Telepathy: Genuine and Fraudulent
(London, 1917)
W. W. Baggally: Experienced investigator of supernormal
phenomena and amateur conjuror with much experience. Alan Gauld
notes in The Founders of Psychical Research that Baggally
'had sat with every notable physical medium since Home and had
found them all wanting'. For many years he had come to a
negative conclusion as to the possibility of any genuine
physical phenomena - until his co-investigation of Eusapia
Palladino in 1909, with Everard Feilding and Hereward
Carrington. |
IN CONCLUSION, I would wish to point out that the establishment of the fact that
telepathy is a scientific truth would have bearings of the greatest importance.
It would show that the transmission of thought could occasionally be effected
otherwise than by the ordinary sense channels.
It would change the materialistic conception that thought only acts within the
limits of the brain.
It would modify the materialistic scientific view of the relation of mind to
matter.
I trust that what I have written will act as an incentive to some of my readers
to try experiments in this branch of psychical research. It is not enough
that a few individuals by patient inquiry and experiment should have been
convinced of the reality of telepathy. What is wanted is that scientific men
generally, by the record of an overwhelming number of experiments under the
strictest test conditions, should be convinced of its truth. Once let them be
so, then public conviction will in due time follow.
Meanwhile I feel bound to state that, in spite of initial improbability, the
experiences which I myself have had, as partly narrated in this book, especially
those briefly summarized in Part 1, have convinced me that the telepathic
faculty does exist, and that its detection is a genuine extension of scientific
knowledge; though much more will have to be done before the bare fact receives
its explanation and is permanently incorporated in a coherent system of Science.
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