SPIRITUALISM

name given to a movement, in existence since 1848, which might be called religious, philosophical, or scientific, and believes in the communication with ‘another world’ together with the existence of phenomena which cannot be explained by ordinary physical laws. The reality and validity of spiritualism and clairvoyance have been hotly discu ed, and whatever opinion be held it cannot be denied that, although there has been much both of unconscious self-deception and of conscious fraud, there are admittedly phenomena for which no adequate explanation has been given outside the mediums are often very unsatisfactory. ~ Much good work in exposing fraud and sifting evidence has been done by the Society for Psychical Research, 1882, in which the late F. W. H. Myers was prominent. Spiritualism has numbered eminent men among its adherents, including manifestations from beyond the grave; Sir. W. Crookes, who pub. accounts of experiments with Home, the most famous medium known; Dr. George Sexton, for fifteen years a skeptic and at one time secularist coadjutor with Brad laugh; Alfred Ru ell Wallace, who accepted the facts long before he could give a spiritual explanation of them; W. T. Stead, who conducted a spiritualistic organ known as Borderland, in which he developed his interest in psychical research; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who declared himself a believer through his personal experiences of psychic phenomena; and Sir Oliver Lodge, for whom it is claimed that he set the science of phsycical research upon a new footing, inasmuch as he presented a spiritualism that is primarily spiritual, and therefore nearer to truth than the spiritualism that is primarily scientific. London, England, 1 mile N. E. of St. Paul’s; seat of silk-weaving industry. roacstead, English Channel, between Portsmouth and Isle of Wight.