Allan Kardec

 From the ranks of the spiritualists investigations were also conducted, although along somewhat different lines than the experimental work of the scientists. The former attempted to describe the world according to the teachings of the spirits themselves. This theorization of spiritualism was mainly due to L. H. D. Rivail (1803-1869) a doctor of medicine who became celebrated under the pseudonym Allan Kardec. 

Kardec's theories were simple enough: After death the soul becomes a spirit and seeks reincarnation, which, as Pythagoras taught, is the destiny of all human souls; spirits know the past, present, and future; sometimes they can materialize and act on matter. We should let ourselves be guided by good spirits, Kardec maintained, and refuse to listen to bad spirits. 

Kardec wrote many books which achieved enormous popularity in his own lifetime. His works also spread to Brazil, where he still has a huge following, and where postage stamps were recently issued in his honor. His intellectual energy certainly deserves admiration.

However, he built his theory on the untenable hypothesis that mediums, embodying a so-called spirit, are never mistaken, unless their utterances are prompted by evil spirits. This notion does not of course, take into account the possibilities of suggestion, multiple personality, or unconscious influences which were quickly developed as alternative hypotheses to outright fraud by skeptical scientific investigators such as Michael Faraday. 

Founding of the Society for Psychical Research 

Sir William F. Barrett, a professor of physics at the Royal College of Science in Dublin, had been conducting experiments in the 1880s testing the notion of thought-transference. Barrett conceived of the idea of forming an organization of spiritualists, scientists, and scholars who would join forces in a dispassionate investigation of psychical phenomena. F.W.H. Myers, Edmund Gurney and Henry Sidgewick attended a conference in London that Barrett convened, and the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was created with Sidgewick, who had a reputation as an impartial scholar, accepting the first presidency. 

The Society set up six working committees, each with a specific domain for exploration: 

1. An examination of the nature and extent of any influence which may be exerted by one mind upon another, apart from any generally recognized mode of perception.
2. The study of hypnotism, and the forms of so-called mesmeric trance, with its alleged insensibility to pain; clairvoyance and other allied phenomena.
3. A critical revision of Reichenbach's researches with certain organizations called "sensitive," and an inquiry whether such organizations possess any power of perception beyond a highly exalted sensibility of the recognized sensory organs.
4. A careful investigation of any reports, resting on strong testimony, regarding apparitions at the moment of death, or otherwise, or regarding disturbances in houses reputed to be haunted.
5. An inquiry into the various physical phenomena commonly called spiritualistic; with an attempt to discover their causes and general laws.
6. The collection and collation of existing materials bearing on the history of these subjects.

The great American psychologist, William James, met Gurney in England in 1882 and immediately they struck up a close friendship. Later James also became a close friend of Myers. In 1884, Barrett toured the United States and succeeded in arousing the interest of American scholars in forming a similar society, which was established in 1885, and in which William James took an active role. The American Society for Psychical Research constituted the first organized effort for experimental psychological research in the United States. For a period of many years, before the ascendancy of the German experimental approach of Wilhelm Wundt, psychology in the United States was equated with the efforts of psychical research. 

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Many levels of the human personality clearly exist and are still generally unexplored and untapped. Yet a number of cases can be cited where even such explanations do not account for all the observed phenomena.