ABSTRACT
Nearly thirty years have elapsed since the foundation, in 1882, of the Society for Psychical Research, whose purpose it was, as stated in its first manifesto, to make “an organised and systematic attempt to investigate that large group of debatable phenomena designated by such terms as ‘mesmeric,’ ‘psychical,’ and ‘spiritualistic.’” With the spread of Rationalism, and the gradual growth of a reasoned belief, based on positive science, in a universe subject to invariable laws, the belief in the occult powers of magicians, witches, and miracle-mongers gradually declined. A psychologist like Carpenter, one of the first scientific elucidators of the activity of the sub conscious mind, having made a detailed study of the phenomena of mesmerism and spiritualism, naturally took a more cautious and less dogmatic view than a pure physicist such as Tyndall.
