Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: STUDIES IN SPIRITISM CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: SCOPE AND STANDPOINT OF THIS STUDY Probably no modern form of religion—not even excepting Christian Science—is so fiercely discussed to-day as Spiritism. On the one hand the Psychical Researchers have for the first time studied the facts in the case systematically and have printed voluminously, persistently calling their work " scientific " and maintaining that they have " proved " certain facts bearing in the most fundamental way upon personal survival after death. They have thus drawn to themselves a large following of well- read, mystically inclined people, who have perhaps found orthodox religion somewhat too arid to satisfy their deeply emotional natures, and who gladly believe in scientific demonstrations of immortality. On the opposite side stand the strict scientists of all sorts, physical, biological, and psychological, who consider the study of such phenomena a waste of time, and who have no tolerance either for the persons or the results of their work. These men rarely put their opinions into print, because for the most part, probably, they are unprintable, and would consist chiefly of dashes, and so the general public has heard little of recent years save the things favourable to " scientific spiritism." We lack, therefore, an evaluation of the subject which will disclose the flaws in the evidence and yet which will do justice to the pioneer work of the Psychical Researchers and to the unsatisfiedneeds which have led to this great outburst of belief in Spiritism. In the space of the present work, I cannot hope to do this with regard to all the phenomena included under Spiritism, nor can I even deal with the historical phase of the subject to any great extent. I shall limit myself rather closely to the work of ...