THE SOCIETIES FOR PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

 PSYCHIC phenomena finally excited such a world-wide interest that they compelled the attention of scientific men. The phenomena might possibly have remained unnoticed much longer, had it not been for their occurrence in respectable families, sometimes to men and women of intelligence and training. But interest even among intelligent people continued for some time without being strong enough to organize any effort to apply scientific methods to an investigation of the facts. At last, however, a few men concluded that it was the scandal of science that the allegations of centuries had not been taken up and investigated. The persistence of the phenomena, and of the claims for the supernormal, was a perpetual challenge to science; at last this challenge was accepted.

 John Addington Symonds states in his letters, with a half-sneer at the folly of it, that Professor Sidgwick of Cambridge University was investigating mediums as early as 1867 with the hope of finding evidence of survival after death. This date was fifteen years before the organization of the Society for Psychical Research.

 The experiences of the Reverend W. Stainton Moses were among the chief incentives to the formation of the society. These experiences were confirmed by other sporadic, remarkable incidents among intelligent people, such as Lord Brougham, Cotter Morison, Andrew Lang, and Sir William Crookes. The Reverend Stainton Moses had been educated at Oxford University and was for a long time a clergyman of the Church of England; but during his intercourse with some skeptical members of his own congregation he was persuaded by them to investigate spiritualism'. He found nothing at first; but he finally developed automatic writing himself, and became convinced by it that the claims of the spiritualist were correct. His unquestioned integrity left intelligent people no choice but to investigate the matter. He was personally known to Professor Sidgwick, Mr. Myers, Edmund Gurney, and others of the same standing. With his case and others challenging science, the men just named organized, in 1882, the English Society for Psychical Research, and obtained the cooperation of other prominent men. Prof. (now Sir) William F. Barrett, however, was probably the chief instigator in the matter. He had independently and individually been investigating the phenomena, especially those of mind-reading, or telepathy, for years, and had brought the matter to the attention of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which would have nothing to do with it. He continued to urge the subject among scientific men, however, until he saw the fruit of his interest and work in the organization of the Society. He was himself one of the vice-presidents in the organization, Professor Henry Sidgwick being the president. Professor Balfour Stewart was also one of the vice­presidents. With them were associated Arthur James Balfour, M. P., Richard Hutton, and the Honorable Roden Noel. The council of the Society was composed of Frederick W. H. Myers, Edmund Gurney, Frank Podmore, Charles C. Massey, and others not so well-known in America. These names guaranteed a scientific treatment of the subject.

 Before this time the Philosophic Society had investigated the phenomena and published a favorable report on them; but its report had not been received by the scientific world with the respect it deserved. The present Society, however, had more than a temporary interest in the subject and was determined to pursue the investigation until some light was thrown upon the phenomena. 'Sir William F. Barrett read the first paper on Thought Reading at the first meeting of the Society, and Professor Sidgwick read his presidential address. A draft of the purposes of the Society was published as a circular; the objects of study included phenomena purporting to represent the influence of "one mind on another apart from any generally recognized mode of perception" (afterward called telepathy), hypnotism, clairvoyance, the experiments of Reichenbach, apparitions, haunted houses, the physical phenomena.of spiritualism, and the collection of existing materials bearing on the history of these subjects. This was an extensive program, but it has been carried on now for more than thirty-five years. The publications of the Society have consisted of a Journal issued monthly and a volume of "Proceedings" issued annually, often in parts distributed through the year.

 In 1884, two years after the organization of the English Society, an American Society was formed, with Mr. N. D. C. Hodges as secretary. Professor Simon Newcomb was its first president. Its vice-presidents were Professor, now President, G. Stanley Hall of Clark University, Professor George S. Fullerton of the University of Pennsylvania, Professor Edward C. Pickering of the Harvard College Observatory, Dr. Henry P. Bowditch of the Harvard Medical School, and Dr. Charles S. Minot of the Harvard Medical School.

 At the sixth meeting of the Society, on January 11, 1887, Dr. Richard Hodgson of London, England, was elected secretary. The Society had on its membership list a large number of scientific men. It issued annual reports which, in the course of five years, made a volume. But by this time membership fell off and interest declined, perhaps because the public did not find the expected progress made. The American Society was therefore abandoned and reorganized as an American branch of the English Society. Dr. Richard Hodgson was continued as its Secretary and remained in that office until his death in 1905

 A year before the death of Dr. Hodgson, the present author, having resigned his position in Columbia University to recover his health, resolved to organize an independent American Society, with the object of finally merging the American branch with it when the financial support of the work justified it. It was determined not to compete in any way with either the English Society or its American branch. The plan was to make Dr. Hodgson its secretary, as he had expressed his willingness to merge the branch with the new American Society. To effect this merger, effort was concentrated on raising the sum of $25,000 as a fund to guarantee preliminary organization. Just as this money was secured, Dr. Hodgson died. The present author refused to organize the new society on his own responsibility alone, conditioning it on either the cooperation of the English body or the dissolution of the American branch. The latter alternative was adopted by the English Society and the new American Society was organized with Dr. James, H. Hyslop as its Secretary. This was in May, 1906. Its publications did not begin until January, 1907.

 There are organizations of some sort in both France and Italy under the auspices of scientific men, but their constitutions are not known to the present author. The Psychological Institute in Paris was founded to include psychical research in its field of inquiry.

 These societies are intended to give scientific character and respectability to the investigation of unusual phenomena bearing on the problems of mind and its survival of bodily death. The prejudice against spiritualism was so strong at the outset that its objects had either to be disguised or ignored. Telepathy, dousing, hypnotism and various phenomena which present no superficial evidence of the intervention of discarnate spirits received the first attention. After the supernormal in some form had been proved, the credentials of spiritualism came under notice. In the course of the work, most of the leading members who have conducted personal investigations have become convinced that man survives bodily death; but it has been regarded as not always good policy to avow the conviction with any missionary zeal. Hence conviction on the point appears to the public to be less strong than it actually is. There are enough questions still unanswered to suggest caution on the subject, especially on aspects of it as yet wholly uninvestigated. But the existence of supernormal phenomena has been so well established by the work of the several groups of investigators that men are fast coming to acknowledge that the subject can no longer be evaded or ridiculed as it was at the outset. Psychic research may now be regarded as having proved its right to a place among the investigations of science.

 As its first work, the Society undertook experiments on telepathy or thought transference with some success. But some doubt was ultimately cast on two series of the experiments, those with the McCreery sisters and those between a Mr. Blackburn and a Mr. Smith. The McCreery sisters confessed that they had used signals in certain experiments, a circumstance which gave the skeptic opportunity to decry the whole work. But the experimenters soon showed that they had attached no value to any experiments save those in which signalling was impossible. The girls insisted also that they had not used a code in those instances which had seemed most impressive. In the other case, as Mr. Blackburn was proved to be a liar or at least wholly untrustworthy as a witness, even in his own confession of fraud, his testimony even in the latter case could not be accepted at its face value. There were additional and better results on which to base the claims of telepathy; something of the kind seems certainly to be a tenable hypothesis. It is true that since its origin, the meaning of the term has been enlarged to cover many and various processes; consequently all the claims made regarding it have been viewed with suspicion.

 Telepathy, in its original meaning, was limited to the transference of present states of consciousness; but, for the sake of combatting the evidence for the existence of discarnate spirits, the definition was extended to include subconscious acquisition of memories from others, by a selective process on the part of the person who received the thoughts thus transmitted. No scientific evidence for this theory has been advanced, though there are coincidences which might well suggest it.

 This, however, is not the place for discussing in detail the meaning of telepathy. Strictly speaking, the term denotes the transmission of thought from one mind to another independently of the recognized channels of sense, or, as the present writer prefers to define it, in order not to suggest any known process, telepathy is a coincidence between the thoughts of two minds, which cannot be explained by chance or normal sense-perception. The facts which it includes are not evidence of the existence of discarnate spirits. This definition leaves undetermined the nature of the process and the directness of transmission.

 Not all of these qualifications were made in the first stages of the investigation; but they were usually implied. It was the object of the Society to ascertain whether there were any supernormal phenomena that would not excite the antagonism which spiritualists always evoked by their claims. It was apparent that the proof of anything like telepathy would involve the possibility of communications with the dead, given the actual survival of personal consciousness. This method of approach made the hypothesis appear less objectionable to the scientific skeptic.

In the course of several years of investigation, two types of phenomena, with perhaps a third, made something like telepathy seem plausible. These were spontaneous coincidences between two persons' thoughts and experimental coincidences, in which the conditions of the result could be regulated and the phenomena repeated more or less at will. The third type consisted of apparitions; since these naturally suggested the agency of spirits, believers in telepathy were interested in attempting to prove the adequacy of that process as an explanation.

 I shall give a few illustrations of the phenomena. I adduce them, not as a scientific proof of thought transference, but only as illustrations of the kind of cases which were for many years collected, and which, whatever the explanation, very frequently occur.

 In "Phantasms of the Living," the authors record the following incident. It is partly experimental and partly spontaneous. A gentleman willed that a lady who lived at some distance from him should leave the part of that house in which she was at the time, should go to her bedroom, and should remove a portrait from her dressing-table. When the gentleman next saw her, she told him that, at the time in question, she had felt strongly impelled to go up to her room and remove something from her dressing­table. She did remove an article, though it was not the portrait. In this case, the man's act was experimental; the lady's act, since she did not know that the experiment was being made, was spontaneous.

