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vol. title: vol. period: 1879-1880 pages in vol.: 577 |
< The Testimony of Conjurors (continued from page 10-475) >
a perfectly unreserved vindication of Slade, after exhaustive investigation. And Mr. Jacobs, a highly accomplished performer in Paris, comes out as an avowed Spiritualist. Robert Houdin, whose fame as an expert has perhaps hardly ever been rivalled, and who had made a special study of the means by which clairvoyance could be simulated, nevertheless discovered the existence of the genuine article, and like an honest man admitted it. Mr. John Nevil Maskelyne does “not presume to prove that such manifestations as those stated in the report of the Dialectical Society are produced by trickery,” and has “never denied that such manifestations are genuine.” And now Mr. Irving Bishop uses similar language. By and by, I imagine, when the facts can be no longer disputed, these gentlemen will be the first to call attention to the admissions by which they now qualify their role of exposers. Meanwhile, perhaps even a Saturday Reviewer who has learned a “ring trick” may pause to ask himself what they mean?
And, by the by, two specimens of that writer’s mode of dealing with evidence may perhaps entertain your readers. At page 105 of Transcendental Physics (the translation), Professor Zöllner records the transfer of two wooden rings, slung on a loop of catgut, from the catgut to the leg of a small table near that at which the Professor and Slade were sitting. This took place during a sitting of about six minutes’ duration, in full light. The ends of the catgut had been tied, sealed, and were held during the sitting, by the Professor himself. The experiment itself was not the one which had been designed by Zöllner, and of this fact the Saturday Reviewer makes the following use. “Now this turn of affairs is acknowledged to have been unexpected: therefore, though the table may have been examined at some previous time, it was clearly not examined at the time, and with a view to this particular experiment. An inkling of the proposed test, which we are not told was kept secret, the help of a turner, two minutes alone with the table at any previous opportunity before the seance, a temps of the most obvious kind, and the affair is, from a conjuror’s point of view, as simple as could be.” The Reviewer does not even mention the little fact of the rings having been slung upon the catgut, secured as described. For all his readers are told, they might have been in Slade’s pocket. How did they get off the catgut, which was found uninjured (as shown in the plate) and tied in two loose knots?
Now, upon this omission some very serious remarks might be made. There are in the article, notwithstanding its little conceits of adeptship, and its very patent prejudice, signs of an intelligence superior to the stupid insolence to which we are accustomed in the comments of the Press. There is at least a formal recognition of the claims of evidence to consideration; and there is an honourable admission that “the testimony of such men as Mr. Crookes and Professor Zöllner is unimpeachable.” But the profession to deal with evidence seriously entails a responsibility which is more than intellectual—which is moral. Now suppose that the Saturday Review had so dealt with evidence on any subject of literary, historical, or scientific interest to the general public, as we have seen it has dealt with evidence in this case. I venture to say that the paper would be held, on discovery, to have lost caste, and would be discredited among men of culture. Here the suppression was quite safe from such consequences. But the offence is not the less as grave as any scientific offence can possibly be. And a scientific controversialist, who does not recognise that a scientific offence is a moral offence has a very inadequate sense of his journalistic responsibilities. Yet the writer, red-handed, as it were, from this mutilation of scientific evidence, forthwith parades his regard for “the cause of truth, science, and religion,” and his apprehensions for these interests from the recognition of facts which, by virtue of his undertaking to explain them, he professes to place fairly before the public.
But the sceptic has another resource, more often resorted to for the explanation of prophetic dreams and ghostly visions than in regard to mediumistic phenomena. This is coincidence. At page 34 of Transcendental Physics, we have the account of the sudden and simultaneous rending of two rods of a bed screen, five feet from Slade, by a force which Professor Zöllner shows must have acted longitudinally upon them. He further proves (p. 125) that this effect represented a force of two- horse power. The screen was a new one— at least, but a year old—and so he, the Reviewer, says: “precisely the same thing happened to an acquaintance of the writer, and was subsequently proved to have been due to the sudden springing of a board owing to the contraction of part of the wood which had not been properly seasoned. We merely wish to point out that a perfectly simple explanation is not even alluded to or suspected in the <... continues on page 10-477 >