PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

Evening Post, Volume CIV, Issue 143, 14 December 1922, Page 16

PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

SCIENTIFIC WORK IN "LAB."

GHOSTS UNDER SEVERE TESTS.

Psysical research, in England, 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, a.nd second that it is conducted . through mediums who are suspect on account of their ingThe equipment of the researcher as he is publicly conceived, his dark room, his medium and that atmosphere which Mr. Stephen Leacock has happily called "Bnoopopathic," are reckoned to be rather the properties for staging a ghost than the apparatus for measuring it, and since few in this age are. ever convinced without measurements of some kind or another, either by rule or by the evidence of thjeir 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 enough pn that cynical formula which passes for broadmindedness in a slack-minded community—"Do it again, and now again. Tell us how it's done, and now let me do it," and only on fulfilment will say "It might be so." A psychical research laboratory recently opened in Leeds meets all thece objections (says the "Manchester Guardian"), and invites this sort of pragmatic proof. Not that its object is the laying or displaying of ghosts as ghosts, but that ghosts come within the theory of physical manifestations its director, Mr. Clifford S. Best, hopes to. establish. It is a laboratory designed for the examination of "super-normal" things on what the public know as scientific lines, and it deserves additional interest by being the only one of its kind known to have been established in this country, 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, and it assumes that any such emanations are physical andi not psychical. It assumes also as a corollary that ghosts—if there are any—are nothing but forms of this physical emanation made visible by exceptional but natural conditions of light and atmos phere

"THE INVISIBLE BODY."

Mr. Best hopes to establish the existence of this human emanation by 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 toward, the point at which he can always and infallibly make that emanation visible with any ordinary man or woman as the sitter. The 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 subtle 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. If it be so, it does not seem improbable that diseases of the body are influenced by diseases of the invisible body, just as the mind is influenced by s;ub-conscious promptings. If, then, this invisible body, that is to say this aura, were made visible, it would come within the reach of direct research, and this research might reveal the source of civilisation's incurable diseases. Thus there is little matter for surprise in the fact that when Mr. Best's laboratory was opened twenty medical men attended the ceremony and witnessed, some of them by speech, to a very real interest in its intentions. ,

j Ancient doctrine, by asserting that everyone has a personal aura which varies in colour according to health, fits neatly, in the general theory. Modern science adds that the spectrum shows there are colours invisible to the eye in ordinary conditions, so that the personal | aura may exist, chimically, in the dark. Pushing theory further along the probable line, it is claimed that the aura and ectoplasm are the same. thing, and that ectoplasm is the concentration and manipulation of the matter composing the aura, and takes the form of a projection from the body capable of moving grosser matter, and returns to the body after projection. The aura of emanation which Mr. Best is anxious first to make visible is, however, not directive, but present in the shape of a bodily halo. A party of nineteen students who were doing research work recently saw it, all except one, as "a sort of steam" hanging round the sitter, and Mr. Best himself is sufficiently sure of his premises for research on fairly- definite lines. WORKING FROM ESTABLISHED FACTS. He proceeds in detail as follows. He supposes the human body to be a magnet; and the sitter thus becomes the first part of his apparatus. The atmosphere in which the experiment is conducted is then surcharged with free electrons by a 16in induction coil of the sort used for X-ray work. This creates an electrical , field which should provide enough, raw material to intensify the aura. To induce the aura to become 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." The curious translucency of these substances when within the beam of. the "dark light" of the ultra-violet, apparatus will be equalled, it is hoped, when the subject is the human aura. Mr. Best is designing, a further piece of apparatus developed from Dr. Kilner's experiments with light filters, but has not yet developed it for use in the laboratory. Dr. Kilner's' filters 1 were made for the use of an individual. Mr. Best, hopes to extend their usefulness and also to fit them literally to the lighting of the laboratory, so that' any number of people may see 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, soi'ie special case arises, but may perhaps. be j 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 pcerfented themselves to psychical ressarehers in the p.ast. The -laboratory _*s housed in the hall of its near philosophical neighbours, the theosophists, being to some extent their child, and, appropriately enough, 13 approached through a room whose walls bear that ambiguous sentence, "There is no religion hither than truth."