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1887, 1920
Now, at the present time, when the attention of the public is turningtowards questions of Psychology and Psychiatry, it is most appropriatethat a volume such as the present Report be again placed in the handsof the public. While it cannot be said that the conclusions reached bythe Seybert Commission were final, yet material for future investigationwas furnished and facts so clearly stated that the reader might form hisown conclusions. The purpose and intended scope of the Commission areplainly set forth in the Preliminary sections, and therefore need not beentered upon here.
Of the members composing that Commission but one is now surviving, Dr.Calvin B. Knerr, who contributed an interesting report on theslate-writing medium, Mrs. Patterson. The sections by theActing-Chairman, Dr. Horace Howard Furness, on Mediumistic Development,Sealed Letters, and Materialization were the occasion of acrimonious andviolent attack on the whole work of the Commission by those periodicalsdevoted to spiritualism and its propaganda. Age cannot wither the charmof the good humoured satire with which the Acting-Chairman treated thesesubjects; and it was largely the spirit in which they were thusapproached that inspired the intense hostility on the part of thespiritual mediums and their many followers.
It has been epigrammatically said that, Superstition is, in many cases,the cloak that keeps a man's religion from dying of cold; possibly thesame may be said of Spiritualism and Psychology.
February, 1920.
The Seybert Commission for Investigating Modern Spiritualism.
To the Trustees of The University of Pennsylvania:
'The Seybert Commission for Investigating Modern Spiritualism'respectfully present the following Preliminary Report, and request thatthe Commission be continued, on the following grounds:
The Commission is composed of men whose days are already filled withduties which cannot be laid aside, and who are able, therefore, todevote but a small portion of their time to these investigations. Theyare conscious that your honorable body look to them for a dueperformance of their task, and the only assurance which they can offerof their earnestness and zeal is in thus presenting to you, from time totime, such fragmentary Reports as the following, whereby they trust thatsuccessive steps in their progress may be marked. It is no small matterto be able to record any progress in a subject of so wide and deep aninterest as the present. It is not too much to say that the farther ourinvestigations extend the more imperative appears the demand for theseinvestigations. The belief in so-called Spiritualism is certainly notdecreasing. It has from the first assumed a religious tone, and nowclaims to be ranked among the denominational Faiths of the day.
From the outset your Commission have been deeply impressed with theseriousness of their unde