INTRODUCTIONRobert H. Thouless, Sc.D.Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
The writer of this book is an unusual woman who has lived through a remarkableseries of events. It is clear that the events themselves are remarkable whatever maybe the explanation of them. ‘The Boy’ was a young working man of little educationwho, in a trance state, gave teachings which seemed to imply knowledge that hecould not have acquired in any normal manner. These teachings were accepted asauthoritative by many highly educated and scholarly persons who heard them.These teachings would, in any case, be of great interest. They become moreinteresting, however, if we allow ourselves to entertain the idea that, in his trances,the boy was acting as the mouthpiece of personal agencies not belonging to ourphysical world-the Brothers. This is the author’s own view of the matter.This is not a view to be readily accepted by those who accept the stand-point of modern scientific psychology. They are more inclined to regard such ostensiblepossession by discarnate entities as due to the activity of dissociated elements of theagent’s own personality, perhaps interacting the group within which the phenomenaoccur.Yet there are reasons now for not feeling too confident that the latter naturalistictype of explanation must be the right one. There is a considerable body of observations within the field of Psychical Research that should make the modernscientific enquirer less ready than would the generation of his fathers to reject aswholly absurd the idea of non-physical personal agencies. He may still, of course,reasonably feel that it is an unlikely explanation in a particular case.A few years ago, the Duke Parapsychological Laboratory (now the
Foundation for Research into the Nature of Man)
coined the useful term ‘I.P.A. hypothesis’. Thisstood for the general principle of explanation of certain phenomena by IncorporealPersonal Agencies. Acceptance of this term does not imply that this type of explanation is to be regarded as a likely one in any particular case; it does imply a
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