20 quotes
It can scarcely be denied that the fundamental phenomena which first led mankind into chemical inquiries are those of combustion.
Address to the Society for Psychical Research (1897)
Our alleged facts might be true in all kinds of ways without contradicting any truth already known.
Address to the Society for Psychical Research (1897)
May not our boasted knowledge be simply conditioned by accidental environments, and thus be liable to a large element of subjectivity hitherto unsuspected and scarcely possible to eliminate?
Address to the Society for Psychical Research (1897)
An omnipotent being could rule the course of this world in such a way that none of us should discover the hidden springs of action.
Address to the Society for Psychical Research (1897)
He could do all that he wanted by the expenditure of infinitesimal diverting force upon ultra-microscopic modifications of the human germ.
Address to the Society for Psychical Research (1897)
Here we use the vibrations of the material molecules of the atmosphere to transmit intelligence from one brain to another.
Address to the Society for Psychical Research (1897)
By such an hypothesis no physical laws are violated; neither is it necessary to invoke what is commonly called the supernatural.
Address to the Society for Psychical Research (1897)
Let it be assumed that these rays, or rays even of higher frequency, can pass into the brain and act on some nervous center there.
Address to the Society for Psychical Research (1897)
Ordinarily we communicate intelligence to each other by speech.
Address to the Society for Psychical Research (1897)
Intelligence and free will here come into play, and these mystic forces are outside the law of conservation of energy as understood by physicists.
Address to the Society for Psychical Research (1897)
Granted the existence of a certain kind of molecular motion, what is it that determines its direction along one path rather than another?
Address to the Society for Psychical Research (1897)
The human creature represents the most perfect thinking and acting machine yet evolved on this earth, developing through countless ages in strict harmony with the surrounding conditions of temperature, atmosphere, light, and gravitation.
Address to the Society for Psychical Research (1897)
Telepathy, the transmission of thought and images directly from one mind to another without the agency of the recognized organs of sense, is a conception new and strange to science.
Address to the Society for Psychical Research (1897)
Is it inconceivable that intense thought concentrated toward a sensitive with whom the thinker is in close sympathy may induce a telepathic chain of brain waves, along which the message of thought can go straight to its goal without loss of energy due to distance?
Address to the Society for Psychical Research (1897)
It is equally difficult, hemmed in and bound round as we are by materialistic ideas, to think of intelligence, thought, and will existing without form or matter and untrammeled by gravitation or space.
Address to the Society for Psychical Research (1897)
A sensitive may be one who possesses the telepathic transmitting or receiving ganglion in an advanced state of development, or who, by constant practice, is rendered more sensitive to these high-frequency waves.
Address to the Society for Psychical Research (1897)
I will point out a curious, inveterate, and widespread illusion — the illusion that our earthly bodies are a kind of norm of humanity, so that ethereal bodies, if such there be, must correspond to them in shape and size.
Address to the Society for Psychical Research (1897)
All the phenomena of the universe are presumably in some way continuous; and certain facts, plucked as it were from the very heart of nature, are likely to be of use in our gradual discovery of facts which lie deeper still.
Address to the Society for Psychical Research (1897)
The human body, which long experience and habit have taught us to consider in its highest development as the perfection of beauty and grace — "formed in the image of God " — is entirely conditioned by the strength of gravitation on this globe.
Address to the Society for Psychical Research (1897)
I shall try to utilize this temper of mind today by clearing away, so far as I can, certain presuppositions, on one side or on the other, which seem to me to depend upon a too hasty assumption that we know more about the universe than as yet we really can know.
Address to the Society for Psychical Research (1897)