Psychical investigations : some personally-observed proofs of survival

Preface

In debatable matters, such as psychical research, readers may naturally wish for information which shall enable them to estimate the amount of a writer's bias. It may therefore be useful to affirm that, at the beginning of my investigations, my prejudices and wishes were opposed to the conclusions which the facts gradually forced upon me. If I am now biased in favour of the belief in personal life after death, it is objective fact, not subjective preference, that has brought it about. And my judgments have not been hasty. I have worked at the subject for over eleven years.

Chapters I., II., and X. have appeared as articles in the Quest, Nineteenth Century and After, and Occult Review respectively. I thank the Editors and Publishers for their kind permission to reprint. The remainder of the book appears now for the first time.

I must beg the reader's indulgence for the repetition, in the central verbatim reports, of certain matter which appears in earlier chapters. It seemed desirable to present this matter in connected form as an easilyreadable introduction to the detailed records; but the latter are necessary also, for in these things fullness and exactness are essential.

J. A. H.

Bradford,

"Cebes answered! I agree, Socrates, in the greater part of what you say. But in what concerns the soul, men are apt to be incredulous ; they fear that when she has left the body her place may be nowhere, and that on the very day of death she may perish and come to an end — immediately on her release from the body, issuing forth dispersed like smoke or air and in her flight vanishing away into nothingness. If she could only be collected into herself after she has obtained release from the evils of which you were speaking, there would be good reason to hope, Socrates, that what you say is true. But surely it requires a great deal of argument and many proofs to show that when the man is dead his soul yet exists, and has any force or intelligence." — Plato, Phtzdo (Jowett's trans.).

"I am confident that there truly is such a thing as living again and that the living spring from the dead, and that the souls of the dead are in existence, and that the good souls have a better portion than the evil." — Ibid. (Socrates speaking).

Contents

CHAPTEB PAGE

I. Immortality 11

II. Investigation: Methods and Examples . 20

Chapter I

AT different times, or at the same time in different minds, different aspects of Religion are emphasised. One school may lay stress on morals and social duty; another may emphasise the sacramental aspect; a still more thoroughly mystical school may concern itself with attaining divine union without special symbolism; and no doubt many other divisions or subdivisions might be specified. All are good in their way, for all of them are helpful to one or other of us. But in the present terrible times, when a great war has spread mourning through many lands, there is another aspect which inevitably comes into special prominence; namely, the question of the continuity of the personal self past the wrench of bodily death. These millions of splendid young men who have made the great sacrifice just at the period when life was most dear — can we reasonably believe that they are gone out of existence, that such a superb triumphing of will over instinct and self is followed by annihilation? We feel that any such belief would involve pessimism of the most radical kind. It would condemn the Universe;

and we feel that it cannot be true. But we want more than feeling, for this is a scientific age. We must consider the subject in the dry light of reason. What, then, can we say about survival of bodily death? And, to clear the ground, we must first discuss the more usual term of "immortality."

Dictionaries mostly say that immortality is the condition or quality of being immortal, and that "immortal" means "exempt from death," which, indeed, is its obvious etymological signification. Implicitly, then, if I say that I — the "I" as known to me — am immortal, I mean that the existence of that self is endless; that I shall go on for ever. A very depressing and indeed terrifying thought, as the child in Emerson's essay realized. "What! will it never stop? What! never die? never, never? It makes me feel so tired!" *

But a further question arises. How can we go on being the same for ever? We find in our present life, which is all we have to judge by, that we are continually changing. We are ceaselessly hiving new experiences, by the external action of the world (including other human beings) upon us through our senses, by the so-to-speak internal action of the natural development and ageing of our own bodies, and by intuitions. There is alteration, growth, progress forward. We acquire larger and larger experience-fields; and even when in extreme age the memory for details begins to wane, there often and perhaps generally remains a mellow wisdom, a sort of serene ripeness, which strikes us as superior — judging by the highest standards — to the phase of great knowledge of detail, which preceded it. In short, there is change and development. The man

