Primary Sources

Question 1

Gurney (with Myers and Podmore), 1886

Answer 1

Phantasms of the Living:

• Mainly Gurney’s work
• Attempted to examine all classes of cases where there is reason to suppose that the mind of one human being has affected the mind of another, without speech utered, or word written, or sign made
• Thousands of case stories of paranormal events, mostly apparitions of the dead, impossible communications between minds over large distances, strange meaningful coincidences, and eerie premonitions of impending crises
• Sheer magnitude of the survey suggested experiences SPR was interested in were v common
• Editors made attempt to apply probability analyses of likelihood that these cases were due to chance. These analyses deeply flawed even for the period, amounting to absurd figures
• Launched hypothesis that crisis-induced experiences of seeing the newly departed loved ones or learning of an accident far away just before or as it happens, were result of spontaneous ‘thought-transference’
• Apparitions were phantasms of the living rather than dead
• Theory of mental action across vast distances became major heuristic for early work of the SPR
• ‘the odds against the occurrence, by accident, of as many coincidences of the type in question … are about a thousand billion trillion trillion trillions to 1’.
• ‘[t]he argument for thought-transference … cannot be expressed here in figures, as it requires 167 nines – that is, the probability is far more than the ninth power of a trillion to 1’.

Question 2

Myers, 1903

Answer 2

Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death:

• Subliminal self = source of genius.
• Curious work of romantic, ‘gothic psychology’ (James)
• When hypnotised, subject typically lost the power to choose his own actions freely. His central, controlling will became subject to commands. Memory proved to be fragmented. Phenomena of alternating memory characterized not just severely disturbed mental patients but presumably normal ppl as well
• Multiple lvls of consciousness not pathological (dissociation). They equipped individual for life as much as fingers and toes, tho more difficult to investigate.
• Never reduced subliminal strata to anything like precision. Beneath waking consciousness, hypnotic stratum and stratum of dream and confusion. Beneath these, Stratum of coherent mentation. No clear lines of demarcation
• The subliminal consciousness cld receive info through channels, e.g. telepathy and clairvoyance, that were inaccessible to the supraliminal, which was restricted to sensory modes of perception
• Subliminal and supraliminal cld exchange info, however. This helped him explain range of psychical phenomena.
• ‘Nunciative’ - message-bearing - automatisms. Mrs Piper and Mrs Thompson - w these he confirmed that spirit survives death of physical body. Satisfied himself that spirit presence controlled their automatisms
• Believed subliminal consciousness cld travel considerable distances
• Spirit contact = part of the normal in human behaviour bc spirit exists in man (he wrote in connection w Mrs Thomas)

Not well received by Spiritualists - review in Light - They wanted a whole series of personal testimonies to survival, not the carefully graded and analyzed examples of abnormal psychology that Myers provided

Question 3

William James, 1902

Answer 3

Varieties of Religious Experience:

draws considerably on Myers’ theory of genius, and rests, as James himself pointed out at the end of the book, on Myers’ notion of the subliminal self

In particular this discovery of a consciousness existing beyond the field, or subliminally as Mr. Myers terms it, casts light on many phenomena of religious biography. That is why I have to advert to it now, although it is naturally impossible for me in this place to give you any account of the evidence on which the admission of such a consciousness is based. You will find it set forth in many recent books, Binet’s Alterations of Personality122 being perhaps as good a one as any to recommend.

The most important consequence of having a strongly developed ultra-marginal life of this sort is that one’s ordinary fields of consciousness are liable to incursions from it of which the subject does not guess the source, and which, therefore, take for him the form of unaccountable impulses to act, or inhibitions of action, of obsessive ideas, or even of hallucinations of sight or hearing. The impulses may take the direction of automatic speech or writing, the meaning of which the subject himself may not understand even while he utters it; and generalizing this phenomenon, Mr. Myers has given the name of automatism, sensory or motor, emotional or intellectual, to this whole sphere of effects, due to “uprushes” into the ordinary consciousness of energies originating in the subliminal parts of the mind.

