SOME BOOKS OF THE WEEK.
(Notice in this column does not necessarily preclude subsequent review.) RAYMOND REVISED. By Sir Oliver Lodge. (Methuen. 6s. net.)—Two new chapters are here added to a book in which Sir Oliver Lodge gave communications through mediums which he believed to have come from his son Raymond, who was killed in the War. The rest of the book is abridged in order that this edition may be cheaper and may reach a wider audience. It is as blindly partisan to refuse to consider such records as to accept their truth without qualification. With any interpretation the facts are remarkable ; and if we do not believe them supernatural they still remain as evidence of not sufficiently examined powers of the human mind. It is possible to explain almost every incident of this book as exhibiting in the medium an unconscious fraud made plausible and mystifying by the heightening of the sensibilities in what, for lack of a better term, we call hysterical conditions. Even so a study of hysterical conditions would be both interesting and valuable ; it might, for example, help to explain water-divining and weather-forecasting, and show us how to make practical use of the more excitable conditions of our senses.
Previous page
