'...a serious and responsible spirit, a spirit of genuine "scepticism, "-that is to say, of critical examination and inquiry, not of dogmatic denial and assertion...'<blockquote>'It is not easy to unsettle minds thus fortified against the intrusion of unwelcome facts ; and their strong faith is probably a salutary safeguard against that unbalanced and comparatively dangerous condition called "open-mindedness," which is ready to learn and investigate anything not manifestly self -contradictory and absurd. Without people of the solid, assured, self-satisfied order, the practical work of the world would not so efficiently be done.
But whatever may be thought of the subject by the majority of people at present, this book is intended to indicate the possibility that discoveries of the very first magnitude can still be made-are indeed in process of being made-by strictly scientific methods, in the region of psychology: discoveries quite comparable in importance with those which have been made during the last century in physics and biology, but discoveries whose opportunities for practical application and usefulness may similarly have to remain for some time in the hands of experts, since perhaps they cannot be miscellaneously absorbed or even apprehended by the multitude without danger.
...
...a serious and responsible spirit, a spirit of genuine "scepticism, "-that is to say, of critical examination and inquiry, not of dogmatic denial and assertion. No phenomenon was to be unhesitatingly rejected because at first sight incredible. No phenomenon was to be accepted which could not make its position good by crucial and repeated and convincing tests. Every class of asserted fact was to have the benefit of inquiry, none was to be given the benefit of any doubt. So long as doubt was reasonable, the phenomenon was to be kept at arm's length : to be criticised as possible, not to be embraced as true.
It is often cursorily imagined that an adequate supply of the critical and cautious spirit necessary in this investigation is a monopoly of professed men of science. It is not so. Trained students of literature - not to mention experts in philosophy-have shown themselves as careful, as exact, as critical, and as cautious, as any professed student of science. They have even displayed an excess of caution. They have acted as a curb and a restraint upon the more technically scientific workers, who - presumably because their constant business is to deal at first hand with new phenomena of one kind or another - have been willing to accept a fresh variety of phenomenon upon evidence not much stronger than that to which they were already well accustomed. Whereas some of the men and women of letters associated with the society have been invariably extremely cautious, less ready to be led by obtrusive and plausible appearances, more suspicious of possibilities and even impossibilities of fraud, actually more inventive sometimes of other and quasi-normal methods of explaining inexplicable facts. Name no names, but from a student of science this testimony is due: and it is largely to the sceptical and extremely cautious wisdom of some representatives of letters and philosophy, as well as to their energy and enthusiasm for knowledge...'
- Sir Oliver Lodge,
Aims and Objects of Psychical Research, Aims and Objects of Psychical Research</blockquote>