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vol. title: vol. period: 1879-1880 pages in vol.: 577 |
< A Memorial to the Secretary of States (continued from page 10-483) >
into a subject of the highest interest and importance as a branch of scientific research.
5. Your Memorialists refer to the prosecution of persons alleging themselves to be the instruments, vehicles, or mediums of an invisible and unknown agency, sometimes operating physically, as in the movement of ponderable objects without any ordinary and visible means; sometimes controlling their own actions or utterance, and thereby giving information not possessed by themselves to others resorting to them. These facts can be substantiated by the testimony of a large number of competent and capable investigators, both scientific and other.
6. While strongly reprobating pretentions knowingly false and unfounded to this character, and earnestly desiring that all proven cases of fraud should meet prompt and decisive punishment, your Memorialists respectfully question, as a matter of policy, the perpetuation of laws designed for the exceptional protection of persons of infirm and credulous judgment, and submit that such cases are sufficiently provided for by the criminal law applicable to the offence of obtaining money by means of false pretences. But apart from this, they desire further to call your attention to the essential distinction between the case of vagrant impostors who defraud the weak and ignorant among the poorer and uneducated classes, and that of the persons generally referred to as mediums. The latter are not “vagrants,” but have usually, if not invariably, a settled place of abode: “fortune-telling”—the governing words of the said Section—is no part of their practice: they make no such profession, nor are they resorted to for such purpose: they submit to and invite full and free investigation by any legitimate methods which the ingenuity of those who resort to them can devise, and such investigation has repeatedly been conducted at great length, and with extreme care, by scientific experts of eminence, who have afterwards borne witness to the honesty of the medium, and to the reality and value of the results obtained: they gain whatever credit accrues to them, not from their own pretentions or professions, but from the tests and evidences that they afford to their visitors, and from the public report so made by them.
Furthermore, they are resorted to, not by the class which the said Section was framed to protect, but by those engaged in the study of mental and psychical phenomena, and generally by the curious, who are usually persons of education or competent understanding, who form an independent judgment of what they witness. Among these are, in fact, many persons distinguished as well by their social position as by their abilities, not a few being of high literary or scientific attainments. By investigators such as these, who are manifestly not to be ranked in the category of the ignorant and credulous who need protection from the wiles and devices of vagrant impostors, these mediums are subjected to tests in which ingenuity is exhausted to render deception impossible: and even in cases where such precautions are not taken the investigator relies upon his own observation, and not, as does the dupe of the fortune-teller, on any pretences or representations made to him by the medium.
7. Your Memorialists further contend that the question whether an alleged medium has or has not been guilty of conscious and intentional deception in a particular case is one wholly unsuited, from the special nature of the questions involved, for investigation by a Court of Justice. They assert as a fact of most certain experience that the phenomena witnessed, and the communications received in the presence of mediums, are frequently illusory and untrustworthy without any conscious duplicity on the part of the mediums, who are simply the passive instruments of an unseen agency. Most of the prosecutions against them have been instituted, and many so called “exposures of fraud” have been published, in entire ignorance of this fact: and no tribunal that is not so far informed by experience as to recognise this truth can do real justice to an accused medium.
Moreover, to the end that due attention be directed to this point, it is further necessary to admit general evidence that the person accused is not an habitual impostor, but is veritably possessed of the powers claimed for him; for on the proof of his mediumship in general depend the presumptions applicable to the special case under consideration.
Now here arises a difficulty. Were the facts known as the phenomena of Modern Spiritualism commonly recognised as matters of experience, to admit general evidence respecting them would be no more difficult than to allow the evidence of experts in other matters to which such testimony is relevant. This, however, is far from being the case: and to substantiate these facts in the first instance, in each case as it arises, to the satisfaction of a presiding magistrate who is presumably not himself instructed by personal experience and knowledge of the subject, would obviously be a quite impracticable extension of the inquiry, even if it were legally permissible.
