In one case the theory of hallucination induced by Home, so that
people saw what did not occur, was asserted by Dr. Carpenter,
F.R.S.[23] Dr. Carpenter, who was a wondrously superior person, wrote:
'The most diverse accounts of a _seance_ will be given by a believer
and a sceptic. One will declare that a table rose in the air, while
another (who had been watching its feet) is confident that it never
left the ground.' Mr. Aide's statement proves that this explanation
does not fit _his_ case. Dr. Carpenter went on to say what was not
true: 'A whole party of believers will affirm that they saw Mr. Home
float in at one window and out at another, whilst a single honest
sceptic declares that Mr. Home was sitting in his chair all the
time.'[24] This was false. Dr. Carpenter referred to the published
statement of Lord Adare (Dunraven) and Lord Lindsay (the Earl of
Crawford), that they saw Home float into a window of the room where
they were sitting, out of the next room, where Home was, _and float
back again_, at Ashley Place, S.W., December 16, 1868. No 'honest
sceptic' was present and denied the facts. The other person present,
Captain Wynne, wrote to Home, in a letter printed (with excisions of
some contemptuous phrases) by Madame Home, and read in the original
MS. by Mr. Myers. He said: 'I wrote to the _Medium_ to say I was
present as a witness. I don't think that any one who knows me would
for one moment say that I was a victim to hallucination or any humbug
of that kind.' Dr. Carpenter, in 1871, writing in the _Quarterly
Review_ (Vol. 131, pp. 336, 337), had criticised Lord Lindsay's
account of what occurred on December 16, 1868. He took exception to a
point in Lord Lindsay's grammar, he asked why Lord Lindsay did not
cite the two other observers, and he said (what I doubt) that the
observations were made by moonlight. So Lord Lindsay had said; but the
curious may consult the almanack. Even in a fog, however, people in a
room can see a man come in by the window, and go out again, 'head
first, with the body rigid,' at a great height above the ground.
[Footnote 23: _Contemporary Review_, January 1876.]
[Footnote 24: _Contemporary Review_, vol. xxvii. p. 286.]
Mr. Podmore has suggested that Home thrust his head and shoulders out
of the window, and that the three excited friends fancied the rest;
but they first saw him in the air outside of the window of their
room.[25] Nothing is explained, in this case, by Dr. Carpenter's
explanation. Dr. Carpenter (1871) discredited the experiments made on
Home by Sir William Crookes and attested by Sir William Huggins,
because the latter was only 'an amateur in a branch of research which
tasks the keenest powers of observation,' not of experiment; while, in
the chemical experiments of Sir William Crookes, 'the ability he
displayed was purely _technical_.' Neither gentleman could dream 'that
there are _moral_ sources of error.'[26]
[Footnote 25: Cf. _Making of Religion_, p. 362, 1898.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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