A “Careful Examination of All Kind of Phenomena”: Methodology and Psychical Research at the End of the Nineteenth Century

"Psychical phenomena" is an umbrella term that referred generally to phenomena allegedly produced by spiritual forces or entities. In this chapter, we encounter four instances of these manifestations: table moving, mediumistic communication, "telepathic" communication, and apparitions. All of these instances offer the opportunity to capture different declinations of "control." First, "control" is mostly about controlling the setting (i.e., the instrument(s), the people's perceptions, or the people's testimonies), rather than about controlling a result against a comparative trial (as it is most of then the case for the chapters in this volume). Second, in some cases "control" is an actors' term, a rare occurrence in this volume. Third, the actors presented in this chapter deploy two distinct but parallel (and ultimately intertwining) strategies of control, which are called -- by the actors themselves -- "experimental" and "historical."