ASPR Journal, V14 - Iapsop.com

524 ]()Urual of the American Society for Psychical Research.
Toledo Blade, June 22, 1920.
The death of Dr. James Hervey Hyslop, secretary and director
of research for the American Society for Psychical Research, ends
the activities of one of the few scientific, conscientious investigators
of psychic phenomena.
Dr. Hyslop, once a materialist and agnostic, became interested
in spiritualism many years ago. He investigated thousands of
mediums and uncounted instances of psychic phenomena and at last
became convinced of the existence of demonstrative proof that there
is a life after death. He claimed no mediumistic powers and his
conclusions were always tempered with scientific caution. His investigation
merely persuaded him that certain occurrences are explainable
only on the ground that the spirit survives bodily rleath,
But long after he came to believe in psychic manifestations he confessed
that all of man's knowledge only afforded a misty conception
of hidden truths.
Baltimore News, June 20, 1920.
The regretted death of Professor James Hervey Hyslop raises
. again the. question how far psychical research has been justified by
results. There can be no doubt that he brought to the study to
which he devoted the best years of his life intense industry, complete
sincerity, and a scientific method, which is needed most of all
in the cloudland of psychic phenomena. The American Society for
Psychical Research, of which he was the founder and moving
spirit, rendered invaluable service, as did the European Societies
founded for a similar purpose, in bringing together a great mass of
evidence on a subject which more than any other is liable to be
obscured by folly, hysteria, lack of the sense of evidence, and even
gross and palpable fraud. Indeed, perhaps the best work of these
societies has been the exposure of fraudulent mediums, self-deceived
or blatantly trying to exploit the hopes or fears of the weak or the
grief -stricken.
Chicago Journal, July 26, 1920.
Persons who are familiar with the reception that Sir Oliver
Lodge received while he was lecturing in this country know that a
peculiar enmity was manifested toward the late Professor Hyslop,
and almost everybody else of prominence who has announced his
conversion to belief in a hereafter as a result of psychic investigations.
Nearly all of these famous converts-men like Professor Hyslop.
Sir Oliver Lodge, Alfred Russel Wallace, Sir Conan Doyle, Sir
William . Crookes, etc.,-were formerly materialists who regarded
belief in a hereafter as a superstition. Nearly all of them refused
for a long time to study psychic phenomena. All Of them investigated
for many years before they felt capable of pronouncing judg-
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