47th Conference of the Society for Psychical Research: Abstracts

Reviewed by: The Invention of Telepathy, 1870–1901 Pamela Thurschwell (bio) The Invention of Telepathy, 1870–1901, by Roger Luckhurst; pp. vi + 324. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002, £40.00, $49.95. The word "telepathy" was coined in an 1882 article in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research by the classical scholar, psychical researcher, and largely forgotten founder of modern psychology, F. W. H. Myers. One of the many pleasures of The Invention of Telepathy is its plethora of entertaining anecdotes about an absorbing cast of characters. When Myers died, after a life spent attending séances and conducting experiments in thought transference, it was hardly surprising that he would return from the dead via numerous trance mediums and automatic scripts. Perhaps more unexpected was his post- death announcement, through the famous Boston psychic Mrs. Piper, that he was planning on forming "a society on this side of life for the further pursuance of the... Psychical work" (254). One wonders what that Society's goal would be—proof of the continued existence of the living? Recent work on the period has seen a growing interest in the Victorians' fascination with psychical research and the occult. Roger Luckhurst's engrossing study both elucidates the reasons for that interest and puts it into a much wider context. By doing a Foucauldian archaeology of one modern word, Luckhurst uncovers the prehistory of the term, the cultural conditions that allowed this concept to become so popular in such a short time, and some of the pathways telepathy has taken since its inception. He does so in a scholarly study that should be as valuable to historians of science as to literary critics. His larger claim, substantiated by his readings, is that telepathy can provide a wholly new take on the culture of fin-de-siècle England. Luckhurst takes issue with the recent ascendancy of Degeneration as the critical term of choice with which to characterize the 1890s. Myers, for instance, saw telepathy as a hopeful sign for mankind. He viewed telepathy as an evolutionarily ascendant sense, one that was bringing humanity closer to heavenly connections to God; prayer could be seen as the ultimate telepathic experience. His evolutionary optimism provides one way of thinking very differently about the zeitgeist of the fin de siècle. Telepathy (or "thought transference," as it was most commonly known before the word was coined), began its life as a "mix of popular therapy, performances of music- hall thought-readers and a parlour game carried to somewhat obsessive lengths" (61). But through its investigation by the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), telepathy soon became the respectable "scientific" relation to spiritualism. Luckhurst is especially good on telepathy's uneasy place within the institutions of science that were forming at the time. He rightly cautions against using a term such as "pseudo-science" to describe psychical research because it assumes an indisputable, noncontingent science in contrast to a false one, whereas the boundaries of science were then (as they arguably are now) very much in flux. The prestige and credibility of an organization such as the SPR—which [End Page 503] included many of the sharpest minds of the day—cannot be automatically assumed, but neither can psychical research simply be dismissed as a "fringe" interest. As the SPR began to distance itself from the spiritualists who had originally been its allies, telepathy became the privileged, potentially scientifically verifiable form of the supernatural; a psychic force that was seen as parallel to, if not continuous with, other kinds of recently investigated yet inexplicable natural forces such as electricity and the elusive "ether." The rise of telepathy in the annals of the SPR is largely due to two con tricks: one perpetrated by the Creery sisters—daughters of a middle-class, respectable clergyman—whose surprising ability to guess cards correctly provided the initial evidence for a postulation of the existence of thought transference; the other carried out by two working-class Brighton men who went through numerous experiments transmitting thoughts under the auspices of SPR stalwart Edmund Gurney. Although the two case studies that carried telepathy into the realm of the nearly proven for the SPR...

There has been a welcome emphasis in the last decade on the importance of mysticism in the work of Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) from several scholars, including Dana Sawyer, Jeffrey Kripal and K.S. Gill. Less attention has been paid to Huxley’s interest in the paranormal and his contacts with the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). While Huxley did not join the SPR until 1956, he closely followed its Journal and Proceedings, and wrote a number of essays on the subject of psychical research. I examine his treatment of spiritualism in the play The World of Light (1931) and in the novel Time Must Have a Stop (1944). In his experiments with mescaline and LSD, Huxley also drew on key thinkers from psychical research, namely Henri Bergson, C.D. Broad and William James. In this article, I examine Huxley’s links with the SPR and the role of psychical research in his work.