Question 4

Myers on the SPR’s mission (Human Personality, 1903)

Answer 4

‘It is my object’, Myers wrote, ‘as it has from the first been the object of the Society for Psychical Research’, to do what can be done to break down that artificial wall of demarcation which has thus far excluded from scientific treatment precisely the problems which stand in most need of all the aids to discovery which such treatment can afford’

Question 5

Myers on supernatural/ supernormal (Human Pers, 1903)

Answer 5

The word supernatural is open to grave objections; it assumes that there is something outside nature, and it has become associated with arbitrary interference with law. Now there is no reason to suppose that the psychical phenomena with which we deal are less a part of nature, or less subject to fixed and definite law, than any other phenomena

Question 6

McDougall, 1927

Answer 6

‘Psychical Research as a University Study’:

Any opposition to psychical research, McDougall argued, must arise from narrow dogmatic ignorance, that higher kind of ignorance which so often goes with a wealth of scientific knowledge, the ignorance which permits a man to lay down dogmatically the boundaries of our knowledge and to exclaim “ignorabimus.” This cry – “we shall not, cannot know!” – is apt to masquerade as scientific humility, while, in reality, it expresses an unscientific arrogance and philosophic incompetence

What McDougall attacks is the kind of agnosticism that withdraws “the supernatural” from the “natural”, and states dogmatically (or by recourse to the a priori) that the former is by definition unreachable, ineffable, and transcendent

clear that McDougall was employing a “more scientific than thou”-tactic against his academic opponents. ‘Dogmatic agnosticism’, on his reading, already assumed a conclusion to the very questions which psychical research wanted to ask (Asprem)

Question 7

Alfred Russell Walace, 1866

Answer 7

Scientific Aspect of the Supernatural:

• miracles had no place in modern science
• argued for ‘an experimental enquiry by men of science into the alleged powers of clairvoyants and mediums’
• there should be no objections in principle against the postulation of intelligences beyond the ordinary knowledge sphere of humanity.
• discovery of Foraminifera, ‘those structureless gelantinous organisms which exhibit so many of the higher phenomena of animal life without any of that differentiation of parts’ deemed essential for life, made possible the existence of ‘sentient beings unrecognisable by our senses’

Question 8

Oliver Lodge, 1925

Answer 8

Ether & Reality: A Series of Discourses on the Many Functions of the Ether of
Space:

Lodge’s concept of “ether bodies” was especially designed to create a space within the natural world where spiritual activity could take place without being contrary to natural law. His system suggested that all mental activity and all animation of life in fact happens through the ether, and that one might therefore expect to find disembodied mental and vital activity on the etheric plane – sometimes interacting with ordinary tangible matter

Question 9

James, 1909

Answer 9

“Confidences of a Psychical Researcher”, American Magazine:

These men [the founders of the SPR] hoped that if the material were treated rigorously, and,
as far as possible, experimentally, objective truth would be elicited, and the subject rescued
from sentimentalism on the one side and dogmatizing ignorance on the other. Like all
founders, Sidgwick hoped for a certain promptitude of result; and I heard him say, the year before his death, that if anyone had told him at the outset that after twenty years he would
be in the same identical state of doubt and balance that he started with, he would have
deemed the prophecy incredible. It appeared impossible that that amount of handling
evidence should bring so little finality of decision.

My own experience has been similar to Sidgwick’s. For twenty-five years I have been in
touch with the literature of psychical research, and have had acquaintance with numerous
“researchers”. I have also spent a good many hours (though far fewer than I ought to have
spent) in witnessing (or trying to witness) phenomena. Yet I am theoretically no “further”
than I was at the beginning

there is a continuum of
cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into
which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir. Our “normal”
consciousness is circumscribed for adaptation to our external earthly environment, but the
fence is weak in spots

Assuming this common reservoir of consciousness to exist, this bank upon which we all draw, and in which so many of earth’s memories must in some way be stored, or mediums would not get at them as they do, the question is, What is its own structure? What is its inner topography? This question, first squarely formulated by Myers, deserves to be called “Myers’
problem” by scientific men hereafter

Question 10

James, 1901

Answer 10

‘Frederic Myers’ Service to Psychology’, SPR Journal

he found it very probable ‘that Frederic Myers will always be remembered in psychology as the pioneer who staked out a vast tract of mental wilderness and planted the flag of genuine science upon it.’

