CONTACT WITH THE OTHER WORLD
THE LATEST EVIDENCE AS TO COMMUNICATION WITH THE DEAD
BY
JAMES H. HYSLOP, P H .D., LL.D
F ORMERLY P ROFESSOR OF L OGIC AND E THICS IN C OLUMBIA U NIVERSITY
PREFACE
The present volume endeavors to treat every aspect of the problem regarding a future life and especially emphasizes a large mass of facts that ought to have cumulative weight in deciding the issue. The facts consist of both spontaneous and experimental experiences, the latter designed not only to add to the force of the evidence, but to suggest more problems than the mere fact of survival. It has not been possible to exhaust any one subject in in the field. That would require several volumes. But there are topics on which the public desires and needs information that I have been unable to consider in previous works and I have endeavored to sketch them as briefly as space would permit. The work as a whole, however, makes an effort to help readers who want a scientific view of the subject into a critical way of dealing with problems which are far larger than the case of mere survival. The attitude is more conservative than many of the books that have a popular hearing. This is rendered necessary by the exceedingly complex nature of the problems before psychic research. If I succeed in leading intelligent people to take scientific interest in the phenomena while they preserve proper cautions in accepting conclusions I shall have accomplished all that can be expected in a work of this kind, and tho I regard the evidence of survival after death conclusive for most people who have taken the pains to examine the evidence critically, I have endeavored in this work to canvass the subject as tho it had still to be proved. The mass of facts sustaining survival is much larger and much of it better than that which I have adduced. But it is too complicated to explain, and hence I have contented myself with illustrations that can easily be made intelligible.
March 12th, 1919.
J AMES H. H YSLOP .
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
SOME years ago a well-known college president thought to put an end to psychic research with the public by calling it a return to fetishism. He has lived long enough to learn that calling names does not refute facts, and we no longer need to apologize for the subject. When the work of investigation was first organized, no mans reputation was safe unless he joined in with the persiflage of the Philistine or the skepticism of the scientific world generally. It is easy to understand the accusation that psychic research is connected with fetishism, for its fundamental interest is in a doctrine that had its origin in what is known as animism, which is the spiritualism of savages, among whom it even took the form of regarding inorganic objects as animate. But the attempt to throttle investigation by invoking the contempt heaped on primitive minds was hasty and ill advised. Those who think it dignified to study folk-lore certainly cannot consider it undignified to pursue inquiries into the real causes of animism. But culture always has its antagonisms, and none is stronger than that which exists in the intellectual classes against ideas supposed to be wholly barbaric. That feeling I myself at one time shared, but I did not purpose to ignore facts in the opinions that I might hold. Prejudice had to be overcome in the face of what was indisputable, or so wide-spread as to demand explanation. Primitive minds may have been wrong in their theories, but they seem to have had facts which require consideration, even though we go no further than fraud or hysteria to account for them; and to find these facts is to discover their kinship with those of modern times.
But true psychic research took its origin not from any sympathy with the ideas of savages nor from any consciousness that the two stages of culture are connected. It was a very concrete set of incidents that exacted of fair-minded men the examination of the facts. Even the types of phenomena did not present themselves clearly at the outset. The most prominent were those claiming to embody some form of communication with the dead; but types of unusual phenomena were soon found that could lay no claim to this character, and as they seemed less clearly to contravene the accepted laws of nature, they offered a ground for compromise between orthodox science and the claims of the supernatural. Among such phenomena were telepathy or mind-reading, dousing, hypnosis, suggestion, muscle-reading, and perhaps a few others. They opened a field for discussion that made the consideration of spiritualism unnecessary, at least for the time, since they were possibly susceptible of (natural) explanation.
It was a mistake of scientific skepticism to invoke any preconceived ideas about the explanation of things in order to eliminate the consideration of psychic phenomena. The question of fact, not of explanation, is the first concern of science. In selecting his course, however, the skeptic exposed himself to all the reactions which follow the proof of what he doubts or denies; and we are to-day reaping the harvest of his imprudence. The public is running off into every imaginable philosophy and religion, because of the trust of believer and skeptic alike in religious and philosophic traditions. Sympathy would have given the skeptic the leadership in a course in which he has been outrun; he now appears as the hindrance to knowledge instead of its supporter. A man should never be required to choose between doubt and belief. He should be able to intermingle both in due proportions. The spirit of open-mindedness and impartiality is to the intellectual world what brotherhood is to the ethical world. Woe betide the man who does not see this elementary truth, for he is sure to fall into one dogmatism or the other.
The facts that led to the conception of psychic research were a set of phenomena which, at least superficially, appeared to be inexplicable by the ordinary theories of science. They were taboo to normal psychology and psychologists, for no scientific man was prepared to reinstate the traditional idea of the supernatural. The opposition between the natural and the supernatural was so fixed that it was necessary to avoid misunderstanding of the latter term in order to pacify the orthodox psychologist. Hence the terms psychic research and psychic phenomena were chosen to denominate a border-land set of phenomena that might possibly be resolved into recognized types of events which, though unusual, would not necessitate a revision of orthodox beliefs. Abnormal psychology had come to accept many extraordinary things, but only as exhibitions of acute sensibility or as phenomena of coincidence. It was therefore necessary to make ones peace with this attitude and not to rush off prematurely into the regions of the miraculous. Psychic research thus became a compromise offered by one school of recognized scientists to another in the hope that some means might be found to extend tolerance to certain persistent facts that would not disappear at the command of conjurer or skeptic. The three types of phenomena which gave most offense were telepathy, apparitions, and mediumship. Hypnotism had won recognition, though only after meeting opposition hardly less bitter than that which these more inexplicable facts encountered. Muscle-reading and phenomena due to hypersthesia, or acute sensibility, lay on the border-land, and offered to the conservative mind a natural explanation of the facts to which they were relevant. Fraud, coincidence, and suggestion were explanations which further limited or refuted the claims of the supernormal and the supernatural.
