About this objectMysticism or The Way Out, a book by Ivor Lloyd Tuckett. Donated to the former Letchworth Museum by the author in 1921.
Dr Tuckett, a physiologist, was a firm disbeliever in spiritualism and the supernatural. He wrote papers and books like this one, exposing the false claims of mediums and believers in the supernatural. Arguing that believers were biased and seeing what they wished to see.
Dr Tuckett wrote against what he called "Mysticism" at a time when interest in the supernatural had been growing. Noted spiritualists of the day included people such as the author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
One supposedly supernatural phenomenon Tuckett takes aim at in this book is automatic writing. The idea that spirits could take over the hands of mediums and write messages. Tuckett argued that these cases investigated by groups like the Society of Psychical Research, an organisation formed to "Conduct organised scholarly research into human experiences that challenge contemporary scientific models", could not be scientifically proven.
Tuckett argued that a no experiment into automatic writing had been carried out successfully. He believed that conditions during experiments had been so lax that it was impossible to "exclude all sorts of fallacies" or that where conditions had been good the results had been negative.
