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THE NEW REVELATION
BY
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
To all the brave men and women, humble
or learned, who have the moral
courage during seventy years to
face ridicule or worldly disadvantage
in order to testify
to an all-important truth
March, 1918
PREFACE
Many more philosophic minds than mine have thought
over the religious side of this subject and many more
scientific brains have turned their attention to its
phenomenal aspect. So far as I know, however, there
has been no former attempt to show the exact relation
of the one to the other. I feel that if I should
succeed in making this a little more clear I shall have
helped in what I regard as far the most important
question with which the human race is concerned.
A celebrated Psychic, Mrs. Piper, uttered, in the
year 1899 words which were recorded by Dr. Hodgson at
the time. She was speaking in trance upon the future
of spiritual religion, and she said: "In the next
century this will be astonishingly perceptible to the
minds of men. I will also make a statement which you
will surely see verified. Before the clear revelation
of spirit communication there will be a
terrible war in different parts of the world. The
entire world must be purified and cleansed before
mortal can see, through his spiritual vision, his
friends on this side and it will take just this line of
action to bring about a state of perfection. Friend,
kindly think of this." We have had "the terrible war
in different parts of the world." The second half
remains to be fulfilled.
A. C. D.
1918.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I THE SEARCH
II THE REVELATION
III THE COMING LIFE
IV PROBLEMS AND LIMITATIONS
SUPPLEMENTARY DOCUMENTS
I THE NEXT PHASE OF LIFE
II AUTOMATIC WRITING
III THE CHERITON DUGOUT
THE NEW REVELATION
CHAPTER I. THE SEARCH
The subject of psychical research is one upon which
I have thought more and about which I have been slower
to form my opinion, than upon any other subject
whatever. Every now and then as one jogs along through
life some small incident happens which very forcibly
brings home the fact that time passes and that first
youth and then middle age are slipping away. Such a
one occurred the other day. There is a column in that
excellent little paper, Light, which is devoted to
what was recorded on the corresponding date a
generation--that is thirty years--ago. As I read over
this column recently I had quite a start as I saw my
own name, and read the reprint of a letter
which I had written in 1887, detailing some interesting
spiritual experience which had occurred in a seance.
Thus it is manifest that my interest in the subject is
of some standing, and also, since it is only within the
last year or two that I have finally declared myself to
be satisfied with the evidence, that I have not been
hasty in forming my opinion. If I set down some of my
experiences and difficulties my readers will not, I
hope, think it egotistical upon my part, but will
realise that it is the most graphic way in which to
sketch out the points which are likely to occur to any
other inquirer. When I have passed over this ground,
it will be possible to get on to something more general
and impersonal in its nature.
When I had finished my medical education in 1882, I
found myself, like many young medical men, a convinced
materialist as regards our personal destiny. I had
never ceased to be an earnest theist, because it seemed
to me that Napoleon's question to the atheistic
professors on the starry night as he voyaged to Egypt:
"Who was it, gentlemen, who made these stars?" has
never been answered. To say that the Universe was made
by immutable laws only put the question one degree
further back as to who made the laws. I did not, of
course, believe in an anthropomorphic God, but I
believed then, as I believe now, in an intelligent
Force behind all the operations of Nature--a force so
infinitely complex and great that my finite brain could
get no further than its existence. Right and wrong I
saw also as great obvious facts which needed no divine
revelation. But when it came to a question of our
little personalities surviving death, it seemed to me
that the whole analogy of Nature was against it. When
the candle burns out the light disappears. When the
electric cell is shattered the current stops. When the
body dissolves there is an end of the matter. Each man
in his egotism may feel that he ought to survive, but
let him look, we will say, at the average loafer--of
high or low degree--would anyone contend that there was
any obvious reason why THAT personality should
carry on? It seemed to be a delusion, and I was
convinced that death did indeed end all, though I
saw no reason why that should affect our duty towards
humanity during our transitory existence.
This was my frame of mind when Spiritual phenomena
first came before my notice. I had always regarded the
subject as the greatest nonsense upon earth, and I had
read of the conviction of fraudulent mediums and
wondered how any sane man could believe such things. I
met some friends, however, who were interested in the
matter, and I sat with them at some table-moving
seances. We got connected messages. I am afraid the
only result that they had on my mind was that I
regarded these friends with some suspicion. They were
long messages very often, spelled out by tilts, and it
was quite impossible that they came by chance. Someone
then, was moving the table. I thought it was they.
