CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Psychical Research
SWEDENBORG once sighed over the kind of people "who deny everything and yet refuse to apply their minds to anything."
To understand him it is unfortunately necessary to ask the reader to do a little work, since the only practical clue to a comprehension of the last third of his life is to be found in the science of psychical research. That is not primarily a feast of ghosts and haunted houses. It is a feast of statistics based on the results of experimental methods seemingly as careful as scientific ingenuity can make them. These results are so upsetting to the old mechanistic conceptions of the laws of nature that they have been fiercely questioned by statisticians—only to be validated by as good or better statisticians.1
The Society for Psychical Research was founded in England in 1882 by a group of scholars, largely from Cambridge University. Among its presidents (not all English) have been such men as the American psychologist William James (who helped to found the American Society for Psychical Research); the physicists Sir William Crookes, Sir William Barrett, Sir Oliver Lodge; the French philosopher Henri Bergson; Gilbert Murray; the psychologist William McDougall; the biology professor Hans Driesch; professor of logic at Cambridge, C. D. Broad; Professor H. H. Price, Oxford; Dr. Robert Thouless, head of the Department of Education, Cambridge University; while among the Society's membership, past and present, have been a number of well-known scholars such as Sir I. I. Thomson, Julian Huxley, and others.
In 1885, the American Society for Psychical Research was founded, Professor Simon Newcomb being its first President. Among its other officers have been Professor G. Stanley Hall, Professor E. C. Pickering, William James, while, in our day, research is being done under the direction of the psychologist Professor Gardner Murphy.
These men, and women such as Mrs. Henry Sidgwick, so far
