“Do not, O illustrious Ulysses, speak to me of death; I would wish, being on earth, to serve for hire with another man of no estate, who had not much livelihood, rather than rule over all the departed dead.”
What have these latter-day dead to tell us? To begin with, it is a remarkable thing that they appear to be much more interested in events here below than in those of the world wherein they move. They seem, above all, jealous to establish their identity, to prove that they still exist, that they recognize us, that they know everything; and, to convince us of this, they enter into the most minute and forgotten details with extraordinary precision, perspicacity and prolixity. They are also extremely clever at unravelling the intricate family connexions of the person actually questioning them, of any of the sitters, or even of a stranger entering the room. They recall this one’s little infirmities, that one’s maladies, the eccentricities or tendencies of a third. They have cognizance of events taking place at a distance: they see, for instance, and describe to their hearers in London an insignificant episode in Canada. In a word, they say and do almost all the disconcerting and inexplicable things that are sometimes obtained from a first-rate medium; perhaps they even go a little further; but there comes from it all no breath, no glimmer of the hereafter, not even the something vaguely promised and vaguely waited for.
We shall be told that the mediums are visited only by inferior spirits, incapable of tearing themselves from earthly cares and soaring towards greater and loftier ideas. It is possible; and no doubt we are wrong to believe that a spirit stripped of its body can suddenly be transformed and reach, in a moment, the level of our imaginings; but could they not at least inform us where they are, what they feel and what they do?
And now it seems that death itself has elected to answer these objections. Frederic Myers, Richard Hodgson and William James, who so often, for long and ardent hours, questioned Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Thompson and obliged the departed to speak by their mouths, are now themselves among the shades, on the other side of the curtain of darkness. They at least knew exactly what to do in order to reach us, what to reveal in order to allay men’s uneasy curiosity. Myers in particular, the most ardent, the most convinced, the most impatient of the veil that parted him from the eternal realities, formally promised those who were continuing his work that he would make every imaginable effort out yonder, in the unknown, to come to their aid in a decisive fashion. He kept his word. A month after his death, when Sir Oliver Lodge was questioning Mrs. Thompson in her trance, Nelly, the medium’s familiar spirit, suddenly declared that she had seen Myers, that he was not yet fully awake, but that he hoped to come, at nine o’clock in the evening, and “communicate” with his old friend of the Psychical Society.