Yet whatever may be the qualities, merits, or demerits of this "George Eliot" matter, what character it has is its own, and different materially from any I have seen recorded from any other control. What is vastly more important, despite the lapses in knowledge, taste, and style, which negative its being the unmodified production of George Eliot, it nevertheless presents, _me judice_, the most reasonable, suggestive, and attractive pictures of a life beyond bodily death that I know of: it is not a reflection of previous mythologies, it is congruous with the tastes of what we now consider rational beings, and might well fill their desires; and it _tallies with our experiences_--in dreams. Yet it is not a great feat of imagination; but in recent times no great genius has attacked the subject, and George Eliot would not have been expected to devote her imagination to it, which raises a slight presumption that what is told is really told by her from experience.
If I had to venture a guess as to how it came into existence, I should guess that somebody within range, hardly Mrs. Piper herself, had been reading George Eliot, or about George Eliot, and the musk-melon pollen had affected the cucumbers. Professor Newbold, for instance, was entirely able involuntarily to create and telepath the stories, and better shaped ones. Some real George Eliot influence may have flowed in too, but on that my judgment is in suspense.
"George Eliot" comes in abruptly to Hodgson, on February 26, 1897. After a few preliminaries, in response to a remark of Hodgson's on her dislike of and disbelief in spiritism, she says:
"... You may have noted the anxiety of such as I to return and enlighten your fellow men. It is more especially confined to unbelievers before their departure to this life."
This remark and the persistent efforts of the alleged G.P. who, living, was a thorough skeptic, would seem strongly "evidential."
[G.E. writes:] "Do you remember me well?... I had a sad life in many ways, yet in others I was happy, yet I have never known what real happiness was until I came here.... I was an unbeliever, in fact almost an agnostic when I left my body, but when I awoke and found myself alive in another form superior in quality, that is, my body less gross and heavy, with no pangs of remorse, no struggling to hold on to the material body, I found it had all been a dream...." R.H.: "That was your first experience?" G.E.: "... The moment I had been removed from my body I found at once I had been thoroughly mistaken in my conjectures. I looked back upon my whole life in one instant. Every thought, word, or action which I had ever experienced passed through my mind like a wonderful panorama as it were before my vision. You cannot begin to imagine anything so real and extraordinary as this first awakening.... I awoke in a realm of golden light. I heard the voices of friends who had gone before calling to me to follow them. At the moment the thrill of joy was so intense I was like one standing spellbound before a beautiful panorama. The music which filled my soul was like a tremendous symphony. I had never heard nor dreamed of anything half so beautiful....