ith the reply attributed to
Iamblichus, reveal Porphyry wandering puzzled among mediums, floating
lights, odd noises, queer dubious 'physical phenomena.' He did not begin
with accurate experiments as to the existence of rare, and apparently
supernormal human faculties, and he seems to have attained no conclusion
except that 'spirits' are 'deceitful.'[1]

Something more akin to modern research began about the time of the
Reformation, and lasted till about 1680. The fury for burning witches led
men of sense, learning, and humanity to ask whether there was any reality
in witchcraft, and, generally, in the marvels of popular belief. The
inquiries of Thyraeus, Lavaterus, Bodinus, Wierus, Le Loyer, Reginald
Scot, and many others, tended on the whole to the negative side as regards
the wilder fables about witches, but left the problems of ghosts and
haunted houses pretty much where they were before. It may be observed that
Lavaterus (circ. 1580) already put forth a form of the hypothesis of
telepathy (that 'ghosts' are hallucinations produced by the direct action
of one mind, or brain, upon another), while Thyraeus doubted whether the
noises heard in 'haunted houses' were not mere hallucinations of the sense
of hearing. But all these early writers, like Cardan, were very careless
of first-hand evidence, and, indeed, preferred ghosts vouched for by
classical authority, Pliny, Plutarch, or Suetonius. With the Rev. Joseph
Glanvil, F.R.S. (circ. 1666), a more careful examination of evidence came
into use. Among the marvels of Glanvil's and other tracts usually
published together in his 'Sadducismus Triumphatus' will be found letters
which show that he and his friends, like Henry More and Boyle, laboured to
collect first-hand evidence for second sight, haunted houses, ghosts, and
wraiths. The confessed object was to procure a 'Whip for the Droll,' a
reply to the laughing scepticism of the Restoration. The result was to
bring on Glanvil a throng of bores--he was 'worse haunted than Mr.
Mompesson's house,' he says-and Mr. Pepys found his arguments 'not very
convincing.' Mr. Pepys, however, was alarmed by 'our young gib-cat,'
which he mistook for a 'spright.' With Henry More, Baxter, and Glanvil
practically died, for the time, the attempt to investigate these topics
scientifically, though an impression of doubt was left on the mind of
Addison. Witchcraft ceased to win belief, and was abolished, as a crime,
in 1736. Some of the Scottish