Chapter 14

... While we were talking one night, Foster and I, there came a knock at the door. Bartlett arose and opened it, disclosing as he did so two young men plainly dressed, of marked provincial aspect.... I saw at once that they were clients, and arose to go. Foster restrained me.

"Sit down," he said. "I'll try and get rid of them, for I'm not in the humor to be disturbed...."

Foster hinted that he had no particular inclination to gratify them then and there, but they protested that they had come some distance, and, with a characteristically good-natured smile, he gave in....

Then follows an account of a fairly good séance--taps on the marble table, reading pellets, describing persons, etc., until I thought Foster was tired of the interview and was feigning sleep to end it. All of a sudden he sprang to his feet with such an expression of horror and consternation as an actor playing Macbeth would have given a good deal to imitate. His eyes glared, his breast heaved, his hands clenched....

"Why did you come here?" cried Foster, in a wail that seemed to come from the bottom of his soul. "Why do you come here to torment me with such a sight? Oh, God! It's horrible! It's horrible!... It is your father I see!... He died fearfully! He died fearfully! He was in Texas--on a horse--with cattle. He was alone. It is the prairies! Alone! The horse fell! He was under it! His thigh was broken--horribly broken! The horse ran away and left him! He lay there stunned! Then he came to his senses! Oh! his thigh was dreadful! Such agony! My God! Such agony!"

Foster fairly screamed at this. The younger of the men ... broke into violent sobs. His companion wept, too, and the pair of them clasped hands. Bartlett looked on concerned. As for me, I was astounded.

"He was four days dying--four days dying--of starvation and thirst," Foster went on, as if deciphering some terrible hieroglyphs written on the air. "His thigh swelled to the size of his body. Clouds of flies settled on him--flies and vermin--and he chewed his own arm and drank his own blood. He died mad. And my God! he crawled three miles in those four days! Man! Man! that's how your father died!"

So saying, with a great sob, Foster dropped into his chair, his cheeks purple, and tears running down them in rivers. The younger man ... burst into a wild cry of grief and sank upon the neck of his friend. He, too, was sobbing as if his own heart would break. Bartlett stood over Foster wiping his forehead with a handkerchief....

"It's true," said the younger man's friend; "his father was a stock-raiser in Texas, and after he had been missing from his drove for over a week, they found him dead and swollen with his leg broken. They tracked him a good distance from where he must have fallen. But nobody ever heard till now how he died." ...

Now it is hardly to be supposed that the young visitor could ever have had this scene in his mind as vividly as Foster had. In that case where and how did Foster get the vividness and emotion? How do we get them in dreams? He dreamed while he was awake.

As Bartlett quotes this, and as it declares him to have been present, he of course attests it by quoting it. So in each of Bartlett's quoted cases, the original witness is the reporter in the newspaper, and Bartlett, who was present (he was Foster's traveling companion and business agent) thus confirms it. We know Mr. Bartlett personally, and have thorough confidence in his sanity and sincerity. We have also been at the pains to learn that he commands the confidence and respect of his fellow townsmen in Tolland, Connecticut, where he is passing a green old age. Moreover, he does not interpret these phenomena by "spiritism."

We also had a sitting with Foster, in which he undoubtedly showed abundant telepathy, and satisfied us that he was fundamentally honest, though not always discriminating between his involuntary impressions, and his natural impulses to help out their coherence and interest.

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Those who explain these things by denying their existence, were at least excusable thirty, or even twenty, years ago, but since the carefully sifted and authenticated and recorded evidence of recent years, especially that gathered by the Society for Psychical Research, the makers of such explanations simply put themselves in the category of those who, in Schopenhauer's day, denied the telopsis which is now quite generally recognized. He said their attitude should not be called skeptical, but merely ignorant. This brings to mind an excellent very practical friend who read the first number of this REVIEW, and praised it, but said: "Don't fool any more with Psychical Research and Simplified Spelling." We refrained from saying that we had not known that he had ever studied either, and we would not say it here if we were not confident that his aversion from the subject will prevent his reading this.

To return to the manifestations: here are some other cases where Foster identified himself with a personality of his vision. (Bartlett, _op. cit._, 93.)

From Sacramento _Record_, December 8, 1873:

Foster at one time seized A.'s hand, explaining, "God bless you, my dear boy, my son. I am thankful I at last may speak to you. I want you to know I am your father, who loved you in life and loves you still. I am near to you; a thin veil alone separates us. Good-by. I am your father, Abijah A----"

"Good heavens!" exclaimed A----, "that was my father's name, his tone, his manner, his action."

"And," said Foster, "it was a good influence; he was a man of large veneration."

