A man of conviction.

Horatio Willis Dresser (1866–1945) was a New Thought religious leader and author. Born January 15, 1866 in Yarmouth, Maine to Julius and Annetta Seabury Dresser. His parents were involved in the early New Thought movement through their study with Phineas Parkhurst Quimby. In 1921, after the Library of Congress made Quimby's papers available, Dresser compiled and edited a selection of Quimby's works, The Quimby Manuscripts. Dr. David Seabury was his younger brother.
He was described, in an enthusiastic 1900 Atlanta Constitution article, as:

Tall and slender, with a finely modeled head, which is poised on a magnificent pair of shoulders; his general athletic appearance indicates something more than mere student ... His delivery is plain, straightforward, and unadorned with the flowers of rhetoric.

"Horatio Dresser Lectures to a Large Audience", Atlanta Constitution, April 17, 1900, p. 6.

A few dates:
Practised mental healing in co-operation with parents, beginning in 1884.
Father died 1893.
Lectured with mother early months of 1894.
Asked to print second lecture, "The Immanent God," first publication.
Rewrote other lectures and published first book, "The Power of Silence," May 10, 1895.

Excerpted from: Horatio W. Dresser’s letter to Mrs. Browne on ESP February 8, 1943 [1]

The book on "Telepathy"[2] raises a highly important question as to the validity of experiences purporting to originate, as causes are concerned, from the "other world." Such a doubt as the book itself suggests would naturally arise after a time, since alleged messages might be generated from within or alleged presences conjured up as if such presences were more than merely psychological.
Back in the 80's when there was marked interest in psychical research in Boston, I was selected by a very influential person affiliated with the Society for Psychical Research to be given a college education at Harvard with a view to preparing me later as a so-called "scientific medium." Evidentially speaking I was supposed to have the requisite sensitivity for such a function.
My father, mother and myself , had declined all overtures for experimentation in psychical matters, howbeit at that time Richard Hodgson[3] hadn't even accepted telepathy as an established fact, and they were known as having proved it long before. Our reason was this: there is a superior value in psychical experiences coming unsought amidst natural circumstances in contrast with prearranged conditions for purposes of proof. For prearrangements imply the possibility of projections or anticipations which might mar the whole proceeding.

Horatio Dresser stated he had adopted an attitude when he was about 18 which he maintained ever since.

He stated:

With the evidences of more than a half-century since I adopted the above outlined attitude, I can now look back over cherished experiences which I believe have disclosed most of the types of psychical experience. The telepathic experiences have been most numerous, and I believe the book is sound in its teachings in connecting telepathy with emotions. I have had comparitively [sic] few experiences of clairvoyance that are outstanding, but a sufficient number to discriminate the type in contrast with telepathy. I have heard words from a distance as if uttered in my car when there was no clairvoyance and no telepathy otherwise than that of this limited experience. I was near enough to mediumship for two years, 20 to 22, to fear that I might succumb to it. I see no reason to doubt that a few experiences affiliated with people who have passed on were real, but I have my own factual basis for belief, namely, the brevity of any such communication--a brevity that was not marred by an effort on my part to enlarge upon a message by keeping it going. The fact that but few messages of any sort have come during the last quarter century leads to no doubt on my part concerning the validity of experiences occurring years ago. For my interpretation is that communications are vouchsafed when needed. So if years pass without any outstanding event, why, once more, well and good. If I need guidance, it will come. If I never reach out to a person who has passed on, I shall have more evidence when and if communicating experiences come. I have never closed the inner door save in a case of an officious correspondent whom I will call Mrs. Psychic who took it upon herself to travel to

And, furthermore, he said:

Mrs. Piper's[4] organism obviously acquired the habit so that messages purporting to come from the beyond during the years of experimentation with this famous medium regularly began with the same words, so a friend who copied many of the messages on the typewriter told me.
The experiences which some people have had with automatic writing as the basis may have conveyed actual messages from the beyond at first. But the recipient's mind, accustomed to the experience after a time, may have picked up the thread and may have done a lot of elaborating.

He further stated:

Why do I believe so heartily in my own experiences while to a large extent doubting those of other people? Because, for one thing, I have not gone out in quest of them but have let them come and have never practised or sought mediumship. Whereas personal experience is so often rejected because it is personal, I am convinced that the personal tone establishes the evidence, as in a telepathic communication from my mother years ago, identifiable by its personal quality in contrast with the remoteness that might enter in case of a mere experiment with a stranger. The scholars have been inclined to reject experiences between friends. But it is friends who know, notably in my relationship with my parents in the early years, my nearness to a young woman cousin, and, in later years, telepathy in case of a patient who was especially in affinity.

I believe we possess powers of communication, clairvoyance, and the rest, that are in abeyance, remaining potential in this life with most of us, as absorbed as we are in externalities. But with a few these powers are awake. We who know them by experience did not try to awaken in this respect. The awakening came naturally, in my case in connection with therapeutic interests in helping people from the time I was about 17.

Much depends on being sufficiently grounded in inner experiences before taking the critical training.

