Examples of mediumistic and prophetical incidents are common from the time of the Hebrew Patriarchs downwards. David and the other Kings did not hesitate to consult seers, and, sometimes unwisely, regulated their conduct accordingly. The episode of the infant Samuel is a good example of the phenomenon called the direct voice. In the Graeco-Roman period monitions were experi enced, and oracles consulted, as everyone knows. Coming down to recent times, the phenomenon, now fairly common, of intelli gent raps, seems to have begun in a family at Hydesville near Rochester, N.Y., about 1848. Stainton Moses, himself a power ful medium, helped to establish the London Spiritualist Alliance, which was joined by the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, while the physicist and chemist Sir William Crookes began a series of investigations into a variety of physical phenomena, with the help of the exceptional medium D. D. Home, through whom startling results had been obtained in good light, as narrated by the late Lord Dunraven (see "Experiences with D. D. Home" printed by Maclehose for the S.P.R.).
In the seventies of last century Sir William Barrett made preliminary experiments in thought transference ; and Cambridge men of letters began to study the various phenomena seriously. In 1882 a special Society was founded by F. W. H. Myers and Edmund Gurney under the Presidency of Henry Sidgwick. This Society for Psychical Research has accumulated a mass of infor mation, critically examined, recorded and discussed in their Pro ceedings, and the work continues to this day.
On the Continent the subject has been taken up by Charles Richet in France, Von Schrenck Notzing in Germany, Morselli, Lombroso and Schiapparelli in Italy, and has been carried on under Dr. Geley and his successors in the Institut Metapsychique of Paris and other organizations ; while the American Society for Psychical Research has published an extensive collection of records. In recent times Professor Charles Richet has written
what is virtually a text book of the subject under the title Traite de Metapsychique, translated into English as Thirty Years of Psychical Research. And Dr. Geley has discussed the subject from the medical, biological and philosophic points of view in From the Unconscious to the Conscious. Books containing what purport to be records of communications received through me diums in the trance state are too numerous to mention ; but the eloquent work of F. W. H. Myers entitled Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death not only fairly covers the sub ject up to 1900, but bids fair to become a classic. Selection from other books is difficult. A history of the subject in two volumes by Podmore eschews the spiritistic hypothesis in order to empha size telepathy. Another history of the subject emphasizing its religious bearings is by Conan Doyle. Older treatises are Hare's Experimental Investigations of the Spirit Manifestations (New York 1856), De Morgan's From Matter to Spirit (1863), Alfred Russel Wallace's Miracles and Modern Spiritualism (1876), Stain ton Moses' Spirit Teachings, Miner's work translated by Massey as Transcendental Physics. Also Reports of the Dialectical So ciety in London, and of the Seybert Commission in America, and the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research in 36 volumes.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.-Books aiming at a philosophical or biological dis cussion of the subject, in addition to those already mentioned, are:— Supernormal Faculties in Man by Osty, Dissociation of Personality by Morton Prince, Body and Mind by McDougall, Mind and Person ality by William Brown, Telepathy and Clairvoyance by Tischner, Ectoplasm and Clairvoyance by Geley, Occultism and Modern Science by Oesterreich, The Facts of Psychic Science and Philosophy by Campbell Holms is an uncritical summary of a large number of asserted observations.