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Hodgson’s limitations
Clearly, Hodgson"s objections were not technically valid. Writers on psychic phenomena, even contemporary writers, have been too enthusiastic to write favorably about what Hodgson claimed about mediums. But these writers repeatedly:
• failed to show that he was under a great deal of pressure from the leadership of the SPR to find against mediums
• failed to show that Hodgson"s presumption of fraud was a deliberately uncontrolled extraneous negative and intervening variable
• failed to show that the onus shifted onto Hodgson to technically rebut the evidence produced by Mrs.. Piper about the afterlife
• failed to criticize Hodgson for not using science to reject the afterlife
• failed to show that he was not sensitive to nor did he have the essential psychic knowledge to properly administer validity and reliability tests.
In his initial objections, Hodgson himself failed to show that:
• his claim about telepathy was a valid claim
• Mrs. Piper had the competence to read other people"s minds
• Mrs. Piper could read minds while unconscious at a séance
• Mrs. Piper"s telepathy extended to those who were hundreds of miles away from the séance while she was unconscious
• the accurate information was not coming from intelligences from the afterlife
• the information was being transmitted directly from a split mind.
There is no escaping the issue of who had the technical burden of proof. The onus clearly was on Hodgson to prove that his objections were valid. But he did not prove anything. He just said words to the effect:
"... I can"t prove anything at all ... I can"t prove fraud, I can"t prove cheating, I can"t prove trickery against Mrs. Piper but trust me; don’t believe anybody else except me; just believe me because only I have the truth about these things but no one else has’.
That kind of personal, intentionally prejudicial, unsubstantiated dogmatic claim was not the professional way to present rebuttals then, nor is it today.
We know that subsequently Hodgson was to swallow his objections, his rejections, his arrogance, his intransigence against the acceptance of
Psychic phenomena and to reluctantly confess that spirit communication was the only explanation for the consistently accurate information he and others received.
It was really most absurd for these SPR investigators, after continuously receiving brilliant and deadly accurate information about hundreds of different things, to claim that it was not possible for an afterlife intelligence to be guiding Mrs. Piper.
The situation arose that a great number of people accepted Mrs. Piper"s afterlife evidence because they received accurate information but the closed-minded skeptical leadership of the SPR didn"t. Their strategy was that if they could discredit and destroy Mrs. Piper"s control Phinuit, they would destroy any notion that anyone from the afterlife was involved at all.
It must be telepathy!
When the closed-minded skeptics failed to discredit Mrs.. Piper, their new attack was that Mrs. Piper, while in trance—that is, while she was totally unconscious?was reading the minds of those who were at the séance and the minds of others who were hundreds of miles away from where the séance was taking place! There is something most bizarre when the leading skeptics of the Society for Psychical Research (like Hodgson initially, and Frank Podmore) who had never accepted telepathy, turned around and claimed "it must be telepathy!" when the evidence Mrs. Piper was providing for the afterlife was objective, scientific, foolproof and absolute.
The facts about Mrs. Piper are not in dispute. Different authors acknowledge that Dr Phinuit was her first control. But then one of Hodgson"s own friends, George Pellew died suddenly and he took over from Dr Phinuit, manifesting through Mrs. Piper when she was in trance. Hodgson was now in a unique position to ask his dead friend thousands of questions about their relationship. Over the years Mrs. Piper—or more correctly George Pellew speaking through her—answered his thousands of questions correctly.
An incredible test
Over several months Hodgson introduced over 150 sitters at séances to the entranced Mrs. Piper. Thirty of these had known George Pellew while he was alive--the others had never met him. George Pellew was able to correctly identify all of the sitters whom he had known. Most of them sat and talked and reminisced with George Pellew, speaking through Mrs. Piper, as if he himself was there in the flesh. His only mistake was to fail to identify a person whom he had not met since the person was a very small girl!
These meetings were so absolutely impressive that Richard Hodgson wrote his report explaining in detail why he was wrong in his earlier reports and that now he had irretrievably accepted the existence of the afterlife. He claimed that he had communicated with intelligences from the afterlife and he couldn"t wait to get there himself!
Author Bio :
Victor Zammit, Copyright 2006 From: http://www.victorzammit.com/book/4thedition/index.html
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