Founding and Constitution

The Society for Psychical Research grew out of a conversation in the autumn of 1881 between the journalist Edmund Dawson Rogers and the physicist William Fletcher Barrett, both frustrated that claims of thought transference and spiritualist phenomena were dismissed by mainstream science without serious study. A conference held on 5 and 6 January 1882 at the headquarters of the British National Association of Spiritualists in London proposed forming a dedicated research body, and the Society was formally constituted on 20 February 1882.

The Cambridge moral philosopher Henry Sidgwick became its first president, lending the enterprise academic respectability, while the founding committee included Barrett, Rogers, the medium William Stainton Moses, the barrister Frederic W. H. Myers and Edmund Gurney. The Society organised itself into standing committees covering thought reading, mesmerism, the reputed force described by Karl von Reichenbach, apparitions and haunted houses, and the physical phenomena of spiritualism. Its stated purpose was to approach these problems in the same spirit of exact and unimpassioned inquiry that had allowed science to resolve other once obscure questions. Early members brought real scientific standing to the project, among them the chemist William Crookes, already known for his controversial investigations of the medium Florence Cook, and the philosopher William James in the United States, who helped found a sister society there in 1885.