Abstract
DB. WILLIAM BBOWN, lecturing on “Modern Science and the Possibility of Survival”, at the Survival League at Caxton Hall on January 11, discussed tne various theories of relation of mind; to brain, and expressed the view that nothing firmly established in modern science makes personal survival after bodily death intellectually inconceivable. But the task of obtaining reliable evidence is beset with enormous difficulties. The results and messages in mediumistic trance should be closely scrutinised in the light of modern knowledge of the psychology of the uncoii-scious, and sifted with due regard to the statistical laws of chance coincidence. Spontaneous psychic experiences on the part of private individuals, though more reliable in other respects, are specially difficult to assess statistically. There is little doubt that a large proportion of the apparent evidence for survival has to be rejected by strict science; but when all the sifting has been done there remains a small residuum very difficult to explain. Phenomena can only be fitted into a scientific system if their conditions of causation are known, and this is far from being the case with psychic phenomena, although some of the more general conditions are beirig gradually revealed. Very thoroughgoing psychological analysis of selecteti mediums will advance our knowledge considerably in this dim borderland of science, and may indicate further lines of investigation.
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Mind, Brain and Survival. Nature 133, 95 (1934). https://doi.org/10.1038/133095c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/133095c0