SPIRITUALISM.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE SPECTATOR.") SIR,—In your comments last week on Dr. Carpenter's lecture on Spiritualism, at the London Institution, you speak of the "re- markable mass of evidence showing that unless individual men of great eminence and ability, and high character, have been repeatedly deluded," the tests which Dr. Carpenter proposes "have been scrupulously applied," and you adduce as an illustra- tion the late Professor De Morgan, the result of whose interview with Mrs. Hayden conclusively proved, he says, that the rapping agency, whatever it was, was independent of the medillra's knowledge.
Allow me to point out that this illustration is singularly unfor- tunate, for it happens that Mrs. Hayden, who was one of the
earliest mediums who practised in public, was completely exposed ; a fact which, however eminent and able a man Mr. De Morgan may have been, cannot but militate against the force of his con- clusions. At a private seance with Mrs. Hayden, an account of which my father, Mr. G. H. Lewes, gave in the' Leader some twenty years ago, and at which were present, besides himself and the medium, only Sir Joseph Paxton, Mr. and Mrs. Owen Jones, and Mr. Pigott, my father proved that, precisely contrary to Professor De Morgan's belief, the answers were suggested to the medium by the manner of the questioner. He proved it by making her give whatever answers he pleased —no matter how fantastic—such as that the "Eumenides died a few years ago in the Jewish faith ;" that "Pontius Pilate was a leading tragedian ;" that Shakespeare wrote the last article in the Quarterly;" and he finally wound up by asking whether Mrs. Hayden was an impostor, to which an emphatic " yes " came twice over. I should, perhaps, mention that the questions were all written down, so that there could be no equivocation on this head. I think this exposé sufficiently disposes of Mrs. Hayden's claims to belief.
The fact seems to be that something more than "eminence and ability and high character" is required to enable men to put really effective tests to mediums ; and although it would be rash to judge of all the other cases to which you allude by this single specimen, yet so many analogous cases turn out to be, on in- vestigation, as little to be relied upon as this case of Mr. de Morgan with Mrs. Hayden, that it cannot be a matter for wonder that Dr. Carpenter, and others like him, should refuse to accept what you speak of as "the carefully-attested evidence of such men as the late Mr. De Morgan," and should deny that there is -any use in farther investigating the phenomena of so-called
4' Spiritualism."—I am, Sir, &c., C. L. LEWES.
[Mr. De Morgan's account of his own tests and his manuer of applying them is given by himself. The real questions are whether that account is trustworthy, and if so, whether the tests were good. Mr. Lewes will hardly deny the former assumption, and we do not hesitate to state that, on the latter point, Mr. De Morgan's tests were as good as Mr. Lewes's. No assumption is, we believe, less sound than that a "medium" who is detected in trickery on one occasion must be assumed to have been a trickster on others, if he were equally carefully tested and the judgment went the -other way. Almost all careful inquirers have come to just the opposite conclusion.—En. Spectator.]
Previous page
