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53,266 published records with substantive text · Page 954 of 1,110
In brief, we must add to the many factors which contribute to deception the recognized lowering of critical ability, of the power of accurate observation, indeed of rationality, which merely being one of a crowd induces
Read record →In this review of the types of deception I have made no mention of such devices as the gaining of one's confidence for selfish ends, preying upon ignorance or fear, acting the friend while at heart the enemy, planned connivance and skilful plotting, together w
Read record →But still another class, and that the most dangerous and insidious, are the deceptions in which self-deception plays the leading rôle
Read record →In brief, the movement became an epidemic; and that despite the fact that from the beginning and continuously satisfactory and rational explanations were offered of what really occurred, and that mediums were constantly detected in the grossest fraud
Read record →nsound mind at the time, and anxious for an experimental demonstration of an already accepted hypothesis (the fourth dimension of space); another, Fechner, was partly blind, and believed because of Zöllner's observations; a third, Scheibner, was also afflicted
Read record →They examined many of the most famous mediums and the manifestations that contributed most to their fame
Read record →"manifestations" and their typical milieu
Read record →The monotony of the narrative of somewhat vulgar deception is agreeably relieved by the entertaining account given by Dr
Read record →There is both entertainment and instruction in Dr
Read record →Yet the description of this wonder-worker's doings by a competent observer, Professor Carvill Lewis, renders the manifestations absolutely transparent
Read record →But all this accounts for only part of the problem
Read record →There is a very broadspread notion that anybody can go to a spiritualistic séance and give a reliable opinion as to whether what he or she may chance to see is explicable as conjuring or not
Read record →Hodgson and Davey, that the kind and amount of mal-observation and faulty description which an average observer will introduce into the account of a performance such as the medium gives, is amply sufficient to account for the divergence between his report of t
Read record →Davey (who, by the way, was at one time deceived almost into conversion by spiritualistic phenomena, and who, before he took up the matter seriously, recorded his conviction that "the idea of trickery or jugglery in slate-writing communications is quite out of
Read record →Davey's performances, as described by many of his sitters, like the descriptions of the performances of many a medium, are marvelous enough to demand the hypothesis of occult agency: "Writing between a conjurer's own slates in a way quite inexplicable to the c
Read record →It may be the difference between placing the slate in a given position and starting to do so when the hand of the medium naturally comes forward to receive it; it may depend upon whether the slates were examined just before or just after a certain detail in th
Read record →and although verbal accounts must always be weak and lack the realistic touch of the mise en scène, yet this account makes possible a kinetoscopic reproduction, as it were, of the original sitting; we may observe the point at which the several sitters committe
Read record →The conclusion thus experimentally arrived at by Messrs
Read record →If we desire a concrete instance of this omission of an important detail, we may turn once more to Dr
Read record →sts,--manifestations, be it clearly understood, which have actually brought hundreds and thousands of converts to its ranks, which have been persistently brought forward as indisputable evidence of supernatural agency--and to show that in reference to these, a
Read record →death, of communion with the dear departed; when the convert becomes a defendant of the faith, anxious to strengthen the proofs of his own conviction,--then we have no longer mere unintentional lapses of observation and memory to deal with, but actual mental b
Read record →ld for twenty years; the theories and explanations of reviewers and critics do not touch them, or in any way satisfy any sane man who has repeatedly witnessed them; they have been tested and examined by skeptics of every grade of incredulity, men in every way
Read record →Tylor fully concords with this view: "The received spiritualistic theory," he says, "belongs to the philosophy of savages
Read record →When it is realized that a system that aims to instruct men in regard to beliefs appealing most earnestly and deeply to the human heart appears in the light of exact investigation as a tottering framework, held together by gross fraud, covered over with innoce
Read record →[8] I desire not to seem to overlook the fact that there are manifestations presented by Spiritualism of a different character from those above considered
Read record →[9] There is a minor problem of psychological interest in regard to the fraud apparent in these manifestations, that is worthy of consideration: namely, the motives for such fraud
Read record →If we accept as the essential fact of modern hypnotism the demonstration of an altered nervous and mental state, in which suggestibility is increased to a quite abnormal degree; in which, accordingly, functions not ordinarily under the control of voluntary eff
Read record →also for the equal advantage of securing data for the interpretation of phenomena, which in the absence of present-day knowledge, and in the misleading accounts current at the time, naturally gave rise to extravagant forms of explanation
Read record →Joseph Glanvill, F.R.S., author of Sadducismus Triumphatus, Dr
Read record →This process of alternation of pain and its remission is continued, until at length the patient is dismissed as cured
Read record →ly impressed; for it was with difficulty that Deslon induced three of them to associate themselves with him in an investigation; and they soon deserted him, when their requests for simple, unambiguous tests and their explanation of the observed effect as due t
Read record →From such experiments, ingeniously devised and varied, the commissioners concluded that the effects witnessed were due to an overstimulated imagination, to an anticipation of the result, to excitement and contagion
Read record →Caricature was a favorite mode of attack; and the examples that have escaped destruction vividly preserve the spirit and the local color of the times
Read record →In criticism of the attitude of the commission, it may certainly be held that they underestimated the significance of what they saw and used the term "imagination" in a sense both vague and uncritical; and yet the tenor of their conclusions was as wholesome as
Read record →By such simple means he put to sleep three or four of every five subjects, and that within a minute or two
Read record →The report was extremely favorable to the magnetists, and urged that, while some of the effects produced were too trivial to serve as evidence of a new system, and while others could be explained as due to the action of the imagination, "some results depend so
Read record →hing was made to rest upon the testimony of these somnambulists; it declared that even the proofs of insensibility were defective, and flatly denied the existence of the condition of somnambulism
Read record →al magnetism was thus denied academic recognition in France, it was in some measure divested of its mystifying and confusing accretions, by the independent observations of an English surgeon, James Braid
Read record →thers; indeed, it is clear that the Abbé Faria's method of inducing the condition and the phenomena that he exhibited were essentially the same as those to which Braid directed attention; while Bertrand, and even Puységur and others, had recognized the rôle of
Read record →e the hypnotic condition; or make a rigid limb flexible, or restore the sight of one eye, and leave the other insensible; or change the condition from that of general inactivity to one of extreme mobility and excitability
Read record →tally absorbed in one idea; and that this narrow concentration of consciousness, this influence of the dominant idea, completely controlled mental and physical action, and rendered the subject insensible to all other stimuli
Read record →He put his subjects to sleep by verbal command, and suggested to them the relief of their pains and ailments, enforcing the suggestions with such prescriptions as were likely to be effective
Read record →The skepticism of the medical profession found expression in extreme and certainly unscientific statements
Read record →Some writing is placed in the hands of the somnambule, and from this she pictures the writer, tells of the lady's recent ailments, her surroundings, her travels, and her condition; and when the lady herself is presented she immediately recognizes her as the su
Read record →The notion is doubtless very ancient,--compare the shew-stone of Dr
Read record →The legitimate and progressive investigations of such as Braid, Liebault, Azam, Durand de Gros, and others, were only fitfully and sparsely recognized
Read record →e phenomena; the same performances that convinced the mesmerist of the existence of the magnetic fluid are evidence to the electro-biologist of the electro-vital force, of the "od" to the followers of Reichenbach; and--more striking still--the outfit of the mo
Read record →For the special student of hypnotism no lesson of the history of its antecedents is more practically significant than its illumination of the extent, variety, and subtlety of unconscious suggestion
Read record →