facts testified to are objective and thus
accessible to clairvoyant observation by the sensitive.
(d) To the objection that no correlation is found between the success or failure
of a sitting and the conditions respectively favorable or unfavorable to
telepathy, Prof. Dodds replies that, actually, we know almost nothing as to what
these are.
(e) Another objection which has been advanced against the telepathy explanation
of the communications is that the quantity and quality of the communications
varies with changes of purported communicator, but not of sitter as one would
expect if telepathy were what provides the information communicated.
The reply here is, for one thing, that, as we have seen in Sec. 3 of Ch. XVIII,
the allegation is not invariably true; but that anyway changes of purported
communicator imply corresponding changes as to the minds that are possible
telepathic sources of the information communicated.
(f) Again, it is often asserted that the telepathy explanation of the facts is
very complicated, whereas the spiritistic explanation is simple. Prof. Dodds'
reply here is that the sense in which greater simplicity entails greater
probability is that in which being "simpler" means "making fewer and narrower
unsupported assumptions;" and that the telepathy hypothesis, not the spiritistic,
is the one simpler in this alone evidentially relevant sense. For the
spiritistic hypothesis postulates telepathy and clairvoyance anyway, but
ascribes these to "spirits", which are not independently known to exist; whereas
the telepathy hypothesis ascribes them to the medium, who is known to exist and
for whose occasional exercise of telepathy or clairvoyance some independent
evidence exists.
4. The facts which strain the telepathy-clairvoyance explanation
In the case of
the other objections to the telepathy explanation commented upon by Prof. Dodds,
his replies are much less convincing than those we have just presented. Indeed,
they bring to mind a remark made shortly before by W. H. Salter concerning
certain features of the cross-correspondences communications: "It is possible to
frame a theory which will explain each of them, more or less, by telepathy, but
is it not necessary in doing so to invent ad hoc a species of telepathy for
which there is otherwise practically no evidence?"(4)
(4) Journal, S.P.R. Vol. 27:331, 1932. The remark occurs towards the end of a
review of C. S. Bechofer Roberts' The Truth about Spiritualism.
The essence of these more stubborn objections is the virtually unlimited range
of the telepathy with which the automatist's or medium's subconscious mind has
to be gifted. It must be such as to have access to the minds of any persons who
possess the recondite items of information communicated, no matter where those
persons happen to be at the time. Furthermore, the telepathy postulated must be
assumed somehow capable of selecting, out of all the minds to which its immense
range gives it access, the particular one or ones that contain the specific bits
of information brought into the communications. But this is not all. The
immediate understanding of, and apposite response to, allusive remarks in the
course of the communicator's conversation with the sitter (or sometimes with
another communicator) requires that the above selecting of the person or persons
having the information, and the establishing and relinquishing of telepathic
rapport with the mind of the appropriate one, be virtually instantaneous. And
then, of course, the information thus telepathically obtained must, instantly
again, be put into the form of a dramatic, highly verisimilar impersonation of
the deceased purported communicator as he would have acted in animated
conversational give-and-take. This particular feature of some of the
communications, as we saw, was that on which - as the most convincing - both Hyslop
and Hodgson laid great stress, as do Mr. Drayton Thomas and also Mr. Salter.
Let us now see how Prof. Dodds proposes to meet these difficulties, which strain
the telepathy hypothesis, but of which the spiritistic hypothesis would be free.
For one thing, he points to some of Dr. Osty's cases, where "sensitives who do
not profess to be assisted by 'spirits'" nevertheless give out information about
absent persons as detailed as that given by the supposed spirits.
Obviously, however, there is no more reason to accept as authoritative what a
sensitive "professes" or believes as to the paranormal source of her information
when she denies that it is spirits than when she asserts it. Mrs. Eileen
Garrett, who in addition to being one of the best known contemporary mediums, is
scientifically interested in her own mediumship, freely acknowledges that she
does not know, any more than do other persons, whether her controls, Abdul Latif
and Uvani, are discarnate spirits, dissociated parts of her own personality, or
something else.