Question 11

1927, The Case For and Against Psychical Belief (in Asprem)

Answer 11

fourteen essays distributed in four categories.

the “convinced” group was dominated by those who advocated qualitative methodologies, based largely on the observation of mediums during séances, or at best the testing against external evidence of “psychic” information that could only be obtained in such situations

middle category of those who were convinced of the rarity of genuine phenomena. This category is important, for here we find a class of researchers who claimed to value the scientific method just as much as the unconvinced experimentalist, yet still thought that some phenomena were genuine, while others were not. It is notable, though, that the men in this class – McDougall, Driesch, Prince, and Schiller

professionalization of parapsychology emerged precisely from this class

Question 12

Rhine, Extra-Sensory Perception, 1934

Answer 12

introduced yet another new set of scientific nomenclature, made a new taxonomy of effects, described methodological protocols, provided fresh interpretation of earlier research, and, above all, presented the results of years of quantitative experiments that seemed to yield an overwhelmingly positive verdict. Furthermore, the research it presented had been funded through a university budget, carried out in the psychology department of the newly established Duke University in North Carolina.

Question 13

Medium historian Emma Hardinge Britten

Answer 13

wondered whether the movement benefitted more from the zealous enthusiasm of its admirers of the bitter persecution of its antagonists, as the latter sometimes generated more publicity

The Civil War added 2 million new believers to Spiritualism

Question 14

Henri Bergson, 1913 presidential address to SPR

Answer 14

‘It is the essence of the things of the mind not to lend themselves to measurement’

Question 15

Janet, Pierre, 1889

Answer 15

L’Automatisme psychologique:

• cited Phantasms of the Living (1886), Myers, Gurney, Podmore.
• methods mainly those of natural history
• historical sketch of spiritism, ending around 1882
  this was the moment when the spiritists retreated from their nearly scientific descriptions of the physical and moral conditions of the séance found in the earlier literature into arguments over esoteric doctrine

Question 16

La Revue Philosophique

Answer 16

Ribot = editor

import Psychology publication - dignified articles that took phenomenon of spiritism as matter of serious scientific inquiry. Laid important groundwork for research on mediumism

In absence of French organization comparable to the British SPR, La Revue gave discussion to mediumism and somnambulism in a context that allowed contributors to reinforce claims of its relevance to scientific study

Question 17

Pierre Janet, 1901

Answer 17

Allocution de M Pierre Janet, Bulletin de l’Institut Psychologique International, May 1901:

Institut Psychologique will find itself faced w dilemma. Either will neglect the truly scientific work w long-term payoffs in order to satisfy the publc and draw financial contributions, throwing itself into passionate and irresolvable issues and immediately losing its good reputation among scientists, or it will favour serious physiological, psychological or clinical studies in order to please men of science and incite the great displeasure of the public, quickly alienating its discouraged subscribers. It will be honourable but poor, and since there is significance only by virtue of fortune, it will be once again completely useless

Question 18

Richet, 1922

Answer 18

Traité de métapsychique:

• face of a young woman, extremely pretty, one could say beautiful, with a sort of golden band of a diadem covering her blond hair.” 77 The next day Richet found himself in the bedroom of Mme Noël, who had been taken ill, and thought he saw a vaporous form in the adjacent water closet. When he approached, the form seemed to dissolve, but Richet admitted in his account that “my memory concerning this instance is rather confused.”
• the other sciences do not suffer from the same plague… A single preoccupation, intense and anxiety ridden, invades my every thought - do everything to prevent being duped - I can think of nothing but this. One must always have in one’s mind the dominating, obsessive idea that the medium is trying to trick you

Janet found troubling Richet’s effort to establish the reality of a particular class of phenomena by giving innumerable examples, none of which was described in sufficient detail.

