The sitting was suspended and resumed at half past eight; and Myers’ “communication” was at last obtained. He was recognized by the first few words he spoke; it was really he; he had not changed. Faithful to his idiosyncracy when on earth, he at once insisted on the necessity for taking notes. But he seemed dazed. They spoke to him of the Society for Psychical Research, the sole interest of his life. He had lost all recollection of it. Then memory gradually revived; and there followed a quantity of post-mortem gossip on the subject of the society’s next president, the obituary article in the _Times_, the letters that should be published and so on. He complained that people would not let him rest, that there was not a place in England where they did not ask for him:
He ought to be given time to collect himself, to reflect. He also complained of the difficulty of conveying his ideas through the mediums: “they were translating like a schoolboy does his first lines of Virgil.”[8] As for his present condition, “he groped his way as if through passages, before he knew he was dead. He thought he had lost his way in a strange town ... and, even when he saw people that he knew were dead, he thought they were only visions.”
This, together with more chatter of a no less trivial nature, is about all that we obtained from Myers’ “control” or “impersonation,” of which better things had been expected. The “communication” and many others which, it appears, recall in a striking fashion Myers’ habits, character and ways of thinking and speaking, would possess some value if none of those by whom or to whom they were made had been acquainted with him at the time when he was still numbered among the living. As they stand, they are most probably but reminiscences of a secondary personality of the medium or unconscious suggestions of the questioner or the sitters.
In this and other “communications,” I have quoted the actual English words employed, whenever I have been able to discover them.—_Translator._
A more important communication and a more perplexing, because of the names connected with it, is that which is known as “Mrs. Piper’s Hodgson-Control.” Professor William James devotes an account of over a hundred and twenty pages to it in Vol. XXIII. of the _Proceedings_. Dr. Hodgson, in his lifetime, was secretary of the American branch of the S.P.R., of which William James was vice-president. For many years, he devoted himself to the medium Mrs. Piper, working with her twice a week and thus accumulating an enormous mass of documents on the subject of posthumous manifestations, a mass whose wealth has not yet been exhausted. Like Myers, he had promised to come back after his death; and, in his jovial way, he had more than once declared to Mrs. Piper that, when he came to visit her in his turn, as he had more experience than the other spirits, the sittings would take a more decisive shape and that “he would make it hot for them.” He did come back, a week after his death, and manifested himself by automatic writing (which, with Mrs. Piper as medium, was the most usual method of communication) during several sittings at which William James was present. I should like to give an idea of these manifestations. But, as the celebrated Harvard professor very truly observes, the shorthand report of a sitting of this kind at once alters its aspect from start to finish. We seek in vain for the emotion experienced on thus finding one’s self in the presence of an invisible but living being, who not only answers your questions, but anticipates your thoughts, understands before you have finished speaking, grasps an allusion and caps it with another allusion, grave or smiling. The life of the dead man, which, during a strange hour, had, so to speak, surrounded and penetrated you, seems to be extinguished for the second time. Stenography, which is devoid of all emotion, no doubt supplies the best elements for arriving at a logical conclusion; but it is not certain that here, as in many other cases where the unknown predominates, logic is the only road that leads to the truth.