The Case for Spirit Photography: With corroborative evidence by experienced researchers and photographers — John Shaqi
The Case for Spirit Photography: With corroborative evidence by experienced researchers and photographersDoyle, Arthur Conan
Religion
The Case for Spirit Photography: With corroborative evidence by experienced researchers and photographers
Doyle, Arthur Conan
Spirit photography; Spiritualism
Anyone who is familiar with Hope’s results is aware that over many of the
psychic faces there appears a roll or arch of some peculiar substance
which has never been explained upon any supposition of fraud, but is so
constant that it would appear to be part of the psychic process. Some of
us have always contended that probably this arch represents a formation
corresponding to the Cabinet upon this side—an envelope or enclosed space
within which psychic forces are generated and condensed. The arch is by
no means peculiar to Hope, though the exact form and texture of it is
such that one could pick out a Hope photograph among a hundred others.
This psychic arch, as it has been named, appears in many forms and many
places, some of them very unexpected. I have, as an example, a photograph
before me as I write which was taken by Mr. Boyd, the respected provost
of a Scotch borough, upon a recent journey which he made upon the West
Coast of Africa. On taking a small group of natives he found an extra
of a woman and child (negroes) upon his plate. This extra figure is
surrounded and surmounted by the psychic arch in an exaggerated form.
Mr. Boyd has no axe to grind, and, so far as I know, he is not even a
spiritualist. How comes it, then, that his result fits so definitely
into the arch system, if it be not that there is some general law which
regulates results whether they be obtained in Crewe or on the Gold Coast?
Again, I have a friend, an amateur, who has himself developed psychic
photography from the time that it was a mere luminous blur upon his
plates, until now he receives very graceful and perfect pictures which
are in some cases recognised faces of the dead. In his case the arch
adjusts itself into the form of an artistic hood or mantilla. But the
arch principle carries on. It is only by a comprehensive view of this
sort, and by the comparison of different independent results, that we
are likely to get at some of the laws which underlie this matter. At
present the system adopted in quarters which should be responsible ones
is to concentrate attention upon whatever may seem to be failure or
deception, and to take no notice at all of the broader aspects of the
question. In every science the methods of advance are to pay strict
attention to the positive results and to regard the negative ones as mere
warnings of what to avoid. This process has been reversed in considering
psychic photography, and the world has been deceived by those who should
have been its guides. Truth will, of course, prevail, but its progress
has been grievously retarded by this unhappy and unscientific mental
attitude.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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