The claims of psychology to a place in the circle of the sciences / sessional address of the President, Mr. Serjeant Cox.

  • Edward William Cox
Date:
[1878]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The claims of psychology to a place in the circle of the sciences / sessional address of the President, Mr. Serjeant Cox. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    results of larger experience and more accurate experiment before tbey venture dogmatically to assert tbe source of them. This caution is the more necessary as undoubtedly the conditions requisite to their production are such as almost tempt to fraud. As the consequence of such temptation, offered by the neglect of inquirers to apply reasonable tests, the most impudent impostures have been practised, and will assuredly be repeated, so long as phenomena, which are the proper subjects of Science, are made to minister to the credulity of the superstitious, to gratify a merely gaping curiosity, or to amuse the vacuous and the idle. It will be impossible to accept the Psychic phenomena as proved, for any uses of Science, until they have been subjected to the serious and laborious investigation of men who come to them with single-minded purpose to learn what truth is in them,—for truth^s sake and for the sake of science alone;—who will view them with eyes coloured by no prejudice nor prepossession—who will insist upon the strictest tests they can devise and accept nothing as proved that is not secured by such tests, and then only after re- peated experiments under various conditions. If such a course had been adopted from the beginning, opportunity would not have been given for the manifold exposures ’’ of impudent frauds that have done so much to discredit even the proved facts. If, at first, reasonable tests had been insisted upon and precautions taken, such as common sense would dictate, the most prevalent form of fraud could not have grown to the proportious which it has assumed, in spite of the protests of all sensible observers against the prohibition of the most ordinary precautions for protection from imposture. But if more caution in tbe future is taught by these catastrophes. Science will profit greatly by them. Psycho- logy desires to be informed what phenomena are proved [253]