The above indicates what we will provisionally call Possession. But it is not possession to the extent of complete expulsion of the original consciousness, as in the trances of Home, Moses, and Mrs. Piper.

And which is the following? (Bartlett, _op. cit._, 103):

[Letter to editor, written Nov. 30, 1874]

New York _Daily Graphic_: ... He told me he saw the spirit of an old woman close to me, describing most perfectly my grandmother, and repeating: "Resodeda, Resodeda is here; she kisses her grandson." Arising from his chair, Foster embraced and kissed me in the same peculiar way as my grandmother did when alive.

But here the Possession seems complete (Bartlett, _op. cit._, 140). From the Melbourne _Daily Age_:

Mr. Foster ... in answer to the question, What he died of? suddenly interrupted, "Stay, this spirit will enter and possess me," and instantaneously his whole body was seized with quivering convulsions, the eyes were introverted, the face swelled, and the mouth and hands were spasmodically agitated. Another change, and there sat before me the counterpart of the figure of my departed friend, stricken down with complete paralysis, just as he was on his death-bed. The transformation was so life-like, if I may use the expression, that I fancied I could detect the very features and physiognomical changes that passed across the visage of my dying friend. The kind of paralysis was exactly represented, with the palsied hand extended to me to shake, as in the case of the original. Mr. Foster recovered himself when I touched it, and he said in reply to one of my companions that he had completely lost his own identity during the fit, and felt like waves of water flowing all over his body, from the crown downwards.

Now for some tentative explanation of these rather unusual proceedings. It is generally known that a hypnotized person will imagine things and do things willed by the hypnotizer, that the sensibility of persons to hypnotism varies, and that persons frequently hypnotized become increasingly susceptible to the influence.

Now what is ordinarily called thought transference has all these symptoms, and the combined indications seem to be that persons who readily experience thought-transference are specially susceptible to hypnotic influence, and get the transferred thought from almost anybody, just as the recognized hypnotic subject gets it from his hypnotizer; and that persons of excessive sensibility, like Foster, Home, Mrs. Holland, Mrs. Piper and mediums generally--the genuine ones,--simply get their impressions hypnotically from their sitters.

But this explanation (?) by no means covers the whole situation. In the first place, it does not cover the vividness and the emotional content often displayed by the sensitive. The sitter is very seldom conscious of anything approaching it. It comes nearer to, in fact almost seems identical with, the frequent vividness and intensity of dreams. But where do dreams come from, whether in sleep, or in a waking "dream state" like that of Foster and many other sensitives? They don't come from any assignable "sitter." This present scribe dreams architecture and bric-a-brac finer than any he ever saw, or than any ever made. Yet he is no architect, or artist of any kind. Where does it all come from?

Dreams, moreover, are filled with memories of forgotten things. Where do they come from? Dreams, too, are by no means devoid of truths not previously known to the dreamer, or, it would sometimes seem, to anybody else. Where do they come from?

Du Prel and his school say they come from a "subliminal self," and Myers picks up the term and spreads it through Anglo-Saxondom. But those queer dreams frequently include persons who oppose the self--argue with it, and even down it, sometimes very much for its information, regeneration and increased stability. That does not seem like a house divided against itself; such an one, we have on very high authority, is apt to fall. James, cornered by his studies in Psychical Research, was inclined to posit a "cosmic reservoir" of all thoughts and feelings that ever existed, and of potentialities of all the thoughts and feelings that are ever going to exist; and under various designations, this cosmic reservoir or,--it seems a better metaphor--the cosmic soul filling it, and dribbling into our little souls,--is a guess of virtually all the philosophers from James back to Plato, and farther still--into the mists.

Moreover this guess is powerfully backed up by another guess: men's speculations have been reaching back for the beginning of mind, until they recognize that a consistent doctrine of evolution finds no beginning, and demands mind as a constituent of the star-dust, and, when it really comes down to the scratch, is unable to imagine matter unassociated with mind. This is admirably expressed by James (Psychology I, 140):

If evolution is to work smoothly, consciousness in some shape must have been present at the very origin of things. Accordingly we find that the more clear-sighted evolutionary philosophers are beginning to posit it there. Each atom of the nebula, they suppose, must have had an aboriginal atom of consciousness linked with it; and, just as the material atoms have formed bodies and brains by massing themselves together, so the mental atoms, by an analogous process of aggregation, have fused into those larger consciousnesses which we know in ourselves and suppose to exist in our fellow-animals.

That mind is not limited to this connection with matter, we see proved _a posteriori_ every day by the appearance from _some_ source, it may be only from the memories of survivors, of minds whose accompanying matter is long since dissipated.

Moreover, in life, the matter is changing constantly and entirely--"renewed once in seven years." Yet not only does the "plan," the "idea," of the material man remain the same, but his mind grows for forty, sixty, sometimes eighty years, while the body begins to go down hill at twenty-eight.

Moreover, we never see the sum of matter in the universe increasing, and we do see the sum of mind increasing every time two old thoughts coalesce into a new one, or even every time matter assumes a new form before a perceiving intelligence, not to speak of every time Mr. Bryan or Mr. Roosevelt opens his mouth. We cite these last as the extreme examples of increase--in quantity. We see another sort of increase every time Lord Bryce takes up his pen--the mental treasures of the world are added to--the contents of the cosmic reservoir worthily increased--the cosmic soul greater and more significant than before.

Parts of it farther and farther removed in time and space seem to be manifesting themselves through the sensitives every day: so the evidence is increasing that none of it has ever been extinguished. The evidence that any part has been, is merely the evidence that it has stopped flowing through each man when he dies. But there are pretty strong indications that it has welled up occasionally through another man, and yet with the original individuality apparently even stronger than it was in the first man--strong enough to make an alien body--Foster's, in the instances quoted, look and act like the original twin body.

Yet while the cosmic soul idea seems very illuminating, and even stimulating, as far as it goes, it soon lands us in the swamp of paradox surrounding all our knowledge. How reconcile it with our individuality--the individuality as dear as life itself--virtually identical with life itself? Well, we can't reconcile them, at least just yet. But we can pull our feet up from the swamp, and make a step that may be towards a reconciliation. Each of our brains is a network of channels through which the cosmic soul flows; and there are no two brains alike--hence our individuality.

But those brains perish. Must individuality be conceded at the cost of our mental continuity? Perhaps not. Grant even the original mind-atom to be a constituent, or inseparable companion, of an original matter-atom (wouldn't it be more up to date to say vibration in each case?), mind, as we have already tried to demonstrate, is not limited, as matter seems to be, to those primitive atoms.

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The vague but almost unescapable notion of the cosmic soul also opens up some hint of an explanation of hypnotism, including, of course, thought transference. These vague hints or gleams on the borderland of our knowledge are of course something like what must be such hints of what we know as color, as go through the pigment spots on the surface of one of the lower creatures. Such as our limits are, we can express them only in metaphors. But for that matter all of our language beyond a few material conceptions, is metaphor from them. Well, on the hypothesis (or facing the fact, if you prefer) of the cosmic soul, telepathy, hypnotism and all that sort of thing at once affiliates itself with all our easy conceptions of interflow--in fluids, gases, sounds, colors, magnetism, electricity, etc. It's all a vague groping, but there seems something there which, as we evolve farther, we may get clearer impressions of.

Well, to return to our sheep. Foster didn't get the clearness and intensity of his visions from the comparatively indistinct and placid impressions in his sitters' minds. There must be something more than hypnotism from the sitter.

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Now here is a tougher case which opens a new element of the problem. It is from _The Autobiography of a Journalist_, by W.J. Stillman, Boston, 1901, Vol. I, pp. 192-4: Not many of our older readers will require any introduction of Stillman. For the younger ones, we may say that he was a very eminent art-critic; spent most of the latter half of his life abroad, being part of the time our consul at Crete; wrote a history of the Cretan Rebellion, and other books; and was a regular correspondent of _The Nation_, and of _The London Times_. We never knew his veracity questioned.

Here is the story:

A "spiritual medium," Miss A. was "under the control" of Stillman's dead cousin "Harvey." The "possession" seems to have been throughout free from trance. Stillman says:

I asked Harvey if he had seen old Turner, the landscape painter, since his death, which had taken place not very long before. The reply was "Yes," and I then asked what he was doing, the reply being a pantomime of painting. I then asked if Harvey could bring Turner there, to which the reply was, "I do not know; I will go and see," upon which Miss A. said, "This influence [Harvey's. Editor] is going away--it is gone"; and after a short pause added, "There is another influence coming, in that direction," pointing over her left shoulder. "I don't like it," and she shuddered slightly, but presently sat up in her chair with a most extraordinary personation of the old painter in manner, in the look out from under the brow, and the pose of the head. It was as if the ghost of Turner, as I had seen him at Griffiths's, sat in the chair, and it made my flesh creep to the very tips of my fingers, as if a spirit sat before me. Miss A. exclaimed, "This influence has taken complete possession of me, as none of the others did. I am obliged to do what it wants me to." I asked if Turner would write his name for me, to which she replied by a sharp, decided negative sign. I then asked if he would give me some advice about my painting, remembering Turner's kindly invitation and manner when I saw him. This proposition was met by the same decided negative, accompanied by the fixed and sardonic stare which the girl had put on at the coming of the new influence. This disconcerted me, and I then explained to my brother what had been going on, as, the questions being mental, he had no clue to the pantomime. I said that as an influence which purported to be Turner was present, and refused to answer any questions, I supposed there was nothing more to be done.