Again, Prof. Dodds argues that recognition of the personality of a deceased
friend by the sitter has but slight evidential value, since there is no way of
checking how far the will-to-believe may be responsible for it; but that even if
the reproduction is perfect, it is anyway no evidence that the personality
concerned has survived after death; for Gordon Davis was still living and yet
Mrs. Blanche Cooper, who did not know him, did reproduce the tone of his voice
and his peculiar articulation well enough for Dr. Soal to recognize them.
Prof. Dodd's reply is predicated on the assumption that, although Dr. Soal was
neither expecting nor longing for communication with Gordon Davis, nevertheless
the recognition was positive and definite. This should therefore be similarly
granted in cases where the person who recognizes the voice or manner of a
deceased friend is, similarly, an investigator moved by scientific interest, not
a grieving person moved to believe by his longing for reunion with his loved
one.
Aside from this, however, the Gordon Davis case shows only that, since he was
still living, the process by which the tone of his voice and his peculiar
articulation were reproduced by Mrs. Cooper was not "possession" of her organism
by his discarnate spirit. Telepathy from Dr. Soal, who believed Davis had died,
is enough to account for the vocal peculiarities of the communication, for the
memories of boyhood and of the later meeting on the railroad platform, and for
the purported communicator's assumption that he had died. But this mere
reproduction of voice peculiarities and of two memories, in the single brief
conversation of Dr. Soal directly with the purported Gordon Davis, is a
radically different thing from the lively conversational intercourse Hyslop and
Hodgson refer to, with its immediate and apposite adaptation of mental or
emotional attitude to changes in that of the interlocutor, and the making and
understanding of apt allusions to intimate matters, back and forth between
communicator and sitter. The Gordon Davis communication is not a case of this at
all; and of course the precognitive features of the communication by Nada (Mrs.
Blanche Cooper's control) at the second sitting, which referred to the house
Gordon Davis eventually occupied, are irrelevant equally to the telepathy and to
the spiritualist hypotheses.
Prof. Dodds would account for the appositeness of the facts the medium selects,
which the particular deceased person concerned would remember and which identify
him, by saying that, once the medium's subconscious mind is en rapport with that
of the telepathic agent, the selection of items of information appropriate at a
given moment to the demands of the conversation with the sitter can be supposed
to take place in the same automatic manner as that in which such selection
occurs in a person when the conversation requires it.
The adequacy of this reply is decreased, however, by the assumption it makes
that the information given out by the medium is derived from one telepathic
source, or at least one at a time; whereas in the case of Hyslop's
communications purportedly from his father, the items of information supplied
were apparently not all contained in any one person's memory, but scattered
among several. Hence, if the medium's subconscious mind was en rapport at the
the same time with those of different persons, the task of selecting instantly
which one of them to draw from would remain, and would be very different from
the normal automatic selection within one mind, of items relevant at a given
moment in a conversation.
But anyway the degree of telepathic rapport which Prof. Dodds' reply postulates
vastly exceeds any that is independently known to occur; for it would involve
the medium's having for the time being all the memories and associations of
ideas of the person who is the telepathic source; and this would amount to the
medium's virtually borrowing that person's mind for the duration of the
conversation; and notwithstanding this, responding in the conversation not as
that person himself would respond, but as the ostensible communicator -
constructed by the medium out of that person's memories of him - would respond.
Concerning the cross-correspondences, Prof. Dodds admits that they manifest
pattern, but he is not satisfied that they are the result of design. Even if
they were designed, however, he agrees with the suggestion others had made that
Mrs. Verrall's subconscious mind, which had all the knowledge of the Greek and
Latin classics required, could well be supposed to have designed the scheme,
rather than the deceased Myers and his associates; for, he asserts, "more
difficult intellectual feats than the construction of these puzzles have before
now been performed subconsciously" (p. 169). H. F. Saltmarsh, however, suggests
"that it may be unreasonable to attribute to the same level of consciousness
intellectual powers of a very high order and a rather stupid spirit of trickery
and deception."(5)
(5) Op. cit. p. 138.
