OVER THE BORDER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 793, 1 October 1954, Page 13

OVER THE BORDER

THE NATURE. ety Tyrell; al wees Seta a yrell, ny English price 12/6, i ae 2 we . |N 1946 G. N. M. Tyrell published The Personality of Man, a careful examination of the factual side of psychical research, His new "book, written in the last years of his life. moves on from the evidence-or uses only what is needed for immediate purposes-and

attempts to explain its significance. He believes that the real boundary of the world is not in space-time, or in the ultra-microscopic region of protons and electrons. "There is no boundary intrin-| sically existent in the universe. All is continuous ad infinitum: but the way we are ourselves constructed limits what we perceive and forces upon us the necessary illusion that we perceive the whole." An analysis of messages alleged to have been received from earlier investigators, including F. W. H. Myers and Edmund Gurney, is used to explain the crudities and distortions of "paranormal" communication. There is a chapter on apparitions, fully documented, and a study of mental attitudes which loosens the ground of some scientific prejudices. Most people, says Mr. Tyrell, reject an experience to which their minds are not adjusted. The unfamiliar is feared as a threat to the security of the senses, perhaps even to instinct. Some people, however, turn to it readily, but protect their | instinctive outlook by drawing it into"the field of the normal"-an ingenious argument to explain the naivety of spiritualism. : Sceptical readers will be left at the end with some unanswered questions; | but they will notice with interest that this is one of the few books written in recent years by men of real intellectual attainment on a subject not very popular with scientists and philosophers.

H.