Memories and Adventures Chapter 9 - Pulling Up the Anchor

**Arthur Conan Doyle** (0:00)
Chapter 9 of Memories and Adventures.
This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit librivox.org. Recording by A Fine Voice. Memories and Adventures by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Chapter 9, Pulling Up the Anchor.
Psychic Studies. Experiments in Telepathy. My First Seances. A Curious Test. General Drayson. Opinion on Theosophy. AP. Sinnett. WT. Stead. Journey to Berlin. Cox Treatment. Brutality of Bergman. Malcolm Morris. Literary Society. Political Work. Arthur Balfour. Our Departure.
It was in these years after my marriage, and before leaving South Sea, that I planted the first seeds of those psychic studies which were destined to revolutionize my views, and to absorb finally all the energies of my life. I had at that time the usual contempt which the young, educated man feels towards the whole subject which has been covered by the clumsy name of spiritualism. I had read of mediums being convicted of fraud, I had heard of phenomena which were opposed to every known scientific law, and I had deplored the simplicity and credulity which could deceive good, earnest people into believing that such bogus happenings were signs of intelligence outside our own existence.
Educated as I had been during my most plastic years in the School of Medical Materialism, and soaked in the negative views of all my great teachers, I had no room in my brain for theories which cut right across every fixed conclusion that I had formed. I was wrong, and my great teachers were wrong, but still I hold that they wrought well, and that their Victorian agnosticism was in the interests of the human race, for it shook the old ironclad unreasoning evangelical position, which was so universal before their days. For all rebuilding, a site must be cleared. There were two separate Victorian movements towards change, the one an attempt to improve the old building and make it good enough to carry on, as shown in the Oxford and High Church development, the other a knocking down of ruins, which could only end in some fresh erections bringing up. As I have shown, my own position was that of a respectful materialist, who entirely admitted a great central intelligent cause, without being able to distinguish what that cause was, or why it should work in so mysterious and terrible a way in bringing its designs to fulfilment.
From my point of view, the mind, and so far as I could see the soul, which was the total effect of all the hereditary or personal functionings of the mind, was an emanation from the brain and entirely physical in its nature. I saw, as a medical man, how a spicule of bone or a tumour pressing on the brain would cause what seemed an alteration in the soul. I saw also how drugs or alcohol would turn on fleeting phases of virtue or vice. The physical argument seemed an overpowering one. It had never struck me that the current of events might really flow in the opposite direction, and that the higher faculties could only manifest themselves imperfectly through an imperfect instrument. The broken fiddle is silent, and yet the musician is the same as ever. The first thing which steadied me and made me reconsider my position was the question of telepathy, which was already being discussed by William Barrett and others, even before the appearance of Meyer's monumental work on human personality, the first book which devoted to these psychic subjects the deep study and sustained brain power which they demand.
It may, in my opinion, take a permanent place in human literature, like the Novum Organum or The Descent of Man, or any other great root book which is marked to date in human thought.
Having read some of the evidence, I began to experiment in thought transference, and I found a fellow researcher in Mr. Ball, a well-known architect in the town. Again and again, sitting behind him, I have drawn diagrams, and he in turn has made approximately the same figure. I showed beyond any doubt whatever that I could convey my thoughts without words. But if I could verify such conclusions up to six feet, I could not well doubt them when they gave me the evidence that the same results could be obtained at a distance.
With an appropriate subject and so undefined sympathy between the two individuals, it was independent of space.
So the evidence seemed to show. I had always sworn by science and by the need of fearless following whatever truth might lie. It was clear now that my position had been too rigid. I had compared the thought excretion of the brain to the bile excretion of the liver. Clearly this was untenable. If thought could go a thousand miles and produce a perceptible effect, then it differed entirely not only in degree but in kind from any purely physical material. That seemed certain, and it must involve some modification of my old views.