Allan Kardec’s theories and methods to investigate the nature of psychical experiences

The French educator Allan Kardec (1804-1869) was one of the first researchers to propose the scientific investigation of psychical experiences and was an influential scholar in Europe during the second half of the 19th Century. However, his life and the outcome of his research in this field are currently little known and often misconstrued. This paper briefly presents Kardec's biography and his first steps in the investigation of psychical phenomena, especially mediumship. Kardec raised and tested several hypotheses on the causes of mediumistic phenomena: fraud; hallucinations; a new physical force; somnambulism (including unconscious cerebration); thought reflection (including telepathy and super-psi); and discarnate minds.