PROFESSOR BERGSON AND THE SOCIETY FOR PSYCHICAL RESEARCH
When, some months since, M. Bergson delivered his inaugural address as President of the Society for Psychical Research, the circumstance was considered of enough importance to justify many cablegrams in the American papers, and much editorial comment. Had the address not been in French, it probably would have been reproduced here. Yet the event was not exceptional enough for that feature to explain the attention of the press. Men to be named in the same breath with Professor Bergson, for instance Professor William James and Mr. Arthur Balfour, had already been presidents of the Society. Therefore the importance attached to M. Bergson's acceptance of the presidency may indicate not merely an interest in his views of the subjects attacked by the Society, but a growing interest in the subjects themselves—perhaps an interest that may lead such of our readers as have not already studied them, to welcome some account of both. The information is doubly worth giving, as there is such a wide belief that the Society is but a group of cranks, while in fact it has always included some of the best minds of the age. This account, however, despite the disproportionate space we venture to allot to it, can give but a pitifully inadequate idea of the Society's work, and has been prepared mainly on the chance that it may lead a few readers to seek adequate knowledge elsewhere.
There is also a better reason for attention to the subject. No argument is needed to convince thinking people that this age stands in peculiar need of a revival, from some source, of that interest in the mysteries surrounding our little experience, without which no age has been really great.
The work hardly seemed worth doing at all unless on the present scale. If any reader begrudges the space, we can pretty safely promise that the subject will not call for so large a proportion in future [Editor].
In 1882 a group of friends who had been meeting occasionally at Cambridge for the discussion of mysterious phenomena, formed the Society for Psychical Research, and took rooms in London. The best known of the early members were Professor (now Sir William) Barrett, Professor Henry Sidgwick, Frederick W. H. Myers, Fellow of Cambridge, Arthur J. Balfour, Richard Holt Hutton (Editor of The Spectator); Professor Balfour Stewart, Hensleigh Wedgwood, Lord Houghton and Archbishop Trench. They were soon joined by, among others, Professor (now Sir William) Crookes, Alfred Russel Wallace, Lord Raleigh, Ruskin, Tennyson, William James, Edmund Gurney, Richard Hodgson, Frank Podmore, Professor (now Sir Oliver) Lodge, and Professor Schiller.
The Society's Proceedings now fill twenty-six octavo volumes, and it has also published a Journal for its members which has reached fifteen large twelvemo volumes.
All were originally published in "parts," of which, in all but two or three cases, several composed a volume. Any portion of the material can be obtained from the Society's American agents, the W. B. Clarke Co. of Boston.
The topic first reported on by the society was thought-transference. Experiments were made with cards, words, pictures and all sorts of objects. The Society published scores, possibly hundreds, of pairs of drawings, one of each pair having been made by a person not seeing the original, who had copied it closely enough to be recognized, in consequence of willing to copy it, and being similarly willed by another person drawing or gazing at it. Some of the duplicates would have been very fair performances even if the originals had been in sight.
The conviction before existing that all sorts of impressions could be conveyed at the will of a hypnotist, was abundantly confirmed, and a strong conviction was aroused in some minds, and it seems to be increasing, that all transference of thought without visible means has a hypnotic element, and is much more frequent than yet generally recognized.