ASPR Journal, V14 - Iapsop.com

. 4:42 Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research.
respectful hearing had he cultivated a better and more restrained
style of writing, and been less dogmatic and combative in the
expression of his opinions.
His tremendous energy and enthusiasm swept him along in
speech as well as in writing, the centre of his thoughts and activities
being always psychical research. At ttte same time he felt
deeply on political questions, and at the outbreak of the great war.
he was ahead of his countrymen in condemning Germany, even
wishing to be a combatant against her. This is interesting, as he
had been a student in Germany, was an admirable German scholar
and had published a translation of some German poems. But he
saw the fatal drift of German thought towards.materialism and
militarism, and he realized the danger of that habit of thought
overrunning the world if Germany triumphed.
Only a year ago Dr. Hyslop sent me his last, largest and, I
think, best work," Contact with the Other World." In this book
he reviews the various phenomena of spiritualism and states (p.
328): "There is no other rational explanation of the facts than
the hypothesis of survival; and the cumulative evidence is so
strong that I do not hesiJ.:ate to say that the proof is even equal to,
or superior to, that for evolution." As is the case in the various
well-attested phenomena embraced under psychical research, the
conclusion reached is " evidential rather than explanatory. ""'ben
we have assured ourselves that personality survives, we may take
up the determination of the conditions under which it survives."
This caution, as already remarked, is very necessary. Telepathy,
for example, is usually conceived as the transmission of ideas
through space after the manner of wireless telegraphy. The
public think it a new mode of physical transmission; it is, however,
a purely psychical process, and we have absolutely no knowledge
of how the process takes place. Dr. Hyslop objects to the
word " transmission," and would substitute " coincidence between
the thoughts of two minds, independently of sense perception,"
and he inclines to the spiritistic view of telepathy. Admitting the
existence of a soul there is growing evidence that it can transcend,
and act independently of, the bodily organism in this life, and
telepathy may be, and I am inclined to think it is, an imperfect
interfusion of two or more souls, without sense perception or
material nexus. But here, as in the psychical phenomena, it is not
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