quarter, by the courageous act of a bereaved father, who did not shrink either from exposing himself to academic ridicule or from divulging the private evidence which he had Sir Oliver obtained of his son's survival and declaring that it "'iffy- S had satisfied him. That a distinguished physicist at mond. " the head of the university of Birmingham should open- ly endorse spiritism was a remarkable event: yet Sir Oliver Lodge's Raymond (1916) was not in itself a remarkable book. Evidentially it did not show that Mrs. Leonard produced anything markedly more conclusive and better in quality than the evidence obtained long before through Mrs. Piper and other " psychics "; nor was there anything remarkable about the quantity of its evidential communications. Hardened sceptics should have had no difficulty in explaining away the "hits" it narrated, as they had dealt with its many predecessors. Nor did its version of the after-life differ markedly from the descriptions of the " summerland " that had been the staple of spiritist litera- ture for the past 50 years, while its apparent crudities, e.g. of ghosts smoking " cigars " and drinking " whiskies-and-soda," were no less susceptible of a " symbolical " explanation.
But what turned out to be remarkably different was the re- ception of the book. It was found that patriotism paralyzed the voice of criticism. The scoffing reviewer, who had been accus- tomed to say that interest in psychical research was " morbid " and a sure passport to the lunatic asylum, or that the mystery of the grave was insoluble and that anyhow no sensible man had the slightest desire to solve it, was no longer regarded as the sort of person to express what the public wanted to hear about a book of that kind. So he was not allowed to touch it, or perhaps himself experienced a change of heart. Able editors perceived that, in war-time, consolations that appealed to millions of bereaved hearts must be treated tenderly, if only to keep the home front unbroken. So Raymond was reviewed respectfully and copiously, and enabled to break down the barrier of peace- time convention. A flood of lesser books followed, ascribed to the living or returning dead, and mostly 'composed of communica- tions received by relatives of fallen soldiers, through automatic writing not without an admixture of pious fraud. Unfortunately they were mostly written by people who paid little or no attention to the difficulty of getting evidential communications and of making their value apparent to their readers, and who considered the mere form of the communication as a sufficient authentication, being wholly ignorant of psychology and of the tricks they were, unconsciously, capable of playing on them- selves. Nor did amateur automatism alone profit by this in- novation. Professional " psychics " obtained an enormous vogue. The resignations from the Society for Psychical Research ceased, and accessions took their place. The membership went up from 1,055 in 1916 to 1,305 in 1919; and the new members were not only willing to pay the two-guinea subscription of a " member " instead of the guinea of the " associate," but insisted on a more active and enterprising policy, and came within measurable distance of " hustling " this eminently respectable society into an endorsement of spiritism.
Of course a change in the social attitude produced in this way cannot -be permanent. The old influences persist, and will inevitably reassert themselves and produce a relapse into the former apathy, unless the exceptional opportunites are exploited, and the abnormal will to believe is fortified by positive achieve- ments. In the long run, therefore, the status of psychical re- search will depend, not on the mere intensity of the desire to know and the amount of social approval it can secure, but on the amount of solid scientific work that will have been accomplished under the stimulus of the abnormal social conditions. It is necessary, therefore, to turn to the scientific side of psychical research, though the developments here will be found to have been relatively small and by no means commensurate with the volume of popular interest excited by the war.
Nevertheless a certain amount of scientific progress has been made, enuring both to the benefit and to the detriment of psychical research. It may be classified under the following heads: (a) Psychology, (6) Multiple Personality, (c) Telepathy,
(d) Trance, (e) Automatic Writing, (/) Physical Phenomena, (g) Dowsing, (h) Thinking Animals.
Psychology during the war made considerable progress because numbers of academic psychologists were compelled to practise, and to apply their theoretical conceptions to clinical problems, while numbers of medical men, finding themselves unable to cope with the profound disturbances of mental equili- brium, inaccurately, but conveniently, designated as " shell- shock," were compelled to reckon with the psychical side of medicine. Thus were large bodies of intelligent men forced not only to apply their theories to concrete cases, and to correct them by their working, but also to recognize the power of the dis- ordered mind to simulate the most various lesions and diseases of the body. As might have been anticipated, the older systems of academic psychology, being compiled out of aesthetic prefer- ences, metaphysical prejudices, methodological assumptions, introspective observations of conscious states, and highly arti- ficial and limited laboratory experiments, did not stand the test of application to the battle-field at all well.
The " psychoanalytic " method, however, devised long before by Dr. Sigmund Freud of Vienna, for tapping the unconscious depths of the mind and bringing their contents to the surface was found to be capable both of explaining the symptoms and in many cases of suggesting a cure. Hence though the psychological theory on which Freud worked had seemed (and been) improb- able, extreme and crude, and had (justly) encountered the strongest emotional repugnance, there was no gainsaying the practical validity of his method, and the reality and importance of the mind's unconscious structure. The mind had to be con- ceived, like the spectrum, as having invisible (unconscious) extensions, as truly characteristic, as susceptible of investigation, and in some respects as important, as its visible (conscious) regions. It had in consequence to be admitted that psychic contents could be " repressed " into this unconscious region without thereby losing their identity and reality, and could thence continue to produce effects in consciousness, even by those who refused to follow Freud in assigning none but an erotic motive to this repression. These psychological discoveries had a considerable bearing on several branches of psychical research. They seemed to throw a flood of light on the mechan- ism of multiple personality. A " repressed complex " could explain the growth of a " secondary self." They also modified the notion of " fraud."
Not only was it clear, as had indeed already long been recog- nized by investigators, that a secondary or trance-personality might perpetrate a fraud of which the primary or normal self might be innocent, incapable and unaware, but a personality of either kind might become unaware of the fraud it had committed by " repressing " its knowledge thereof. Thus the problem of the fraudulent medium was enormously complicated, and it could be suggested, as by Dr. Culpin (Spiritualism and the New Psychology, London, 1920), that even the most honest mediums were frauds, who had cleared their consciences by " repressing " the knowledge of their delinquencies. Furthermore, this same process might be used to explain many errors and gaps in the narratives of observers of supernormal occurrences. Having " repressed," as unwelcome, the real facts, they might honestly deny that they had ever possessed or divulged the knowledge they were bent on regarding as supernormal: it would thereupon appear to be so. Hence repression of the truth would have to be added as a third to mal-observation and forgetfulness, as a very subtle source of error in testimony to the occurrence of the super- normal, and would further complicate the problem of what the evidence really proved. On the other side it is fair to remember that whatever goes to show how little we really know as yet about the functions of the mind should act as an encouragement to psychical research, and renders more credible pro tanto claims to unsuspected powers.
In the field of multiple personality Dr. Morton Prince has extended and confirmed his brilliant researches, attending particularly to the proof of the reality of " coconscious " secondary selves (cf. his Unconscious, 1914). It will doubt^