Question 19

Le Bon, 1911

Answer 19

Les Opinions et les croyances:

Taking the hypothetical case of the “very skeptical” scientist who decides to undertake an experimental study of phenomena produced by “occultists,” Le Bon traces the process by which rationality is overturned by belief. Entering into a circle of true believers, the only place where such phenomena are produced, the scientist finds himself waiting attentively in a darkened room for noises, moving furniture, luminescence, and materializations.
Lets guard down. Fraudulence goes unnoticed

Question 20

Flournoy, 1900

Answer 20

From India to the Planet Mars:

had an advantage over other approaches to psychical research in that it emphasized the affective dimensions of the medium’s representations as opposed to the objectivity that was so often at issue in the field (Brower)

left out consideration of his relationship to Smith’s past lives. Reluctance to take into account the intersubjective dimensions of the séances

Question 21

Nordmann, 1922

Answer 21

Les Mystères de l’ectoplasme, La Revue des Deux Mondes:

Between the illustrious and respectable scientist and the phenomenon there are others interposed: there is the medium and the other participants. It is not Crookes alone who produces, by experimentation, ectoplasm, it is this collective personality called “Crookes-the medium-the participants”

mediated quality of the experience produced insurmountable conditions of indeterminac

Question 22

Myers, letter to James

Answer 22

probably fewer than 20 workers in the world in this strange field w only James and Hodgson in America

Question 23

Oliver Lodge, 1916

Answer 23

Raymond:

pain almost negligible in view of the service which it is legitimate to hope may thus be rendered to mourners, if they can derive comfort by learning that communication across the gulf is possible

main object of a book like this is to help to bring
comfort to bereaved persons, especially to those who have
been bereaved by war

To base so momentous a conclusion as a scientific
demonstration of human survival on any single instance.
if it were not sustained on all sides by a great consensus
of similar evidence, would doubtless be unwise ; for
some other explanation of a merely isolated case would
have to be sought. But we are justified in examining
the evidence for any case of which all the details are
known, and in trying to set forth the truth of it as completely and fairly as we may.

6 editions in just over a month. Two editions a yr for the rest of the war.

Question 24

Flammarion to Abbé Berillo, priest who had been his childhood confessor

Answer 24

Through automatic writing, he had received messages from the spirits of Fénélon and Galileo, who had provided numerous cosmological insights

I study Spiritism as I study mathematics.”

Question 25

Ernest Chevreul, 1854

Answer 25

De la baguette divinatoire:

people of light-hearted temperament,
under the influence of that love of the marvelous so natural to
man, cross the boundaries of the known, the finite; and how, unwilling to
bring a considered assessment to bear on new opinions that have the allure
of the marvelous and supernatural, they precipitously accept what, examined
with a cold eye, would be phenomena of a kind amenable to human
explanation

Babinet and Chevreul shifted their attention from phenomenon to observer in this manner, they changed the terms of the debate. What had previously been a conflict between two different conceptions of objectivity became a conflict between objectivity and its opposite—a subjective, atavistic amour du merveilleux.

Question 26

Littré, 1856

Answer 26

“Des Tables parlantes et des esprits frappeurs,” La Revue des deux mondes:

Over time, civilization inevitably tended toward “a progressive
improvement,” he observed, but nevertheless remained subject to “perturbations
and disorders that slow, block and divert the overall movement.”
The vogue for tables tournantes, like witchcraft scares before it, exemplified
this type of dangerous “perturbation.

Question 27

The Saturday Review

Answer 27

1876:
argued that spirit manifestations could not be reduced to a ‘true’ ‘law of nature’ because they were ‘never performed in a straightforward open way, like any honest experiment. They are either done in the dark, or only before known believers and confederates, or within a specially prepared place; and even when they are done in the daylight, the operator is full of tricks to distract attention, and to produce mysterious bewilderment.

