W. E. Gladstone

1809-1898

          The great Victorian statesman, four times Prime Minister of Britain, was interested in psychical research which he considered "the most important work which is being done in the world - by far the most important." On October 29, 1884, he had a successful slate writing sitting with William Eglinton. After the séance he was quoted as saying:

"I have always thought that scientific men run too much in a groove. They do noble work in their own special line of research, but they are too often indisposed to give any attention to matters which seem to conflict with their established modes of thought. Indeed, they not infrequently attempt to deny that into which they have never inquired, not sufficiently realising the fact that there may possibly be forces in nature of which they know nothing."

Shortly afterwards Gladstone joined the SPR. Some reminiscences of his attitude towards things psychic are published in Violet Tweedale's Ghosts I Have Seen, 1919.

Source (with minor modifications): An Encyclopaedia of Psychic Science by Nandor Fodor (1934).