In most people the inner "degree," as Swedenborg explained, is closed. Hence they are natural-minded and nothing more, while in this the natural world. In the few this degree is open. So they have what Swedenborg calls spiritual perception (I use the term intuition to cover this kind of perception). Hence these people discern by spiritual-mindedness. St. Paul also contrasts the two.

On the lower level, as I call it, of natural-mindedness one may well push doubt to the limit, explaining away right and left if one can.

Thus, when my queen-like patroness tried to get a psychical message when I was visiting her in Bar Harbor by putting her hand on mine while I held the pencil for automatic writing and she asked a question into the air, the pencil wrote plainly only so far as her mind and mine agreed, the rest being a blur. So the content of the writing was plainly attributable to her mind and mine, and nothing more.

When I sat one night with a table-tipping group the table-stuff ran into chaos because, the strongest mind present, was sceptical of any validity. That mind being mine, the experiment was ruined.

And:

We have, then, spiritual, not organic, powers, such that in this life some of these powers are awake and are active in case of telepathy while others are quiescent. The primary ability is in the spirit. Thus we can on occasion think with the spirit, as Swedenborg puts it. Some people are so immersed in natural or external-mindedness that the only thinking they supposedly do is with the brain. But the brain is the organic basis for this life only. Telepathy at its best is direct communication from spirit to spirit, as if space did not exist. That is why, when I was in Switzerland in 1888, I communicated with mother, then in Vermont, as if I were actually present with her. She recognized me by my quality, as she had become accustomed to such discernment through her experiences in spiritual healing. Whatever the status of the brain or the glands, such matters were incidental. The bodily organism could be shuffled off and the interchange could take place just as well.

And even:

Swedenborg was sufficiently awake to these differences to give an adequate account of them. Mediumistic experiences occur on such a low level, amidst so much confusion, that Swedenborg warned people to have nothing to do with them at all. They would lack the requisite psychology. They could not discriminate a fallacy from a truth.

In 1905 Dresser started graduate work at Harvard University, studying under William James and Josiah Royce, and he received his doctorate in 1907 at age forty-one, making him very likely the best educated of all the New Thought writers.
In 1919, Dresser was ordained a minister in the Swedenborgian Church of New Jerusalem, although in 1925 he retired from clerical life to write books.
His last book Knowing and Helping People, appeared in 1933 and was distinctly Unitarian in Flavor. He spent his last decades teaching and counseling at Church of Our Savior, a Unitarian Congregational church, in Brooklyn Heights, New York, activities he continued until shortly before his death in 1954 at age eighty-eight. [Self-help and popular religion in early American culture: an interpretive guide By Roy M. Anker-1999]

Quimby on Clairvoyance: http://pvrguymale.blogspot.com/2010/06/clairvoyance.html
[1] FULL TEXT: http://www.ppquimby.com/anderson/appendix_f.htm
[2] Eileen J. Garrett's "Telepathy" (New York: Creative Age Press, Inc., 1941).

[3] Dr Richard Hodgson (1855-1905) is believed to have been the first full-time, paid psychical researcher. During some 20 years of research, Hodgson moved from sceptic and debunker to a believer in psychic phenomena and survival. He is well known as the primary investigator into the case of the trance medium Leonora Piper[4].


[4] Leonora Piper (1857 - 1950) is perhaps the foremost trance medium in the history of psychical research, often credited as providing the most evidence for the belief in survival of death. As with other mediums of the era, Piper claimed the use of spirit guides or "controls". Among hers was 'Phinuit' who was purportedly a French doctor. Phinuit's French was limited to salutations like "bonjour" and "au revoir" and had little apparent knowledge both of the French language and medicine. According to some accounts, medical people were surprised Phinuit did not know the French or Latin names for the many remedies Piper advised for her sitters, and Phinuit's historical existence could not be verified by SPR investigations. Martin Gardner[5] wrote in his essays “How Mrs. Piper Bamboozled William James” and "William James and Mrs. Piper" that records of Piper's seances clearly suggest she may have feigned being unconscious and used the techniques of cold reading and "fishing", where vague statements were followed by more precise information based on how sitters reacted. Gardner reported that when Phinuit made a mistake he would claim deafness and leave, and that Piper was unable to discern between real and fictitious information given to her.

[5]Martin Gardner (1914 – 2010) was an American mathematics and science writer specializing in recreational mathematics, but with interests encompassing micromagic, stage magic, literature (especially the writings of Lewis Carroll), philosophy, scientific skepticism, and religion. He wrote the Mathematical Games column in Scientific American from 1956 to 1981. Gardner's uncompromising attitude toward pseudoscience made him one of the world's foremost anti-pseudoscience polemicists of the 20th century. His book Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (1952, revised 1957) is a classic. This book and his subsequent efforts earned him a wealth of detractors and antagonists in the fields of "fringe science" and New Age philosophy, with many of whom he kept up running dialogs (both public and private) for decades. Gardner also became known as a sceptic of the paranormal, and wrote works debunking public figures.

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