ABSTRACT
In May 1900 Henry Sidgwick learned that he had an incurable cancer of the bowels. An operation for the construction of an artificial exit was urgently necessary. To his friends Sidgwick was first and foremost not a dry moralist but a kindly and sociable human being. He possessed a keen ‘sense of fun’, and would skip with excitement whilst watching or playing in a game of croquet or tennis. Sidgwick’s scrupulousness and his ability to see all sides of a question prevented him from exercising a decisive influence either upon the opinions of his pupils or the outcome of committee meetings. During the first eighteen years of the Society for Psychical Research’s existence Sidgwick had moved from believing that there was practically no evidence for survival to believing that there was at least some prima facie evidence, though the proper interpretation of it presented almost insuperable problems.
