In 1853 a. work was published by Judge Ed monds and Dr. George Dexter that was second in interest only to that of Davis. Mr. Edmonds was a Judge of the Supreme Court of New York State and Dr. Dexter was an eminently respect able citizen of New York City. Their attention had been called to the subject of spiritualism by the excitement about the Fox sisters, and they set about investigation for themselves. and soon developed personal phenomena of a peculiar in terest. They entered upon a system of experi ments in coiSperation upon themselves and vari ous 'mediums,' with the result that they pub lished a work which soon became classic, owing to the reputation of the authors. The phenomena recorded and described purported to represent more or less direct communications with discar nate spirits. At first they investigated with a view to ascertain whether the phenomena were genuine in any sense of the term, and having con vinced themselves that they were dealing with spiritistie influences, they published, as the bulk of their work, the alleged messages from Sweden borg and Bacon, and the respectability of the men availed to carry their work through many editions. But the subject of secondary person ality was not understood in their time, and was not worked out until a generation later, when the result was to discredit the spiritistic claims of Edmonds's and Dexter's work.
The most remarkable personality, however, in this movement was William Stainton Moses. lle was born in and was educated at Oxford in England, becoming a clergyman in the Estab lished Church. In 1872 lie became interested in spiritualism through his friend, Mrs. Speer, and soon developed 'mediumistic' powers in himself. He fought against their influence on his mind for a long time, but his skepticism was finally over come, and he became a spiritualist and abandoned the Church and at last became the editor of the chief spiritualist paper, Light. No one ever ques tioned his sincerity and honesty. The phenomena which he records were of a type and variety which tend to excite astonishment. They in cluded the physical and the trance phenomena of the usual kind, such as the alleged movements of physical objects without contact. and even through other matters, and automatic writing evincing the personal identity of deceased persons and the spiritual and hortatory counsel of dis earnate spirits long since deceased. His two works, ,tipirit Identity and Spirit Teachings, were widely read. But he resented scientific investiga tion because he thought it a reflection on his honesty, and hence, though there is some inde pendent testimony to the nature of his phenom ena, they depend mostly upon his own assevera tions; and though there is no reason to impeach the probity of these, neither he no• his contempo raries reckoned slilliciently with the problems of abnormal psychology and secondary personality to assure the elimination of influence in the pro duction of the phenomena that were quite com patible with honesty and yet were inconsistent with their supernormal character.
After the excitement produced by the Fox sis ters, there appeared a perfect inundation of simi lar and more questionable performances in the person of all sorts of traveling 'mediums.' The popular conception of spiritualism was soon de termined by the methods of this class of impos tors. Their 'demonstrations' took the form of cabinet seances, `materializations.' slate writing performances, and tricks that are easily imitable by the prestidigitator. To this day the general public has no other conception of spiritualism than that which is furnished by the most absurd and most trivial legerdemain. Finally the indif ference of the public after discovering the futility of such methods and the influence of the Report by the Seyhert Commission (see below) caused the interest in such phenomena to decline. The Society for Psychical Research (see PSYCHICAL RESEARCH, SOCIETY FOR) also had its share of the credit in this depreciation of the movement.
To this period, contemporaneous with Moses and apparently combining the phenomena de scribed by him and the performances of the average trickster, belonged David D. Home, who created an enormous sensation throughout Ameri ca and Europe. He received the attention of Sir William Crookes, and a system of experiments involving all sorts of physical 'miracles,' which still mystify students who have confidence in Crookes.
What the Society for Psychical Research has accomplished tends to show that the methods of physical science which had captivated the last generation are not adequate to cope with the problem. It has been shown to be a psychological problem that must comprehend the whole field of normal and abnormal psychology, including in the latter all the phenomena of automatism, sensory and motor. illusion, hallucination, secondary per sonality, hysteria, insanity of the functional sort, and the various hypemsthesias. The consequence of all this has been to suggest that neither fraud nor spirits are always necessary to account for seemingly supernormal phenomena. We are being made acquainted with a vast fund of facts in connection with subliminal consciousness which are well calculated to strike the unwary as having a spiritistic significance, but which are only the strange productions of irresponsible secondary personalities. These personalities, like the dream life of normal people, are apparently quite as liable to deception as are the states of conscious ness of every-day life. However, the range and ca pacity of the powers of subliminal states have not yet been exactly determined.