This chapter examines an episode in late 19th-century intellectual history when the relationship between science and religion was being transformed by secularisation. During this episode, both the authority and purview of science and religion were contested, and intellectuals in newer fields like psychology actively engaged in what we might call boundary work. In 1884, Williams James founded an American branch of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), a British organisation that explored the supernatural by employing ostensibly scientific methods. SPR members on both sides of the Atlantic believed that science could yield insights about the unseen world. Influenced by the earlier movement known as Spiritualism, psychical researchers brought scientific methodologies to bear upon telepathy, divination, and other psychic phenomena. Their goal was to communicate with the dead and to provide evidence of a supernatural world. The writer Henry James was sceptical of his brother William's investigations, yet he studied the SPR's 'copious psychical record of cases of apparitions' to write his most famous ghost story, The Turn of the Screw (1898). The story of the James brothers and the SPR reveals a surprising convergence of religion and science at a time when they were increasingly understood to be antagonistic or incompatible worldviews.

Reviewed by: William James: Psychical Research and the Challenge of Modernity by Krister Dylan Knapp Linda Simon, Emerita Krister Dylan Knapp. William James: Psychical Research and the Challenge of Modernity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. xi + 385 pp. Ill. William James’s intense interest in psychical research has puzzled philosophers, historians, and biographers seeking to reconcile his efforts in this area with the empiricism and pragmatism that defined much of his philosophical work. What did James believe about psychical matters, these scholars ask, and how did his beliefs evolve over time? Knapp, senior lecturer in history at Washington University in St. Louis, addresses these questions by analyzing James’s writings and correspondence pertaining to psychical research, and by contextualizing his work historically and biographically. He closely examines James’s relationships with researchers and practitioners, and illuminates the place of spiritualism in western culture from the late nineteenth to early twentieth century. His purpose, he says, is to clarify a statement by James’s biographer Ralph Barton Perry, whom Knapp much admires: “James’s interest in ‘psychical research’ was not one of his vagaries,” Perry wrote in The Thought and Character of William James, “but was central and typical” (p. 5). Knapp finds this statement tantalizing, since Perry “did not specify of what it was central and typical” (p. 305) and therefore requires explanation. Unsatisfied with fragmented analyses from scholars of philosophy, psychology, psychopathology, parapsychology, and religion, Knapp proposes an overarching argument: James’s psychical research can be seen as an expression of modernist thought, arising from four intellectual developments of the late nineteenth century: a crisis of religious faith; the rise of scientific naturalism; the impact of statistical thinking and measurement on scientific research; and the professionalization of the social sciences. This “cognitive modernism” (p. 15) allowed for “all the accouterments of scientific practice to systematize the study of psychic phenomena while simultaneously making room for the ever-present subjectivity that permeated the investigator’s experience” (p. 13). Knapp calls this effort to account for subjective experience along with objective findings James’s tertium quid method of inquiry, which he believes underpins James’s philosophy and psychology. He argues persuasively that for James, the central question that engaged him in psychical research was not “is there an afterlife?” but “what is a fact?” Deeply immersed in James scholarship, Knapp offers a thoughtful and well-argued analysis of the increasing centrality of subjectivity that permeates James’s thought, informed his vision of reality as flexible and fluid, and defines him as a proto-modernist. Knapp divides his book into three sections focused on the origins and development of James’s interest in psychical matters, a chronicle of his investigations, and the relationship of psychical research to his theories of consciousness and immortality. He asserts that James’s interest “began much earlier than scholars have heretofore recognized” (p. 59), grounded in childhood, growing up as he did in the 1850s, when ghosts, rapping, and mediums were much in the air in his native New York and in London, where the James family lived in 1855–56. Henry, Sr. was a close friend of Garth Wilkinson, a champion of Spiritualism, and his circle of fellow believers. But Knapp’s conclusions about how this atmosphere affected [End Page 211] James is speculative, filled with assertions about James’s “probable knowledge” and how his path to Spiritualism “most likely began” (p. 59). Knapp is on firmer ground in tracing the research that James began in earnest in the 1880s, when he engaged in investigations whose protocols emulated those applied in laboratories of experimental psychology. Knapp offers vivid portraits of the founders of the British Society for Psychical Research, whom James met during a visit to England in 1882, and who formed a “dynamic brotherhood” welcoming James’s participation (p. 101). They included philosopher Henry Sidgwick; Edmund Gurney and F. W. H. Myers, who had been Sidgwick’s students at Cambridge; and Australian-born Richard Hodgson, who became one of the group’s principal investigators of mediums. In 1884, urged by his British colleagues, James helped to found the American Society for Psychical Research, and devoted much time and effort serving on its...

