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vol. title: vol. period: 1879-1880 pages in vol.: 577 |
< The Testimony of Conjurors (continued from page 10-476) >
account given of the incident.” Even if the springing of the unseasoned wood could have resulted in the rupture as described, imagine the coincidence of such an accident at such a moment! Just previously this very screen had been pushed forward a foot into the room by some force which was certainly not the springing of a board. It had just been replaced in its position, five feet from Slade, by Zöllner, when the “accident” occurred! For a whole year that perverse screen had been behaving itself like a properly seasoned article through every change of weather and temperature— winter, spring, summer, autumn, (the sitting was on November 16th), and then, at the very moment when a mediumistic impostor has occasion for its services, two separate parts simultaneously spring! Probably the doubt above expressed as to the physical possibility of the incident from such a cause would be confirmed by any joiner or carpenter who should read the account, and this may have seemed apparent on the face of it to Professor Zöllner.
On the most remarkable of the other phenomena recorded by Professor Zöllner, the Saturday Reviewer is prudently silent. Nor, though the whole article is a vindication of the claims of the conjuror’s art to explain and to produce all the phenomena, have we the least allusion to the evidence of Bellachini.
There is one proposition which seems strange to the Reviewer, and makes him hopeless of us. “It has been over and over again asserted by leading Spiritualists that if every medium living were proved to be an impostor, their faith would remain unshaken. For such person there is no reply!”—If for “to be an impostor” is substituted “to have practised imposition,” I believe that all really experienced Spiritualists will be ready to accept the responsibility of this statement. I commend to the consideration of the Reviewer a proposition precisely analogous. If every drop of water could be proved to have been seen as ice, I should still maintain that water is a fluid. For those who cannot understand that facts which no supposition of trickery can explain remain untouched by any subsequent discovery of trickery where this is a possible and sufficient explanation, there is indeed “no reply.” But it must be observed that that case is put only as an extreme hypothesis, that the proposition is merely a logical statement of our position, and by no means represents our real sentiments towards mediums sufficiently proved to be such. The question of the moral responsibility—as that term is usually understood—of mediums in the simulation of phenomena is an extremely difficult one. But it has no relation to the main evidences on which we rely.
Having given these instances of the Saturday Reviewer’s treatment of evidence, it is amusing to find him adding “it cannot be too often repeated that the question is one of evidence alone,” quite as if this were an admission to be extorted from those who adduce the evidence, rather than from those who, like the Reviewer himself, described the facts to be proved as “pernicious doctrines.” A similar guarantee for the candour with which evidences are likely to be judged is to be found in the foreboding of “lamentable results for the cause of truth, science and religion,” from the public recognition of them. It must be added, that with all his regard for evidence the Reviewer does not give his readers the opportunity of comparing his account—such as it is—of Professor Zöllner’s experiments with the book itself, now published in English, the article making no allusion to the existence of a translation. But perhaps he was not aware of the latter.
September 20th.
The Wallace-Fletcher Controversy
Sir,—Respect for the name of Mr. Alfred R. Wallace compels me to notice a letter, which, coming from a person of his understanding, has astonished me.
The “wilful and deliberate untruth” with which, in The Spiritualist of November 21st, 1879, I charged Mr. Fletcher, was his statement in The Spiritualist of November 14th, 1879, that, in certain remarks made by him to a gentleman who reported them in the Whitehall Review, “Dr. Slade was not the American Medium who was in his mind.”
I must now reluctantly go over again the justifications I had for so characterising that statement, and for making a charge which I deliberately repeat, and claim to have proved for every rational understanding not resolutely blind to facts.
Attention to dates is necessary.
Mr. Fletcher’s remarks as reported in the Whitehall Review of September 13th, 1879, (and the accuracy of the report has never been impugned) were the following:—
“There are men, not necessarily impostors, but charlatans, who have disgraced our creed. For my own part, when I learned that an American had rendered Spiritualism detestable and contemptible in this country, I at once resolved to come over and wipe out the disgrace. I have partly succeeded.”
Observe the words: “I at once resolved to come over” (the italics are mine). It is possible to suggest an ambiguity, since at once to resolve to do a thing is not necessarily the same as to resolve to do it at once. Of this ambiguity Mr. Fletcher and his defenders may have the benefit, though the former did not claim it when the words were pressed upon him.
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Editor's notes
- ↑ The Wallace-Fletcher Controversy by Massey, C.C., London Spiritualist, The, No. 423, October 1, 1880, pp. 159-60
Sources
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London Spiritualist, No. 423, October 1, 1880, pp. 159-60