1 Essay on Immortality.

at seventy is very different from what he was at seven, or from what he was just after birth. If, then, a short seventy years can thus transform an individual quite out of recognition, making him more different from himself of seventy years ago than he is from any other fellow-adult, and tremendously more different than he is from a fellow-septuagenarian of the same nationality and class, what shall we say of the possibilities of endless sons'? Do we not perceive that this idea of personal immortality is a sort of verbal self -contradiction 1 ? If there is to be continued experience of any conceivable kind, we shall change out of all recognition, and shall therefore not be the "same." It is an inaccuracy to say that the septuagenarian is the "same" as the baby from which he has evolved. Much less can we remain the "same" after long periods of time, filled with new experiences. The tree is not the same as the acorn from which it grew; it has less resemblance to it than it has to other trees. Similarly, taking the reality of Time for granted, for the purpose of the present argument — though as a matter of fact this doctrine is debatable — and assuming continued experience, on the analogy of the present life, we see that if we are immortal we shall develop into beings of some inconceivably superior order — trees to our present acorns — much more like each other than like our present selves. There will be no identity with these present selves. "Persons" are not immortal; for their personality changes. Even if we make the venturesome suppositions of reincarnation and the recovery of all past memories in some future condition, the difficulty will still remain. There has been development, increase of experience, growth, and the final product is not the same thing as

H PSYCHICAL INVESTIGATIONS

the thing that began. Change involves death — the death of the preceding state. Personal immortality, then, if it connotes experience at all — and we can conceive no consciousness without experience being involved — and if Time is fundamentally real, is a contradiction in terms, and cannot be discussed.

Personal survival of bodily death, however, is a more defensible phrase. It may be incorrect to say that I am the same person that I was ten minutes since — strictly speaking, it is incorrect — but as a useful though loose phrase it is allowable. And if it is, it is equally allowable to say that I may be the same person five minutes after death that I was five minutes before it. Such short periods do not allow of such development as to change our forms of manifestation beyond recognition. The word "same" conveys at least some meaning. There is close similarity, if not identity. We are not yet concerned with the question of whether persons do survive death, but only with the question of legitimacy of terms, in order to clear the ground. Personal immortality, then, is a meaningless or self-contradictory expression and must be avoided. Personal survival of death is legitimate, being based on common usage, and having a meaning, though a vaguely-defined one. And, indeed, this personal survival of bodily death is, for the most part, what people really mean by immortality. They do not, as a rule, hanker after endless ages of existence, or worry themselves about the metaphysics of Time. No; they merely want an extension, so to speak, of the present state of affairs; some assurance or some hope that death does not mean an utter darkness and annihilation. They want to believe that it is "a covered way, leading from light to light, through a brief darkness," as Longfellow and most of his brother poets have thought.

At least, it is the general notion that this is what people do want to believe and are ready to believe, on sufficient reason or evidence being produced. Whether it is as much so as is supposed may be doubted. The state of mind of the average individual with regard to the question of his wishes about a future life is probably rather chaotic. If you ask a man whether he wants a future life or not, and if he is a man who thinks for himself and does not automatically respond with the stock phrases of his pastors and masters, he will answer in one or other of various and perhaps equally surprising ways. He may say "Yes" or "No," or that he doesn't care and never thinks about it if he can help it — which last answer would probably be true for very many people who would be rather shocked at the idea of admitting it! But, indeed, there is no harm, but rather good, in facing ourselves frankly on this as on all other questions. There can be no good in sham and hypocrisy and self-deception of any kind. There is nothing to be ashamed of in the admission that you never think about immortality or survival if you can help it. Certainly it was illogical of the man who expected to go to everlasting bliss when he died, but did not want to talk about such depressing subjects; but it is not illogical to avoid the subject if you have no particular convictions about the everlasting bliss. And, after all, it is this world that we are living in, and there is plenty to do in it. If we were continually speculating about the next we should neglect many duties. We are social beings, with various obligations to our fellows.

And this brings us to another consideration, namely, that of the fundamental unity, or possible unity, of many things which now seem sundered. The late Professor James said, in his free-and-easy way — as if it didn't matter much — that a sort of anima mundi, thinking in all of us, seems a more promising hypothesis than that of "a lot of absolutely individual souls." ! Our reception of this cavalier remark will vary according to temperament. Those who want to "remain themselves," like Peer Gynt when the Button- Moulder wanted to melt him down again for a fresh start, will resent it. They will not like the idea that they are not really individuals — separate and walledoff entities, which will for ever remain themselves. A friend of mine, a man of heart and head, told me not long ago of his feelings when looking out over the sea. The thought occurred to him that human individuals were perhaps only like the wavelets which rose and fell on the water's surface; parts of a greater whole, but still only temporarily existing forms, evanescent, con tributory but non-essential, relatively unimportant And the thought filled him with sadness: if he ha believed it true, his sadness would have reached the point of despair. Curiously enough, this same thought has no terror for me. I feel more like Mrs. Stetson : —

What an exceeding rest 'twill be When I can leave off being Me !

To think of it ! at last be rid Of all the things I ever did !

