Science Quote by Oliver Joseph Lodge

Lodge is trying to sound like a lab man even as he tiptoes into the parlor-room weirdness of early psychical research. The sentence is built like a scientific caveat, but it smuggles in a striking claim: the more a medium slips into trance, the more convincing the evidence can look that someone else is thinking through them. And yet the messages get cruder. That tension is the point. He’s outlining a pattern that protects the phenomenon from the most obvious critique. If the “communicator” shows polish, skeptics can say the medium is consciously performing. If it’s dull or ill-formed, believers can say: exactly - the channel is purer, the body is running on low power, so the signal comes through stripped of style.

The subtext is defensive and strategic. Lodge wants to keep two competing commitments in play: intellectual respectability and openness to spirit communication. “Separate intelligence” reads like a careful legal phrase, distancing him from outright credulity while still granting the possibility of an independent mind at work. “Sophistication less” is doing heavy lifting too: it anticipates disappointment, reframes banality as corroboration, and lowers the aesthetic bar so the evidentiary bar can be claimed as higher.

Context matters: Lodge was a leading physicist in a moment when new invisible forces (X-rays, radio) had made the unseen feel technologically plausible. His wording borrows that era’s signal-noise imagination. Trance becomes a kind of human receiver: clearer carrier wave, poorer content. It’s an argument designed to survive scrutiny by making messiness not a bug, but part of the proof.