Cook, Emily Frazer William

English

Parapsychology, or psychical research, continues to
be viewed by many scientists and laypeople as a pursuit
characterized by occult beliefs and pseudoscientific
approaches, despite the longstanding efforts of its leaders
to operate within the framework of modern scientific
methods. This thesis represents an attempt, by examining
the 19th-century origins of psychical research, both to
understand more fully the reasons for the continued
rejection of parapsychology as science and also to define
the aim of parapsychology and its potential role in or
contribution to modern science in general and psychology
in particular. Modern science progressed by rejecting
the concept of mental, or "spiritual", causality as a
vestige of supernaturalistic, teleological thinking.

Scientific psychology was built on the foundation of this
rejection of mental causality as an inherently
unscientific notion, and as a result psychologists
abandoned the field's most basic theoretical problems.
Psychical research developed explicitly as an attempt to
keep alive, and to develop empirical approaches to, fundamental
questions about the nature of mind and its relationship
to physical processes, at a time when most
psychologists were abandoning such questions as
metaphysical or religious problems outside the scope of
scientific inquiry.

Part I attempts to demonstrate that scientific
psychology had its roots in the assumption that mind is a
secondary phenomenon derived from matter. In particular,
it examines ideas about the relationship of mind and matter
in the writings of 11 scientists who were influential
in the development of scientific psychology during its
formative period, the last half of the 19th century. The
essential failure of such scientists to address empirically
the problem of the relationship between mental and
physical phenomena only further entrenched, and did
nothing to resolve, the rift between mind and matter that
had led to the rejection of dualism by modern scientists.

Part II examines the aims and purposes of 19thcentury
psychical research, as represented by its primary
spokesman, Frederic W. H. Myers. In contrast to most
other scientists, Myers believed that empirical research
on the mind-matter problem is not only possible but is
the primary task of and challenge to scientific psychology.
Chapters in Part II examine the basic purposes and
principles behind Myers's work, the theoretical framework
and model of mind that he proposed for psychology, and
the phenomena and empirical studies that he thought would
be most useful in attacking psychology's basic problems.

Scientists and others who reject parapsychology do so
because they believe that parapsychology represents a
reversion to supernaturalistic thinking and would thus
undermine the foundations of modern science. Parapsychology,
however, undermines not science but the longstanding
assumption behind modern science and scientific
psychology that mental causality is a supernatural, not
scientific, concept. In attempting to examine the
assumption that matter is the primary, and mind a secondary,
derivative, characteristic of nature, parapsychology
reminds scientists that science is most fundamentally
a method and not a particular set of assumptions.
Myers's primary belief was that that method could be used
to push our understanding of mind-matter relations beyond
both dualism and materialism toward some new, more comprehensive
conception

Cook, Emily Frazer Williams

Edinburgh Research Archive

The intellectual background and potential significance of F.W.H Myers work in psychology and parapsychology

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The intellectual background and potential significance of F.W.H Myers work in psychology and parapsychology

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