Question 28

Henry Dircks, eminent civil engineer and the co-inventor of the popular theatrical illusion, 1872

Answer 28

letters to The Times:

He contrasted science, which ‘always brings its miracles to the light of day’, which concerns reproducible and useful ‘wonders’, and which relates to ‘certain laws of nature’, with spiritualism, which not only ‘shrouds itself in dark chambers, has its special mediums, and shuns the light’, but has not led to any ‘practical results’, contains ‘an amazing amount of childish jugglery’, ‘relates to the supernatural, and is opposed to every known natural law’

Question 29

1877 public lecture on Spiritualism

Answer 29

Carpenter:

concluded by warning that when assessing the extraordinary phenomena of the séance, ‘we should trust rather to the evidence of our sense rather than to that of our senses’.

Carpenter thus reiterated his belief that common sense, achieved through proper mental education, was the ultimate court of appeal for sensory experience, which was ‘liable to many fallacies’

Question 30

Crookes,

Answer 30

‘Spiritualism Viewed by the Light of Modern Science’,
Quarterly Journal of Science, 1870:

the ‘pseudo-scientific spiritualist’, with his sloppy séance protocols and vague physical theories of manifestations, could not undertake ‘investigations which so completely baffle the ordinary observer’: rather, this task was for the ‘thorough scientific man’ who was trained in ‘care and accuracy’ and skilled in using the sensitive instruments needed to produce, under test conditions and independently of spiritual or other any theory, decisive evidence of the physical manifestations of the séance

Question 31

Carpenter, 1871

Answer 31

‘Spiritualism and its latest converts’, Quarterly Review:

Carpenter was clearly annoyed that Crookes had not deferred to the authority of those with greater experience of psychological disorders

The case of Crookes dramatically illustrated how ‘a man may have acquired a high reputation as an investigator in one department of science, and yet be utterly untrustworthy in regard to another’

Question 32

Crookes, 1872

Answer 32

Psychic Force and Modern Spiritualism

explosive defence of his scientific credibility and a fierce denial of Carpenter’s apparently disingenuous claim that he was a spiritualistic convert.

since the production of ‘broad, tangible, and easily demonstrable facts’ about Home’s alleged power turned on the ‘question of apparatus’ used to register such powers then it was precisely ‘one “who is trustworthy in an enquiry requiring technical knowledge”’ who could best undertake this task.

Question 33

Henry Sidgewick, first presidential address to SPR

Answer 33

1882:

• marvels of spiritualism might be just what was needed for the wasting sickness of the Anglican church
• the Society planned to pursue its investigations ‘with a single-minded desire to ascertain the facts, and without any foregone conclusion as to their nature’
• died of cancer 1900

Question 34

First issue of the Proceedings of the SPR

Answer 34

Entirely dealt with thought reading, apart from the obligatory Objects of the Society, and First Presidential Address

‘to examine without prejudice or prepossession and in a scientific spirit those faculties of man, real or supposed, which appear to be inexplicable on any generally recognised hypothesis’

Question 35

Mrs Sidgewick to Henry, 1886

Answer 35

I really think the spiritualists had better go. It seems to me that if there be truth in spirit their attitude and state of mind distinctly hinder its being found out… Their spirit is theological not scientific, and it is so difficult to run theology and science in harness together’.

Question 36

SPR, Census of Hallucinations

Answer 36

1889-94:

to strengthen statistical foundations of conclusions reached in Phantasms of the Living

Question 37

Podmore, 1897

Answer 37

Studies in Psychical Research

offered a number of natural explanations - fraud, coincidence, poor observation, weak memory - for allegedly supernatural occurrences. Seemed to distrust the observational skills of witnesses as much as the integrity of mediums

Question 38

Myers, 1900

Answer 38

Presidential Address:

To prove the preamble of all religions; to be able to say to theologian or to philosopher: Thus and thus we demonstrate that a spiritual world exists - a world of independent and abiding realities, not a mere epiphenomenon or transitory effect of the material world… this would indeed, in my view, be the weightiest service which any research could render to the deep disquiet of our time.’