 The following, in the form of a dream by the percipient, is spontaneous on both sides:

 "I dreamt I was looking out of a window, when I saw father driving a Spids sledge, followed in another by my brother. They had to pass a cross­roads, on which another traveller was driving very fast, also in a sledge with one horse. Father seemed to drive on without observing the other fellow, who would without fail have driven over father if he had not made his horse rear, so that I saw my father drive under the hoofs of the horse. Every moment I expected the horse to fall down and crush him. I called out 'Father! Father!' and woke in great fright. The next morning my father and brother returned. I said to him, 'I am so glad to see you arrive quite safely, as I had such a dreadful dream about you last night.' My brother said, 'You could not have been in greater fright about him than I was,' and then related to me what had happened, which tallied exactly with my dream. My brother in his fright, when he saw the feet of the horse over father's head, called out, 'Oh, father, father!'"

 Thousands of such coincidences have occurred, many of them under conditions and with confirmation that seem to prove the reality of telepathy. It is difficult to believe that they are due to chance.

 But I am not concerned to prove anything by these incidents, which are only illustrations of what, if performed under proper conditions, would be regarded as proof of the supernormal transfer of mental states or pictures. The Society carried on experiments for a long time and in large numbers, besides recording as evidence spontaneous incidents as good as or better than that quoted. It felt justified in maintaining, despite the objections of a critical scientific world, that the existence of telepathy has been proved.

 Of course, part of the difficulty in carrying conviction arose from the lack of an exact definition of telepathy or thought transference. If the Society had held to a negative conception of the term, assuming neither its value as an explanation nor the directness of transfer between the two minds, it might have aroused less criticism. But it and the public used the term as if it explained certain occurrences, and as if it necessarily implied direct transmission. We have no evidence to justify these conclusions; we proved only the existence of certain coincidences not due to chance nor to normal sense-perception, and not evidence of the discarnate. The controversy with the spiritualists, however, gave the term in relation to spiritistic theories a meaning that it should never have had.

 Two other types of occurrence, however, made it necessary to ask whether spiritual beings exist: namely, apparitions and mediumistic phenomena. The Society then began to investigate phantasms or apparitions; the two volumes published on that subject, together with the volume entitled "A Census of Hallucinations," I announced the unanimous conclusion of the committee that these apparitions were not due to chance. The committee regarded this conclusion as proved, regardless of the explanation, which many assumed to be telepathy. As the census was limited to phantasms of the living or of persons at the moment of death, the hypothesis had its plausibility. Apparitions of the dead were not considered in this report.

 Mediumistic phenomena strengthened the case of the spiritualists. Soon after the announcement of the conclusions regarding telepathy and apparitions, the Society discovered Mrs. Piper, through Professor William James, who had reported on her phenomena as early as in 1885. In 1887, Dr. Richard Hodgson became acquainted with the case; in the course of eighteen years of work with Mrs. Piper he, together with some other members of the Society, became convinced of the spiritistic theory. After Mrs. Piper, Mrs. Verrall, Mrs. Holland and others exhibited the same type of phenomena. The American Society has investigated Mrs. Smead, Mrs. Quentin, Mrs. Chenoweth and a few others. There can be no doubt, whatever the explanation, that supernormal information has been obtained through them.

 In the meantime other fields of inquiry were opened. The original Society unsuccessfully tried to repeat the experiments of Reichenbach. Sir William Barrett spent much time in investigating dousing, and issued two reports, in which he announced the conclusion that the finding of water by the divining-rod is possible. Hypnotic phenomena were to some extent investigated, particularly with a view to inducing conditions for proving telepathy; some remarkable experiments were performed by Edmund Gurney. In the course of thirty years of work, the Society collected an immense amount of data, which leaves the scientist no excuse for ignoring the immemorial claims of a supernormal element in human experience.

 The American Society has been handicapped in its work by the need of funds and a laboratory for scientific work, and of cooperators in the field. It has succeeded in raising an endowment of $160,000 for its work, but the income from this, together with membership fees, guarantees only its publications and the running expenses of its office. It has made no experiments in telepathy, and has had only limited opportunity to investigate spontaneous phenomena. But it has managed to do some work in the mediumistic field, and maintains its "journal" and "Proceedings" with such material as it can secure from personal reports and the experiments with a few psychics. It has not yet exercised any such influence over the public as has the English Society. Academic and scientific support, probably on account of the avowed spiritistic sympathies of its secretary, has been weak.