Some Answers of Objections
Some Answers of Objections is a letter written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published in The Freethinker on 21 march 1920.
Letter
TO THE EDITOR OF THE "FREETHINKER."
Sir, — I do not find much to answer in your correspondent's letter, for whether a whole page or part of a page of the Codex Alexandrinus appeared upon the plate at Crewe is really of no importance. The wonder is the same in either case. I do not know what your correspondent is trying to prove when he reproaches me for saying that it never left the museum. That is how I understand the account of the matter given on p. 219 of Professor Henslow's recent book. Do I understand that your correspondent has some proof that it did leave the museum? If not, what is amiss?
In answer to your correspondent's question, I do deny that Professor Zollner was in bad health either at the time of the Slade experiments or at any other time until the seizure which rapidly carried him off. This I can show by evidence from his University. For one who is such a stickler for accuracy in others your correspondent is very loose in his remarks.
Finally, your correspondent says: "To bring up Drs. Schrenk, Notzing, and Geley, as Sir A. C. Doyle does, as if their investigations were necessarily of a spiritualistic nature, is simply to mislead the public." Is it? The Spiritualists for the best part of seventy years have been contending amid the jibes of their critics, that a medium exudes a soft plastic matter, and that this is the physical base of all materialization phenomena. Here we have the existence of this matter confirmed by men of science with hundreds of photographs. How, then, is there no connection with Spiritualism, when it is a complete confirmation of what we have been preaching to deaf ears? The last sentence of Madame Bisson's detailed account is: "Since the seances described, and on several occasions, the entire phantom showed itself; it came out of the cabinet, began to speak, and reached Madame Bisson, whom it kissed on the cheek. The sound of the kiss was audible." Has this nothing to do with Spiritualism?
Arthur Conan Doyle.
P.S. — The foot-note to the above quotation is: "During these phenomena Eva remained visible, stretched without motion on the couch."