Question 39

James on Myers, in Proceedings of the SPR

Answer 39

M’s theory wld figure always as a momentous event in the history of our Science

something akin to Darwin’s genius in Myers’s passion for collecting and classifying, ranking evd.

Question 40

McDougall, 1961

Answer 40

Body and Mind:

Organic processes are in some sense controlled by mind or by teleological principle of which our conscious intelligence is but one mode of manifestation among others.

Oppenheim: Had G and M lived to see it, they wld have delighted in knowledge that one of creators of social psych was building upon foundations furnished by the SPR

Question 41

Darwin, Origin of Species

Answer 41

1859

Question 42

Wallace, 1877

Answer 42

Article in Fraser’s:

(in reply to Carpenter article)

‘We persist in accepting the uniform and consistent testimony of our senses’.

Question 43

Wallace, 1870

Answer 43

the Limits of Natural Selection as Applied to Man:

Pointed out traits that seemed not to fit pattern of natural selection - e.g. man’s hairlessness and fact the brain of primitive man was so much larger than that of anthropoid apes

Not possible to explain certain intellectual capacities in terms of their utility in the natural competition to survive

Question 44

Wallace, 1889

Answer 44

Darwinism:

physical structure changes explained by natural selection. However, outside intervention of higher intelligence required to produce man as thinking, reasoning and ethical creature

Question 45

Balfour Steward, 1871

Answer 45

‘Mr Crookes on the Psychic Force’, Nature:

can’t reject strange testimony based on preconceived ideas, for by this menas we shld never arrive at anything new

Question 46

Crookes, letter to Lodge

Answer 46

said avoided mentioning Cook séances in public bc had been so troubled by hints and rumours.

Question 47

Lodge, 1933

Answer 47

My Philosophy

• argued ether was indispensable - despite fact that during 2nd and 3rd decades of 20th C, ether ceased to be a meaningful concept for modern physics.

Question 48

Lodge, 1919

Answer 48

address to the Royal Institution

Described self as a conservative physicist

Question 49

Fournier D’Albe

Answer 49

The Life of Sir William Crookes, 1923:

Spiritualism as a religion may legitimately be studied in a section of anthropology, but Spiritualism as a science does not exist. To be a Spiritualist, the scientist must surrender his wishes, his methods, his views into the hands of his ‘spirit friends’ on the ‘other side’. If he does that he may achieve a certain peace of mind, but his scientific work will be at an end

Question 50

Wallace, 1875

Answer 50

A Defence of Modern Spiritualism:

mentions Hudson’s photos as objective proof of existence of apparitions said to have occurred during spiritualist séances since the 1860s

Question 51

Freud, 1904

Answer 51

Psychopathology of Everyday Life:

“we must … at least touch upon the question of whether real roots of superstitions should be altogether denied, whether there are really no omens, prophetic dreams, telepathic experiences, manifestations of supernatural forces and the like”

nervous persons afflicted with compulsive thinking … show very plainly that superstition originates from repressed hostile and cruel impulses … and he who has frequently wished evil to others, but because of a good bringing-up has repressed the same into the unconscious, will be particularly apt to expect punishment for such unconscious evil in the form of misfortune threatening him from without

Question 52

Freud, 1933

Answer 52

Dreams and the Occultism:

reported all the peculiar cases of possible telepathy that he had collected and mentioned over the years.

