Sir Oliver Lodge, eleven years ago, took practically the same view as
Robert Chambers in 1853. “I can move this tumbler with my hand,” he
said, “but the question remains whether I can move the same tumbler at
a distance of a couple of feet from my hand without actually touching
it. Note that there is nothing inconceivable about this. The boundary
of an organism, as of everything else, is more or less arbitrary; we
know that in a sense a vortex ring exists, not only where it is seen,
but at some distance also, and that the influence of every atom
extends throughout the visible universe. And so, perhaps, on analogous
lines, we may look for some explanation of these curious occurrences
which will not take them altogether beyond the reach of more ordinary
experience.”
III
We have given the opinion of scientific men in 1853 and in 1908 with
regard to the phenomena of table-turning. Spiritualists to-day are much
interested in the experiments of a distinguished Belfast scientist, Dr.
W. J. Crawford, with the Goligher family, whose table experiments have
satisfied him that “the invisible operators” are “the spirits of human
beings who have passed into the beyond.” Sir William Barrett, who has
personally watched the Belfast experiments, suggests that “many of the
physical manifestations witnessed in a Spiritualistic séance are the
product of human-like, but not really human, intelligences. Good or bad
dæmonia they may be; elementals some have called them, which aggregate
round the medium--drawn from that particular plane of mental and moral
development in the unseen which corresponds to the mental and moral
plane of the medium.”
Sir Oliver Lodge, in a recent article,[20] speaks of “many grades of
development” in the other world, “some lower than humanity.”
Mr. Arthur E. Waite, writing more than twenty years ago on
Spiritualistic phenomena, set forth the theory of the Kabalists that
“shells and elementals,” the “low life deeps of the world of souls,”
might exercise a baneful influence on humanity. “The revelations of the
unseen world which have come to us through Spiritualism,” he says,
“can have come only from the dregs and lees of the unseen, or, as I
should prefer to put it, from the roots and the rudiments of that house
which, however, on account of those rudiments, may not be less the
House of God.”
Scientific students of to-day seem divided between two theories as they
examine the table phenomena. These are ascribed (1) to supernormal
and little understood powers of the human personality, or (2) to the
intervention of irresponsible and, it may be, sub-human intelligences.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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