Psychical research / by Sir W.F. Barrett.

  • Barrett, William, Sir, 1844-1925.
Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Psychical research / by Sir W.F. Barrett. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    “ I look for ghosts, bat none will force Their way to me,” little disposed as we may be to draw her despairing conclusion—• “!Tis falsely said That there was ever intercourse Between the living and the dead.” Certainly, for our own part, we believe there is some active intelligence at work behind, and apart from, the automatist, an intelligence which is more like the deceased person it professes to be than that of any other we can imagine. And though the intelligence is provokingly irritating in the way it evades simple direct replies to questions, yet it is difficult to find any other solution to the problem of these scripts and cross-corre- spondences than that there is an attempt at intelligent co-operation between certain dis- embodied minds and our own. But does the evidence afford us proof of immortality ? Obviously it cannot; nor can any investigations yield scientific proof of that larger, higher, and enduring life which we desire and mean by immortality. Some of the evidence, indeed, seems rather to indi- cate a more or less truncated personality, a fragment of earthly memories, partly roused by, and mainly connected with, those through and to whom the communications come; to picture, in fact, a dim, wraith-like survival such as that imagined by Homer when he made Achilles in the underworld declare that he would rather serve as a hireling among the