Frederic William Henry Myers
1843-1901. English writer, classicist, and psychical researcher. Born at Keswick and educated at Cheltenham and Trinity College, Cambridge, he taught classics at that university from 1865 until he became a school inspector in 1872. In 1882 he became a co-founder and president of the Society for Psychical Research. In its early days he helped collect a mass of alleged evidence for survival, much of it published in the Phantasms of the Living (1886). He made the first deep studies of the relations between hallucination, hypnotism, and mediumship, published posthumously as Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (2 vols., 1903). As a result of his great desire to put religion on an empirical basis, Myers drifted slowly away from his early faith in Christ as exemplified by his beautiful poem Saint Paul (1867).