But in any case, more than the construction of the puzzles would be involved;
namely, in addition, telepathic virtual dictation of the appropriate script to
the other automatist - whose very existence was, in the case of Mrs. Holland in
India, quite unknown at the time to Mrs. Verrall in England. To ascribe the
script to "telepathic leakage" will hardly do, for, as Lord Balfour remarked
concerning such a proposal made by Miss F. M. Stawell in the Ear of Dionysius
case, "it is not at all clear how 'telepathic leakage' could be so thoughtful as
to arrange all the topics in such an ingenious way. It seems a little like
'explaining' the working of a motor car by saying that it goes because petrol
leaks out of a tank into its front end!"(6)
(6) Proc. S.P.R. Vol. XXIX:270.
5. What would prove, or make positively probable, that survival is a fact
The
difficult task of deciding where the various kinds of facts now before us, the
rival interpretations of them, and the criticisms of the interpretations,
finally leave the case for the reality of survival requires that we first
attempt to specify what evidence, if we should have it, we would accept as
definitely proving survival or, short of this, as definitely establishing a
positive probability that survival is a fact.
To this end, let us suppose that a friend of ours, John Doe, was a passenger on
the transatlantic plane which some months ago the newspapers reported crashed
shortly after leaving Shannon without having radioed that it was in trouble.
Since no survivors were reported to have been found, we would naturally assume
that John Doe had died with the rest.
Let us now, however, consider in turn each of three further suppositions.
(I) The first is that some time later we meet on the street a man we recognize
as John Doe, who recognizes us too, and who has John Doe's voice and mannerisms.
Also, that allusions to personal matters that were familiar to both of us, made
now in our conversation with him, are readily understood and suitably responded
to by each. Then, even before he tells us how he chanced to survive the crash,
we would of course know that, somehow, he has survived it.
(II) But now let us suppose instead that we do not thus meet him, but that one
day our telephone rings, and over the line comes a voice which we clearly
recognize as John Doe's; and that we also recognize certain turns of phrase that
were peculiar to him. He tells us that he survived the disaster, and we then
talk with ready mutual understanding about personal and other matters that had
been familiar to the two of us. We wish, of course, that we could see him as
well as thus talk with him; yet we would feel practically certain that he had
survived the crash of the plane and is now living.
(III) Let us, however, now consider instead a third supposition, namely, that
one day, when our telephone rings, a voice not John Doe's tells us that he did
survive the accident and that he wants us to know it, but that for some reason
he cannot come to the phone. He is, however, in need of money and wants us to
deposit some to his account in the bank.
Then of course - especially since the person who transmits the request over the
telephone sounds at times a bit incoherent we would want to make very sure that
the person from whom the request ultimately emanates is really John Doe. To this
end we ask him through the intermediary to name some mutual friends; and he
names several, giving some particular facts about each. We refer, allusively, to
various personal matters he would be familiar with; and it turns out that he
understands the allusions and responds to them appropriately. Also, the
intermediary quotes him as uttering various statements, in which we recognize
peculiarities of his thought and phraseology; and the peculiar nasal tone of his
voice is imitated by the intermediary well enough for us to recognize it.
Would all this convince us that the request for money really emanates from John
Doe and therefore that he did survive the accident and is still living? If we
should react rationally rather than impulsively, our getting convinced or
remaining unconvinced would depend on the following considerations.
First, is it possible at all that our friend somehow did survive the crash? If,
for example, his dead body had been subsequently found and identified beyond
question, then obviously the person whose request for money is being transmitted
to us could not possibly be John Doe not yet deceased; and hence the identifying
evidence conveyed to us over the phone would necessarily be worthless, no matter
how strongly it would otherwise testify to his being still alive.
But if we have no such antecedent conclusive proof that he did perish, then the
degree of our confidence that the telephoned request ultimately does emanate
from him, and hence that he is still living, will depend for us on the following
three factors.
(a) One will be the abundance, or scantiness, of such evidence of his identity
as comes to us over the phone.
