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This book, first published in 1902 under the title, Modern Spiritualism, was the Bible of unbelievers in psychic phenomena. Its republication after sixty years appears to be part of a campaign directed at discrediting the foundations on which parapsychology (Extra-Sensory Perception) research has been built. The success of this research, originated at Duke University by Dr. J. B. Rhine, has been phenomal. Nevertheless, if psychical research of the past century, based on the challenge of Spiritualism, could be destroyed, parapsychology would suffer indirectly even though it has no investment in the claims of the past and rests entirely on the investigation of the unknown powers of the average unconscious mind.
The leader of this campaign in England is Dr. E. J. Dingwall, an anthropologist who contributes a long introduction to these two volumes. As Podmore was a worker in what Dingwall now considers his own backyard of total negation, he not only receives respectful treatment but is also given an apology that is totally out of place. Speaking of Sir William Crookes and Florence Cook, the materialization medium he investigated, Dingwall says that Podmore hardly could have had “a suspicion that the famous chemist himself might have been involved in the fraudulent conspiracy.”
This defamatory statement is an echo—and espousal of—Trevor H. Hall's recent exposure of Sir William Crookes’ psychic investigation in a