THE last of the jubilee meetings of the Society for Psychical Research was held on July 4 at the Con-way Hall, when Dr. William Brown, Wilde reader in mental philosophy in the University of Oxford, lectured on “Psychology and Psychical Research. The president, Sir Oliver Lodge, took the chair. Dr. Brown said that hypnotic and psycho-analytic investigations have greatly supplemented the theory of the 'subliminal ‘self first propounded by F. W. H. Myers, one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research, without, however, really supplanting it. The employment of the statistical method on large numbers of cases is entirely in the spirit of strict science, yet the predominantly negative results recently obtained along these lines as regards manifestations of telepathy and clairvoyance should not blind the public to the possibility of such phenomena in special cases and under special conditions. The intensive study of well-attested individual cases is needed to correct the balance, and it is especially along this line that the Society for Psychical Research has done much useful work. One might base one's belief in survival most firmly on general philosophical and religious considerations as to the nature and value of human experience; nevertheless, the sum total of evidence of a scientific nature accumulated by the Society for Psychical Research in support of survival is far from negligible.

This chapter examines the investigation into second sight undertaken by the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in the closing decade of the nineteenth century. Focusing on its chief researcher, Ada Goodrich-Freer, and on her claim to possess 'Celtic' blood, Richardson finds a corollary for this desire for identification and proximity in the contemporaneous Celtic Revival. Reading the SPR's inquiry alongside the rediscovery of folk culture and mysticism at the fin de siècle, it spends time with William Sharp, a Scottish-born lawyer, published poet and member of the occultist Order of the Golden Dawn, who also wrote under a female pseudonym 'Fiona Macleod'. This chapter examines second sight in relation to the interconnected narratives of psychical research, occultism and revivalism.

In the past thirty years historians have demonstrated that the ether of physics was one of the most fl exible of all concepts in the natural sciences. Cantor and Hodge’s seminal collection of essays of 1981 showed how during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries British and European natural philosophers invented a range of ethers to fulfi l diverse functions from the chemical and physiological to the physical and theological. 1 In religious discourse, for example, Cantor identifi ed “animate” and spiritual ethers invented by neo-Platonists, mystics and some Anglicans to provide a mechanism for supporting their belief in Divine immanence in the cosmos; material, mechanistic and contact-action ethers that appealed to atheists and Low Churchmen because such media enabled activity in the universe without constant and direct Divine intervention; and semi-spiritual/semi-material ethers that appealed to dualists seeking a mechanism for understanding the interaction of mind and matter. 2 The third type proved especially attractive to Oliver Lodge and several other late-Victorian physicists who claimed that the extraordinary physical properties of the ether made it a possible mediator between matter and spirit, and a weapon in their fi ght against materialistic conceptions of the cosmos. 3 Lodge was, of course, one of many late nineteenth-century British physicists who were involved in psychical research. More physicists than representatives of other scientifi c disciplines reached senior positions during early decades of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), that symbol of the Victorian intellectual preoccupation with the occult which was founded in 1882. The SPR boasted Balfour Stewart, William Crookes, William Fletcher Barrett, and the third Baron Rayleigh as presidents, J. J. Thomson as a vice-president, and Arthur Chattock, Arthur Schuster, W. C. D. Whetham and many other physicists as ordinary members. It is tempting to think that physicists’ marked interest in the mysterious, and typically invisible and imponderable phenomena, of psychical research was linked to their adherence to the hypothesis of an invisible and imponderable ether. Connections between the ether and the kind of phenomena studied by late-Victorian psychical researchers certainly had some pedigree. From the mid-nineteenth century many spiritualists speculated that “spiritual” ethers or ethereal elements were involved in the production of clairvoyance, telekinesis, and the manifestation of spirits, and they championed physicists’ conception of the ethereal basis of matter as a sign that science in general and physics in particular was becoming spiritualistic. 4 But to what extent did the ether constitute a link between physicists and psychical research?

