BOOKS.
THE DIALECTICAL SOCIETY'S REPORT.*
IT is now nearly three years since the Council of the London Dia- lectical Society appointed a Committee, consisting of upwards of thirty of its members, " to investigate the phenomena alleged to be Spiritual Manifestations, and to report thereon;" and the Report of this Committee has been looked forward to with considerable interest and curiosity, especially since it became known that dif- ferent members had arrived at diametrically opposite views with regard to the genuineness of the phenomena investigated. This Committee held fifteen meetings, received evidence from thirty. three persons, who described phenomena which, they stated, had occurred within their own personal experience, and appointed six Sub-committees for the purpose of experiment and test, one of which held as many as forty sittings. The result of this is a thick volume of 400 pages, containing the report of the committee, reports of the experimental sub-committees, communications from members of the committee, minutes of the committee, correspondence, com- munications from persons not members of the committee, notes of seances comm unicated to the committee, and minutes of two of the sub-committees ; and we must do the gentlemen who have edited the volume the justice to state that no conscious bias pro or con appears to have determined the selection of material published.
The volume is an extremely curious one. We have all read or heard of the extraordinary freaks in which disembodied spirits sometimes indulge ; but to have such a number and variety col- lected together as are here recorded, attested by gentlemen and ladies well known in London society, is startling. In one page we read of tables skipping about the floor without anyone touch- ing them, or of chairs playfully pursuing sceptics round the room and hunting them into corners ; in another of Mr. Homo and Miss Bertolaoci visibly elongating themselves in the presence of the assembled company, the former to the extent of eleven inches ; in another, of the party being overwhelmed with a shower of beautiful flowers, which had presumably made their way through the solid ceiling or walls.
The results obtained by the six several sub-committees were very unequal. To three the appearances were of a more or less startling character ; two of them thus succinctly word their re- ports :—" Nothing occurred in the presence of this sub-committee worth recording," and, "This committee met four times, but failed to obtain any phenomena that deserve to be recorded "; and the sixth was almost equally unfortunate. This is the more to be regretted, as it was specially appointed to meet Mr. Home for the &port on Spiritualism of the Committee of the London Dialectical Society; (Nether, with the Evidence, Oral and Writzon, and a heleetionporn the Correspondence. London: Longmana and Co. 1$71.
purpose of investigating the alleged spiritual phenomena produced through his agency. Unfortunately, although Mr. Home is stated to have " afforded every facility for examination, and appeared to be anxious to further the object which the committee had in view," after four seances, at which "only the most feeble phenomena" were afforded, he pleaded illness, and the investigation was not renewed ; and thus the committee lost the opportunity of testing the performances of the greatest of modern media. It is obvious, therefore, that since only one-half of the committee had the opportunity of seeing these phenomena for themselves, the con- stitution of the several sub-committees is of great importance in enabling the public to judge of the value of their reports ; and it is a serious defect in the volume that only in one case, that of the sub-committee appointed to meet Mr. novae, is this informa- tion given us.
How important it is to be able to judge of the observing and analyzing power of the different Sub-committees, may be judged from the following particulars respecting some of the witnesses whose evidence was received orally or in writing :—A member of one of the sub-committees at which the most extraordinary results were said to be obtained, was seized soon after one of the dark seances with a mysterious form of paralysis ; another has become the prey of mental illness, and a third has been confined in a lunatic asylum. One of the witnesses, Mrs. Hardinge, stated that in order for the results to be satisfactory the committeee ought to consist of individuals " of receptive, inquiring dispositions," and kindly offered to nominate such a committee herself ; another, the Master of Lindsay, now Lord Lindsay, one of the witnesses to the elongation and levitation of Mr. Home, acknowledges that he " was once subject to a singular optical illusion," that of being followed by the spectre of a black dog ; another, Mrs. IIouywood, gravely de- scribes the mode in which a table ordinarily raps out answers, by stating that it balances itself on three legs and deliberately raps with the fourth ; another was once harshly consigned by his friends to the seclusion of a private asylum ; another, Mr. Thomas Shorter, was compelled to resign an honourable office in connection with the Working-Men's College in consequence of defective eyesight ; and another, Miss Anna Blackwell, relates how she once read and copied from a work she was reading a passage which had no exist- ence except in her own imagination. When conclusions are deduced from the evidence of such witnesses as these, what faith can be placed in the discriminating faculty of the judges ?
By far the most remarkable phenomenon described is that detailed in the Report of Sub-committee No. 1, in which a large dining-room table is stated to have moved, in bright gaslight, five times, over spaces varying from four to six inches, "all the chairs being removed twelve inches from the table, and each person kneeling on his chair, folding his hands behind his back, his body being thus about eighteen inches from the table, and having the back of the chair between himself and the table." These facts, recorded with every appearance of truthfulness and candour, are enough to startle the most profound disbeliever in spiritualism ; but here, above everything, we ought to have been informed of the names of the witnesses who vouch for the story, and of the medium through whose agency the phenomena were produced, for the presence of a medium was always necessary, and the medium was " a member of the Sub-committee." It is a remarkable comment on the above narrative that the seance took place at the house of Dr. James Edmunds, and that Dr. Edmunds himself states his conviction " that none of the extraordinary phenomena will ever come within the range of real investigation by a com- petent observer without being at once divested of all mystery." Of evidence of direct wilful imposture there is but little. Dr. Edmunds states that " he felt Mrs. Marshall strike the foot of the table with her toe in the most business-like manner, so as to produce every rap that was made," and we have the evidence of a sur- geon who was in the habit some years ago of "supplying to people certain magnets for the production of rapping sounds at spiritual seances." The Committee, however, themselves display a singular estimate of the value of evidence, which we should hardly have expected of members of the Dialectical Society. When they say "Fourteen witnesses testify to having seen hands or figures, not appertaining to any human being, but life-like in appearance and mobility, which they have sometimes touched or even grasped, and which they are therefore convinced were not the results of impos- ture or illusion," profane sceptics might draw precisely an opposite conclusion with regard to the spirituality of the phenomenon.
On the whole, we believe the result of the publication of this volume will be to endorse the verdict given by certain members of the Committee itself. Dr. Edmunds was the member of the Dialectical Society at whose instigation the committee was appointed ; he was chairman of it, and attended all its sittings ; he was present when Mr. Home and Mrs. Marshall were tested, and some of the most extraordinary phenomena took place at his house ; and he is now, whatever he was at first, an utter dis- believer in their genuineness. Our own conclusion could not be better expressed than in the words of another member of the Com- mittee, Mr. Henry Jeffery :—" That the phenomena which hay& been the subject of our inquiry are of a kind particularly open to. imposture and credulity ; that many of the votaries of Spiritualism have such an eagerness of faith as to render their evidence un- reliable, and that the boundary between wilful falsehood and self-deception is not a clearly-defined line, but an extensive mental, territory, on which many popular delusions have, for a time, played, their pranks and then disappeared." Few, however, could read the mass of evidence collected in this volume, showing the firna• faith in the reality of the alleged spiritual phenomena possessed by a number of individuals of honourable and upright character, without also agreeing with Mr. Jeffery's opinion that the remark- able phenomena witnessed, some of which had not been traced to imposture or delusion, and the gathered testimony of respectable witnesses, "justify the recommendation of the subject to further cautious investigation."
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