They probably thought that I did it. I was puzzled and
worried over it, for they were not people whom I could
imagine as cheating--and yet I could not see how the
messages could come except by conscious pressure.
About this time--it would be in 1886--I came
across a book called The Reminiscences of Judge
Edmunds. He was a judge of the U.S. High Courts and a
man of high standing. The book gave an account of how
his wife had died, and how he had been able for many
years to keep in touch with her. All sorts of details
were given. I read the book with interest, and
absolute scepticism. It seemed to me an example of how
a hard practical man might have a weak side to his
brain, a sort of reaction, as it were, against those
plain facts of life with which he had to deal. Where
was this spirit of which he talked? Suppose a man had
an accident and cracked his skull; his whole character
would change, and a high nature might become a low one.
With alcohol or opium or many other drugs one could
apparently quite change a man's spirit. The spirit
then depended upon matter. These were the arguments
which I used in those days. I did not realise that it
was not the spirit that was changed in such cases, but
the body through which the spirit worked, just as it
would be no argument against the existence of a
musician if you tampered with his violin so that
only discordant notes could come through.
I was sufficiently interested to continue to read
such literature as came in my way. I was amazed to
find what a number of great men--men whose names were
to the fore in science--thoroughly believed that spirit
was independent of matter and could survive it. When I
regarded Spiritualism as a vulgar delusion of the
uneducated, I could afford to look down upon it; but
when it was endorsed by men like Crookes, whom I knew
to be the most rising British chemist, by Wallace, who
was the rival of Darwin, and by Flammarion, the best
known of astronomers, I could not afford to dismiss it.
It was all very well to throw down the books of these
men which contained their mature conclusions and
careful investigations, and to say "Well, he has one
weak spot in his brain," but a man has to be very self-
satisfied if the day does not come when he wonders if
the weak spot is not in his own brain. For some time I
was sustained in my scepticism by the consideration
that many famous men, such as Darwin himself, Huxley,
Tyndall and Herbert Spencer, derided this new
branch of knowledge; but when I learned that their
derision had reached such a point that they would not
even examine it, and that Spencer had declared in so
many words that he had decided against it on a
priori grounds, while Huxley had said that it did not
interest him, I was bound to admit that, however great,
they were in science, their action in this respect was
most unscientific and dogmatic, while the action of
those who studied the phenomena and tried to find out
the laws that governed them, was following the true
path which has given us all human advance and
knowledge. So far I had got in my reasoning, so my
sceptical position was not so solid as before.
It was somewhat reinforced, however, by my own
experiences. It is to be remembered that I was working
without a medium, which is like an astronomer working
without a telescope. I have no psychical powers
myself, and those who worked with me had little more.
Among us we could just muster enough of the magnetic
force, or whatever you will call it, to get the table
movements with their suspicious and often stupid
messages. I still have notes of those sittings and
copies of some, at least, of the messages. They were
not always absolutely stupid. For example, I find that
on one occasion, on my asking some test question, such
as how many coins I had in my pocket, the table spelt
out: "We are here to educate and to elevate, not to
guess riddles." And then: "The religious frame of
mind, not the critical, is what we wish to inculcate."
Now, no one could say that that was a puerile message.
On the other hand, I was always haunted by the fear of
involuntary pressure from the hands of the sitters.
Then there came an incident which puzzled and disgusted
me very much. We had very good conditions one evening,
and an amount of movement which seemed quite
independent of our pressure. Long and detailed
messages came through, which purported to be from a
spirit who gave his name and said he was a commercial
traveller who bad lost his life in a recent fire at a
theatre at Exeter. All the details were exact, and he
implored us to write to his family, who lived, he said,
at a place called Slattenmere, in Cumberland. I
did so, but my letter came back, appropriately enough,
through the dead letter office. To this day I do not
know whether we were deceived, or whether there was
some mistake in the name of the place; but there are
the facts, and I was so disgusted that for some time my
interest in the whole subject waned. It was one thing
to study a subject, but when the subject began to play
elaborate practical jokes it seemed time to call a
halt. If there is such a place as Slattenmere in the
world I should even now be glad to know it.
