author
University of Pennsylvania. Seybert Commission for Investigating Modern Spiritualism
A skeptical committee at the University of Pennsylvania took on one of the 19th century's most controversial subjects and turned its findings into a remarkably readable report. The result is part investigation, part historical snapshot of how science and belief collided in the age of spiritualism.
1 Audiobook
Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University of Pennsylvania to Investigate Modern Spiritualism In Accordance with the Request of the Late Henry Seybert
by University of Pennsylvania. Seybert Commission for Investigating Modern Spiritualism
About the author
This author credit refers not to a single writer, but to a University of Pennsylvania committee formed in the 1880s to examine claims of Modern Spiritualism. The Seybert Commission was created after a bequest from Henry Seybert called for an investigation into spiritualist phenomena and related systems of belief.
Its best-known work, Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University of Pennsylvania to Investigate Modern Spiritualism, was published in 1887. The report gathers the commission's observations on séances, slate writing, mediumship, and other widely debated claims of the era, offering a careful, often skeptical record of what its members witnessed.
Today, the commission's work is valuable both as an inquiry into paranormal claims and as a window into late 19th-century intellectual life. Rather than presenting a personal literary voice, this book preserves the collective voice of investigators trying to test extraordinary assertions with the tools and standards available to them at the time.