an Institution, is another. Such
men as Professor Lodge, the eminent English physicist, and Professor
Richet, the eminent French physiologist, are among the most active
contributors to the Society's Proceedings; and through the catalogue of
membership are sprinkled names honored throughout the world for their
scientific capacity. In fact, were I asked to point to a scientific
journal where hard-headedness and never-sleeping suspicion of sources
of error might be seen in their full bloom, {304} I think I should have
to fall back on the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research.
The common run of papers, say on physiological subjects, which one
finds in other professional organs, are apt to show a far lower level
of critical consciousness. Indeed, the rigorous canons of evidence
applied a few years ago to testimony in the case of certain 'mediums'
led to the secession from the Society of a number of spiritualists.
Messrs. Stainton Moses and A. R. Wallace, among others, thought that no
experiences based on mere eyesight could ever have a chance to be
admitted as true, if such an impossibly exacting standard of proof were
insisted on in every case.

The S. P. R., as I shall call it for convenience, was founded in 1882
by a number of gentlemen, foremost among whom seem to have been
Professors Sidgwick, W. F. Barrett, and Balfour Stewart, and Messrs. R.
H. Hutton, Hensleigh Wedgwood, Edmund Gurney, and F. W. H. Myers.
Their purpose was twofold,--first, to carry on systematic
experimentation with hypnotic subjects, mediums, clairvoyants, and
others; and, secondly, to collect evidence concerning apparitions,
haunted houses, and similar phenomena which are incidentally reported,
but which, from their fugitive character, admit of no deliberate
control. Professor Sidgwick, in his introductory address, insisted
that the divided state of public opinion on all these matters was a
scandal to science,--absolute disdain on _a priori_ grounds
characterizing what may be called professional opinion, while
indiscriminate credulity was too often found among those who pretended
to have a first-hand acquaintance with the facts.

As a sort of weather bureau for accumulating {305} reports of such
meteoric phenomena as apparitions, the S. P. R. has done an immense
amount of work. As an experimenting body, it cannot be said to have
completely fulfilled the hopes of its founders. The reasons for this
lie in two circumstances: first,