I was in practice in Southsea at this time, and
dwelling there was General Drayson, a man of very
remarkable character, and one of the pioneers of
Spiritualism in this country. To him I went with my
difficulties, and he listened to them very patiently.
He made light of my criticism of the foolish nature of
many of these messages, and of the absolute falseness
of some. "You have not got the fundamental truth into
your head," said he. "That truth is, that every spirit
in the flesh passes over to the next world exactly as
it is, with no change whatever. This world is full
of weak or foolish people. So is the next. You need
not mix with them, any more than you do in this world.
One chooses one's companions. But suppose a man in
this world, who had lived in his house alone and never
mixed with his fellows, was at last to put his head out
of the window to see what sort of place it was, what
would happen? Some naughty boy would probably say
something rude. Anyhow, he would see nothing of the
wisdom or greatness of the world. He would draw his
head in thinking it was a very poor place. That is
just what you have done. In a mixed seance, with no
definite aim, you have thrust your head into the next
world and you have met some naughty boys. Go forward
and try to reach something better." That was General
Drayson's explanation, and though it did not satisfy me
at the time, I think now that it was a rough
approximation to the truth. These were my first steps
in Spiritualism. I was still a sceptic, but at least I
was an inquirer, and when I heard some old-fashioned
critic saying that there was nothing to explain, and
that it was all fraud, or that a conjuror was
needed to show it up, I knew at least that that was all
nonsense. It is true that my own evidence up to then
was not enough to convince me, but my reading, which
was continuous, showed me how deeply other men had gone
into it, and I recognised that the testimony was so
strong that no other religious movement in the world
could put forward anything to compare with it. That
did not prove it to be true, but at least it proved
that it must be treated with respect and could not be
brushed aside. Take a single incident of what Wallace
has truly called a modern miracle. I choose it because
it is the most incredible. I allude to the assertion
that D. D. Home--who, by the way, was not, as is
usually supposed, a paid adventurer, but was the nephew
of the Earl of Home--the assertion, I say, that he
floated out of one window and into another at the
height of seventy feet above the ground. I could not
believe it. And yet, when I knew that the fact was
attested by three eye-witnesses, who were Lord
Dunraven, Lord Lindsay, and Captain Wynne, all men of
honour and repute, who were willing afterwards to
take their oath upon it, I could not but admit that the
evidence for this was more direct than for any of those
far-off events which the whole world has agreed to
accept as true.
I still continued during these years to hold table
seances, which sometimes gave no results, sometimes
trivial ones, and sometimes rather surprising ones. I
have still the notes of these sittings, and I extract
here the results of one which were definite, and which
were so unlike any conceptions which I held of life
beyond the grave that they amused rather than edified
me at the time. I find now, however, that they agree
very closely, with the revelations in Raymond and in
other later accounts, so that I view them with
different eyes. I am aware that all these accounts of
life beyond the grave differ in detail--I suppose any
of our accounts of the present life would differ in
detail--but in the main there is a very great
resemblance, which in this instance was very far from
the conception either of myself or of either of the two
ladies who made up the circle. Two communicators sent
messages, the first of whom spelt out as a name
"Dorothy Postlethwaite," a name unknown to any of us.
She said she died at Melbourne five years before, at
the age of sixteen, that she was now happy, that she
had work to do, and that she had been at the same
school as one of the ladies. On my asking that lady to
raise her hands and give a succession of names, the
table tilted at the correct name of the head mistress
of the school. This seemed in the nature of a test.
She went on to say that the sphere she inhabited was
all round the earth; that she knew about the planets;
that Mars was inhabited by a race more advanced than
us, and that the canals were artificial; there was no
bodily pain in her sphere, but there could be mental
anxiety; they were governed; they took nourishment; she
had been a Catholic and was still a Catholic, but had
not fared better than the Protestants; there were
Buddhists and Mohammedans in her sphere, but all fared
alike; she had never seen Christ and knew no more about
Him than on earth, but believed in His influence;
spirits prayed and they died in their new sphere before
entering another; they had pleasures--music was
among them. It was a place of light and of laughter.