But Miss A. still sat unmoved and helpless, so we waited. Presently she remarked that the influence wanted her to do something she knew not what, only that she had to get up and go across the room, which she did with the feeble step of an old man. She crossed the room and took down from the wall a colored French lithograph, and, coming to me, laid it on the table before me, and by gesture called my attention to it. She then went through the pantomime of stretching a sheet of paper on a drawing-board, then that of sharpening a lead pencil, following it up by tracing the outlines of the subject in the lithograph. Then followed in similar pantomime the choosing of a water-color pencil, noting carefully the necessary fineness of the point, and then the washing-in of a drawing, broadly. Miss A. seemed much amused by all this, but as she knew nothing of drawing she understood nothing of it. Then with the pencil and her pocket handkerchief she began taking out the lights, "rubbing-out," as the technical term is. This seemed to me so contrary to what I conceived to be the execution of Turner that I interrupted with the question, "Do you mean to say that Turner rubbed out his lights?" to which she gave the affirmative sign. I asked further if in a drawing which I then had in my mind, the well-known "Llanthony Abbey," the central passage of sunlight and shadow through rain was done in that way, and she again gave the affirmative reply, emphatically. I was so firmly convinced to the contrary that I was now persuaded that there was a simulation of personality, such as was generally the case with the public mediums, and I said to my brother, who had not heard any of my questions [He says above that they were mental. Ed.] that this was another humbug, and then repeated what had passed, saying that Turner could not have worked in that way.

Six weeks later I sailed for England, and, on arriving in London, I went at once to see Ruskin, and told him the whole story. He declared the contrariness manifested by the medium to be entirely characteristic of Turner, and had the drawing in question down for examination. We scrutinized it closely, and both recognized beyond dispute that the drawing had been executed in the way that Miss A. indicated. Ruskin advised me to send an account of the affair to the _Cornhill_, which I did; but it was rejected, as might have been expected in the state of public opinion at that time, and I can easily imagine Thackeray putting it into the basket in a rage.

I offer no interpretation of the facts which I have here recorded, but I have no hesitation in saying that they completed and fixed my conviction of the existence of invisible and independent intelligences to which the phenomena were due.

To me they seem perhaps the nearest I have come to a communication of something not known to any earthly intelligence, and yet it _may_ have been so known.

When manifestations of this general nature first attracted systematic study, they were attributed, as already stated, to telepathy from the sitter. Stillman knew Turner, and as Stillman had an artist's vividness of impression, the sensitive could have got from him a pretty good idea of Turner, and have acted it out. But how about the innumerable cases not unlike the Foster cases quoted, where sensitives get impressions much more vivid than the sitter appears capable of holding, and act them out with dramatic verisimilitude of which the sitter is absolutely incapable; and how about the innumerable cases where the sensitive gets impressions and memories which the sitter never had?

These have been accounted for as being picked up from absent persons, by a kind of wireless telegraphy, for which we have ventured, with the assistance of a couple of Grecian friends, to suggest the name teloteropathy.

Well! In this Turner case, _somebody_ somewhere, _may_ have known what neither the sensitive nor Stillman knew of Turner's method of work, and the sensitive's wireless _may_ have picked up all those detailed impressions and dramatic impressions of them from that unknown _somebody_. But is that any easier to swallow than that old Turner himself was the somebody--that his share of the cosmic soul, or a sufficient portion of his share, flowed into or hypnotized the sensitive, and made her act as she did?

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And now let us go on to some of the developments of these phenomena manifested by Mrs. Piper. Unlike the manifestations already given, hers are not from waking dreams, but from dreams in trance. Moreover, so far the sensitives have manifested impressions of but one personality at a time, but Mrs. Piper has manifested one by speech and, at the same time, another by writing, the expressions of the two apparent personalities progressing independently, with full coherence and consistency. Moreover, in many of her trances she seemed as if surrounded by a crowd of persons endeavoring, with different degrees of success, to express themselves through her, or she endeavoring to express them. All this of course, is counter to the impression prevailing during the early years of her career, that her soul had left her body, and the body was "possessed" by a postcarnate soul expressing itself through her. The present aspect of the facts is more as if she had impressions such as we all have in dreams, of any number of personalities around her. Some of her typical manifestations may give still further indications of interflowing of mental impressions.