ASPR Journal, V14 - Iapsop.com

Extracts from Editorials. 525
ment. When they did pronounce judgment on the phenomena that
they had witnessed, they were greeted with a chorus of ridicule
from men who had never given ten minutes of their time to this
kind of work in their lives.
One would fancy after reading some of the comment upon
Lodge, Hyslop & Co., that it was almost a crime for a man 'in this
scientific age to believe in the possibility of a life after death. That
would seem to be the only explanation of some of the bitterness that
has been manifested. But it is pretty hard for an unbiased mind to
see what harm can come to humanity from an increase in its stock
of hopefulness. The psychic researchers may be becoming too
hopeful, but they are doing nothing to make the world a more evil
place in which to live.
Chicago Journal, July 10, 1920.
The late Professor Hyslop seemsd to many of his contemporaries
to contribute much to human gaiety in his role of what they regard
as spook-chasing. These contemporaries never took Professor
Hyslop or his spooks seriously. But it might have been well for
them to have borne iri mind that Professor Hyslop was cast by
nature in a skeptical mold, and that during a considerable part of
his career he was a disbeliever in an extra-terrestiallife.
Perhaps he and his congeners have not succeeded in proving the
truth of their thesis, that the dead so-called live on, and may, under
certain conditions, actually communicate with those who are left
behind. But, at any rate, they have succeeded in opening up new
tracts of the mind's map, of which but for them, humanity might
never have learned the existence.
Thanks to the spook-chasers, as they have been dubbed by
humorists, it is known today that there is a subconscious mind of
vast dimensions, vaster indeed in the opinion of some savants, than
those of the conscious mind, which the average person thinks he
lmows so well, and it is now pretty clearly established that more of
the real personality functions in the sub-conscious than in the conscious
part of man. If they had accomplished nothing beyond this,
the debt owed to the psychic researchers, would be a large one.
But Hyslop and his co-workers have done more. They have
proved that there exists a vast body of phenomena of most startling
character which requires some explanation or other. They have
shown that the hypothesis of fraud will not cover an immense regimentation
of discovered facts. True, the theories of Hyslop may
some day be discredited, as some of Darwin's have been, but the facts
that he discovered, like those that Darwin discovered, will still remain
for the tough minded to consider.
All the stars that Ptolemy found in the heavens are still shining,
though it took a Copernicus to correct the theoretical errors of his
predecessor.
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