Spiritualism and the New Psychology: An Explanation of Spiritualist Phenomena and Beliefs in Terms of Modern Knowledge
John Stuart Mill · en
But no spiritualist writer can avoid the names of Home, Stainton Moses
and Mrs. Piper, for _they were never caught cheating_; nevertheless, we
apparently need testimonials at great length to their honesty. Mr. J.
Arthur Hill gives two pages of testimonials to Stainton Moses, and
repeats a story telling how the Reverend medium made an automatic
drawing of a horse and truck and gave a spirit message concerning a man
who had been killed that day under a steamroller in Baker Street. Mr.
Hill says: 'Mr. Moses had passed through Baker Street in the afternoon,
but had heard nothing of any such incident.'[26]
[Footnote 26: _Spiritualism_, p. 64. Cassell & Co., 1918.]
If Mr. Hill knew anything about dissociation he would not give us this
oft-quoted but flimsy story. Whence does he obtain his evidence that
the medium had heard nothing of the incident? Of course, from the honest
personality of Mr. Stainton Moses himself.
But a story of some terrifying episode is often, by psychological
technique, extracted from a war-strained soldier only to be repressed
and honestly denied by the man a little while later. If the dissociated
sufferer can deny the truth of an incident which, when recalled again,
fills him with horror, then the denial by another Dissociate that he has
heard of a street accident does not carry weight, even if we read a
bookful of testimony to his honesty.
The accounts of this famous medium, who is still held in awe by
believers, are full of such happenings. On another occasion the spirit
in possession of him gave the names of members of a family who had died
in India and were unknown to him or any one present. The names were
verified by reference to the obituary column of _The Times_ of a few
days before. We can assume that the honest Stainton Moses did not read
_The Times_, but that the dissociated Stainton Moses read and
remembered.
With this dissociation well established and having for its object the
production of occult phenomena, we can understand the rest of the
manifestations that he produced for his circle of friends. He received
numerous communications from the dead, produced spirit lights,
transferred objects from one room to another through closed doors,
floated about, and, in short, went through all the spiritualist
repertory.
The ball is kept rolling by all sorts of people. The late Archdeacon
Wilberforce, who believed in 'objective entities that seem able to
manipulate or influence nerve currents, or magnetic ether, or whatever
it is, of persons in the flesh',[27] wrote approvingly of him: 'The most
remarkable medium I ever knew was the Reverend Stainton Moses, a
clergyman in my father's diocese of Oxford'.[28]
[Footnote 27: _There is no Death_, p. 14.]
[Footnote 28: _Ibid._, p. 62.]