Aged Agnostic

FORTY YEARS OF PSYCHIC RESEARCH-- Hamlin Garland--Macmillan ($3).

Whether or not convicts in the death-house can be counted on to tell the truth about their past, men who have survived three-score-&-ten are more serious than their juniors on the subject of the future. After that lonely milestone, many an agnostic joins the comforting company of the faithful. But last week stout-hearted Hamlin Garland, though he is five years beyond the warning mark, still kept to his lifelong agnosticism. This intransigence was the more remarkable because for 45 years he had been an eager investigator of spiritualism. Last week he submitted his lifetime's report on psychic research. Its sober findings will be respected by followers of both camps but will give little aid & comfort to either.

Author Garland was a young (31) writer in Boston, "a novelist, holding a keen interest in positive science," when he was approached by a friend who was a spiritualist, asked to join a circle for the investigation of psychic phenomena. When a skeptical professor of physics also agreed to join, Garland went along. Thereafter, in many a darkened room (and sometimes in a daylit office), he heard, saw, felt many a queer thing. Scientifically curious, he kept records of the seances he attended. In Forty Years of Psychic Research he has rewritten those records into a "plain narrative of fact." Though he has changed "psychics' " names, supplemented his written record with his memory, he goes bail for the essential accuracy of his facts. Says he: "If these supernormal events are illusory, then all the events of my life are illusory."

For those familiar with the popular literature of spiritualism, what Researcher Garland has to tell will be nothing new. He and his fellow-researchers did what they could to cramp the mediums' style, by tying them to their chairs, tacking their skirts to the floor, putting rustly newspapers on their laps. In spite of these bonds tables gyrated, pianos played, "ectoplasmic" faces made luminous appearances, megaphones whispered remarks from dead-&-gone characters on "the other side.'' Investigator Garland was impressed but noticed some incongruities. "I confess that it was a bit surprising to find Socrates and Julius Caesar writing messages in commonplace English for the benefit of an elderly citizen of Washington." It was hardly less surprising to hear Roosevelt I admitting that 1912 was "great times but these are greater. I stand, behind my cousin."

Garland's conclusion: the phenomena are inexplicable but their interpretation is too hopeful. Spiritualism naturally draws people who have been bereaved, but their faith is "a fairy story with a heartache in it." Garland thinks mediums are often sincere but are probably subconscious frauds. His guess at the queer things he heard, saw, felt: "They all originate in the seance room and have not been proven to go beyond it."

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