Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 24, 2025
It ought, however, to be said that even these members of the S.P.R. who have become spiritistic have generally been savingly conservative in their conclusions.
Psychical research, of which so much mention has been made in the preceding pages, may be roughly yet sufficiently described as an effort to determine by strictly scientific methods the nature and significance of apparitions, hauntings, spiritistic phenomena, and those other weird occurrences that would seem to confirm the idea that the spirits of the dead can and do communicate with the living.
So that bearing in mind the further fact that he was no blatant advocate of his opinions it seems altogether likely his spiritistic ideas would have gained no great measure of attention, had it not been for a series of singular occurrences that took place between 1759 and 1762.
Naturally this attitude of itself made for converts to the spiritistic beliefs of which he was such a successful exponent, and its influence was powerfully reinforced by the result of an investigation conducted in the spring of 1852 by a committee headed by the poet, William Cullen Bryant, and the Harvard professor, David G. Wells.
It is at the best the too easy solution of a challenging problem, at the worst an aspect of that renaissance of superstition which is one of the strangest characteristics of our own time. The second explanation is spiritistic.
The Beginnings of Trance-Mediumship We have here plainly enough the beginnings of trance mediumship. It needed only unstable personalities, capable of self-induced trance states, so to widen all this as to supply the bases of spiritistic faith and the material for the immensely laborious investigation of the Society for Psychical Research.
"'The sweet fulfilment of the flesh' is a final roundup that gracefully blends Whitman's and Ella Wheeler Wilcox's influential powers and, incidentally, justifies the magnificent title of the poem. "Then, as a crowning triumph, note the splendid last line, a masterpiece brought about by the influence of Sir Oliver Lodge and his spiritistic ilk! Could anything be finer?
None of these postulates fully applies to the spiritistic investigation.
And he derived little encouragement from the investigations carried on by Sidgwick, Myers, and himself in the field of spiritistic mediumship. Fraud seemed always to be at the bottom of the phenomena produced in the séance room.
The only plausible theory which in any way accounts for the Piper and similar phenomena short of the spiritistic is one based upon the existence of independently fluctuating strata of the medium's mind, acquiring their knowledge by means of telepathy, clairvoyance, and other supernormal means.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking