
Fesruary 17, 1923] 
effort is therefore the supreme task of those concerned 
in social progress at the present time. The growth has 
hitherto been mainly automatic. We have to under- 
stand it, grasp it, and turn it to the still greater good 
of mankind. Science having made the modern world, 
with all its strength and its weaknesses, let men of 
science inspire a social will into the whole community, 
to use this master-instrument for its highest end, the 
salvation and elevation of the humanity to which it 
belongs. F. S. Marvin. 

Phantasms of the Living. 
Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. 
Vol. 33, Part 86, October. (London: F. Edwards ; 
Glasgow: MacLehose, Jackson and Co., 1922.) 
16s. 6d. net. 
BOOK entitled “ Phantasms of the Living,” by 
Edmund Gurney, F. W. H. Myers, and Frank 
Podmore, was published in 1886. Under this title 
were included all experiences where there was reason 
to suppose that the mind of one living person had 
affected the mind of another otherwise than through 
the recognised channels of sense. The chief aim of 
this book was to produce a cumulative quasi-statistical 
proof of telepathy. 
In the thirty-six years which have elapsed since the 
publication of this book the Society for Psychical 
Research has received and published in its Journal 
- many accounts of happenings similar to those recorded 
by Gurney, and in its Proceedings of October last 
Mrs. Henry Sidgwick has submitted the best of these 
cases to a careful examination and analysis. 
While Gurney and his collaborators were chiefly 
concerned to prove telepathy to be a fact of Nature, 
_ Mrs. Sidgwick thinks we have arrived at a stage when, 
if our knowledge of telepathy is to grow, we must seek 
light on its process and the conditions under which 
_ evidence of it can be obtained. She says: ‘‘ We may 
now, for the sake of argument at least, assume that 
Gurney’s book has accomplished its object, and that 
telepathy is proved, and starting from that point may 
~ devote ourselves primarily to seeking for light on the 
occasions and mode of its operation.” Mrs. Sidgwick 
does not mean to imply that telepathy is yet accepted 
by the scientific world; but she thinks something 
more than the mere piling up of facts is required, and 
that “ our facts will be the more readily accepted, the 
more we can compare them, and, provisionally assuming 
telepathy, show when and how it occurs.” 
Many of the best cases received by the Society 
during the past thirty-six years have already been 
published in various works on psychical research, and 
_ fifty-four have appeared in the Proceedings of the 
NO. 2781, VOL. I11] 
° 
NATURE 
2Tt 
Society for Psychical Research. All these, being 
therefore already before the public, are excluded from 
this collection. The cases included have appeared 
only in the Journal of the Society, which is printed for 
private circulation among members. The value of 
the present collection is considerably diminished by 
the exclusion of so many cases which were of course 
selected for earlier publication, because they were 
regarded as being specially important or interesting. 
Even without these, however, we have here some two 
hundred cases, many of which are important as afford- 
ing evidence that telepathy does occur, and all of which 
help to throw some light on the occasions and mode of 
its operations. 
The broad lines of classification adopted in the 
description of telepathic phenomena may be gathered 
from the headings of the four chapters into which 
Mrs. Sidgwick’s volume is divided: (1) Experimental 
and semi-experimental cases; (2) Spontaneous cases 
in which the percipient’s impression is not externalised ; 
(3) Spontaneous cases in which the percipient’s im- 
pression is externalised as a waking hallucination ; 
also dreams of the same character ; (4) Collective and 
reciprocal cases without evidence of any agency external 
to the percipient. 
In all modern records of telepathic experiences the 
person whose mind receives the impression is called 
the percipient, and the person from whose mind the 
impression comes is called the agent; but it would 
appear from the evidence that the percipient is very 
often the “ active ” party, and that the so-called agent 
plays a purely passive part. This is seen in the semi- 
experimental cases in which a percipient is trying to 
get an impression from another person who is quite 
unaware that any such attempt is being made. In 
experimental cases, properly so-called, the agent is 
deliberately trying to impress telepathically a particular 
percipient, and that percipient is deliberately trying 
to receive an impression. It is doubtful, however, 
what part, if any, the concentrated effort of the agent 
plays in the success of such experiments. 
The experimental and semi-experimental cases 
recorded in this collection can scarcely be regarded as 
representative of the group because of the number 
excluded, owing to their having been already pub- 
lished ; but even had these been included there would 
still have been occasion for Mrs. Sidgwick’s comment 
that ‘‘more experiments carefully conducted and 
well recorded are greatly needed.” 
Of spontaneous cases in which the percipient’s 
impression is not externalised as a hallucination, Mrs. 
Sidgwick says: ‘‘ As a whole the class is not a strong 
one as evidence of telepathy,” because the triviality 
or vagueness of the impression in many cases makes 