Reviewed by: Occult Roots of Religious Studies. On the Influence of Non-Hegemonic Currents on Academia around 1900 ed. by Yves Mühlematter and Helmut Zander Stanislav Panin yves mühlematter and helmut zander, eds. Occult Roots of Religious Studies. On the Influence of Non-Hegemonic Currents on Academia around 1900. Oldenbourg: De Gruyter, 2021. Pp. xii + 283. The volume consists of nine chapters exploring the history of interactions between esotericism and academia. In the introduction the editors outline two main ideas of the volume, first, "that religious studies have little-known and sometimes repressed origins which lie in the field of esotericism" and, second, "that esotericism is an intrinsic part of hegemonic cultures and not a separate, small, 'secret,' or 'occult' field of minority groups" (1). The volume, therefore, argues for a shift from understanding esotericism as a marginal form of spirituality to understanding of it as a central (though often invisible or underappreciated) part of European history. The chapter by Helmut Zander introduces readers to major theories of esotericism. The author contrasts "content-related" and "discourse-related" approaches. While recognizing that both contribute to our understanding of esotericism, Zander also points out their limitations. He maintains that content-related definitions are often too narrow and tied to arbitrary cultural contexts while discourse-related definitions tend to be too open-ended, allow "extremely different and broad definitions," and therefore limit a meaningful communication between scholars (26–27). A possible solution, according to Zander, requires a globally oriented yet historically aware approach. The word [End Page 353] "esotericism" refers to different things in different contexts and, consequently, scholars will always operate with a variety of definitions that only partially overlap (37). At the same time, the existence of these overlaps constitutes a family resemblance between definitions of esotericism that allows thinking about it as the same phenomenon while providing flexibility for empirical research. Marco Frenschkowski's chapter provides an in-depth analysis of interactions between esotericism and early religious studies in Britain, situating both within the cultural context of the Victorian era. Frenschkowski highlights the role of learned societies and argues that, due to the scarcity of relevant university positions, the early research in the field was primarily driven by learned societies rather than universities. These societies were not strictly academic and consisted of enthusiasts motivated by personal interests. In this context, groups clearly related to the history of esotericism, such as the Theosophical Society and the Society for Psychical Research, competed for recognition and status with organizations like the Folklore Society. There also was a fair share of interaction between them. For instance, Andrew Lang served as a president of both the Folklore Society and the Society of Psychical Research, and championed an idea that psychical research could be used in the analysis of folklore (54–56). As Frenschkowski concludes, in Victorian Britain esotericism became a catalyst for the comparative study of religion and ignited interest to folklore, ancient and non-Western religions. As such, it played a pivotal albeit often overlooked role in emergence of religious studies. Stepping a few decades back, Daniel Cyranka discusses the figure of Christian Gottfried Daniel Nees von Esenbeck, a German biologist who served as the president of the Academy of the Natural Sciences Leopoldina between 1818 and 1858 and was interested in animal magnetism and spiritualism. Using Nees von Esenbeck's career as an example, Cyranka shows how attitudes about esotericism shifted during the first half of the nineteenth century. While early in his career Nees' interest in animal magnetism was not considered an issue, by the 1850s it became problematic and had to be concealed (85–86). Cyranka further argues that in the second half of the nineteenth century the comparative study of religion took over the vacuum created by expulsion of these topics from the academia. Despite its connection to esotericism, the necessity to secure academic status led scholars to oppose themselves to religion as "the Other" while controversial subjects such as magic or communication with spirits were attributed to non-Western or non-Modern cultures. [End Page 354] Moving to more specific research fields, Boaz Huss in his chapter deals with the influence of esotericism on the academic study...

