Occultism and Common-Sense

What It's About

A Canadian journalist and author sets out to examine the evidence for the supernatural as an ordinary man with an open mind, and finds the case harder to dismiss than he expected. Rather than reporting séances of his own, he surveys the published research and the investigators behind it, chiefly members of the Society for Psychical Research. The fourteen chapters cover science's hostility to the "supernatural", hypnotism, phantasms of the living and the dead, dreams, hallucinations, hauntings, dowsing, mediumistic and physical phenomena, the materialisation of ghosts, spirit photography, clairvoyance, and the trance utterances of the medium Mrs Piper. A foreword by the physicist Sir William Barrett introduces the book.

Key Concepts

The author argues that scientific institutions dismissed psychical phenomena on prejudice rather than examination, and that explanations such as coincidence, fraud and hallucination cannot account for everything reported. Telepathy and the "subliminal self" (an idea from F. W. H. Myers) carry much of the argument, but he concludes that a small residue of cases points to the action of discarnate spirits. Barrett's introduction supports the investigation while cautioning that this conclusion goes further than the evidence can establish. Readers should also bear in mind that much of the book rests on second-hand testimony and on the opinions of the researchers it quotes, not on the author's own investigations.

About the Author

Beckles Willson (1869–1942) was a Canadian-born author, journalist and historian who spent much of his career in England. He later served as an officer in the Canadian forces during the First World War.