withdrawal of
the spiritistic representatives as soon as they learned that strictly
scientific methods of inquiry were to prevail; or by the accession, as
honorary members, of national figures like W. E. Gladstone, John Ruskin,
Lord Tennyson, A. R. Wallace, Sir William Crookes, and G. F. Watts.

To the scientific as well as the popular consciousness, the society was
little better than an assemblage of cranks, with strangely fantastic
notions, and only too likely to lose its mental balance and help
ignorant and superstitious people to lose theirs. Conscious, however, of
the really serious and important nature of their enterprise, and cheered
by Gladstone's comforting assurance that no investigation of greater
moment to mankind could be made,[R] the members of the society applied
themselves zealously to the business that had brought them together.

Sensibly enough, they adopted the principle of specialization and
division of labor. While one group carried on experiments designed to
prove or disprove the telepathic hypothesis, another engaged in a
systematic examination of the alleged facts of clairvoyance. A third, in
its turn, under the skilful guidance of Gurney, investigated the
phenomena of the hypnotic trance, with results unexpectedly beneficial
to medical science. A special committee was also appointed to collect
and sift evidence as to the reality of apparitions and hauntings, making
whenever possible personal examinations of the seers of the visions and
the places of their occurrence. Finally, there were various
subcommittees of inquiry into the physical phenomena of spiritism,--the
knockings, table turnings, production of spirit forms, and similar
marvels of the Dunglas Home type of "medium." From the outset, these
subcommittees demonstrated the value of psychical research, as a
protection to the interests of society, by exposing, one after another,
the fraudulent character of the pretended intermediaries between the
seen and the unseen world.

In this region of inquiry no one was more successful than a recruit from
distant Australia, by name Richard Hodgson. Hodgson, unlike Sidgwick and
Myers and many others of his associates, had not engaged in psychical
research from the hope that the truths of the Bible might thereby be
demonstrated. His motive was that of the detective eager to unravel
mysteries. From his boyhood he had had a singular fondness for solving
tricks and puzzles of all sorts; and when, in 1878