nd, if
reports from the spirit world may be accepted, the once-renowned ghost
hunter has himself become a ghost, visiting in especial two of his
American colleagues, Prof. William James and Prof. James H. Hyslop.[S]

To return, however, to the early days of the Society for Psychical
Research. Valuable as were the results obtained by Hodgson and his
associates on what may be called the anti-swindle committees, they had a
distinctly negative bearing on the supreme object of inquiry--proof of
the existence of a spiritual world in which human personality exists
after the death of the body. Some enthusiasts did not hesitate to
proclaim at an early date that such proof had actually been secured,
basing this assertion on the seemingly supernatural facts brought to
light by the committees on telepathy, clairvoyance, and apparitions. But
the society, under the leadership of the cautious Sidgwick, who was its
president for many years, steadily refused to countenance this view, and
insisted that before any definite conclusions could be reached far more
evidence would have to be assembled. Thus the first ten years of the
society's existence were marked by few positive results,--the most
important being the statement of the case for telepathy and of its
possible relationships to apparitions and hauntings, as well as to the
purely psychical phenomena of spiritualism.

Indeed, the society formally expressed its acquiescence in the
telepathic hypothesis as early as 1884, in the words, "Our society
claims to have proved the reality of thought transference--of the
transmission of thoughts, feelings, and images from one mind to another
by no recognized channel of sense." But to no other dictum did it commit
itself until ten years more had passed when, following the so-called
census of hallucinations, it gave voice to its belief that between
deaths and apparitions of the dying person a connection existed that was
not due to chance. And since then the society has contented itself with
steadily accumulating evidence designed to throw light on the causal
connection between deaths and ghosts, and to illumine the central
problem of demonstrating scientifically the existence of an unseen world
and the immortality of the soul.

Individuals, of course, have been free to express their views, and from
the pens of several have come striking and suggestive analyses of the
evidence assembled in the course of the society's twenty-five years. In
this