Now if these various answers came from the minds of the "workers," we were asking questions which we ourselves were answering, we will say, unawares, out of the depths of our consciousness. As a seeker after truth, therefore, I became as much involved as the dreamer spoken of by Jeremy Taylor in one of his sermons. A man who implicitly believed in dreams, he relates--in effect--dreamed one night that all dreams were false. "If," reasoned he on awakening, "dreams are indeed false, then is this one false; therefore they are true. But if, as I have always supposed, they are true, then is this dream true; therefore they must be false."
Planchette's oracular sayings became famous among the passengers who thronged the room to hear its predictions and to ask questions. The trip to which I refer was made in the early part of November, 1868, while the Presidential election was in progress, and there was naturally great curiosity on the part of the passengers to know how their several States had voted.
Of the six States asked about, Planchette gave the majority in figures for one candidate or the other. On comparing these figures subsequently with the published returns, it was found that not one answer was correct--_not a single answer was even approximately true_.
There was a certain shipmaster on board who had left his vessel in Rio Janeiro, with directions to the mate to bring her to San Francisco, by way of Cape Horn. The oracle was consulted as to the position of the ship at that particular time. Without a moment's hesitation, the latitude and longitude of the vessel were given, placing her somewhere off Valparaiso (Chili). "That's just where _I_ put her!" cried the master with an ejaculation of unfeigned surprise. On reaching San Francisco shortly after, the vessel was discovered quietly tied up at one of the wharves. I found too, on landing, that the prophecy, "You will find important letters awaiting you from home," was not fulfilled, neither in my case nor in that of the other "worker."
Now in the case of putting down the position of the merchant vessel, the "worker" who was operating with me at the time did not know how to plot the position of a ship at sea, after the manner of seamen; and although the method of stating a ship's position was perfectly familiar to me, yet I _anticipated_ that the answer in regard to her would have been given in general and indefinite terms. What was my astonishment, then, to find distinctly written out, "Latitude 35 deg. 30 min. S.; longitude 98 deg. 40 min. W." True this position was about four thousand miles out of the way, but where did the answer, such as it was, come from?