ASPR Journal, V14 - Iapsop.com

384 Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research.
burn, in a periodical called " The Chronicle", answers us. The
psychologists. It is their field and it is mere impertinence for
anyone outside their Brahmic circle to meddle. But there are
difficulties even yet. William James was a psychologist, some
think even greater than Witmer and Leuba and Joseph Jastrow.
But it counts nothing that he was impressed with mediumistic
clairvoyance, reported a case of telekinesis observed by him and
took great interest in the automatic writing of Mrs. Piper, which
he felt showed" a will to corrununicate ". F. W. H. Myers was
a pretty fair psychologist-at least all psychologists today are
using some of the words which he invented for psychological conceptions--and
he was convinced that messages are received from
the dead. Schiller, of Oxford, they do say is something of a
psychologist as well as a philosopher and he has a hearty respect
for psychical research and is not exactly a skeptic to spirit return.
But these voices are lost in the chatter of Professors Smith,
Brown and Robinson, whose opinions were formed as the sentiments
of certain ancient gentlemen were formed regarding a
man who fell among thieves-by taking a contemptuous glance
and passing by on the other side. What is the use of psychologists
being so competent by virtue of their being psychologists if
they will not exercise their distinguished abilities in an intelligent
manner, but deliver themselves as prey into the hands of the
spoiler every time they open their mouths on the subject of
psychical research ? Thus, psychologists who studied the problems
enough to give their opinions weight have no more respect
paid their views than have men of the physical sciences, while
other psychologists who have incautiously become vocal have
not always given brilliant evidence of competence, or at least of
the employment of competence in this field.
But there is one step more, and here we fall off the cliff.
Professor Muensterberg (in the Atlantic Monthly, January,
1899) declared that he, by virtue of being a psychologist," should
be the last man to see through the scheme and discover the trick "
in a case of fraud. As an experimental psychologist, he regarded
himself as absolutely spoiled for the business of a detective. He.
too, thought scientists unfitted for psychical research but reckoned
psychologists among them and as in the same box. Miss Washburn
can hardly claim that it is the psychologists who do not do
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