She added that they had no rich or poor, and that the
general conditions were far happier than on earth.
This lady bade us good-night, and immediately the
table was seized by a much more robust influence, which
dashed it about very violently. In answer to my
questions it claimed to be the spirit of one whom I
will call Dodd, who was a famous cricketer, and with
whom I had some serious conversation in Cairo before he
went up the Nile, where he met his death in the
Dongolese Expedition. We have now, I may remark, come
to the year 1896 in my experiences. Dodd was not known
to either lady. I began to ask him questions exactly
as if he were seated before me, and he sent his answers
back with great speed and decision. The answers were
often quite opposed to what I expected, so that I could
not believe that I was influencing them. He said that
he was happy, that he did not wish to return to earth.
He had been a free-thinker, but had not suffered in the
next life for that reason. Prayer, however, was a
good thing, as keeping us in touch with the spiritual
world. If he had prayed more he would have been higher
in the spirit world.
This, I may remark, seemed rather in conflict with
his assertion that he had not suffered through being a
free-thinker, and yet, of course, many men neglect
prayer who are not free-thinkers.
His death was painless. He remembered the death of
Polwhele, a young officer who died before him. When he
(Dodd) died he had found people to welcome him, but
Polwhele had not been among them.
He had work to do. He was aware of the Fall of
Dongola, but had not been present in spirit at the
banquet at Cairo afterwards. He knew more than he did
in life. He remembered our conversation in Cairo.
Duration of life in the next sphere was shorter than on
earth. He had not seen General Gordon, nor any other
famous spirit. Spirits lived in families and in
communities. Married people did not necessarily meet
again, but those who loved each other did meet again.
I have given this synopsis of a communication to
show the kind of thing we got--though this was a very
favourable specimen, both for length and for coherence.
It shows that it is not just to say, as many critics
say, that nothing but folly comes through. There was
no folly here unless we call everything folly which
does not agree with preconceived ideas. On the other
hand, what proof was there that these statements were
true? I could see no such proof, and they simply left
me bewildered. Now, with a larger experience, in which
I find that the same sort of information has come to
very, many people independently in many lands, I think
that the agreement of the witnesses does, as in all
cases of evidence, constitute some argument for their
truth. At the time I could not fit such a conception
of the future world into my own scheme of philosophy,
and I merely noted it and passed on.
I continued to read many books upon the subject and
to appreciate more and more what a cloud of witnesses
existed, and how careful their observations had been.
This impressed my mind very much more than the
limited phenomena which came within the reach of
our circle. Then or afterwards I read a book by
Monsieur Jacolliot upon occult phenomena in India.
Jacolliot was Chief Judge of the French Colony of
Crandenagur, with a very judicial mind, but rather
biassed{sic} against spiritualism. He conducted a
series of experiments with native fakirs, who gave him
their confidence because he was a sympathetic man and
spoke their language. He describes the pains he took
to eliminate fraud. To cut a long story short he found
among them every phenomenon of advanced European
mediumship, everything which Home, for example, had
ever done. He got levitation of the body, the handling
of fire, movement of articles at a distance, rapid
growth of plants, raising of tables. Their explanation
of these phenomena was that they were done by the
Pitris or spirits, and their only difference in
procedure from ours seemed to be that they made more
use of direct evocation. They claimed that these
powers were handed down from time immemorial and traced
back to the Chaldees. All this impressed me very
much, as here, independently, we had exactly the
same results, without any question of American frauds,
or modern vulgarity, which were so often raised against
similar phenomena in Europe.
My mind was also influenced about this time by the
report of the Dialectical Society, although this Report
had been presented as far back as 1869. It is a very
cogent paper, and though it was received with a chorus
of ridicule by the ignorant and materialistic papers of
those days, it was a document of great value. The
Society was formed by a number of people of good
standing and open mind to enquire into the physical
phenomena of Spiritualism. A full account of their
experiences and of their elaborate precautions against
fraud are given. After reading the evidence, one fails
to see how they could have come to any other conclusion
than the one attained, namely, that the phenomena were
undoubtedly genuine, and that they pointed to laws and
forces which had not been explored by Science. It is a
most singular fact that if the verdict had been against
spiritualism, it would certainly have been hailed
as the death blow of the movement, whereas being an
endorsement of the phenomena it met with nothing by
ridicule. This has been the fate of a number of
inquiries since those conducted locally at Hydesville
in 1848, or that which followed when Professor Hare of
Philadelphia, like Saint Paul, started forth to oppose
but was forced to yield to the truth.
