Contact with the other world - 1919 Author:James Hervey Hyslop Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II PSYCHIC PHENOMENA IN ANTIQUITY IF it had not been for our present knowledge of psychic phenomena, no matter what the explanation of them, we shoul... more »d be unable to make intelligible most of the stories that have come down to us from ancient times. But present knowledge makes it easy to understand their meaning. Even savages were conversant with psychic phenomena, in the form of superstitions. Savage, no less than civilized imaginations, went far beyond the facts in their efforts to explain them, went so far that science has ever been disposed to cite these imaginings as proof of feeble intellectuality, as superstitions which it has been the achievement of civilization to overthrow. Tylor's " Primitive Culture," Herbert Spencer's works, Frazer's " Belief in Immortality among Savages " and many similar works, as well as the legends of folk-lore, bear testimony to the existence of psychic phenomena in the earliest times, even though we make due allowance for magic, fraud, hysteria, and morbid conditions. Dreams and sorcery seem to have been the chief forms of manifestation. In dreams the savage mind seemed to find evidence of survival, and in sorcery and magical rites it seemed to find means to invoke the aid of the dead or to propitiate their anger. The study of savage beliefs will some day be deemed as important as it is interesting in this respect, but only as throwing light upon the history of psychic phenomena. In all ages these phenomena participate in the character and preconceptions of the people affected by them. Their form is influenced and shaped by the preconceptions of normal experience. Moreover, savages assumed a reality in their experiences which the modern psychic researcher does not assume. They interpreted occurrences according to superficial appearance...« less