PSYCHICAL RESEARCH IN THE “LAB.”

Dominion, Volume 16, Issue 89, 11 January 1923, Page 5

PSYCHICAL RESEARCH IN THE “LAB.”

GHOSTS AND THE SCIENTIST THE ‘AURA’ UNDER PHYSICAL TESTS Psychical research, though long discussed, has always .suffered qualifications in the public mind; first that it has no fact in common with the experience of ordinary people, and second that it is conducted through mediums who are suspect on account of their calling. r The equipment of the researcher as he is publicly conceived, his dark room, his medium, and that atmosphere which Mr. Stephen Leacock has happily called “snoopopathic,” are reckoned to bo rather the properties for staging a ghost than the apparatus for measuring it, and since few in this age are ever convinced without nieasurements of some kind or another, either by rule or by the evidence of their own eyes, talk of ghosts only meets laughter or cold suspicion. Education has taught most people that photographs can show anything, that verbal evidence can be distorted, or bought, that clever men can be misled; and so the worldly wise man who exists in everybody falls back happily enougK on that cyuical formula which passes for broad-mindedness in a. slackminded community—“Do it again, and now again. 'I ell us how it s done, and now let me do it,” and only on fulfilment wil say “It might bo so. A psychical research, laboratory recently opened in Leeds, states tho “Manchester Guardian,” meets all these objections and invites this soru of ' pragmatic proof. Not that its object is tho laying or displaying of ghosts as ghosts, but that ghosts come within the theory of physical manifestations its director. Mr. Chnord b. Best, hopes to establish. It is a laboratory designed for the examination of “super-normal” things on what the public* knows as scientific hues, and it deserves additional interest by being the only one of its kind known to have been established in England, and is probably the only one of its kind in the world. It starts with one main point of application—the investigation of the supposed emanations from the human body, ai.d it assumes that any such onianations are physical and not psychical. It assumes also- as a corollary that ghosts—if there ai.e an y— aro nothing but forms of this physical emanation made visible by exceptional but natural conditions ot light and atmosphere. “The invisible Body."

Mr. Best hopes to establish the existence of this human emanation 5 reproducing such exceptional and natural conditions, so that the emanation becomes visible, not to one or two students, but to a roomful. He will work towards tho point at which he can always and infallibly make that emanatioii visible with any ordinary man or woman as the* sitter. U lO possession of an aura, Mr. Best believes to be an essential property of the physical existence of mankind. Everybody has one, though the matter of which it is. composed may be too subtlo for human sight to catch. Supposition goes further. The existence of a mind and a sub-conscious mind might in some ways tend to confirm the theory that there may be a visible and an invisible body. ft it be so, it does not seem improbable that diseases of tho body are influenced by diseases of the invisible body, just as the mind is influenced by sub-con-scious promptings. If, then this invisible body, that is to say this aura, were made visible, it would conio.iiitliin the reach of direct research, a.nd tills research might reveal the. source of civilisation’s incurable diseases. Thus there is little matter for suiprise in the fact that when Mr. Best s laboratory was opened twenty medica men attended the ceremony and witnessed, some of them by speech, to a very real interest in its intentions. Ancient doctrine, by asserting that everyone has a personal aura which varies in colour according to health, fits neatly into the general theory. Modern science adds that the spectnim shows there are colours invisible to t e eye in ordinary conditions so that; the fiura may exist chemically in the edark. Pushing, theory further along the probable hue, it is c that tho. aura and ectoplasm aie the same thing, and that ectoplasm is the concentration anil •p, iani P ulatl^ a °LS® matter composing, the aura, andtakes the form of a projection Hom the bo b capable of moving grosser matter, and returns to the body after Protection The aura, or emanation winch M . Best 1« anxious first to make visible i.-. however not directive, but present in the shape of a bodily halo. A party of nineteen students who were edoiriL, research work recently saw it. all except one, as “a sort of s tea m hanging round tho sitter, and il •• •&. himself is sufficiently sure of his plemises for research on fairly definite lines. ’ Working from Established Facts.

ll o proceeds in.detail as followsHe supposes the human body to be, a nia-mct; and the sitting thus become, the"first part of his apparatus, li e atmosphere in which tlle , exl^r s in Au SffA” to bedonte visible Mr. Best stimulates it with the ultra-violet rays which have the property of making lustrous certain fluorescent substances whose natural colour is dead. 11 e curious translucency of these substances when within the beam of the “dark liMit” of the ultra-violet apparatus will'be equalled, it is hoped, when the subject is tho human aura. Mr. Best is' designing a further piece of apparatus developed from Dr. Kilner s experiments with light filters, but has not vet developed it for use in the laboratory. Dr. Kilner’s filters were made for the use of an individual. Mr. Best hones to extend their usefnines and also to fit them literally to tho lighting of the laboratory, sofat ally number of people may sec the sitter under exactly the same conditions as each other, and without the inconvenience of individual apparatus. All this, however, is only one step. The Laboratory exists to continue its work as it can, making its way from one established fact to the other. At present it will not set out to examine the phenomena produced through the services of mediums, unless, that is, some special case arises, but mav perhaps be able to do so later. It will continue to explore this first problem until it has a working knowledge on which to progress to other difficulties Which have presented themselves to nsvch'cal researchers in the oast. The laboratory is housed in.th® hall of its near philosophical neighbours. the thposophists, he ins to •sonic extent their child, and, appropriately enough is approached through a room whose walls bear that ambiguous sentence. ‘'There is no religion higher than truth.”