As an instance in point your Memorialists would refer to the case of Henry Slade, an American medium, charged at Bow Street Police Court in the year 1876, under the 4th Section of the said Act. For the defence the Magistrate allowed to be called as witnesses four gentlemen, one of them of great scientific eminence, who were experts in the investigation of Spiritualism, and who had especially tested the mediumship of the Defendant on many occasions. These gentlemen gave evidence of facts wholly inconsistent with the supposition that the Defendant was an impostor—evidence which the Magistrate himself declared from the Bench to be “overwhelming.” In attendance were other witnesses prepared to give similar testimony. Yet the Magistrate refused to allow them to be called; and, in giving judgment against the Defendant, he avowedly put the evidence, which he had described as above, altogether out of consideration, expressly declaring that he based his decision “according to the known course of nature.” The law, it is true, does not expressly sanction any presumption against the existence of agencies in nature other than and surpassing those generally known—and these it is, and not “miraculous” or “supernatural” powers that Spiritualists allege—but the persons who administer the law are unavoidably bounded by this common knowledge in dealing with evidence and the probabilities arising therefrom.
It results, then, that the Magistrate who adjudicates “according to the known course of nature” in respect to phenomena which do not conform to such “known course” as interpreted by him, finds it practically unnecessary to hear evidence beyond the mere proof of the alleged occurrence of the phenomena in question in the presence of a certain individual, when no other person also present can be taken to have produced them. The case is therefore prejudged; and the examination of witnesses to prove that any alleged act of imposture was not really of that character is a superfluous mockery and pretence. It is upon this fact that no tribunal, without going into an exhaustive and impracticable enquiry upon an unfamiliar subject, can do other than take its own knowledge and experience as the standard of probability, that your Memorialists chiefly rest their statement of the unavoidable injustice and prejudicial character of these prosecutions.
8. Your Memorialists represent that the prosecutions of mediums under the 4th Section of the said Act have usually been instituted by persons who, under the pretence and probably in the belief that they were performing a public duty, were in truth actuated by a prejudice, generally referable to ignorance, against the facts of Modern Spiritualism, and by a desire to discredit what has been recognised by many competent authorities as a legitimate subject for scientific investigation. And this end has been attained by proceedings in which the question, so prejudiced, although apparently involved, was not and could not, as above pointed out, be really at issue. On the double ground, therefore, of the injustice inflicted upon individuals by these essentially defective proceedings, and of the obstruction and prejudice to scientific enquiry intended by and arising from them, you are respectfully requested to entertain the question of such an amendment of the said Act as shall at least confine its operation to the purposes originally intended by the Legislature, and which have been exceeded, as it is contended, by a strained and forced interpretation.
9. The foregoing observations are founded on the contention that the facts of Spiritualism, exposed though they are to much obloquy and misrepresentation, owing to general ignorance on the subject, ought not to be assumed in Courts of Justice, and in proceedings involving the liberty and character of Her Majesty’s subjects, to be of the character of notorious and open imposture and delusion. For that this assumption is in fact involved in proceedings of this nature from which the evidence of experts is excluded, has been sufficiently demonstrated. It therefore remains for your Memorialists to refer you shortly to some authorities and evidences substantiating the alleged facts of Spiritualism, which, as they submit, entitle the subject to rank among the scientific questions of the day.
10. The phenomena in question have attracted the attention of competent observers for a long time past, and are year by year being more extensively and thoroughly investigated in nearly every civilised country in the world. Those who have satisfied themselves of the objective reality of these phenomena, either by personal investigation or by testimony, have been estimated, on the competent authority of Judge Edmonds, supported by the Hon. R. Dale Owen, at several millions in the United States alone. Those who, like Mr. Epes Sargent, have the best means of judging at the present time, confirm this estimate; and those equally competent to form an opinion in this country estimate that several hundreds of thousands of Her Majesty’s subjects are to be numbered in the ranks of Spiritualism.
Evidence such as has convinced those observers has been obtained, not merely from professional mediums, but from ladies and gentlemen in almost every rank and condition in private life. The late Mr. Serjeant Cox, who devoted a large amount of time and attention to the question, declared that among those known to him as psychics or mediums were “a banker, a physician, two ladies of title, eight persons of very high social position, two members of Universities, two Dissenting Ministers, the son of a county <... continues on page 10-485 >