******

Why should I long to have John Smith Eternally to struggle with? . . . Rest and Power and Peace Must surely mean the soul's release

1 Principles of Psychology, vol. i., p. 346.

From this small labeled entity, This passing limitation — Me ! x

However, perhaps both my friend and I are right. Perhaps we survive death and pass on into a better but not wholly dissimilar state: —

No sudden heaven, nor sudden hell, for man, But thro' the Will of One who knows and rules — And utter knowledge is but utter love — iEonian Evolution, swift or slow, Thro' all the Spheres — an ever opening height, An ever lessening earth, 2

and then, when the desire of continued personality is extinct, merge into the primal source, "ascend into heaven," reach the final stage. Icebergs survive from day to day, though gradually changing, as we may change in the forms of our manifestation through a series of planes or lives; but they sink at last into the element which gave them birth. Rivers survive from mile to mile, losing by evaporation, gaining by tributaries, and continually changing their volume and shape; but they merge in the ocean at last — "even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea." Indeed, the well-known hymn recognizes the parallel, and uses the figure as an analogy: —

Rivers to the ocean run, Nor stay in all their course,

1 The Cosmopolitan of some unknown date. It reminds one of J. Addington Symonds's "sanguine hope" of "resumption into the personal-unconscious"; the "immeasurably precious hope of ending with this life the ache and languor of existence" — Biography, by H. F. Brown, p. 416. But Symonds was an invalid; this attitude is not the product of health and soundness. My agreement with him is probably due to likeness in physical constitution.

"Tennyson, The Ring.

Fire ascending seeks the sun, Both speed them to their source; So a soul that's born of God Pants to view His glorious face, Upward tends to His abode And rests in His embrace.

The hymn-writer is a little ambiguous — probably he rather hesitated at the absorption idea — but the unit3^-thought is there, as indeed it is in a great proportion of the world's religious literature. The mystic, whether Christian, Buddhist, Mohammedan, or Taoist, aims at a union with the Divine, a renunciation of his own small and unsatisfactory self. The idea is expressed by Virgil, in one of his most earnest passages : —

To God again the enfranchised soul must tend, He is her home, her Author is her End ; No death is hers ; when earthly eyes grow dim Starlike she soars, and Godlike melts in Him. 1

It is the idea of the Christian hymn just quoted. And, indeed, it was taught by that great saint and missionary whom we may call the lieutenant of the Captain of our salvation, for his doctrine was that in Him we live and move and have our being, even now, though we fail to realise it.

But though some such conception may be present to the minds of most really religious people, and certainly to the minds of all mystics, it is not held by the majority of human beings in the West. We Westerners are individualists. We are great on Personality. Consequently, whatever the mystic or Mrs. Stetson may say, and however we may agree with them in the com-

1 F. W. H. Myers's translation in Classical Essays, p. 175 (from Georgics, iv.)

paratively rare moments when we are uncomfortably disgusted with ourselves and our activities, we usually think of Immortality as a proximate survival of the personality past bodily death, not worrying much about more ultimate things. But the question is, is such survival a fact? If men die, shall they live again, and, if they do, with what body do they come? What is their experience like, in their new state?

Some of these questions are now answerable. Not answerable in as complete and cut-and-dried a way as some would have us believe, for it is certain that any description of a spiritual world in materialistic terms must be wrong or inadequate; but answerable at least as to the main points. The advance in psychical research during the last thirty years enables us, as it seems to me, to go as far as that, to say that personal survival is a fact, and that something — not everything — may be learnt of the surviving spirit's state and powers and interests and feelings.

Chapter II

investigation: methods and examples

But the task of attaining scientific conviction is not easy. Our generation has grown up in a materialistic atmosphere, and we do not easily get out of it. We run in the old grooves, and a pretty violent jolt is required, or long-continued pressure, to lift us up and get us free. Consequently it is generally found that the reading of books about survival does not prove very effective. Even the forty-odd volumes of Proceedings and Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, which are devoted almost exclusively to the presentation of actual evidence, may be read without any resultant change or gain in belief. The reader may be impressed, but he will not be convinced. The people he is reading about are unknown to him, and they may have made mistakes. Perhaps they strongly wished to believe in a future life, and consequently were unable to state the case in a quite unprejudiced fashion. Other doubts also arise. If the investigators are eminent in science, philosophy, or letters, the layman reader wonders whether these people of the laboratory or the study are the best qualified to detect a fraudulent medium; if, on the other hand, the investigator is a shrewd business man, the reader says to himself: "Well, this writer has had no scientific training: can I safely take him as reliable"?" Then there are the various difficulties about telepathy and the like. Conviction remains unattainable.

