OUR DEBT TO PSYCHICAL RESEARCH
I
Early in the history of the Society for Psychical Research, Von Helmholtz speaking to Professor Barrett, of telepathy, said, “Neither the testimony of all the Fellows of the Royal Society, nor even the evidence of my own senses, could lead me to believe in the transmission of thought from one person to another independently of the recognized channels of sensation. It is clearly impossible.” Many have followed the example of the psychologist Wundt, in holding that “no man of science, truly independent and without parti pris, could be interested in occult phenomena.” Stranger still, as reported by William James, “An illustrious biologist told me one day that even if telepathy were proved to be true, the savants ought to band together to suppress and conceal it, because such facts would upset the uniformity of nature, and all sorts of other things without which the scientists cannot carry on their pursuits.” Dogmatic skepticism, veiled or overt contempt, and an unreasoning aversion—such was the attitude of the scientific world in general toward the men who, in the early eighties of last century, first seriously grappled with the problems of the weird and the uncanny; while the great majority of educated laymen, almost equally under the spell of the preponderating materialism of the age, heartily endorsed the verdict of the scientists.
Things have not much changed in the years that have passed. It is true that there have been numerous accessions to the ranks of the “psychical researchers” from the scientific world itself. Many men of science—some among them even eminent men of science—have scandalized their fellows by adopting Newton’s ridiculous point of view—“To myself I seem to have been as a child playing on the seashore, while the immense ocean of Truth lay unexplored before me”—and by deeming psychical research not unworthy their personal participation. Crookes, Lodge, James, Richet, Flammarion, Flournoy, Bergson, Lombroso, Morselli, are a few names that instantly flash into mind. And from some great thinkers of non-scientific training, but justly esteemed for their intellectual powers, has come an endorsement of Gladstone’s appreciation: “Psychical research is the most important work which is being done in the world—by far the most important.” But scientists and laymen, so far as concerns the great mass, are still over-eager to deride and belittle the delvers into the occult—who, so their critics say, have been laboring all these years to no purpose whatever, and whose labors, no matter how long continued, can have only futile or mischievous results.
This widespread conviction of the futility of psychical research is evinced in many ways. It is seen in the jesting or scornful comments of writers in the periodical press; it is continually cropping out in the half-contemptuous, half-pitying smile that greets any sympathetic reference to “ghosts” or “telepathy”; it manifests in petulant outbursts from “orthodox” scientists, akin to the outburst of Von Helmholtz, as when our genial friend, the excellent Professor Münsterberg, heatedly proclaims, “As to spirit communications, there are none, and there never will be any.” Perhaps most striking of all is the almost complete indifference with which the published reports of the various psychical research organizations now in existence are regarded by instructors and students alike in many, if not all, institutions for higher education. In one great American university, to the writer’s personal knowledge, the many volumes of the Proceedings and Journal of the English Society for Psychical Research, and of the younger American Society for Psychical Research, are seldom removed from the library shelves except to be dusted. Truth-seekers in this university, it would seem, have no time to waste on the “bosh,” “rot,” and “rubbish” which these silly publications contain.
Now, it may be true—though a number of really learned men believe otherwise—that those engaged in psychical research have not as yet demonstrated scientifically either telepathy or survival; and it may be true that they have set themselves a hopeless task in endeavoring to establish communication between this world and the next. But it decidedly is not true that their investigations have been entirely fruitless. On the contrary, it is safe to say that no other scientific movement ever set on foot has, in the same length of time, contributed so much toward the advancement of knowledge as has psychical research.
Few will dispute that psychology today is the most conspicuous and most promising of the “recognized” sciences. Its marvellous growth during the past quarter of a century is quite generally attributed to the increasing application of the laboratory methods devised by Wundt and his pupils. In reality a large part of the credit—perhaps the larger part—must be given to those “dabblers in the occult,” who, like Sidgwick, Myers, and Gurney, in England, and Janet and Richet in France, thought it not beneath their dignity to study table-tipping, alleged telepathy, and the disputed phenomena of the hypnotic trance. To them, incontrovertibly, we owe the foundation-laying of abnormal psychology, with its manifold practical implications to the physician, the criminologist, and the educator; to them, as will hereinafter be shown, we chiefly owe the opening up of vistas of progress undreamed in the days before scientific psychical research began.
The men who enrolled under Sidgwick in 1882 to form the English Society for Psychical Research, were not the fanatical, credulous “ghost-hunters” they are commonly supposed to have been. Their first task, they saw clearly, was to determine whether the alleged facts adduced in support of the soul doctrine were really facts; and, if facts, whether they were not susceptible of adequate explanation on a wholly naturalistic basis. In the words of Frank Podmore, one of the earliest and most active members of the Society (The Naturalization of the Supernatural, p. 2):
The title which I have chosen for the present book, The Naturalization of the Supernatural, describes in popular language the object aimed at. The facts which the Society proposed to investigate stood, and some still stand, as aliens, outside the realm of organized knowledge. It proposed to examine their claim to be admitted within the pale. And it is important to recognize that whether we found ourselves able to accept the credentials of these postulants for recognition, or whether we felt ourselves compelled to reject them as undesirables, the aim which the Society set before itself would equally be fulfilled. In undertaking the inquiry we did not assume to express any opinion beforehand on the value of the evidence to be examined. Whatever the present bias of individual members toward belief or disbelief, it will not, I think, be charged against us, by any one who dispassionately studies the results ... that any private prepossessions were allowed to pervert the methods of the inquiry. To ascertain the facts of the case, at whatever cost to established opinions and prejudices, has been the consistent aim of the Society and its workers.
In this spirit the Society for Psychical Research attacked the whole strange medley of occult phenomena, from hypnotism to premonitions and hauntings. To most readers of these pages it may seem almost incredible that so short a time ago hypnotism was still outside the pale of science, and was pretty generally regarded as imaginary or supernatural, according to one’s temperament and training. But, prior to the founding of the Society for Psychical Research, only a few inquirers of established reputation—such as Esdaile, Braid, Liébeault, and Charcot—had deemed it a proper and desirable subject of investigation; the scientific brotherhood would have none of it, and frowned on its exponents as self-deluded simpletons or impudent charlatans. As late as 1875 a writer in the Grand Dictionnaire Encyclopédique des Sciences Medicales, summing up in a few words all that was to be said about hypnotism, brushed it aside as non-existent. It was because they questioned dogmatic utterances like this, and because they hoped through hypnotism to gain fresh light on the problem of the soul, that the members of the English Society for Psychical Research listed the study of hypnotism among their principal activities.