Abstract
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.
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Society for Psychical Research. Nature 130, 54 (1932). https://doi.org/10.1038/130054a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/130054a0