(b) A second factor will be the quality of the evidence. That is, does it
correspond minutely and in peculiar details to what we know of the facts or
incidents to which it refers; or on the contrary does it correspond to them
merely in that it gives, correctly indeed, the broad features of the events
concerned, but does not include much detail?
(c) The third factor will be that of diversity of the kinds of evidence the
telephone messages supply. Does all the evidence, for example, consist only of
correct memories of personal matters and of matters typical of John Doe's range
of information? Or does the evidence include also dramatic faithfulness of the
communications to the manner, the attitudes, the tacit assumptions, and the idiosyncracies of John Doe as we remember him? And again, do the communications
manifest in addition something which H. F. Saltmarsh has held to be "as clear an
indication of psychical individuality as finger prints are of physical,"(7)
namely associations of ideas that were peculiar to John Doe as of the age he had
reached at the time of the crash?
(7) Evidence of Personal Survival from Cross Correspondences, G. Bell & Sons,
London 1938, p. 34.
If these same associations are still manifest, then persistence of them will
signify one thing if the communication in which they appear is made not too long
after the accident, but a different thing if instead it is made, say,
twenty-five years after. For a person's associations of ideas alter more or less
as a result of new experiences, of changes of environment, of acquisition of new
ranges of information, and of development of new interests. Hence, if the
associations of ideas are the same a few months or a year or two after the crash
as they were before, this would testify to John Doe's identity. But if they are
the same a quarter of a century later, then this would testify rather that
although some of the capacities he had have apparently persisted, yet he has in
the meantime not continued really to live; for to live in the full sense of the
word entails becoming gradually different - indeed, markedly different in many ways
over such a long term of years.
Now, the point of our introducing the hypothetical case of John Doe, and of the
three suppositions we made in succession as to occurrences that convinced us, of
that inclined us in various degrees to believe, that he had not after all died
in the plane accident is that the second and especially the third of those
suppositions duplicate in all essentials the evidences of survival of the human
mind which the best of the mediumistic communications supply. For the medium or
automatist is the analogue of the telephone and, in cases of apparent possession
of the medium's organism by the purported communicator, the latter is the
analogue of John Doe when himself telephoning. The medium's "control," on the
other hand, is the analogue of the intermediary who at other times transmits
John Doe's statements over the telephone. And the fact recalled in Sec. 2 of
this chapter - that survival has not been proved to be either empirically or
logically impossible - is the analogue of the supposition that John Doe's body was
never found and hence that his having survived the crash is not known to be
impossible.
This parallelism between the two situations entails that if reason rather than
either religious or materialistic faith is to decide, then our answer to the
question whether the evidence we have does or does not establish survival (or at
least a positive probability of it) must, in the matter of survival after death,
be based on the very same considerations as in the matter of survival after the
crash of the plane. That is, our answer will have to be based similarly on the
quantity of evidence we get over the mediumistic "telephone;" on the
quality of
that evidence; and on the diversity of kinds of it we get.
6. The conclusion about survival which at present appears warranted
To what
conclusion, then, do these three considerations point when brought to bear on
the evidence referred to in Chapters XVII and XVIII?
The conclusion they dictate is, I believe, the same as that which at the end of
Chapter XVIII we cited as finally reached by Mrs. Sidgwick and by Lord Balfour -
a conclusion which also was reached in time by Sir Oliver Lodge, by Prof. Hyslop,
by Dr. Hodgson, and by a number of other persons who like them were thoroughly
familiar with the evidence on record; who were gifted with keenly critical
minds; who had originally been skeptical of the reality or even possibility of
survival; and who were also fully acquainted with the evidence for the reality
of telepathy and of clairvoyance, and with the claims that had been made for the
telepathy-clairvoyance interpretation of the evidence, as against the survival
interpretation of it.
Their conclusion was essentially that the balance of the evidence so far
obtained is on the side of the reality of survival and, in the best cases, of
survival not merely of memories of the life on earth, but of survival also of
the most significant capacities of the human mind, and of continuing exercise of
these.
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