To exhaust this question of survival and of communications with the dead, I ought to speak of Dr. Hyslop’s recent investigations, made with the assistance of the mediums Smead and Chenoweth (communications with William James). I ought also to mention Julia’s famous “bureau” and, above all, the extraordinary sittings of Mrs. Wriedt, the trumpet medium, who not only obtains communications in which the dead speak languages of which she herself is completely ignorant, but raises apparitions said to be extremely disturbing. I ought, lastly, to examine the facts set forth by Professor Porro, Dr. Venzano and M. Rozanne and many other things besides, for spiritualistic investigation and literature are already piling volume upon volume. But it was not my intention nor my pretension to make a complete study of scientific spiritualism. I wished merely to omit no essential point and to give a general, but accurate idea of this posthumous atmosphere which no really new and decisive fact has come to unsettle since the manifestations of which we have spoken.
So much for survival proper. But certain spiritualists go farther and attempt the scientific proof of palingenesis and the transmigration of souls. I pass over their merely moral or scientific arguments, as well as those which they discover in the prenatal reminiscences of illustrious men and others. These reminiscences, though often disturbing, are still too rare, too sporadic, so to speak; and the supervision has not always been sufficiently close for us to be able to rely upon them with safety. Nor do I propose to pay attention to the proofs based upon the inborn aptitudes of genius or of certain infant prodigies, aptitudes which are difficult to explain, but which may nevertheless be attributed to unknown laws of heredity. I shall be content to recall briefly the results of some of Colonel de Rochas’ experiments, which leave one at a loss for an explanation.
First of all, it is only right to say that Colonel de Rochas is a savant who seeks nothing but objective truth and does so with a scientific strictness and integrity that have never been questioned. He puts certain exceptional subjects into an hypnotic sleep and, by means of downward passes, makes them trace back the whole course of their existence. He thus takes them successively to their youth, their adolescence and down to the extreme limits of their childhood. At each of these hypnotic stages, the subject reassumes the consciousness, the character and the state of mind which he possessed at the corresponding stage in his life. He goes over the same events, with their joys and sorrows. If he has been ill, he once more passes through his illness, his convalescence and his recovery. If, for instance, the subject is a woman who has been a mother, she again becomes pregnant and again suffers the pains of child-birth. Carried back to an age when she was learning to write, she writes like a child and her writing can be placed side by side with the copy-books which she filled at school.