Psychic "Sleuths" Challenged
Psychic "Sleuths" Challenged is an article published in the Daily Express on 22 october 1921.
Psychic "Sleuths" Challenged
CAMBRIDGE CRIME A TEST OF THEIR POWER.
REPLY TO SIR A. CONAN DOYLE.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's remarkable conclusions regarding the work of clairvoyance in two recent cases which have puzzled the police are challenged by Mr. Stuart C. Cumberland, the thought reader, and author of "That Other World," in the following letter:—
To the Editor of the "Daily Express."
Sir, — My friendly antagonist, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is, I see all for linking up his "psychometrist," folk with the police in order to unearth crime.
Good. There are several murder and other crime mysteries awaiting solution which mere police intelligence has been unable to supply.
What about the Cambridge shop murder? What have Sir Arthur's psychic friends done towards bringing this home to the actual criminal?
On the morning of the "Beach murder" a clairvoyant was called in, and held a mystic seance on the very spot where the body of the murdered girl was found.
The conclusions of this mystic were wholly wide of the mark, and the crime was eventually brought home to actual murderers by recognised police methods, and they duly suffered the penalty of the law.
UNFATHOMED TRAGEDIES.
It is not enough for these gifted psychics in construct unfathomed tragedies out of the chance discovery of a few ancient bones or to arouse agreeable expectations that a missing man will be found by fingering his coat. Assuredly this psychic "sensing" should go a good deal further.
Let us be told who were the murdered and who are or were the murderers, furnishing at the same time practical proof of these conclusions. And why could not Sir Arthur's clairvoyants have told straightaway where the missing boy Gray was to be found?
Surely what they "sensed" was not in advance of conclusions that might well have been arrived at by the most ordinary individuals in similar circumstances.
I agree with Sir Arthur that, with this mystic business, it is still "looking in a glass darkly," but I must join issue with him in the assertion that the "flash" which comes now and again is above coincidence. Mere coincidence obviously does not completely explain everything in this direction, but it goes by way of corroboration, some way towards fitting in with the erroneous inferences which obsessed self-deception is prone to draw.
STUART C. CUMBERLAND.
