Henry Habberley Price

Place memories

Price developed the concept of "place memories" (see Stone Tape). He proposed that hauntings could be explained by memories becoming lost from an individual's mind and then somehow attaching themselves to the environment which could be picked up by others as hallucinations. He also believed that "place memories" could explain psychometry.

Psychic ether

Linking his afterlife hypothesis with the concept of place memories Price proposed another hypothesis called the "psychic ether" hypothesis. He wrote that this hypothesis would explain where the memories would be stored for hauntings as well as for clairvoyance, ghosts and other paranormal phenomena. Price proposed that a universal psychic ether coexisting dimension exists as an intermediary between the mental and ordinary matter. According to Price the psychic ether consists of images and ideas. Price wrote that apparitions are actually memories from people and that under the right conditions they can be seen as hallucinations. Price believed that the dreamlike world of the afterlife exists in the psychic ether. According to (Ellwood, 2001) the psychic ether of Price is "a posited level of reality consisting of persisting, dynamic images created by the mind and capable of being perceived by certain persons."

Reception

Some researchers have attempted to update the afterlife hypothesis of Price. Michael Grosso (1979) in an extension of Price's theory suggested that the "ego may become fragmented in the afterlife state and when ones wish's and desires are played out may experience a transpersonal state akin to those experienced by the mystics". The psychical researcher Ralph Noyes (1998) published an article discussing the theories of Price and attempted to update them with recent finds in parapsychology. Noyes proposed that the mental world of Price is a "psychosphere" which he defined as a "vast and complex cauldron of ideas, memories, volitions, desires and all the other furniture of conscious experience and unconscious mental functioning".

The most common criticism of HH Price's afterlife hypothesis has come from the religious community as his suggestions are not consistent with traditional Christian teaching, nor the teachings of any other monotheistic religion.

Works

Perception (1932) Truth and Corrigibility (1936) Hume's Theory of the External World (1940) Thinking and Representation (1946) – the 1946 Hertz Philosophical Lecture at the British Academy Thinking and Experience (1953; second edition, 1969) Belief (1969) (1959–61 Gifford Lectures, online) Essays in the Philosophy of Religion, based on the Sarum lectures 1971 (1972) Philosophical Interactions with Parapsychology: The Major Writings of H. H. Price on Parapsychology and Survival (1995) edited by Frank B. Dilley Collected Works of Henry H. Price (1996) four volumes, edited by Martha Kneale Thinking and Experience, and Some Aspects of the Conflict between Science and Religion (1996) reprints

Articles Price, H. H. (1939). "Haunting and the 'psychic ether' hypothesis: With some preliminary reflections on the present condition and possible future of psychical research". Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 45, 307–374. Price, H. H. (1940). "Some philosophical questions about telepathy and clairvoyance". Philosophy, 15, 363–374. Price, H.H. (1947). "Harold Arthur Prichard", Proceedings of the British Academy, XXXIII, 1947 [reprinted as pamphlet, 1–20] Price, H. H. (1948). "Psychical research and human personality". Hibbert Journal, 105–113. Price, H. H. (1953). "Survival and the idea of 'another world'". Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 50, 1–125. Price, H. H. (1959). "Psychical research and human nature". Journal of Parapsychology, 23, 178–187. Price, H. H. (1961). "Apparitions: Two theories". Journal of Parapsychology, 24, 110–125.