THE SOCIETY FOR PSYCHICAL RESEARCH.

Press, Volume LXVI, Issue 19887, 26 March 1930, Page 13

THE SOCIETY FOR PSYCHICAL RESEARCH.

TO THB EDITOR OF THB PBESB Sir,—As the membership-list of the Society for Psychical Research contains most of the names famous in science and philosophy throughout the world, it is hardly likely that the secession from its ranks of Sir A. Conan Doyle, who can lay. no greater claim, to intellectual distinction than the authorship of a series of successful detective yarns, will cause tW Society much anxiety. The Society has, no creed — each member has his own—and was founded in 1882, mainly by the efforts of Professor Sidgwick who co-operated with several other savants and with (among other believers in the spiritual causation of certain phenomena) a prominent professional medium, Stainton Moses. In view of the grounds given for Sir A. Doyle's recent resignation, it is noteworthy that Moses and others subsequently withdrew from tho Society "because of their dissent from the leaders' sceptical attitude and drastic method' - Theplaintruthofthe xnat-

ter seems to bo that spiritualists, in general, have fought shy of the fact that extraordinary claims must, if they are to gain credence among reasoning people, be supported by extraordinary —bv more than ordinarily sufficientevidence. Hence their impatience with the "puerile halting methods of psychic research," as Mr Peter Trolove puts it in his letter on March 22nd. If by chance, "these good folk" (the Society) have become "biased on the side of caution," that, possibly, is largely due to the history of spiritualism. "No living man has so influenced the trend of modern thought towards spiritual things," writes Mr Trolove of Sir Artnhr. Mr Trolove is welcome to such an opinion, which is not likely to be widely endorsed outside the spiritualistic societies, the numerical strength of which is (I believe) very much on the wane.—Yours etc., NOT. A MATERIALIST. March 24th, 1930.