After presenting these cases, he stated, “I must confess that I have a feeling that here too the scale weights in favor of thought-transference”

Question 53

Freud, 1922

Answer 53

Dreams and Telepathy:

Called for more research into telepathy:

“I would like to induce you to collect similar cases” (p. 66). As of today, however, many psychoanalysts remain reticent to devote their research to such topics

Question 54

Münsterberg, 1910

Answer 54

Metropolitan magazine:

• Claimed to have exposed Palladino once and for all
• Neither the medium nor Mr. Carrington had the slightest idea that a man was lying flat on the floor and had succeeded in slipping noiselessly like a snail below the curtain into the cabinet. I had told him that I expected wires stretched out from her body and he looked out for them. What a surprise when he saw that she had simply freed her foot from her shoe and with an athletic backward movement of the leg was reaching out and fishing with her toes for the guitar and the table in the cabinet!
• therefore: ‘Her greatest wonders are absolutely nothing but fraud and humbug; this is no longer a theory but a proven fact’
• ‘unconscious’ mediumistic trickery

Question 55

James, letter to Flournoy 1910

Answer 55

Eusapia’s type of performance is detestable – if it be not fraud simulating reality, it is reality simulating fraud!’

Question 56

Rouby, Bien-Boà et Charles Richet, 1907

Answer 56

with “thighs worthy of the chisel of Praxiteles,” appeared and performed barebreasted “warrior dances” for the audience in attendance. In other words, Rouby concluded, “they weren’t bored at the Villa Carmen.”

Rouby suggested that the deceptions engineered by Marthe had a particular effect on the illustrious Richet, one that eroded his better judgment and completely compromised his authority on the subject of spirits

Question 57

SPR mission, phantasms of the living 1886

Answer 57

does yet stand next in order among the new adventures on which Science must needs set forth, if her methods and her temper are to guide and control the widening curiosity, the expanding capacities of men.

its general plea is such as he has often noted
in the history of science before. “ To approach these various problems
without prejudice or prepossession of any kind, and in the same spirit
of exact and unimpassioned inquiry which has enabled Science to
solve so many problems, once not less obscure nor less hotly debated

sometimes [we are told] that no respectable man of science would
condescend to meddle with such a reeking mass of fraud and hysteria.
Sometimes we are pitied as laborious triflers who prove some infinitely
small matter with mighty trouble and pains

show as clearly as we can at what points our
inquiries touch the recent results of science

Biology, the science which on the whole approaches
the closest to our own inquiries. Biology has, during the last half-
century, made an advance which, measured by the hold exercised on
the mass of cultivated minds, has perhaps had no parallel since the
forward stride of astronomy and physics in the days of Newton

glance at the text-books of the last generation, in physical or mental
science — Whewell’s History of the Inductive Sciences, or Mill’s
Logic, — as compared, for instance, with the works of their
immediate successor, Mr. Herbert Spencer, shows something which is
not so much progress as revolution

Biology, which even at the date of Whewell’s
book could barely make good its claim to be regarded as a
coherent science at all, has now acquired a co-ordinating and
continuous principle of unity which renders it in some respects
the best type of a true science which we possess

in the view of
some ardent physiologists, it is becoming more and more probable
that we are in fact physiological automata ; that our consciousness
is a mere superadded phenomenon — a mere concomitant of some
special intensity of cerebral action

this view, as it would seem, depends in a great part upon
something which corresponds in the mental field to a familiar optical
illusion. When we see half of some body strongly illuminated, and
half of it feebly illuminated, it is hard to believe that the brilliant
moiety is not the larger of the two.

the increased
definiteness of our conception of the physical side of our mental
operations which seems to increase its relative importance

Wundt
stands, of course, among the foremost of those who have treated
human thought and sensation as definite and measurable things

nevertheless, Wundt believes himself
able to assert that there is within us a residue — an all-important
residue — of psychical action which is incommensurable with physiological law

my illustration
shows at any rate that the development of physiology is tending not
always to make the old psychical problems seem meaningless or
sterile, but rather to give them actuality and urgency

in our endeavours to establish and to elucidate telepathy,
we look primarily for aid to the most recent group of physiological
inquirers, to the psycho-physicists whose special work — as yet in its
infancy — has only in our own day been rendered possible by the
increased accuracy and grasp of experimental methods in the sciences
which deal with Life.

