- Sir, -- It is impossible to deny that the passages in the history of Spiritualism to which you refer in your article of this date, fully justify your animadversions on the conduct of scientific investigators and contemners of investigation. They have been guilty of insolence and stupidity. Yes, sir, I dar to impute stupidity to the man whom our facts, "even if true, do not interest," although he be a Huxley, immeasurably my superior in intellect and knowledge. We owe them no kindness, and I don not know that policy dictates any soft words. But we want them [MD: emphasis original]. We want them more than your editors, more than your "highly cultured sections of society." We want their names, and we want their brains. The great majority of mankind are led or misled by authority. Editors live, or the papers live, by popularity. Ridicule, or the fearful and intolerable imputation of believing more than other people, nine out of every ten of the "cultivated" shrink from as or more than they would shrink from a libel on their morals. Yourself excepted, sir, I do not have the smallest faith in editors, and as for the cultivated classes they would come in [to the movement] by hundreds and thousands if a Herbert Spencer or a Dr. [W. B.] Carpenter were to tell them they might open their eyes and their mouths without being laughed at. M. A. (Oxon) tells us he has succeeded in inducing an eminent man of science to go, or to promise to go, to Dr. Slade. All honour to M. A. (Oxon), for, most assuredly, if that eminent person (it is pretty generally known who he is) does go, and see what everybody sees who visits Slade -- prejudiced as he is, prepossessed as he is, he will go a second time and a third time, and at last he will have to face the alternative of either ceasing to believe in his own scientific honesty and love of truth, or of saying that to the world about Spiritualism which will make the interest in the subject spread like wildfire through the land. Bur are we to depend on the individual efforts of two or three who, like M. A. (Oxon), appreciate the supreme importance of this passing opportunity [of Slade's presence in England]? Your article is not encouraging. In estimating the probability of the facts being again ignored or mis-stated by men of science, you seem to me to leave out of sight the difference between conditions of investigation offered to them formerly and now. Of course, if we had to deal with men who were consciously and designedly dishonest on this or any other subject, there would be no more to be said. But no one, surely, however indignant he may be at the incidents of which you remind us, little consistent as these are with intellectual [MD: emphasis original] honesty, would for a moment suggest this. For my own part, I do not believe that there is a Fellow of the Royal Society who would not be as incapable of suppressing or purposely misrepresenting a scientific fact once explicitly recognized in his own mind, as of picking a pocket. And depend upon it, that in every case in which a scientific tribunal has dealt unfairly with the facts of Spiritualism, there has been something or other -- circumstances of suspicion, or apparent defect of proof -- that to minds warped with prejudice would seem to justify a hostile verdict, or an abrupt abandonment of the inquiry.
Do we not all know how difficult it is to get unequivocal phenomena under test conditions, even with mediums of unquestioned powe? Are we not all but too familiar with cases of gross and impudent cheating by nevertheless genuine mediums, which fill experienced Spiritualists with vexation and disgust, and make sceptics turn away with unutterable scorn from the whole business? I am not, however, suggesting that men of science have not had, and rejected, good evidence, but I maintain that they have not yet been presented with the best [MD: emphasis original]. This we are now in a position to offer them. It may be summed up in three words -- Light, Certainty, Objectivity. I claim for Dr. Slade that prejudice, however confirmed, will be able to discover no loophole, no crevice through which even the scientific conscience can wriggle out of an admission. If we get that admission -- get it not from one eminent physicist or from two, but from the number from whom, if we can only beguile them into that room in Bedford-place [where Slade lodges], common moral honesty, and not the rarer intellectual honesty, will extract it -- Spiritualism will take rank as an accepted truth, and as an incipient science in England, before the year is out [MD: emphasis added]. Then, and not before, will the Editors venture or be compelled to speak out, tumbling over each other in their several anxiety to protest that they, for their part, have never committed themselves to a hasty or unphilosophical judgment on an obscure subject, which now, upon the authority of Professor A. and Dr. B., must be held entitled to the gravest consideration, &c.
To conclude, I would remark that in offering our evidence, in the first place, to men of science, we lay it before men who have come under a peculiar and especial obligation to examine into and proclaim the truths of Nature.
We have a right to call upon them to publish the "discovery" we put them in the way of making; they, on the other hand, have a sort of right to the "earliest information." We speak of them en bloc, as if scientific pursuits destroyed all individuality, and were necessarily incompatible with "the particular order of mind which gravitates into the spiritual movement." We do as much injustice to Spiritual as to physical science by this supposition. No doubt exclusive observation of the laws of physical nature, severed as these are by the loss of physical "science of correspondence" from the spiritual, has a tendency to make the latter seem emptiness and illusion. But the root of the impulse which prompts men to give up their lives to science is the yearning for a deeper insight into the significance of things. This impulse materialism, even in its recent transcendent development, can never satisfy. Depend upon it that there are men in the ranks of the Royal Society to whom our facts would not, after all, be unacceptable. But my position is independent of this hope. For I am steadfast in my conviction that if it is a question of mere moral honesty, disengaged from intellectual difficulty, we shall find men of science equal to the occasion. Bring Huxley, Tyndall, Carpenter, Clifford, I care not which of them. face to face with Slade, and I maintain that the scientist will be "beat," and what is more, that he will admit that he is "beat" like a decently honest man.
C. C. Massey
Temple, August 4th [1876].
And the leaps of faith. My goodness.
- Whilst there are certain great advantages in the ignoring of the existence of the scientific world by Spiritualism, there are, on the other hand, also many reasons why an opposite course should be pursued towards them as set forth with much power by Mr. Massey. Perhaps, on the whole, his case is the strongest; with an overwhelming victory founded upon the irrevocable facts of nature lying before us in the future, it may be the more magnanimous course not like Shylock to exact the "pound of flesh," but to let bygones be bygones, remembering that we are all more or less the children of error. After all, when the ice is once melted Spiritualism will spread with more celerity, and gain for itself more influence in the scientific world than anywhere else, wherefore we now yield to Mr. Massey, and will assist in doing everything possible to give facilities for observation to men of science.
- The publication of the so-called message from Charles Bravo must have re-awakened in the minds of many thoughtful Spiritualists a problem of which the difficulties have hardly yet been enough appreciated. Owing to the notoriety which that communication has obtained, many of us probably have within the last few days to encounter questions from our friends -- the outside public -- which we could not answer without very apparent doubt....But that these facts cannot be relied upon as sufficient to satisfy speculative minds of spirit agency is evidence from the silence of Mr. Crookes, and the expressed doubts of Mr. Serjeant Cox, who have both had as large an experience of these phenomena as any of us....That the physical manifestations in general, and such messages as are commonly written upon Dr. Slade's slates, leave the nature of the intelligence in much doubt, must needs be conceded. BY establishing the action beyond the organism of a force originating within the organism, which force is probably the same as that by which muscular effects are produced, it may be said that we are so far from having proved spirit agency that we have not even disposed of Dr. Carpenter....Unconscious Cerebration is nearly as applicable to the transcorporal as to the organic operations of a force obedient to the physiological changes of the brain.
Harrison had carried his point: the press was a great amplifier, if one could find something they'd be willing to print.
And Algernon Joy, a Harrison partisan and former secretary (if memory serves) of the BNAS, gets into an epistolary controversy, in defense of the Bravo communique, with the editor of one of the penny papers, and manages to drag into the discussion his one-thousand-pound challenge to Maskelyne & Cooke to duplicate the Davenport Brothers' phenomena, which causes the entire thing to degenerate into a publication-of-private-correspondence and he-said-she-said.
People just didn't stay on the talking points.
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