The upshot of this is that personal experience is necessary. The seeker must investigate for himself. He must not expect to reach another person's point of view without laborious travelling. He will have to go over the same ground, or similar ground, and will have to surmount the same obstacles as that other person had to struggle with before him. And instead of grumbling at this, he should be thankful that at least the direction is indicated, and some sort of track made. His task will therefore be a little easier than was that of his precursors. The pioneering work is done.

And, this being so, perhaps I overestimate the need of personal experience. It was necessary for me, but I am of exceptionally sceptical habit of mind, and I was steeped in Spencer, Mill, and others of the negative school of those days. With the present generation it may be -different. Certainly I am far from wishing that all should become "psychical researchers." The investigation is best left to specialists, as in other sciences; and perhaps most people will be able to feel that the records already in existence, though not furnishing absolutely knockdown proof, are nevertheless sufficient to render the old materialism an improbable hypothesis and to open the door to that belief in a spiritual world which is, as Myers said, the preamble of all religions.

Those inquirers who still seek experience of their own — and in many, perhaps the majority of cases, this desire will be felt — must seek it in the way best adapted to their individual circumstances. No doubt the ideal thing is to get into touch with some private person who has these peculiar psychic powers of clairvoyance or trance ; who, by making the mind quiet and hushing the turmoil of the external senses, can perceive in other and finer ways, obtaining knowledge not normally possessed. Full and careful notes should be taken of all that is said by both sensitive and sitter, so that it is known how much information, if any, has been given away. This is not easy, and needs practice, but it can be done. If identity can be hidden, as it can when one is introduced to a private circle, so much the better. But I repeat that the quest is not suitable for everyone. And good sensitives are rare.

My own investigations have been mostly along these lines, but mainly in the "normal clairvoyance" department, there being a good medium not far away whom I can see occasionally. The advantages of being unknown are here absent, but my friends and I have established the fact of this medium's possession of supernormal powers by introducing friends from distant towns, quite unexpectedly and without giving any names. Their deceased relatives and friends have in several cases been named and described as fully and as correctly as my own. Also it is a common thing for very intimate family matters to be referred to in my sittings; matters which the medium could not have learnt by any amount of outside inquiry. We were sceptical when be began the investigation, ten years ago; we are now fully convinced, all of us, that the explanation must be supernormal, and, further, that the telepathic hypothesis seems on the whole much less rational than the spiritistic. In fact, we do not stop at the "hypothesis" stage; we think the case is proved, so far as proof is possible.

Some of the evidence, obtained mostly in my friends' sittings, has already appeared ; 1 the main purpose of the present volume is to present further evidential incidents occurring in my own sittings. They will at least indicate the kind of evidence that may be expected by anyone beginning the investigation. It will be observed that a sitting often contains a number of apparently unconnected statements, the relation and significance of which become apparent only by having a series of sittings and carefully collating the reports; hence the importance of contemporaneous verbatim notes, which I make in shorthand. In what immediately follows I have sorted out a few main strands, omitting those irrelevant to the incidents I wish to present. The names are disguised, for obvious reasons ; but I trust there is nothing to cause pain, even if this volume is read by some relative or friend who recognises the people concerned. These latter gave me the evidence — we cannot force it — and I think they mean me to publish it in order to spread the knowledge of the truth.

THE "ROBERT PARBERRY LEATHER" SERIES OF INCIDENTS

In a sitting on July 21st, 1914, after giving various descriptions of deceased friends and acquaintances, some of them relatives, the medium (Mr. A. Wilkinson) remarked:

1 Neiu Evidences in Psychical Research. (Rider, London.)

"I get the name Dunlop. A doctor. Medical doctor. Old times"

This was mildly interesting, but of no particular significance so far as I could see at the moment. A Dr. Dunlop formerly lived here in my native town, and was well known to my parents. He died over forty years ago; certainly I never knew him. But his house was known as Dunlop House until about 1900, when it was divided into cottages; and there is a faint possibility that Mr. Wilkinson may have heard the name, though he lives many miles away, and I think it extremely unlikely. The house was hidden away among poor property remote from all high roads about half a mile from my home, and farther away from the railway station than this latter.

Later in the same sitting the medium said :

"I get the name heather. I feel that he would be an old man, very gentlemanly, rather retiring. I hesitate to say the name, for I never heard it before as a name. It only means boots, leggings, etc., to me."