Strange Things. The Enquiry by the Society for Psychical Research into Second Sight in the Scottish Highlands, the Story of Ada Goodrich Freer, the Ballechin House ghost hunt, and the stories and folkore collected by Fr. Allan McDonald of Eriskay. By John L. Campbell and Trevor H. Hall, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 1968. Pp. xvi + 350. Price 55s. - Volume 115 Issue 523

The Society for Psychical Research--Human personality.

Between 1899 and 1907, the medium Rosalie Thompson-giving voice to her dead daughter, Nelly-participated in a number of experimental seances with the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), which were formative in the development of the society's theories of telepathy, personality and survival. Using the extensive séance notes taken by the researchers, and the range of published materials related to the case, this article situates psychical research as an intimate practice; its scientific method relied on the production of intimate evidence by the medium, including the intimacy of touch; its leading proponents were neighbours, friends and relatives, who began communicating via Thompson once key members began to die from 1900. By keeping the focus on the life of Thompson herself, however, the article seeks to use the 'small history' of Mrs Thompson to tell a bigger and more complex story about intimacy in early twentieth-century Britain.

This chapter looks at E.R. Dodds’s engagement with the paranormal. Dodds’s career in psychic research had three distinct phases: before, during, and after his tenure of the Oxford chair. His own paranormal beliefs, however, solidified early and remained consistent over his long career in the field. Telepathy was real, an innate part of human development, and a default explanation for other forms of clairvoyance and mediumship. On the other hand, disembodied intelligences—including demons, ghosts, and spirit guides—were a delusion. Though marginalized in modern histories of psychic studies, Dodds’s long and active association with the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) made him a central figure in the history of twentieth-century paranormal research in Britain, and one of the most thoughtful and hard-nosed embedded observers of its journey from the Victorian parlour to eventual extinction in the laboratory environment he had spent his adult life advocating.

Spiritualists in the 19th century have endeavored to prove their assessments by using science itself which tried to debunk their field’s phenomena. The most principal claims of spiritualism have been the possibility of communicating with spirits through the agency of mediums and visioning a close person who has been in the moment of dying or far away. Scientific studies have not only been used to prove these assessments but to create new concepts and perceptions about psychic experiences. The aim of this article is to determine that spiritualists have assimilated themselves into society by using science apart from being denounced as superstitious. Hereby, what spiritualists have suggested in terms of science will be documented within a historical process and the terms which they have coined will be examined. It will be clarified that the people who have evaluated these phenomena consisted of scientists, scholars and literary figures. SPR (The Society for Psychical Research), which was completely formed by scientists and scholars, investigated the mediums and put them under multiple psychical experiments. These researches were published in their anthology named as Phantasms of The Living and their periodicals named as “The Proceedings”. The terms which were coined in order to scientificate spiritualism have been “psychic force”, “telepathy”, “hallucination” and “ectoplasm”. It will be concluded that these terms have enabled to categorize the assessments of spiritualism which were communicating and visioning spirits, and also accommodated the psychic researchers and mediums to express themselves subjectively by assimilation into society.

