Presidential address at the opening of the third session, Nov. 2, 1876 / by Mr. Serjeant Cox.
- Edward William Cox
- Date:
- 1876
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Presidential address at the opening of the third session, Nov. 2, 1876 / by 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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![liberally presented to the Society, and this course must continue to be observed for the present. The subjects that have come under discussion during the last session have extended over a very wide area of Psycho- logical science, whose magnitude and importance will be shown by recalling the subjects that engaged the attention of the members. I take them in the order of time. Mr. Geo. Harris raised a very curious question in a paper entitled “ Caligraphy as a Test of Character.” In fact every intelligent action of the body is an expression of a mental action, and as the mind is so must be the bodily act. Character is really indicated in every lifting of a finger —the difficulty lies in the reading of it, and tracing the pre- cise mental characteristic with which the act is associated. But the question well deserves investigation. Two nights were occupied in debating the question of Materialism as advanced in Professor Tyndall’s article in the Fortnightly Review. The discussion revealed great differences of conception as to the meaning of psychological terms— almost every speaker using them in a different sense. This led to a suggestion for the settlement of definitions of terms to be recognised within the Society—so that they may be understood and used by all the members in the same sense, — but without attempting to impose those definitions out of doors. The Committee has not as yet made progress with this work, but we hope soon to do so. Mr. Massey laid before us a report of some experiments tried by him in America with some powerful Psychics. He did not then anticipate the conspicuous part he would after- wards take at home in opposing the prosecution of one of them and in resisting the attempt of the Ma- terialists, under a transparent pretext of protecting the public, to suppress the investigation of all psychological phenomena, because, if proved to be true, they are fatal to the theory of materialism. To Mr. Tagore we were in- debted for two very eloquent papers on “ The Psychology [149]](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22443915_0005.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