Now it happens that I knew a Mr. Leather very well some years ago. He lived three-quarters of a mile from my home (where all my sittings have been held), and died in 1909. The description is very apt as far as it goes. He was eighty-four at death; was rather retiring, and had very much the grand seigneur manner — a true gentleman of the old school. I visited him occasionally, between 1890 and 1899; but I saw most of him at Dunlop House in 1893 to 1895, wn $r e lived a friend of his who was also a friend of mine. A small party of us met there for whist nearly every Thursday evening in winter. Of that party all are dead or long since removed from this part of the country, except my sister and myself. Neither of us has ever told Mr. Wilkinson anything about this, and I feel pretty sure that no one by local inquiry could find any connexion between me and Mr. Leather by way of Dunlop House. It is true that no definite connexion was alleged in the sitting, but it is a fact that if Mr. Leather is still alive and wishful to prove his identity by alluding to shared experiences which the medium could hardly know of, he could not do better than mention Dunlop House or Dr. Dunlop.

The next incident occurred a few months later, when I received (November 19th, 1914) a letter from Mr. Wilkinson, who happened to be at Bournemouth, whither a letter of mine, asking him to come over, had followed him. After answering this and describing his journeyings, he said:

"By the way, did you ever know someone named Parrbury or some such name? I am impressed it would be a very old gentleman you might have known; however, I get the feeling while I am holding your letter. He was a man who retained his faculties in a large measure till the end of life almost. I am not sure but I feel perhaps he was called Robert, but of that I could not be too sure; the other name, however, being so uncommon that I thought I would tell it to you. He evidently is keenly interested in you"

On reading this I thought it was meaningless. But when I told my sister about it, she said that Robert Parrbury, or Parberry — spelling uncertain — was Mr. Leather's Christian name. Then I remembered that Robert was certainly right, but the other name was unfamiliar; Mr. Leather's friends never used it, nor did I remember ever having known it, though I may have known and forgotten. On inquiry I found that his full name was Robert Parberry Leather. He retained his faculties until near the end, as stated; remaining, indeed, particularly young and alert in mind up to the time of his fatal paralytic seizure, after which he died in a few hours, never regaining consciousness.

I wrote to Mr. Wilkinson saying that the name "Robert Parrbury" had interesting significance, and that I should like him to come over for a sitting as soon as possible. I gave him no further information.

On December 14th, 1914, he came for a sitting, and I said in preliminary conversation that the Parrbury of his letter had meaning; whereupon he remarked that when writing the letter he had felt that the gentleman in question was waiting for some old friend to pass over. This, as it happens, was curiously true. At the time of that letter's being written, Mr. Leather's brother-in-law and most intimate friend was dying, not far from Mr. Leather's old home, and three hundred miles from where Mr. Wilkinson then was. Presumably space is less of an obstacle to those "over there," and, while waiting about in the old earthregions or conditions generally, Mr. Leather could give his message to the medium at Bournemouth as easily as if the latter had been here, nearer the dying friend. I told Mr. Wilkinson, in reply to his remark, that it was quite correct, an old friend of Mr. Leather's having died, after gradually sinking for many months > on November 29th, 1914 — eleven days after the writing of the letter. A fairly good sitting followed, with a considerable amount of matter about various deceased friends and relatives of mine whom I am sure the medium had never known; but there was no sign or mention of Mr. Leather. So I concluded that, the two friends having been reunited, they had now gone forward together.

This incident seemed to me to have an eminently pleasant and consoling significance. The intimacy of these two men had been quite exceptionally close and unbroken, over a period of about fifty years. They were, as I have said, brothers-in-law and neighbours; alike in tastes and temperament; both became widowers very early in life, and they spent much time together. I am quite sure that, assuming survival, the person whom Mr. Drayton (the second to die of the two friends) would most wish to meet him would be his old chum, Mr. Leather.

At the end of this sitting I asked the medium if he had ever been in Knowlston Cemetery. (That is where the bodies of the two men are buried.) He replied that he had never heard the name before, and had never been in any cemetery in this neighbourhood at all. Having fully satisfied myself of Mr. Wilkinson's genuine supernormal faculty through earlier evidence already mentioned, I have long since rejected the idea of wilful deception; but I thought it just possible that he might have been in that particular graveyard, and might have seen and forgotten the names, for we must assume that "forgotten" things are still subliminally remembered. I entirely accept his statement that he has never been there. Moreover, it is a private cemetery, belonging to a Nonconformist Chapel; and the grave of Mr. Leather — about whom I was mainly concerned because of the medium's getting the littleknown second name — is hidden away in a remote part, far from the path. The tombstone inscription cannot be read without going close up to it, threading about among many other graves.