ASPR Journal, V14 - Iapsop.com

492 Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research.
JAMES HERVEY HYSLOP.
BY SIR OLIVER LoDGE.
The single-minded devotion of Professor Hyslop, which has
aroused so much admiration wherever the facts are known, is
exemplified by his declining to draw any salary for his work
although he abandoned his Chair in Columbia University to attend
to it more closely.
He recognized Psychic Research as a subject of great and
growing importance, and he had the advantage of entering upon
its study as a psychologist.
In spite of poor health his industry was immense and he has
left voluminous writings behiqd him, both in the Proceedings and
the Journal of the American S. P. R. and in his books. The English
Society recognized his labors by making him one of its
vice-presidents ( [ 1900-1920].
If he had had the gift of clear writing, in English, his position
and influence would have been greater even than they are; but
unfortunately, in spite of what he assured the present writer was
the great amount of trouble taken in composition, his sentences
are involved and tedious to read. His meaning when deciphered
is usually sound enough, but the labor of arriving at it has too
often deterred students from the benefit they would · otherwise
have derived from his voluminous work.
It is well known that after long experience he was contempt·
- uous of the hypothesis that all the infonnation given by an en·
tranced medium could be traced to mind-reading or telepathy
from the living; and he gradually became a confinned believer in
the possibility of genuine communications with the dead. At the
same time he strove to get the subject located on rational lines, to
divorce it as far as possible from superstition or over-credulity
on the one hand, and from prejudice and dogmatic materialism on
the other. He knew well that consciousness could exist apart
from the brain and physical organism, though instruments of
that kind were necessary to manifest consciousness to us here
and now.
The work of establishing a society for the rational and scientific
study of psychic phenomena, in any country, must always be
a strenuous and sometimes discouraging task; and we who inherit
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