International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals

   

Periodical: The Psychical Review

Summary:  From Pat Deveney's database:

Psychical Review.
A Quarterly Journal of Psychical Science and Organ of the American Psychical Society.
Truth for Authoritiy, Not Authority for Truth
1892—1894 Quarterly
Boston, then Grafton, MA. Language: English.
Publisher: American Psychical Society. Editor: Rev. T.E. Allen.
Corporate author: American Psychical Society1/1, August 1892-2/8, May 1894. 100 pp., 6 x 9. $3.00 a year.

This was the journal of the American Psychical Society, which was founded in Boston in 1885 by Allen with the specific intention of supporting the “spiritualist hypothesis,” something that he and others felt was being neglected by the Society for Psychical Research. Allen was the secretary of the society and the editor of the journal, both of which collapsed from lack of support, financial and otherwise, from the public, including wealthy spiritualists whose support had been expected. Regular frontispiece engravings or photographs of notable researchers such as the Savage, Benjamin Orange Flower, B.F. Underwood, Hamlin Garland (an investigator for the society), J. Rodes Buchanan, et al., and contributions by the same and by Lucinda B. Chandler, Hester M. Poole, Giles B. Stebbins, James R. Cocke, and J.C.F. Grumbine.

Other Sources:NYPL; Buffalo and Erie County Public Library; Columbia University; Cornell University; University of California, Berkeley; Yale University; Newberry Library; Northwestern University; etc. Microfilm, University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, MI; LOC; Wisconsin Historical Society.
Issues:Psychical Review V1 Index 1892-3
Psychical Review V1 N1 Aug 1892
Psychical Review V1 N2 Nov 1892
Psychical Review V1 N3 Feb 1893
Psychical Review V1 N4 May 1893
Psychical Review V1 Wrappers 1892-3
Psychical Review V2 Index 1893-4
Psychical Review V2 N5 Aug 1893
Psychical Review V2 N6-7 Feb 1894
Psychical Review V2 N8 May 1894
Psychical Review V2 Wrappers 1893-4
Claude-Generated Themes:   The Psychical Review was the organ of the American Psychical Society, published at Boston in the early 1890s, and it approached the seance room as a laboratory. Mediumship, seances, spirit controls and materialisations are its recurring subject matter, but they are examined with the scientific apparatus of the decade: the hypnotism of Jean-Martin Charcot and Hippolyte Bernheim as the leading rival explanation, the physiology of the brain and the nerve cell as the frame within which mind must be understood, and the experimental testing of psychometry, the claimed reading of an object's history from contact with it. Its epistemology is stated plainly in its own pages: the only way to know whether there is writing on a slate is to look, and if the senses declare that there is, it makes no difference whether the fact can yet be accounted for scientifically, because the perception of facts logically precedes their explanation. That principle — insisting on the phenomenon while suspending the theory — is what distinguishes serious psychical research from both credulity and dismissal, and this journal is a good American instance of it.

Generated by Claude from the periodical's digitized text; a thematic reading, not a bibliographic description.
Topics:Hypnotism and Suggestion | Psychical Research and Parapsychology | Spiritualism