London Dialectical Society
An Encyclopaedia of Occultism (1920)
In 1869 an important enquiry into the phenomena of spiritualism was undertaken by the London Dialectical Society. A committee of more than thirty members-including Alfred Russel Wallace, Sergeant Cox, Charles Bradlaugh, H. G. Atkinson, and Dr. James Edmunds-was formed, and resolved itself into six subcommittees. During the eighteen months over which their labours extended, the committee received a large quantity of evidence from believers in the phenomena, but very little from those antagonistic to the spirit hypothesis. In "The Dialectical Society's Report on Spiritualism ," published by the Society, particulars are given both of the members' own experiences and of testimonies from witnesses whose character and position made their evidence valuable. Practically every form of manifestation, both physical and automatic, is covered in the report, which concluded thus : "In presenting their report, your Committee, taking into consideration the high character and great intelligence of many of the witnesses to the more extraordinary facts, the extent to which their testimony is supported by the reports of the sub-committees, and the absence of any proof of imposture or delusion as regards a large portion of the phenomena ; and further, having regard to the exceptional character of the phenomena, and the large number of persons of every grade of society and over the whole civilised world who are more or less influenced by a belief in their supernatural origin, and to the fact that no philosophical explanation of them has yet been arrived at, deem it incumbent upon them to state their conviction that the subject is worthy of more serious attention and careful investigation than it has hitherto received." The Dialectical Society's investigations are noteworthy as the first organised attempt to elucidate the problem of spiritualistic phenomena.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The events described here were already half a century old when the Encyclopaedia of Occultism recorded them in 1920, and the factual account still stands: the committee sat from 1869, and its report appeared in 1871 as "Report on Spiritualism of the Committee of the London Dialectical Society". What has moved is the context. The Society itself has long since vanished, and the work of organised psychical inquiry passed in 1882 to the Society for Psychical Research, whose more sceptical methods, along with the exposure of numerous physical mediums of the 1870s, left the Dialectical committee's finding of "the absence of any proof of imposture or delusion" looking like the product of an investigation that heard, as the entry itself concedes, "very little" from hostile witnesses. Historians of Victorian spiritualism still cite the report constantly, but as evidence of what respectable mid-Victorians were willing to believe rather than as evidence of the phenomena.
Written for this edition, 2026.