NATURE 



489 



THURSDAY, OCTOBER 20, 1910. 



RECENT PROGRESS IN PSYCHICAL 

 RESEARCH. 

 The Newer Spiritualism. By Frank Podmore. 

 Pp. 320. (London : T. Fisher Unwin, 1910.) Price 

 Ss. 6d. net. 



THE recent untimely and tragical death of Mr. 

 Frank Podmore has directed general attention 

 to his writings, especially to the book which, no doubt 

 fully prepared before his death, has been published 

 posthumously. 



Mr. Podmore was an early member of the Society 

 for Psychical Research, and he collaborated with 

 Edmund Gurney and F. W. H. Myers in the collec- 

 tion and discussion of that large mass of cases, con- 

 sisting chiefly of spontaneous apparitions or death- 

 wraiths, which resulted in the publication of the two 

 volumes called " Phantasms of the Living " in the 

 year 1886. 



The objectivity of these apparitions of the injured 

 or dying or dead was always doubted or denied by 

 the writers of that book ; but inasmuch as the hallu- 

 cinations were sometimes veridical — that is to say, 

 inasmuch as they corresponded to or represented some 

 actual occurrence, with a precision which, though not 

 complete, was very striking — was found, indeed, on 

 subsequent most careful and conscientious scrutiny, 

 to be immensely beyond any chance coincidence — the 

 writers devised a theory to explain such cases by 

 means of the direct action of one mind on another 

 through some agency not yet recognised in science. 



The actual occurrence of such mental interaction, 

 or thought-transference, was investigated by direct ex- 

 periment, its possibility was considered proved, and 

 a short account of these experimental cases forms 

 part of the standard treatise referred to above. Prof. 

 Barrett, F.R.S., is the leading surviving pioneer in 

 the work of that period. Not only ideas and images 

 could be thus conveyed, but full-blown apparitions of 

 living people could be apparently effected by purposed 

 concentration of mind acting on sufficiently sensitive 

 percipients. 



Since that time Mr. Podmore was an enthusiastic 

 supporter of this doctrine of "Telepathy," as the 

 process was conveniently named by Mr. Myers ; and 

 subsequent investigation and cumulative experience 

 have gone far to strengthen the belief in it, as a 

 genuine human faculty, among all those who have 

 worked at the subject. So the reality of some un- 

 known mode of communication between mind and 

 mind may now be considered fairly established, not- 

 withstanding that it has not yet received the sanction 

 of high official science. 



But it must never be forgotten that the detection 

 of this process as a fact of observation, and the giving 

 it a name for convenience of reference, by no means 

 explains it or reduces it to the level of commonplace. 

 U a fact at all, it must be a fact of exceedingly 

 great importance. For 'a new or previously unrecog- 

 nised human faculty is not the kind of thing that may 

 be expected to turn up every century. It has shown 

 NO. 2138, VOL. 84] 



signs, indeed, of being but the precursor and most 

 prominent member of a whole group of human facul- 

 ties, which had been more or less experimented with 

 and more or less believed in, during the course of 

 human history, until the age of science supervened 

 and relegated everything of the so-called magical or 

 occult to the domain of superstition, thereby excluding 

 it from reasonable consideration. 



As now contemplated, however, there is nothing 

 superstitious about telepathy. Indeed, it is often 

 employed as the antidote to what may still be called 

 superstition ; and Mr. Podmore in particular — so far 

 from regarding it as only the first-discovered member 

 of a series, after the analogy of such a chemical 

 element as Argon — preferred to use it as a master-key 

 wherewith to open a large number of locks, and 

 thereby to let fresh air into chambers which else 

 would be stuffy and obscure. He was apt to forget, 

 I think, that telepathy is itself an obscure and, so to 

 speak, "locked" faculty, inasmuch as no explanation 

 of it has ever been given, or the process explained, 

 either by physicists or psychologists. We do not even 

 know for certain whether it is or is not accompanied 

 bv any physical process or stimulus akin to those 

 with which we are familiar in the case of all the 

 ordinary operations of sense-perception. There are 

 some who think it a direct psychical action — that is 

 to say, a direct action of mind on mind ; there are 

 others who think that it may be the result of a wider 

 kind of mental interaction than exists among ordinary 

 human beings, and that it points in the direction of 

 the survival of human personality. 



Mr. Podmore did not take that view; he does not 

 seem to have pondered deeply on the actual meaning 

 and process of telepathy. He accepted it as a fact, 

 and tried to explain every other occult phenomenon by 

 means of it — showing a tendency, indeed, to accept 

 readily anything that could be thus explained, and 

 to reject, also readily anything that could not. This 

 is not the place for criticism in detail, but it would 

 be easy to select sentences illustrative of this tendency 

 on the part of the author. 



Up to a certain limit, indeed, such a method of 

 procedure is legitimate ; and undoubtedly the clue 

 furnished by the working-hypothesis of unconscious 

 telepathic communication has rendered easier of belief 

 a great many strange legends and asserted experi- 

 ences. But to regard it as the only legitimate clue, 

 to test all facts by means of it, and to reject with 

 contumely those which it does not explain, which it 

 can by no contortions be made to explain, is not so 

 legitimate. And if Mr. Podmore has at all fallen into 

 error — as it is only human that he should — it is in 

 this direction that he has erred. I desire to review 

 with extreme delicacy the work of a deceased writer, 

 especially one to whom the subject of psychical re- 

 search is largely indebted for acute criticism and 

 remarkable industry. Yet I cannot fail to notice in 

 many parts of the book, and, indeed, in his other 

 writings generally, something that may be called bias 

 in favour of the supremacy or monopoly of his favourite 

 e.\planation. 



It is true that some of the most recent investiga- 

 tions by members of the society, those which can be 



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