Psychical Research
BY ANDREW LANG
THE subject of "psychical research" is exciting-, I am told, much interest, but in my opinion the interest is not very ardent. The societies for psychical research in the United States and in England do not contain the strength of two regiments, numerically, and their "Proceedings" are very little read by any but a few of themselves. They are not lively reading, for to understand psychics a person must first understand the ordinary psychology of the schools, of which any one may get a fair grasp by perusing Professor William James's well-known work. Now that work is not commonly to be seen on drawing-room tables, and it is in drawing-rooms or dining-rooms that I am apt to be asked,
"Do you really believe in ghosts?"
I generally answer, "What do you mean by a ghost?"
The fair querist, invited to furnish a definition, sometimes replies, "I mean apparitions."
"Yes, I believe in apparitions," I reply. "I have seen three—of living people."
"Oh, but I mean, do you believe in seeing ghosts—spirits of the dead."
"How am I to know they are spirits? If you can see an appearance of a living person who is not present, why should you call the appearance of a dead person a 'spirit'?"
"But if the appearance represents a dead person whom you never saw, but whom people recognize from your description, must not that be a spirit become visible?"
"But clothes have no spirits, yet one sees the clothes; I never heard of but one naked ghost, in 1753."
At this point the lady wants to hear about the naked ghost, and we tell each other ghost-stories, and the philosophy of the subject is entirely lost to view.
Now, as far as my experience goes, the public interest in psychical research gets as far as the lady did, and stops there. The subject is no more amusing than history, or anthropology, or anything that demands a persevering effort of attention. It is true that the results of psychical research do point in the direction of the existence of what we call "spirit," for want of a better word. That is to say, they tend to show that in man there are faculties not taken into account at all by orthodox science, such as the occasional intercommunication of thought, or sensation, from one living person to another, without the aid of any of the known channels of sense. There are apparent cases of persons getting knowledge of things remote in space, or distant in time, or acquiring other information, not given through ordinary sight or hearing, or in any way recognized by science.
If any of these cases are correctly stated (as I am entirely certain that some of them are), then there is in man something much more curious and important (call it spirit, or call it X) than radium or Roentgen rays, or any other novelty of physical science. The faculties of that something are so transcendent that they may not be confined to the little life of flesh and blood, nerve and brain, but, for all that we know, may persist in conscious existence when our earthly bodies are dust.
That these things are so has ever been the opinion of the vast majority of mankind, and the opinion has always been based on and fortified by precisely the class of alleged phenomena which psychical research investigates, and which orthodox science dismisses without examination. In studying the ways of savages I have found them believing in much mere nonsense, but also in every species of experience and phenomenon which, when it is now said, on good evidence, to occur, is examined by psychical research. Among these things, of course, are visions or appearances of the dead,
