PROFESSOR CROOKES ON PSYCHICAL RESEARCH,

Waikato Argus, Volume II, Issue 112, 27 March 1897, Page 1 (Supplement)

PROFESSOR CROOKES ON PSYCHICAL RESEARCH,

♦ In his presidential address delivered recently to the Society for Psychical Research, Professor William Crookes, F.R.S., devoted himself to an attempt at clearing away sorao to the " scientific superstitions" which tended to prevent many possible coadjutors from adveuturiug themselves on the new and illimitable road, which the society was endeavouring to open up. Psychical fccience was, he said, the embryo of something that might in time dominate Hie whole world of thought. Human ignorance beset research iu this direction with many difficulties, but conscious ignorance was a healthful stimulant if it led to the conviction that one could not possibly lay down beforehand what did not exist in the universe or what was not going on in the world. One of the greatest thorns in tho path of the society was the fact that very many jeoplo started with certain presuppositions depending 1 upon a too huscy assumption that we knew more about the universe thr.n really was known. For instance, among those who believed with him in the survival of man's individuality after death there t vas an inveterate and widespread illusion that ethereal bodies, if such therej were, most correspond to earthly bodies iu shape and size. The human body, it was truo, was the most perfect thinking and acting machine yet evohedon this earth, but its excellence for its varied purposes depended, of course, upon the conditions by which it was surrounded. Its action was, for instance, entirely governed by the strength of the force of gravitation, which had not apparently varied at all during the ages in which animated thinking beings had existed Were the force of gravitation to bo either doubled or decreased, there would be remarkable changes in the type of humanity to suit the alterid state of affairs. Yet popular imagination, taking no heed of this, presupposed spiritual beings to be superior to the laws of gravitation, and ye.t to retain shapes and proportions which gravitation originally determined and only gravitatiou seemed likely to maintain. His own picture of the constitution of spiritual beings would make them centrjs retaining individuality, persistenc > of sjlf and memory, and each mutually penetrable, while at the same time permeating what wo called space. Addressing those who not only took too terrestrial a view, but who even denied the possibility of an unseen world existing at all, Professor Crookes said he would like to point out to them the difference in the apparent laws of tho universa which would follow upon a mere variation of size in the observer of them. Following this idea out, he imagined, first, a hornuncuius of mbrosoopio size, and, next, a human being of enormous magnitude, showing by familiar illustrations how the supposed laws of matter and of the universe would appear to such beings to be quite difierent from those now accepted. Was it not possible, he u«ked, that wo also, by tho raera virturo of our size and weight, might fall into misinterpretations of phenomena; and that our boasted knowledge might be pimply conditioned by accidental environment and therefore liable to a large and hitherto unsuspected element of subjectivity ? Passing thence the speculation of Professor VV. Jaiuc, of Harvard, which dealt with the possible difference in rapidity of sensation on the part of beings presumably on a larger scale than ourselves, Professor Crookes applied this general conception of the impossibility of predicting what unseen forces might be at work around us specially to telepathy, or thought transference—-i.e., the transmission of "thought and images directly "from one mind to another without the agency of the recognized organs of sense. Was it inconceivable, ho said (after making an elaborate calculation as to tho vibrations which produce sound and light), that intense thought, concentrated by one person upon another with whom he was in close sympathy, should induce a telepathic chain along which brain waves should go straight to their goal without loss of energy duo to distance " Such a speculation was, he admitted, new and strange to science ; it was at present strictly provisional, but ho was bold enough to make it, and the time might come when it could be submitted to experimental tests. In conclusion Professor Crookes spoko of the work which was being done by lho society as likely to form no unworthy preface to a profouuder science of man, of Nature, and of " worlds not realized " than wo yet had ; and said ho could see no reason why any man of scientific mind should cither shut his eyes to or stand deliberately aloof from it.