About 1891, I had joined the Psychical Research
Society and had the advantage of reading all their
reports. The world owes a great deal to the unwearied
diligence of the Society, and to its sobriety of
statement, though I will admit that the latter makes
one impatient at times, and one feels that in their
desire to avoid sensationalism they discourage the
world from knowing and using the splendid work which
they are doing. Their semi-scientific terminology also
chokes off the ordinary reader, and one might say
sometimes after reading their articles what an American
trapper in the Rocky Mountains said to me about some
University man whom he had been escorting for the
season. "He was that clever," he said, "that you
could not understand what he said." But in spite
of these little peculiarities all of us who have wanted
light in the darkness have found it by the methodical,
never-tiring work of the Society. Its influence was
one of the powers which now helped me to shape my
thoughts. There was another, however, which made a
deep impression upon me. Up to now I had read all the
wonderful experiences of great experimenters, but I had
never come across any effort upon their part to build
up some system which would cover and contain them all.
Now I read that monumental book, Myers' Human
Personality, a great root book from which a whole tree
of knowledge will grow. In this book Myers was unable
to get any formula which covered all the phenomena
called "spiritual," but in discussing that action of
mind upon mind which he has himself called telepathy he
completely proved his point, and he worked it out so
thoroughly with so many examples, that, save for those
who were wilfully blind to the evidence, it took its
place henceforth as a scientific fact. But this was
an enormous advance. If mind could act upon mind
at a distance, then there were some human powers which
were quite different to matter as we had always
understood it. The ground was cut from under the feet
of the materialist, and my old position had been
destroyed. I had said that the flame could not exist
when the candle was gone. But here was the flame a
long way off the candle, acting upon its own. The
analogy was clearly a false analogy. If the mind, the
spirit, the intelligence of man could operate at a
distance from the body, then it was a thing to that
extent separate from the body. Why then should it not
exist on its own when the body was destroyed? Not only
did impressions come from a distance in the case of
those who were just dead, but the same evidence proved
that actual appearances of the dead person came with
them, showing that the impressions were carried by
something which was exactly like the body, and yet
acted independently and survived the death of the body.
The chain of evidence between the simplest cases of
thought-reading at one end, and the actual
manifestation of the spirit independently of the body
at the other, was one unbroken chain, each phase
leading to the other, and this fact seemed to me to
bring the first signs of systematic science and order
into what had been a mere collection of bewildering and
more or less unrelated facts.
About this time I had an interesting experience,
for I was one of three delegates sent by the Psychical
Society to sit up in a haunted house. It was one of
these poltergeist cases, where noises and foolish
tricks had gone on for some years, very much like the
classical case of John Wesley's family at Epworth in
1726, or the case of the Fox family at Hydesville near
Rochester in 1848, which was the starting-point of
modern spiritualism. Nothing sensational came of our
journey, and yet it was not entirely barren. On the
first night nothing occurred. On the second, there
were tremendous noises, sounds like someone beating a
table with a stick. We had, of course, taken every
precaution, and we could not explain the noises; but at
the same time we could not swear that some
ingenious practical joke had not been played upon us.
There the matter ended for the time. Some years
afterwards, however, I met a member of the family who
occupied the house, and he told me that after our visit
the bones of a child, evidently long buried, had been
dug up in the garden. You must admit that this was
very remarkable. Haunted houses are rare, and houses
with buried human beings in their gardens are also, we
will hope, rare. That they should have both united in
one house is surely some argument for the truth of the
phenomena. It is interesting to remember that in the
case of the Fox family there was also some word of
human bones and evidence of murder being found in the
cellar, though an actual crime was never established.
I have little doubt that if the Wesley family could
have got upon speaking terms with their persecutor,
they would also have come upon some motive for the
persecution. It almost seems as if a life cut suddenly
and violently short had some store of unspent vitality
which could still manifest itself in a strange,
mischievous fashion. Later I had another singular
personal experience of this sort which I may describe
at the end of this argument.[1]