The list of Corresponding Members of our Society will serve to
show that this confidence on our part is not wholly unfounded

connection of anthropology with psychical research

as the creeds
and customs of savage races become better known, the part played
by sorcery, divination, apparitions becomes increasingly predominant.

Passing on from Anthropology to history in its wider accepta-
tion, we find these psycho-physical problems perpetually recurring, and
forming a disturbing element in any theory of social or religious
evolution. The contagious enthusiasms of the Middle Ages

committee of the
Society for Psychical Research has investigated the claim of the so-
called “ Theosophy,” of which Madame Blavatsky was the prophetess,
to be an incipient world-religion, corroborated by miraculous, or at
least supernormal, phenomena, — and has arrived at the conclusion
that it is merely a rechauffe of ancient philosophies, decked in novel
language, and supported by ingenious fraud. Had this fraud not been
detected and exposed, and had the system of belief supported thereon
thriven and spread, we should have witnessed what the sceptic might
have cited as a typical case of the origin of religions

would be a mere abuse of language to call
Swedenborg mad.

His position must be decided by a much more
difficult analogy. For before we can even begin to criticise his
celestial visions we must be able in some degree to judge of his visions
of things terrestrial ; we must face, that is to say, the whole problem
of so-called clairvoyance

We shrank from taking advantage of men’s hopes or fears, from represent-
ing ourselves as bent on rescuing them from the materialism which
forms so large a factor in modern thought, or from the pessimism
which dogs its steps with unceasing persistency.

held it to be
incumbent on us, in an especial degree, to maintain a neutral and
expectant attitude, and to conduct our inquiries in the “ dry light” of
a dispassionate search for truth.

This book, as will be seen, does
not attempt to deal with the most exciting and popular topics which
are included in our Society’s general scheme

We hold that we have
proved by direct experiment, and corroborated by the narratives
contained in this book, the possibility of communications between
two minds, inexplicable by any recognised physical law

In another case, the choice lay between 4 things, but these were
not suits, but simple colours — red, blue, green, and yellow. The
percipient throughout was Mr. A. J. Shilton, of 40, Paradise Street,
Birmingham ; the agent (except in one small group, when Professor
Poynting, of Mason College, acted) was Mr. G. T Cashmore,
of Albert Poad, Handsworth. Out of 505 trials, 261 were successes.
The probability here afforded of a cause other than chance is con- siderably more than a trillion trillions to 1.

Question 58

Richard Hodgson, 1895

Answer 58

Account of Personal Investigations in India:

- Says he's sympathetic
- Not qualified in straightforward way to do this investigation
- Relatively well-educated
- Blavatsky = fraud
- Hodgson wants to divide ppl into frauds or dupes. Simplistic
- Ties in logical knots. Various ppl - by this point must have known they were tricking ppl. Debunking simplistic. Historicise debunking rying to set up experimental conditions. 
- Saying undoubtedly but at other times saying make up own time, don't have time to  go into details - minutiae 'It is needless for me to enter into all the minutiae of so complicated an investigation. It would in truth be impossible either to reproduce all the palterings and equivocations in the evidence offered to me, or to describe with any approach to adequacy how my personal impressions of many of the witnesses deepened my conviction of the dishonesty woven throughout their testimony. What follows, however, will, I think, be more than enough to convince any impartial inquirer of the justice of the conclusion which I have reached.' 
- Says presenting evd but actually presenting own reliability as a witness - Doesn't take account of self-deception

Material details of situations. All about specifics - laying out how room set up. What objects in, what out.

For someone like Hodgson - all about asserting own authority. Enemies wrong - stupid or evil.

don’t think way he is constructing science is particularly detailed.
A lot is about writing, fake letters.Not much about scientific method. He just says sci is due caution

nothing in report to appeal to scientific method

Not much about scientific method. He just says sci is due caution