phenomena are classed telepathy, premonition and prevision, clairvoyance, apparitions at the moment of death and after death, trance utterance and automatic writing, and kindred phenomena. In the former class the physical world is affected; in the latter class it is not.
Whether such phenomena really exist, or whether they are one and all figments of the imagination,
was the question to be settled. A The Prob- group of earnest thinkers gathered to- lem; the gether at Cambridge, England, in 1881 Societies. to discuss this question, and in 1882the English Society for Psychical Research was founded. An American branch was inaugurated in 1888 under the general supervision of Richard Hodgson, LL.D., and continued until his sudden death in 1905, when the present independent American Society, under James Hervey Hyslop, Ph.D., was incorporated. The founders of the English Society were Prof. Henry Sidgwick, Frederic William Henry Myers, Edmund Gurney-all of Cambridge-and, Prof. W. F. Barrett, of the University of Dublin. Prof. Sidgwick was its first president. Since that date, such illustrious names have appeared on the society's membership roll as Sir Oliver Lodge, Sir William Crookes, Prof. Joseph John Thomson, the Rt. Hon. Arthur James Balfour, Prof. William James, Lord Rayleigh, the Rt. Rev. William Boyd Carpenter, Bishop of Ripon, Andrew Lang, Prof. Balfour Stewart, and Mrs. Henry Sidgwick. Some consider it, as Mr. Gladstone said, " the most important work in the world-by far the most important." The reason is obvious. Here and only here are found phenomena that seem to prove scientifically that man possesses a soul capable of existing apart from the body and of exercising its functions in that condition. The resurrection was, after all, a historical fact, to which Christianity points as proof of a future life. In an age of skepticism faith by itself fails to convince; an appeal must be made to actual facts. Such facts are the phenomena studied by psychical students.
One of the first conclusions drawn by the members of the society was that telepathy-the power of one mind to affect another otherwise than through
the recognized channels of sense-was Results of a fact in nature. By an elaborate series
Study. of experiments, it was ascertained that such a power exists in man, and that it can and in fact does become operative under cer tain conditions. Unsuccessful attempts were made to explain the facts. The only conclusion that can be drawn is that " spirit has the power of mani festing to spirit," as F. W. H. Myers expressed it in his monumental work Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death (2 vols., London, 1904). Vibrations do not seem to pass; space and time do not affect it; it would appear to be a true and di rect manifestation of spirit. The application of this to spiritual guidance and to prayer may easily be conceived. The next great advance was made when, on the publication of Phantasms of the Living, by E. Gurney, F. W. H. Myers, and F. Podmore (London, 1886), it was first proved that appari tions of the dying occur far oftener than chance would permit. Seven hundred and two cases of a
Brsraoanwray: Massachusetts Historical Collections, 2 ser., vol. viii., 10 vols., Boston, 1814-23; J. (3. Palfrey, History of New England, ii. 395-396, 4 vols., New York, 1858-75; H. M. Dexter, The Congregationalism of the Last 300 Years as seen in its Literature, Appendix, no$. 1552, 1838, 1642, 1705, ib. 1880; F. H. Foster, Genetic Hist. of New England Theology, pp. 16-20, 114, Chicago, 1907; DNB, x1vii. 85: