Historical article by Tricia Robertson
Historical psychical research covers many
topics but it is a fact that the careful and prolonged studies by psychical researchers,
sometimes over decades, of mediums such as Mrs Piper, Mrs Leonard, Mrs Willett,
Mrs Garrett and Miss Cummins have demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt to
anyone of open mind that these psychics again and again could acquire knowledge
in a paranormal manner. The majority of the psychical researchers who
participated in such studies or who came later into psychical research and
studied carefully the detailed, thoughtful, numerous and varied case reports in
the literature, concluded that unless one accepted a variation of
super-telepathy and clairvoyance, the possibility that some human beings
survive death, retaining their essential personalities, memory,
characteristics, skills, and concern for those they have left behind, had to be
taken very seriously indeed.
There can really be no doubt that there has
been collected, over more than a century, a wealth of hard evidence demanding
attention by any person, be s/he philosopher, physiologist, psychologist,
physicist or indeed anyone seriously interested in human personality, showing
that the nineteenth century model of the human being as a biological machine
with the mind simply the brain in action is embarrassingly and grossly
inadequate. That model cannot encompass and explain the evidence gathered by
psychical researchers and supporting the view that the mind is not simply the
brain in action, that some form of dualism or interaction of mind and brain is
necessary, that part of the human personality can under certain conditions
transcend space and time and that the question whether a human being in some
way survives the death of the body is one eminently worthy of the attention of
any modern, educated person. It is not a question of faith; it follows from a
careful consideration of the abundant evidence for the existence of paranormal
events.
There is obviously a place for the
open-minded and well -informed sceptic. In all sciences she is a necessary and
helpful presence, refereeing and commenting on papers, suggesting ways in which
the authors' experimental methods could be tightened up to remove dubiety,
suggesting more helpful modes of presentation, and so on. She plays a positive
and co-operative part and we neglect what she says at our peril since
invariably s/he has intelligence and a satisfactory track record in the
subject.
Consider the case of Eusapia
Paladino, the physical medium. After the four years
of careful experiments and studies at the Sorbonne by scientists including the
Curies, Professor Henri Bergson, the professor of
psychology Jules Courtier, Professor Charles Richet,
Jacques-Arsene d'Arsonval,
director of the Laboratory of Biological Physics, and many others, most of them
professed that after the strict conditions and controls they had had, they
could no longer doubt that a wide variety of genuine physical paranormal
phenomena had been witnessed and recorded on many occasions in the presence of Eusapia..
We turn now to a different kind of experiment, one which it was hoped would provide evidence
supporting more clearly one of the hypotheses put forward to account for the
phenomena. It was called the proxy sitting. The sitter is in the medium's
presence in place of or on behalf of another person about whom the sitter knows
nothing. If paranormally-acquired data is subsequently discovered to be veridical , the medium, in the super-ESP theory, cannot have
got it by telepathy from the sitter's mind. The proxy sitter knows nothing of
relevance about the relations or lives of the two people involved - the
deceased and the distant, unknown living person. If telepathy or clairvoyance
is involved rather than survival, it is argued that the proxy sitting
circumstances must surely make the super-ESP theory run very hard to keep up in
plausibility with the relatively simpler survival theory. It may be thought
that the very nature of a proxy sitting would make it impossible to set up.
Nevertheless, the fact that the absent sitter is unknown to the proxy sitter
does not seem to be an insuperable problem. The absent sitter, often a person in
great grief because of the loss of a loved one, may directly get in touch with
a well-known psychical researcher and ask him or her to try to obtain
information from a medium trusted by the researcher as honest and gifted. Two
people managed over the years of Mrs Leonard's mediumship to actualise a large
number of proxy sittings. One was Nea
Walker, secretary to Sir Oliver Lodge. A well-educated woman of great
intelligence, the daughter of Professor Hugh Walker of Lampeter , she wrote two
books about her experiences. Her sister Damaris had
psychic ability and through her, Mrs Leonard and other mediums, a group of
communicators claiming to be dead friends of the
Proxy sittings certainly give food for
thought and although much historical work has been done on them, they may prove
to be a way forward in future research.