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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    If such a force be, certain it is that there is some intelligent actor determining its direction. That intelligent actor can only be the Soul of the Psychic, or some independent invisible being. If the former, the exist- ence of Soul is proved. If the latter, that actor must either be the disembodied Soul of some dead person, or some non-human creature, invisible and impalpable to us, in- habiting the world with us, and, in certain conditions, enabled so far to become palpable to our senses as to play the pranks—for the most part, the unmeaning and unworthy pranks—that nevertheless are played—as will be admitted by any person who has honestly and laboriously investigated the phenomena. Here are a series of problems, growing out of proved facts and phenomena, the solution of which is the proper province of Psychology. If that province embraced nothing more than this, her claim to admission into the circle of the Sciences would be unanswerable and such, indeed, as few of the recognised Sciences could advance on their own behalf. It must be admitted that if, after painstaking investi- gation, the conclusion of scientific research should be, that the phenomena called Psychic, when all forms of imposture are eliminated, are the work of some class of invisible beings inhabiting this earth with us, it will not give to us the same conclusive proof of the being of Soul, with a life not limited to the life of the body, as does the popular theory of the source of these phenomena. But happily our prospect of futurity does not depend upon the reality of Psychic phenomena alone, nor on the correctness of any theory as to their source. All the other abnormal con- ditions of the Mechanism of Man, to which I have directed your attention as coming within the province of Psycho- logy, point more or less to the conclusion that as a fact in Science Soul is a reality. Some of them, indeed, admit of no other rational explanation. [255]