Rappings - New Age Village

A scientific inquiry into the facts and causes of mediumistic phenomena. Its first concern is to establish the occurrence of the claimed facts. If they are not due to fraud, observational error, the laws of chancel i.e., if they are found to occur, the next stage of the inquiry is to establish the reason of their occurrence, whether the known natural laws are sufficient to explain them or whether there is reason to suppose the action of unknown forces. The nature of this unknown force, the mode of its manifestation, has to be experimentally investigated. If it is not a blind force but operated by intelligence it has to be examined whether this intelligence is mundane. Not until every other explanation fails can the claim of a supermundane source be tested.

Psychical research performs the pioneering work for official silence. Indeed it is no exaggeration to say that it lays the foundations of the coming science. According to Geley it is the most complex of all sciences. Sir William Crookes considered it "a science which, though still in a purely nascent stage, seems to me at least as important as any other science whatever." The nascent stage has since been left far behind. The societies for psychical research and individual investigators have built up an impressive edifice of facts. Many of the first skeptical investigators, like Sir Oliver Lodge, Professor William Barrett, F. W. H. Myers and Professor Hyslop, have become firm believers in demonstrated survival. Many others remained hesitative, like Edmund Gurney, Prof. William James, Prof. Hans Driesch, Prof. E. C. S. Schiller, Prof. William MacDougall, Mrs. Henry Sidgwick, Camille Flammarion, Professor Richet, Dr. Gustave Geley, Hereward Carrington, Dr. Walter Franklin Prince, J. Malcolm Bird and Harry Price but very few could preserve the extreme skepticism which Frank Podmore evidenced. As a working theory the spirit hypothesis is now accepted by many psychical researchers. If the opposition of orthodox science is not yet yielding the reason is probably to be found in the observation of Mr. Stanley de Brath: "History shows that even in the case of normal and verifiable physical facts involving a departure from habitual modes of thought, a period of two generations usually elapses between the first verification and the general acceptance."

The history of psychical research officially dates from the establishment of the S.P.R. in 1882. But the foundations were laid much before by such pioneers as Prof. de Morgan, Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace and William Crookes in England, Prof. Hare and Prof. Mapes in America. About twenty-five years before the S.P.R. was founded a few of the younger Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, started a Ghost Society very much on the lines of the S.P.R. The original document of the Cambridge Ghost Club is in the archives of the S.P.R. It is dated 1851, and the purpose is stated as "a serious and earnest inquiry into the nature of the phenomena vaguely called supernatural."

In 1875 Serjeant Cox founded the Psychological Society of Great Britain for the same purpose. A volume of Proceedings of the Society's work was published in 1878. Stainton Moses, C. C. Massey and Walter H. Coffin were among the members. When Serjeant Cox died in 1879 the society came to an end.

In 1878 the British National Association appointed a research council which carried on significant research work with well-known mediums of the day under strict test conditions.

It was after such a beginning that the Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882. The American S.P.R., founded in 1885, and the Boston S.P.R., founded in 1925, are representative bodies of the same standing. The National Laboratory of Psychical Research was established in 1925.

Parapsychology

While most of the early SPR research had an anecdotal flavor, where experiments involved testing the abilities of specific mediums and other "gifted individuals" with claimed psychic abilities, there were some probabilistic experiments involving card guessing and dice throwing. But it was not until the development of statistical tools by R. A. Fischer and others about the 1920s that modern experimental parapsychology came into its own, with the efforts of J. B. Rhine and his colleagues. It was during this time that the term 'parapsychology' largely replaced the term 'psychic research'.

The "Rhine revolution" had three aims: First to provide parapsychology with a systematic, progressive program of sound experimentation, progressive in the sense of trying to characterize the conditions and extent of psi phenomena rather than merely trying to prove their existence; Second, to gain academic status and scientific recognition. Rhine helped form the first long-term university laboratory devoted to parapsychology in the Duke University Laboratory, later to become the independent Rhine Research Center; And third, to show that psychic ability was not restricted to a few gifted individuals, but was widespread, and perhaps latent in everyone. While not wholly successful in any of these aims, Rhine did much to move the field in these directions. By the end of his era, now the modern era, we find that much if not most experimental psychology today is geared toward "ordinary people" as subjects rather than mediums or "gifted psychics". Rhine also helped found the Journal of Parapsychology in 1937, which remains one of the most respected journals in the field today, and the Parapsychological Association in 1957, the foremost professional body of parapsychologists today, that was accepted into the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 1969. Rhine also popularized the term "Extra-sensory perception" (ESP).