Spiritualism and the New Psychology: An Explanation of Spiritualist Phenomena and Beliefs in Terms of Modern Knowledge — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
Spiritualism and the New Psychology: An Explanation of Spiritualist Phenomena and Beliefs in Terms of Modern Knowledge
John Stuart Mill · en
In _The Road to Endor_, we read how two clever officers, E. H. Jones and
C. W. Hill, giving the whole time of a tedious captivity to evolving
tricks of the business, successfully fooled a hundred of their
fellow-officer prisoners, men of intelligence and education, into belief
in telepathy. In the appendix of their book there is given a portion of
their telepathy code to show the sort of system which may be worked, a
code which allowed the communication of the names of hundreds of common
articles, numbers, the names of all the officers in the camp, etc. They
could use the code with, or without speaking; perfection in its use, the
authors say, involved a good deal of memory work and constant practice.
'Nothing but the blankness of our days, and the necessity of keeping our
minds from rusting could have excused the waste of time entailed by
preparation for a thought-reading exhibition. It is hardly a fitting
occupation for free men.' What these officers could do obviously the
professional conjurer can do, no less the humbug and quack who swindles
money out of the credulous and superstitious. Let no one give credence
to telepathy till he or she has read this most amusing and educative
book. The authors no less humbugged the camp by planchette writing
whereby they transmitted messages supposed to come from disembodied
spirits. They fooled not only their fellow-prisoners with these spirit
messages, but the Turkish interpreter and Commandant of the camp,
gaining thereby important concessions. They planned a daring method of
escape which depended on exciting the cupidity of the Commandant and on
a hunt for buried treasure, occupying many months of preparation, and
only failing at the last through the unwitting interference of a brother
officer. Some of their 'spirit' messages were actually transmitted
through the Commandant to the War Office in Constantinople, so implicit
became his obedience. What these two officers affected is unequalled by
anything in Sir Oliver Lodge's evidence as set forth in _Raymond_. They
give details of how they used chance remarks and trivial facts heard and
memorised months beforehand, and of how they observed and were guided by
the slightest variation in tone of answer or movement of their victims,
which expressed interest and excitement or the reverse, and so built up
a story of some past action which clinched belief. The hits were
striking and memorised, and the misses unnoticed, forgotten--for such is
the tendency of the human mind. Such are the methods of the professional
medium, and in _The Road to Endor_ they lie unravelled and fully
exposed.