No one who believes in spiritualism ever changes his opinion by reading arguments against it. Few who do not believe are won over by anything they read.
—Henry Clay McComas in Ghosts I Have Talked With.
Though firm believers in spiritualism and implacable non-believers may not be swayed by anything they read, for persons willing to hear from both camps two new books were at hand last week containing excellent statements pro & con. One author is a Baltimore-born Johns Hopkins psychologist who does his ghost-hunting with affability and scientific guile. The other is an elderly, dead-earnest, British-born spiritualist who has written some 70 books and papers on psychic phenomena, now heads the American Psychical Institute. All that the two books have in common is that both are readably written and each is dedicated to the author's wife.
Pro. Spiritualist Hereward Carrington's treatise is called Loaves & Fishes.* Mr. Carrington makes it clear that spiritualist philosophy needs no recourse to the supernatural. Everything that occurs must be a part of Nature. True, some weird things that happen are out of the ordinary; but these he prefers to call supernormal. They answer to "higher" psychic laws, would probably be objects of widespread scientific research if scientists were not afraid to confess how staggered they are by what goes on in seances. Mr. Carrington apparently accepts everything in the spiritualist showcases from crystal-gazing to astral projections and ghosts (which he prefers to call phantasms) on what he deems an overwhelming weight of sound evidence and reliable testimony.
Mr. Carrington brings into court the lifting of objects and human bodies without physical contact, telepathy, clairvoyance, premonitions, materialized phantasms which can snuff candles, transmission from the Other World of information to which the mediums could not possibly be privy, a mass of other phenomena.
As to the miracles narrated in the four Gospels, Mr. Carrington thinks some are coincidences (e. g., quieting the storm, the heavy catch of fish) while others are simply parables (e. g., feeding the multitude, finding the coin in the fish's mouth). Changing water to wine may have been mass hypnotism. Most of the others, especially the healing miracles, he considers to be demonstrations of Jesus Christ's extraordinary psychic power—but within the frame of Nature. Some of the disorders represented as blindness, dumbness, leprosy, demoniacal possession may have been hysterical in character and thus curable by powerful suggestion. Tissue actually diseased may have been made healthy by dematerialization and rematerialization. Lazarus and the other dead who were raised were probably only in cataleptic trances, since in two cases Jesus explicitly said they were not dead but "sleeping."
The Resurrection was "the greatest psychic event in all history." The appearance of Christ to his disciples after the Crucifixion was either a phantasm—a mental projection of the personality—or an actual psychic materialization, since Thomas was invited to thrust his fingers into the wounds.