This paper reviews the Society for Psychical Research's (SPR) work on dissociation carried out between 1882-1900. The work of such SPR researchers and theorists as Edmund Gurney and Frederic W.H. Myers on hypnosis and mediums was part of nineteenth-century efforts to understand dissociation and the workings of the subconscious mind. It is also argued that the SPR's openness to these phenomena represented the first institutionalized attempt in Britain to study dissociation in a systematic manner. An analysis of the dissociation papers published in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research shows that hypnosis was the most frequently discussed phenomena. Attention to the contribution of psychical researchers will expand our understanding of the factors that have affected the development of the concept of dissociation and of the subconscious mind.

SignificanceVolume 9, Issue 6 p. 26-26 FeaturesFree Access Dr Fisher's casebook: Job descriptions First published: 07 December 2012 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2012.00618.xAboutSectionsPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Cartoon courtesy of xkcd. See http://xkcd.com for more I heard a TV quiz show contestant give his occupation as “solutions advisor”. That, I thought, is the title for me: Dr Fisher, solutions advisor! Perhaps I should be a little more precise and say “statistical solutions advisor”, but it would detract from the encompassing wonderfulness of it. If “solutions advisor” is not justifiable for a statistician, then for whom? (I think the quiz contestant was in information technology; I know you want to know.) As I have remarked before, statistics is a discipline which exists to help solve problems and answer questions for others. A cartoon on xkcd.com, my favourite mathematical cartoon website (and how many mathematical cartoon websites are there?) shows subjects ordered by purity: the psychologist claims that sociology is just applied psychology, the biologist claims that psychology is just applied biology, the chemist that biology is just applied chemistry, the physicist that chemistry is just applied physics and that it's nice to be on top. The mathematician says “Hey, I didn't see you guys all the way over there” (http://xkcd.com/435/). I laughed, then wondered where statisticians come in this sequence. We don't, we soar above it. Some mathematicians notoriously look down on statisticians as being a rather impure and inferior kind of mathematician, but although mathematics may be involved in statistics and many statisticians may have studied mathematics along the way, statistics is far more than that. We can solve problems in disciplines from sociology to physics and far beyond, taking in economics, history, literature, and sport along the way. It is not in writing down likelihood functions that the key skill of the statistician lies, but in seeing how numerical data can be used to answer the real question which the biologist or archaeologist is asking. (A subsidiary skill is in guiding our collaborators away from inappropriate analyses which mislead, despite some other scientist having successfully published using them.) When I was a student, I learned the toast “Here's to pure mathematics, may it never be any use to anybody!”. I could claim that I abandoned mathematics because I wanted to be of use to somebody, but it wouldn't really be true; I didn't do well enough and mathematics abandoned me. But I secretly tell myself that I didn't do well enough because I wasn't interested enough, and I wasn't interested enough because I was more interested in trying to the make the world a better place. (It clearly worked; the world is a far better place than it has ever been before, is it not?) The true statistician can advise solutions to almost anybody. My eponymous inspiration, the great R. A. Fisher, though much more interested in his own genetic research and in squabbles with people who dared to disagree with him, advised the Society for Psychical Research on how to assess experiments in telepathy using playing cards1. I apologise for citing a reference that I haven't actually read, but this is the general idea: if the “transmitter” turns over the king of spades, the “receiver” might guess the king of clubs which, while not perfect, would be a closer match than the queen of clubs, which would in turn be closer than the queen of hearts, in turn closer than the five of diamonds. He recognised that cards may match partially and devised a scoring system to reflect this. Despite his contributions to psychical research, Joan Fisher Box, his daughter and biographer, assures us that he was a sceptic2. In the same spirit, I have randomised and analysed a trial, as yet unpublished, of a homoeopathic treatment. To no surprise on my part, there was no evidence of any effect whatsoever. References 1Fisher, R. A. (1924) A method of scoring coincidences in tests with playing cards. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 34, 181– 185. Google Scholar 2Box, J. F. (1978) R. A. Fisher: The Life of a Scientist. New York: Wiley. Google Scholar Volume9, Issue6December 2012Pages 26-26 ReferencesRelatedInformation