882 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. 111. No. 77. 



of progress, an account of such new obser- 

 vations and new conceptions as the interim 

 might have brought forth. But our active 

 workers are so few compared with those 

 engaged in more familiar departments of 

 natural learning, and the phenomena we 

 study so fortuitous and occasional, that two 

 years must, as a rule, prove too short an 

 interval for regular accounts of stock to be 

 taken. Looking back, however, on our 

 whole dozen years or more of existence, 

 one can appreciate what solid progress we 

 have made. Disappointing as our career 

 has doubtless been to those of our early 

 members who expected definite corrobora- 

 tion or the final coup de grace to be given in 

 a few short months to such baffling ques- 

 tions a^ that of physical mediumship, to 

 soberer and less enthusiastic minds the 

 long array of our volumes of Proceedings 

 must suggest a feeling of anything but dis- 

 couragement. For here, for the first time 

 in the history of these perplexing subjects, 

 we find a large collection of records, to each 

 of which the editors and reporters have 

 striven to attach its own precise coefiRcient 

 of evidential value, great or small, by get- 

 ting at every item of first-hand evidence 

 that could be attained, and by systematic- 

 ally pointing out the gaps. Only those 

 who have tried to reach conclusions of their 

 own by consulting the previous literature 

 of the occult, as vague and useless, for 

 the most part, as it is voluminous, can 

 fully appreciate the immense importance 

 of the new method which we have in- 

 troduced. Little by little, through con- 

 sistently following this plan, our Proceed- 

 ings are extorting respect from the most 

 unwilling lookers-on ; and I should like 

 emphatically to express my hope that the 

 impartiality and completeness of record 

 which has been their distinguishing char- 

 acter in the past will be held to even more 

 rigorously in the future. It is not as a 

 vehicle of conclusions of our own, but as a 



collection of documents that may hereafter 

 be resorted to for testing the conclusions 

 and hypotheses of anybody, that they will 

 be permanently important. Candor must 

 be their very essence, and all the hesita- 

 tions and contradictions that the phenomena 

 involve must appear unmitigatedly in their 

 pages. Collections of this sort are usually 

 best appreciated by the rising generation. 

 The young anthropologists and psycholo- 

 gists who will soon have full occupancy of 

 the stage will feel, as we have felt, how 

 great a scientific scandal it has been to 

 leave a great mass of human experience to 

 take its chances between vague tradition 

 and credulity on the one hand and dogmatic 

 denial at long range on the other, with no 

 body of persons extant who are willing and 

 competent to study the matter with both 

 patience and rigor. There have been iso- 

 lated experts, it is true, before now. But 

 our Society has for the first time made their 

 abilities mutually helpful. 



If I were asked to give some sort of dra- 

 matic unity to our history, I should say 

 first that we started with high hopes that 

 the hypnotic field woiild yield an important 

 harvest, and that these hopes have subsided 

 with the general subsidence of what may 

 be called the hypnotic wave. Secondly, I 

 should sajT that experimental thought-trans- 

 ference has jdelded a less abundant return 

 than that which in the first year or two 

 seemed not unlikely to come in. Professor 

 Richet's supposition that if the unexplained 

 thing called thought-transference be ever 

 real, its causes must, to some degree, work 

 in everybody at all times (so that in any 

 long series of card-guessings, for example, 

 there ought always to be some excess of 

 right answers above the chance number) is, 

 I am inclined to think, not very well sub- 

 stantiated. Thought-transference may in- 

 volve a critical point, as the physicists call 

 it, which is passed only when certain psy- 

 chic conditions are realized, and otherwise 



