Fact and Fable in Psychology. Joseph Jastrow

against the view that for the comprehension of such processes as sensation and perception a course in Psychology may be useful, but that telepathy may be established by any moderately intelligent but not specially informed percipient and agent; or that the study of hallucinations is indeed a complex and difficult subject, but haunted houses, and phantasms of the living, offer a proper occupation for a leisure hour. All this is wrong and absurd; and yet it is hardly an exaggeration to declare that a majority of those who profess a deep interest in, and express an opinion about the one group of topics, would be surprised to have demanded of them a familiarity with the data of Psychology as a prerequisite to an intelligent coöperation in Psychical Research. If the problems of Psychical Research, or that portion of the problems in which investigation seems profitable, are ever to be illuminated and exhibited in an intelligible form, it will only come about when they are investigated by the same methods and in the same spirit as are other psychological problems, when they are studied in connection with and as a part of other general problems of normal and abnormal Psychology. Whether this is done under the auspices of a society or in the psychological laboratories of universities is, of course, a detail of no importance. It is important, however, what the trend, and the spirit, and the method, and the purpose of the investigation may be; as it is equally important, what may be the training, and the capabilities, and the resources, and the originality, and the scholarship of the investigators.

      Is the "psychical researcher" then merely a psychologist gone astray? Is he a mere dilettante, an amateur collector of curious specimens, or is he something very different from a psychologist? He is doubtless one or the other or all of these. He may be a psychologist in the truest and best sense of the word; and as all psychologists have their special interests, so his may be centred in the group of phenomena which have been unwisely separated from their milieu, and have been inaptly termed "Psychical Research." I am ready not only to admit but to emphasize that a considerable portion of the influential contributors to Psychical Research are animated by as truly scientific motives, and carry on their work with as much devotion and ability, with as careful a logical acumen, with as shrewd comprehension of the dangers and difficulties of their topic, as characterize the labors of any other field of psychological endeavor. But this statement can by no means be extended to all; nor does it at all militate against the opinion that many of those to whom it does apply, subscribe to illogical and pernicious conclusions, and indirectly encourage a most unfortunate attitude in others.