They cannot tell us what it is like.

James Hervey Hyslop(1854- 1920) was a professor of logic and ethics and prominent psychical researcher. He was educated at Wooster College, Ohio (B.A., 1877), the University of Leipzig (1882-84), and Johns Hopkins University (Ph.D., 1877). He was one of the first American psychologists to connect psychology with psychic phenomena. He joined the philosophy department at Columbia University as a professor in ethics and logic, during which time he became deeply involved with psychical research. As early as 1888, in a skeptical frame of mind, he was brought for the first time into contact with the supernormal through the mediumship of Leonora Piper. Messages from his father and relatives poured through. Out of 205 incidents mentioned as of his sixteenth sitting, he was able to verify 152. The personalities of the communicators were so impressive that after 12 sittings he publicly declared,

"I have been talking with my father, my brother, my uncles. Whatever supernormal powers we may be pleased to attibute to Mrs. Piper's secondary personalities, it would be difficult to make me believe that these secondary personalities could have thus completely reconstituted the mental personality of my dead relatives. To admit this would involve me in too many improbabilities. I prefer to believe that I have been talking to my dead relatives in person; it is simpler.''

Early in the new century ill health forced him to retire from his teaching post. He used the occasion to found the American Institute for Scientific Research to stir interest and raise funds for psychical research. However, in 1905 Richard Hodgson, the research officer and real force in the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR), died. The following year the ASPR was dissolved. Hyslop quickly revived it as a section of his institute. It soon absorbed and replaced the institute altogether. Hyslop dominated, somewhat autocratically, the ASPR for the rest of his life. He assumed Hodgson's role as chief investigator of Piper's continuing mediumship. He issued the first Journal in January 1907. Hyslop became a significant propagandist of human survival of death. In his Life After Death (1918), for example, he forcefully stated,

"I regard the existence of discarnate spirits as scientifically proved and I no longer refer to the skeptic as having any right to speak on the subject. Any man who does not accept the existence of discarnate spirits and the proof of it is either ignorant or a moral coward. I give him short shrift, and do not propose any longer to argue with him on the supposition that he knows anything about the subject.''

. . . One only has to read such works such as Andrew Jackson Davis produced to raise the severest sceptical doubts. No one could have given a more graphic account of the other life than he does in his Summerland. But if we compare it with the communications of Judge Edmonds the differences are so great as to create doubt rather than prove the case. Then Stainton Moses in his Spirit Teachings gives an altogether different account and through Mrs. Piper the same real or alleged personalities denied some of the important statements made by them through Stainton Moses. In all of them, however, it is represented as a replica or duplicate of the material world. And yet, in the face of this communicators will often tell us that they cannot tell us what it is like and that we would not understand it if they did. Psychical Research and Survival By Prof. James Hyslop 1914