Part of the Casswiki article series Books
On the Threshold of the Unseen: An Examination of the Phenomena of Spiritualism and of the Evidence for Survival After Death is a book by experimental physicist Sir William F. Barrett (1844-1925), with a short introduction by psychologist James H. Hyslop, first published in 1917.
This book is considered to be a revived edition of the author’s On the Threshold of a New World of Thought (1908) with attained “trustworthy evidence”.
Sir Barrett gave two reasons for this book to come to light - one, it attempts to bring back “psychical research” from the scores of ridicules from his colleagues, and two, it provides irrefutable evidence for the existence of paranormal phenomena, including the evidence of life after death. In this book, he examines a wide range of practices of Spiritualism, including levitation, mediumship, automatic writing, the Ouija board, clairvoyance, and telepathy, fire-walking, poltergeists, mesmerism, and cryptomnesia (“hidden memory”). He carefully considers the evidence for each phenomenon in a hope that they would be recognized as scientific facts.
There are six parts with four appendices. The first part focuses on mass ignorance, public opinion, and the “attitudes” from closed-minded individuals. Second section goes into the author’s observations of the physical phenomena and discusses how spiritualism was suffering from fraudulent imitations. Part 3 brings the reader to look at the evidence, the theories, and the problems of mediumship and other aspects of the phenomena. The fourth part reveals the evidence of survival of death with a number of case examples and personal experience. The fifth section discusses telepathy, clairvoyance, and dowsing rod as means of communications with the spirit world before going into discussion of questioning these evidences. The last part brings the reader to consider the questions and lessons involving the “interpretations” of the phenomena and the perilous issues with the materialistic school of thought.
Evidence Of Survival After Death, as recommended by FOTCM, is an excerpt from this book. For this portion of the book, the author has refrained from citing any evidence obtained through “paid professional mediums”, and in it, there are much testimonies and case examples supporting the evidence of life after death.
Sir William F. Barrett was one of the founding members of Society for Psychical Research in United Kingdom.
See also
- Spiritualism
- Recurrence