Parapsychology: The rise and fall of paranormal experimentation

In the 1800s, giants of science were open-minded towards scientific paranormal research. What happened?

If you visit the slightly dated-looking official website for the Society for Psychical Research, you’re greeted by a quote intended to give sceptics pause for thought: “I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.” The quote on its own might not register if it weren’t for the figure it’s attributed to: Carl Jung.

Yes, that Carl Jung. In the early 1900s he was a proud member of the society, along with other titans of science and culture including William James, Sigmund Freud, Arthur Conan Doyle, WB Yeats, Lewis Carroll and Henry Sidgwick. The organisation was set up in 1882 to study paranormal phenomena “without prejudice or prepossession of any kind, and in the same spirit of exact and unimpassioned inquiry which has enabled Science to solve so many problems, once not less obscure nor less hotly debated”.

Nowadays, that heat of the debate has distinctly cooled, and the study of telepathy, past lives, ghosts and ESP has been left a much weaker field. Although it was never exactly mainstream, discourse on paranormal research rarely makes its way onto the scientific agenda. The number of universities providing courses in parapsychology barely breaks into double figures, and when they make the news, even that bastion of impartiality the BBC can’t resist giving the report a slightly wacky tone (just look at the captions).

Read more @ http://www.alphr.com/science/1001390/parapsychology-the-rise-and-fall-of-paranormal-experimentation


"What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us."  ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson ~