Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 18.djvu/530

* SPIBITTJALISM. 456 SPIRITUALISM. name of mesmerism to hypnotism and employed 'suggestion' as the exijhmatoiy principle as against 'magnetic fluids' of Jlesmer. But the peculiar methods of producing hypnosis and the strange psychological susceptibilities exhibited by hypnotic patients were well calculated to impress the popular mind with the belief in occult forces, and in spite of the scientific treatment to which it has been exposed, it still suggests to the public the possibility of supernormal plienomena. Its facts were more easily demonstrable, and could be put to more dignified uses, than the ordinary absurdities of the seance room. Another type of phenomena occurred about the same time to encourage the spiritualist in his general theory. It was the production of Andrew Jackson Davis, who discovered in 1844 that he could go into a 'trance,' and that he had a strange power of performing intellectual feats in this con- dition, which were not natural to him in liis nor- mal state. He made a bargain with two friends to 'mesmerize' him and to take down in notes what he said during the 'trance.' A volume was published as a result representing the work of fifteen months. His utterances, which were very slow and deliberate, were taken down verbatim, and the volume was called The Principles of Ma- ture, Her Divine Rerelalioiis, and a Voice to Mankind. The work dealt with the physical, chemical, and vital phenomena of the cosmos on a large scale, and treated of astronomical mat- ters in a manner to excite curiosity, especially when the prediction of a new planet was verified soon afterwards by the discovery of Neptune by Leverrier and Adams. At the same time the man ■was practicing 'clairvoyance,' and the book as- serted the existence of spirit 'communication.' But it was not the philosophic nature of the work that gave it its influence. It was the ap- parent illiteracy of the man who produced it, and its association with 'clairvoyance' and alleged spirit 'communications.' Davis himself said that, up to the time of his work, he had read but one book in his life and this was a romance called Three flpaniards. This claim, however, seems to be fairly well controverted, and it is probable that the man had read scientific matter in a casual way. But no amount of casual reading will easily explain in a normal way the system- atic character of this work. There are indica- tions in the man's history, and the fact that he was 'clairvoyant' or subject to the 'trance' state is evidence, that his was a remarkable ease of secondary personality. See Double Conscious- ness. In 1853 a work was published by Judge Ed- monds and Dr. George Dexter that was second in interest only to that of Davis. Jlr. Edmonds was a Judge of the Supreme Court of New York State and Dr. Dexter was an eminently respect- able citizen of New York City. Their attention had been called to the subject of spiritualism by the excitement aliout the Fox sisters, and they set about investigation for themselves, and soon developed personal phenomena of a peculiar in- terest. They entered upon a system of experi- ments in cooperation upon themselves and vari- ous 'mediums,' with the result that they pub- lished a work which soon became classic, owing to the reputation of the authors. The phenomena recorded and described purported to represent more or less direct communications with discar- nafe spirits. At first they investigated with a view to ascertain whether the phenomena were genuine in any sense of the term, and having con- vinced themselves that they were dealing with spiritistic infiuences, they published, as the bulk of their work, the alleged messages from Sweden- borg and Bacon, and the respectability of the men availed to carry their work through many editions. But the subject of .secondary person- ality was not understood in their time, and was not worked out until a generation later, when the result was to discredit the spiritistic claims of Edmonds's and Dexter's work. The most remarkable personality, however, in this movement was William Stainton Moses. He was born in 1839 and was educated at Oxford in England, becoming a clergjiuan in the Estab- lished Church. In 1872 he became interested in spiritualism through his friend, Mrs. Speer, and soon developed 'mcdiumistie' powers in himself. He fought against their infliience on his mind for a long time, but his skepticism was finally over- come, and he became a spiritualist and abandoned the Church and at last became the editor of the chief spiritualist paper, Lifiht. No one ever ques- tioned his sincerity and honesty. The phenomena which he records were of a tyjie and variety which tend to excite astonishment. They in- eluded the physical and the trance phenomena of the usvial kind, such as the alleged movements of physical objects without contact, and even through other matters, and automatic writing evincing the personal identity of deceased persons and the spiritual and hortatory counsel of dis- carnate spirits long since deceased. His two Avorks, Spirit Irlentiti/ and fipirit Tcachintis. were widely read. But he resented scientific investiga- tion because he thought it a reflection on his honesty, and hence, though there is some inde- pendent testimony to the nature of his phenom- ena, the}' depend mostly upon his own assevera- tions; and though there is no reason to impeach the probity of these, neither he nor his contempo- raries reckoned sufficiently with the problems of abnormal psychology and secondary personality to assure the elimination of influence in the pro- duction of the phenomena thai were quite com- patible with honesty and yet were inconsistent with their suijernormal character. After tile excitement produced by the Fox sis- ters, there appeared a perfect inundation of simi- lar and more questionable performances in the person of all sorts of traveling 'mediums.' The popular conception of spiritualism was soon de- termined by the methods of this class of impos- tors. Their 'demonstrations' took the form of cabinet seances, 'materializations.' slate writing performances, and tricks that are easily imitable by the prestidigitator. To tliis day the general public has no other conception of spiritualism than that which is furnished by the most absurd and most trivial legerdemain. Finally the indif- ference of the public after discovering the futility of such methods and the influence of the Report by the Seybert Commission (see below) caused the interest in such phenomena to decline. The Society for Psychical Research (see PsvcHic.41. Research, Society for) also had its share of the credit in this depreciation of the movement. To this period, contemporaneous with Jloses and apparently combining the phenomena de- scribed by him and the performances of the