Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1908-08-16

days before Christmas. 1905, he suddenly died
Boston; and. if reports from the spirit world ma
be accepted the once renowned ghost hunter h.
himself become ghost. visiting specially two
his American colleagues, Professor William Jane
and Professor James H. Hyslop
Committed to Telepathy
TO return however, to the early days of tt
Society for Psychical Research. Valuable
were the results obtained by Hodgson and his ass'
mttees they had distinctly negative bearing o
the supreme object of inquiry,-proof of the exi
tence of spiritual world in which human person
atty survives after the death of the body Som
enthusiasts did not hesitate to proc.a m at earl
date that such proof had actually been secured
basing this assertion the seemingly supernatur;
facts brought to light by the committees on teleI
athy, clairvoyance. and apparitons But the SC
ciety under the leadership of the cautious Sidgwcl
who its president for many years. steadily re
fused to countenance this view, and insisted tina
before any definite conclusions could be reache
far more evidence would have to be assembled
Thus the first ten years of the societys existenc
were marked by few positive results,-the mos
teepathy and of it's possible relationship to appar
tions and hauntings well as to the purely psych
phenomena of spiritualism
Indeed, the society formally expressed its acqu
essence in the telepathic hypothesis early a
1884 in the words, Our society claims to hav
proved the reality of thought transference. of tn
transmission of thoughts, feelings and images fror
mind to another by no recognized channel c
sense" But to no other dctum did it comm
itself until ten years more had passed. when, 70
lowing the called census of Authorizations,
gave voice to its belief that between deaths an
apparitons of the dying person a connection ey
listed that not due to chance. And since ther
it may we'll be said here elsewhere. the societ
has contented itself with steadily accunulatin
evidence designed to throw light the causal cor
nection between deaths and ghosts, and to umin
the central problem of demonstrating scientifcall
the existence of an unseen world and the mmortalt
of the soul
Finding the " Sublinina1 Self"
INDIVIDUALS. of course. have been free to es
press their views and from the
pens of several have come striking
and suggestive analyses of the evidence
assembled in the course of the SOcietys
twenty-five years In this respect,
beyond any question, primacy must
be given the writings Of Myers. Even Iausll'
before the organization of the soci- y" T.
ETY., his personal researches had led
him to suspect that. whatever the
truth about life beyond the grave.
there reason for radical changes
of belief regarding the nature of
human personality itself. In the light
of the phenomena of the hypnotic
trance, clairvoyance. Authorizations.
and even of natural sleep. it seemed
to him that, instead of being a stable.
ndvisible unity human personality
was essentially unstable and divlSlbe.
And as the years passed and he
was enabled to coordinate the results
Of the Investigations carried on by the
different committees, he gradually
became convinced that and be-
yond the self of which man is normally
conscious there existed in every
secondary self endowed with faculties $
transcending those of the normal wake Ak
aday self. To this he gave the name of =
the subliminal self. and. in the words
of Professor James. endowed psychol-
ogy with a new problem,-the explor Isl
alton of the subliminal region being -
destined to figure thereafter in that -
branch of learning as Myers problem
Not content with this, he gave HIM =
self, with all the earnestness that had ~
originally drawn him into activity with